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Vampire burial? Medieval girl buried face down, ankles tied found in England

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The image shows the remains of a teenage girl found in the town of Conington, England. — MOLA Headland Infrastructure/File
The image shows the remains of a teenage girl found in the town of Conington, England. — MOLA Headland Infrastructure/File

A group of archaeologists discovered a teenage girl’s body that had been buried with her face down and ankles bound in the village of Conington, Cambridgeshire in England.

The archaeologists’ finding suggests that the 15-year-old teenage girl may have died more than a thousand years ago.

The teenager’s grave dates back to the ninth century, around the same time villagers in Conington moved out. They dug out their “elaborate entrance gate” and buried the girl’s body in one of the ditches.

“The position of her ankles suggests they may have been tied together,” Don Walker, a senior human osteologist with the museum, said in the release. “This implies that the community took extra measures to ensure she could not ‘return’ from the grave.”

While there weren’t set burial traditions at the time, bodies were typically arranged face up, according to the museum.

The girl’s face-down burial “marks this young woman out as different,” experts said adding that she had a spinal joint illness aggravated by rigorous manual labour and evidence of childhood malnutrition in her bones, which suggested she may have belonged to a low social class.

Experts haven’t identified a cause of death, but they said it’s likely she died suddenly or unexpectedly.

The girl’s burial in the entry gate’s pit is also significant. A similar burial — a woman buried face down in a settlement’s boundary ditch — dating to the late eighth to ninth century was found about 30 miles away, as per the Miami Herald.

“We will probably never know exactly how this young woman was viewed by the community she grew up in, but the way she was buried tells us she was almost certainly seen as different,” Walker said in the release. “Her burial rites may have reflected the nature of her death, or her social identity, or that of her family.”

Conington, which means “King’s Town,” was likely abandoned when the Kingdom of Mercia’s influence waned in the early ninth century, according to researchers.

The young woman’s burial could have been “a symbolic final closure of the site” in Conington which is about 80 miles north of London.

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