Went to opera tonite, saw "Phantom of the Opera". Wonderful show.
The History channel has a show where they scientifically describe the typical symptoms of a vampire and how villager a thousand years ago may have assumed the dead came back to life.
The show discusses the decomposition of the corpse and things like:
- fingernails, hair and teeth look like they grow after death due to the dehydration and retraction of flesh, making look like the body may still be alive and growing and the teeth look elongated.
- gasses from decomposition tend to bloat the body, making it look well fed.
- juices tend to exit out of the body at various places, including the mouth, which look like the corpse had been drinking blood.
If someone died soon after another death, the villager could well exhume the body to find these types of things and assume the body was a vampire.
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