Punishing the Dead: The Man With No Tongue and the Ancient Fear of the Restless Dead
by M.P. Pellicer | Noir Notebook
Death was supposed to end a person’s troubles. Across centuries and cultures, however, some communities feared that death might not end the danger. A troublesome person could remain a threat even after the grave closed. A suspected witch might return. A plague victim might somehow spread disease from beyond the grave. Even someone who died suddenly or violently could inspire enough fear to prompt unusual precautions.
Archaeologists have uncovered evidence of these fears in graves scattered across Europe: bodies buried face down, corpses weighed down with stones, heads removed, hearts pierced, mouths filled with rocks, and even skeletons pinned to the earth. These practices reveal something unsettling about the people who performed them. They did not always regard the grave as a final resting place. Sometimes they treated it as a prison—and the corpse as something that needed to remain contained.
One of the strangest examples emerged from Roman Britain: a man buried face down with a flat stone inside his mouth, apparently replacing his tongue. Whether someone deliberately removed his tongue during his lifetime remains uncertain, but his unusual burial raises an even darker question.
What had this man done—or what did his community believe he might do—to deserve such treatment?
The Man With No Tongue
In 1991, archaeologists working near the village of Stanwick in England uncovered a series of burials dating to the centuries following the Roman occupation of Britain. The Stanwick site underwent excavation between 1984 and 1992, revealing evidence of human occupation stretching back to the early Iron Age.
During the first through third centuries A.D., Stanwick developed into a prosperous Romano-British settlement. A large villa appeared during the fourth century and continued in use after the settlement itself declined. People continued to bury their dead around the villa’s outer walls as late as the sixth century.
Among those graves, archaeologists encountered one burial that stood apart from the others. He had a flat stone resting inside his mouth where his tongue should have been.
The discovery immediately raised questions. Had someone actually cut out his tongue? If so, why? And why did someone place a stone inside his mouth after his death?
The reason why his tongue would be cut out remains unknown. This was the time when the Romans controlled Britain, and no reference has been found in ancient texts where they used this method as a type of punishment, so perhaps it was a sentence imposed by the local populace.
His burial position, however, appears significant. A face-down burial could represent deliberate disrespect or exclusion. It may also have marked someone whom the community considered dangerous, troublesome, or somehow different.
One possibility suggests that the man had committed a crime and suffered tongue amputation as punishment. Another proposes that his community blamed him for misfortune, perhaps even severe weather.
That idea might sound strange to the modern mind, but the location itself provides an intriguing clue. By the time people began using the area as a cemetery, flooding had apparently made the surrounding land unsuitable for habitation. In a world without modern meteorology or a scientific understanding of disease, desperate communities sometimes sought human causes for disasters they could not explain.
Perhaps someone had become a scapegoat. Perhaps the man had earned his punishment. Or perhaps the stone in his mouth had nothing to do with his tongue at all. We cannot know.
A person who worked on site for four years noted that none of the graves showed any indication of being Christian burials.
The answers remain uncertain. Archaeologists can examine the physical evidence, but the thoughts and fears of the people who buried him disappeared more than a millennium ago.
A Tongue Cut Out in Punishment?
Human skeletal biologist Simon Mays of Historic England examined the unusual burial and considered the possibility that the man had undergone tongue amputation.
Historical law codes provide some precedent for such punishment. Germanic laws describe tongue removal as a penalty for spreading malicious accusations. Mays noted, however, that researchers had not found evidence showing that Roman authorities in Britain used tongue amputation in the same way.
The distinction matters.
Roman Britain did not necessarily follow every custom practiced elsewhere in the Roman world, and written sources tell us surprisingly little about the daily practices of ordinary people living in Britain.
The stone itself provides another clue.
Archaeologists have discovered other Romano-British burials in which missing body parts appear to have been replaced with objects. In several cases, stones or pottery vessels occupy the anatomical position where a body part should have been.
Some graves contain decapitated individuals with stones or pots placed where their heads once rested. Another burial involved a missing foot replaced by a pot.
The practice raises two fascinating possibilities.
Perhaps mourners attempted to symbolically complete a damaged body.
Or perhaps they deliberately replaced a human body part with something lifeless.
If the stone in the Stanwick man’s mouth really represented a missing tongue, it may have served as a symbolic substitute—or as a deliberate reminder that the dead man’s body should never become whole again.
That possibility gives the burial an especially ominous quality. The stone may have completed him. Or it may have prevented him from becoming complete.
A Strange Position—and a Stranger Arm
Photographs taken when archaeologists uncovered the skeleton in 1991 show the man lying face down with his right arm extending at an unusual angle.
Some have interpreted that position as evidence that someone may have restrained him before death. The archaeological evidence cannot establish exactly what happened, but the possibility adds another layer of mystery to the burial.
Face-down burials themselves appear in different periods and places throughout Britain and Europe.
They could signify shame, punishment, social exclusion, or fear.
Some communities may have buried people face down because they considered them dangerous. If the dead could somehow rise again, perhaps placing the body face down would force the corpse to face the earth instead of the living world.
In some traditions, the logic became even more literal: bury the suspected troublemaker face down so that, should he rise, he would begin digging into the ground rather than climbing toward the surface.
The Stanwick man may have been a criminal. He may have suffered a punishment during life. He may have become a scapegoat after death. Or his burial may have followed a ritual whose meaning has vanished from history.
The mystery remains.
Could Disease Explain the Mutilation?
The man’s skeleton provides another disturbing possibility.
He was in his thirties and had suffered an oral infection that spread into other areas of his body. The infection produced new bone growth around his mouth and portions of his skull.
That raises the possibility that his mouth had already suffered severe trauma or disease.
Modern medical knowledge also offers several alternative explanations for injuries involving the tongue. People experiencing seizures or certain neurological disorders can bite their tongues or lips. Severe psychotic episodes can also produce extreme self-injury.
Yet researchers have found no convincing medical explanation for complete loss of the tongue in this case.
The stone therefore remains significant.
If someone had removed the man’s tongue, the act could have contributed to infection. If the infection came first, however, the mutilation may have had another cause.
The evidence cannot tell us which came first.
And somewhere between the skeleton and the centuries lies the answer.
When the Dead Became Dangerous
The Stanwick burial does not exist in isolation.
Across Britain and continental Europe, archaeologists have uncovered graves that suggest some communities feared particular corpses long after death.
The remains sometimes show deliberate mutilation, restraint, unusual positioning, or objects placed on and inside the body.
These practices did not always relate to what we would recognize as “vampire” beliefs. In some cases, communities may simply have feared that a dangerous person could somehow continue causing trouble after death.
Iron Age Celtic burial sites in Britain and Ireland provide examples of unusual treatment of the dead. The head and heart frequently received special attention because people associated those parts of the body with identity, life, or the soul.
Sometimes the person had committed no known crime.
An unnatural death might have been enough.
A sudden death through violence or accident could create fear because the deceased had died before completing the natural course of life. Folklore sometimes portrayed such people as restless or capable of returning.
The living therefore took precautions. They did not always wait for the corpse to rise. They acted first.
Punishing a Corpse
In some traditions, mutilating the dead served a second purpose: punishment.
A person’s body could suffer consequences even after the person’s life had ended. If the community believed that the soul could not move peacefully into the afterlife, damaging the corpse might prevent that journey—or prevent the deceased from returning.
The grave became the final courtroom, and the corpse became the prisoner. The living became the guards.
This mentality appears repeatedly throughout European burial history. In some places, people removed heads. In others, they pierced hearts. Some placed stones over bodies or inside mouths. Others buried corpses face down. Still others burned or dismembered them.
The methods changed, but the underlying fear remained remarkably similar:
What if the dead do not stay dead?
The Bulgarian Dead
In 2012, archaeologists working in Sozopol, Bulgaria, uncovered skeletons with iron rods driven through their chests.
The burials reflected a belief that certain individuals could return from the grave.
Other unusual burials across Europe contain bodies weighed down with stones. Archaeologists have also found decapitated skeletons, bodies with pierced hearts, and remains deliberately buried in wetlands.
These practices predate and overlap with the later European vampire traditions.
The important distinction is that people did not always discover a supposedly evil person after death and then decide to mutilate the body. In many cases, the community apparently suspected the individual while that person remained alive.
The corpse simply received the final precautions.
The heart and head often received particular attention because people associated them with the essence of a person. If the dead could return, those were the parts that needed to remain under control.
The Fear of an Unnatural Death
Not every suspected revenant had been accused of wrongdoing. Sometimes the only “sin” may have been dying suddenly.
A person killed in an accident or murder had not reached the expected end of life. In folklore, such an abrupt death could create a dangerous state between life and death. The person had been cheated. The person might therefore return.
That fear helps explain why some communities went to extraordinary lengths to restrain corpses.
They were not necessarily trying to punish a monster. They were trying to prevent one from becoming a monster.
The Polish “Vampire” Burial
In 2022, archaeologists investigating a seventeenth-century cemetery in Poland uncovered the remains of a young woman buried with a sickle laid across her neck. The position of the weapon suggests a grim purpose. If the woman attempted to rise, the sickle could sever her head.
Archaeologists also found a triangular padlock attached to one of her toes, another feature that may indicate fear of the deceased returning.
A fragment of silk suggested that she may have held a relatively high social position. Yet status did not protect her from the suspicions surrounding her grave.
The sickle did something more than mark her burial. It guarded it. The woman could not rise without encountering the blade.
Lilias Adie: Witch or Victim of Fear?
The treatment of Lilias Adie offers another grim example.
In 1704, people imprisoned Adie at Torryburn in Fife after accusing her of witchcraft. A month and a day after her arrest, she died in jail. The cause was never given out, but considering the way she was interred, she might have committed suicide.
Her community denied her an ordinary burial and placed her body in the foreshore between the high- and low-water marks. A flat stone covered her grave.
The location itself carried meaning. She could not receive a conventional Christian burial. She could not simply join the dead in consecrated ground. And those who buried her apparently wanted her contained, since as a witch she could not cross water.
Grave robbers disturbed her remains in 1852. Reports described a coffin measuring approximately six and a half feet long. Her skull retained most of its teeth, described at the time as “white and fresh,” and her leg bones suggested that she had stood considerably taller than the average woman of her period.
Her remains then embarked upon a disturbing journey.
In 1875, antiquarian Joseph Neil Paton displayed her skull in a private museum in Dunfermline. Nine years later, Dr. Dow exhibited it to the Fifeshire Medical Association. In contrast to her above-normal height, the skull was abnormally small, and Dr. Dow stated that Lilas Adie was a person with a diseased brain.
Eventually, the skull entered the collections of the University of St Andrews.
Photographs of her remains appeared in 1904. Then the skull disappeared.
In 1928, a walking stick was found among items in a Carnegie collection. It had a silver band engraved with her name, the year 1704, and that it was made from Lilas Adie’s coffin. Eventually it entered the collection of Pittencrieff House Museum.
But there was no sign of the skull until 1938, when it resurfaced at the Empire Exhibition at Bellahouston Park in Glasgow. That became its last known location.
In death, Lilias Adie never received the peace her burial was supposed to provide. Her grave became an object of curiosity. Her skull became an artifact, which has never been found. And the woman once accused of witchcraft became a historical mystery.
Lilas Adie was not the only one suspected of being a witch. In Dunfermline, there was a boulder at the side of the road between Crossford and Cairney Hill. It was known locally as the Witches’ Stone, supposedly carried there by a witch. In 1972 explosives blew it up, and now nothing remains.
Farquhar Shaw and the Cage Over the Grave
Britain’s unusual burials stretch much further back.
Deviant burial practices appear in Britain from at least the eleventh century and continued in various forms into later centuries. Some offenders could not receive burial in a churchyard.
Farquhar Shaw, who lived in Scotland, received an especially severe burial. In 1405, people placed five heavy stones on his flat tombstone. Then they erected a metal cage over the grave.
Why? Because Shaw had “troubled the neighborhood” while alive. His neighbors apparently feared that death would not end the trouble.
The stones weighed down the grave. The cage guarded it. The message could hardly have been clearer: Stay buried.
The Face-Down Skeleton at Tintern Abbey
In 1824, laborers excavating a saw-pit near Tintern Abbey discovered a skeleton buried in an orchard. The body lay face down.
An elderly local woman reportedly identified the burial with an old story. She believed the skeleton belonged to a man suspected of having been murdered roughly a century earlier and then disappeared.
If her theory proved correct, the murderer may have deliberately buried the victim face down to prevent him from returning for vengeance.
The story becomes even stranger because another case emerged decades later.
During an Edinburgh murder trial in 1889, the victim’s clothing appeared in court, but the man’s boots were missing.
Investigators learned that a local constable had received orders to bury the boots on the shore between the high- and low-water marks—the same type of location used for Lilias Adie’s burial.
The reason? To prevent the dead man from walking among the living. The belief had apparently extended beyond the murderer. Someone feared the victim himself.
Superstition Even During War
Such beliefs did not vanish with the arrival of the modern world.
In July 1915, during the First World War, a British officer reportedly observed two soldiers burying a dead German face down.
Even amid modern warfare, superstition could survive.
The soldiers apparently wanted to ensure that the dead man could not rise and seek revenge.
The image is haunting: soldiers surrounded by the machinery of twentieth-century war, yet still observing an ancient precaution against the restless dead. Modernity had arrived. Fear had not.
When the Dead Became Responsible for the Weather
The idea that corpses could influence the living extended beyond disease and vengeance.
In numerous nineteenth- and early twentieth-century stories from Russia, Austria, Poland, Romania, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia, people blamed the dead for severe weather.
A drought needed a culprit. A flood needed an explanation. A storm needed a cause. And sometimes the answer lay beneath the cemetery.
In 1891, a Russian woman who had died from alcohol poisoning was reportedly disinterred after villagers associated her death with a drought.
In 1900, villagers in Czechoslovakia blamed a summer drought on a deceased schoolmaster. He had been buried with a feather pillow beneath his head. The solution? Open the grave. Remove the pillow.
In 1926, folklorist Agnes Murgoci recorded another disturbing story from Zarnesti in Transylvania. Villagers blamed heavy rains on the corpse of a recently buried girl whom they suspected of vampirism.
The dead had once again become responsible for the misfortunes of the living.
The Wizard of Svino Krivza
One story from rural Crimea demonstrates just how far fear could override religious authority.
During a prolonged drought in the summer of 1905, villagers in Svino Krivza blamed a man whom they believed had practiced magic. He had died and been buried months earlier.
One Sunday at midnight, villagers formed a torchlit procession to his grave. Fiddles and flutes played mournful music as the crowd disinterred the body. They intended to have the village priest sprinkle the corpse with holy water before reburying it.
The priest, Father Constantin, objected.
He condemned the villagers’ actions as barbaric superstition. His protest did not end well. The villagers threw him into the open grave and placed the corpse on top of him. They later pulled the priest from the grave, but he had died.
Only after two devout women alerted the police did authorities learn what had happened.
The story reveals something deeper than simple belief in magic. Fear can overpower reason. It can overpower religion. And in desperate times, it can even overpower the instinct to respect the dead.
The Vampire of Medveda
In 1725, Petar Blagojevic, a Serbian peasant, died in his hometown. Soon after his death, nine villagers died under mysterious circumstances. Blagojevic’s wife stated that he had visited her and asked her for his opanci (shoes); she then moved to another village for safety reasons.
Authorities exhumed Blagojevic’s body, and it had not decomposed, and the corpse’s hair and nails had grown. The villagers staked the corpse through the heart. Eyewitnesses said fresh blood poured from the wounds.
A year after Blagojevic’s death, the village of Medveda saw their own mysterious deaths. The suspect responsible was Arnold Paole, a Serbian hajduk. He had told people he had been attacked by a vampire as Gossowa, and he had eaten soil from the vampire’s grave to cure himself. Paole died after falling from a hay cart and breaking his neck in 1726. Four people who said he had visited them after his death sickened and died.
Austrian authorities sent medics to investigate the case. Paole was disinterred, and like Blagojevic, his body was said not to have decomposed, and his hair and nails had grown. The body and coffin were smeared with blood, and a stake was driven through the corpse’s heart. According to reports, the dead man screamed out. The body was dismembered and burned.
Another twelve people died supposedly from vampirism in the following five years. In total, seventeen people who had died in the vicinity were exhumed and executed, with their hearts and heads removed and their ashes scattered in the river.
Ireland’s Cillini
Ireland preserved another troubling tradition in the form of cillini—unconsecrated burial grounds used for people whom the Church or community excluded from ordinary Christian cemeteries.
These sites served as resting places for stillborn or unbaptized infants, people with certain disabilities, strangers, shipwreck victims, criminals, famine victims, and people who died by suicide.
The practice expanded from roughly the seventeenth century onward, although its roots reached much deeper.
People established these burial places in deserted churchyards, ancient monuments, boundary ditches, crossroads, castles, lakeshores, and coastal areas.
Their locations reflected exclusion.
These people had died, but they did not receive the same burial treatment as members of the accepted community.
When Burial Became a Form of Punishment
Traditional Christian burial generally placed the body in a west-to-east orientation, often lying extended or slightly supine and without grave goods.
Deviant burial broke those conventions. A person might receive an isolated grave. Someone might remove the head. A body could undergo amputation. Stones might cover the corpse or weigh it down. The location itself could mark the deceased as different.
In some traditions, removing a head or another body part served a theological purpose: it prevented the deceased from rising intact on Judgment Day.
Other practices focused on preventing physical resurrection.
The body had to remain where it lay.
The Stones in the Mouth
One of the oldest and most intriguing examples of mouth stones comes from Ireland.
In 2008, archaeologists working at Kilteashee uncovered two eighth-century skeletons with large stones inside their mouths.
The discovery predates the great vampire hysteria that swept through parts of Europe centuries later.
The two men had lived roughly between the seventh and ninth centuries.
One man, estimated to have been between forty and sixty years old, lay with a large black stone wedged inside his mouth.
The second man, probably between twenty and thirty, had an even larger stone forced between his teeth. The pressure had almost dislocated his jaw.
Why? The answer remains uncertain. Perhaps the community feared these men. Perhaps they had died under suspicious circumstances. Perhaps someone believed they might return.
The mouth itself may explain the ritual. Ancient traditions sometimes associated the mouth with the departure of the soul. But the mouth also provided a possible entrance for evil. If a corpse could become reanimated, perhaps something could enter through the mouth.
A stone offered a simple solution. Block the entrance.
The Cemetery of the Babies
The Kilteashee burials were only two among many unusual graves found throughout Ireland.
Archaeologists excavated 137 skeletons at the site between 2005 and 2009, while estimates suggest that roughly 3,000 people may have been buried there between approximately A.D. 700 and 1400.
Elsewhere, an even stranger cemetery emerged in Italy.
At an abandoned Roman villa near Lugano in Teverina, excavations beginning in 1987 revealed what researchers later called La Necropoli dei Bambini—the Cemetery of the Babies.
The Roman villa had collapsed during the third century, and people later transformed the ruins into a burial ground.
Archaeologists discovered evidence of ritual practices among the graves.
Raven talons appeared among the remains. Bronze vessels containing ash lay nearby. Toad bones and the remains of puppies suggested that people may have performed occult ritual sacrifices involving animals. The site contained dozens of young children, most newborns or under three years old.
Yet one burial stood apart.
The Vampire of Lugano
Archaeologists discovered a three-year-old girl with stones placed over her hands and feet. Perhaps someone intended to keep her in the grave.
Then they found another burial that proved even stranger. A ten-year-old child lay with a piece of limestone inside the mouth.
Researchers came to call the individual the “Vampire of Lugano.”
The stone may have formed part of a ritual designed to prevent the child from returning and spreading the illness that most likely caused the death.
Malaria provides one possible explanation for the burial. The child’s skull also showed evidence of an abscessed tooth. Yet the most intriguing question concerns the child’s age.
The cemetery contained roughly sixty children, most of them newborns or toddlers. Why did someone bury a ten-year-old in a cemetery apparently intended primarily for babies?
No definitive answer has emerged. The archaeology offers clues. The grave offers questions. And the silence of the dead supplies no answers.
The Stone That Crossed Centuries
The tradition of placing a stone inside the mouth did not belong to a single culture.
Archaeologists discovered another example in Venice, where a woman buried in the sixteenth or seventeenth century lay in a cemetery associated with plague victims.
Like the child at Lugano, she had a large stone inside her mouth. The logic appears grimly practical.
The Venetian ritual confirmed “the intimate belief held at those times, between the plague and the mythological character of the vampire”. The insertion of a rock or brick in the mouth of a corpse has no reference, even folkloric, for this practice. Despite Venice being considered a very cosmopolitan city during the time of the woman’s burial, there was superstition
If plague victims could somehow return and spread disease, the stone could prevent them from biting, chewing, or otherwise interacting with the living.
The Dead Were Not Always Innocent
These strange graves reveal an uncomfortable truth about the past. People feared those who represented a threat to society while they were alive, and the evil persisted even after death. In some instances, the threat came about in the way they died.
Criminals, witches, murder victims, plague victims, and people who died suddenly were all believed to thirst for life, or want to drag the living into the land of the dead. Strangers were feared because their lives were mostly a secret. Those who killed themselves were going against the laws of God and would become puppets of the devil after death; this included even children.
The living could respond by mutilating the corpse, restraining it, weighing it down, burying it face down, blocking its mouth, removing its head, piercing its heart, or denying it a conventional grave.
Modern observers may view these practices as cruel or irrational. But within the worldview of the people who performed them, the actions could make perfect sense. A community facing an unexplained disaster needed an explanation, or in some cases a solution.
A family watching loved ones die needed a reason. A village terrified by disease needed someone—or something—to blame. And the grave offered a place to find that answer.
The Mystery Beneath the Grave
The man from Stanwick never received a name that survived in history. We do not know what he said. We do not know whom he angered. We do not know whether anyone accused him of spreading malicious rumors, or if he even committed a crime. We do not even know with certainty whether someone removed his tongue.
What we know is what remained.
A body, buried face down in a strange position with a damaged mouth. A stone. And more than a thousand years of silence.
His burial belongs to a much larger archaeological pattern—one in which communities sometimes treated the dead as though death itself had failed to make them harmless.
Perhaps the stone symbolized a missing tongue. Was he punished for just spreading gossip, or did he actually betray someone with horrible consequences?
Perhaps it deliberately kept the body incomplete. The truth may never emerge. But the grave tells us something chilling about those who stood around it. They did not simply bury this man. They took precautions.
And somewhere in the darkness of Roman Britain, someone apparently believed that whatever had troubled the living might not end when the man’s heart stopped beating.
They made certain the dead man stayed where they put him. Or at least, they tried. Because throughout history, the grave has never represented only death. Sometimes it represents fear.
And sometimes, the most frightening question is not why someone died; it is: Why were the living so afraid that the dead might come back?