Charon’s obols were coins supposedly used by the ancient Greeks for funerary purposes. More precisely, the belief is that these coins were used by the shades (roughly equivalent to the concept of ‘...
The Lion of Lucerne (known also as the Lion Monument) is a memorial located in Lucerne, Switzerland. This monument is a rock relief carved into the cliff face of a former sandstone quarry, and...
Heartless propaganda made people believe that Anne Boleyn was a witch - a woman who manipulated the king and put spells on him to reach her goals. She was obviously a very intelligent woman, but her...
Silbury Hill, said to be the largest prehistoric man-made mound in Europe, looms over the landscape. Yet so little is understood about this enigmatic British site. However, surprising as it may seem...
Italian scientists are attempting to give Ötzi the Iceman a voice. By using CT scans of his throat and the tissue around his voice box, the researchers believe there is a chance to recreate the...
Read Part 1 As shown in numerous existing Romanian legends and testimonies, the main measure of protection against strigoi (vampires) is respecting funeral rites in detail. (The majority of strigoi...
Romanian folklore records two atypical versions of the western vampire. These are the strigoi and the moroi which, even though they resemble the western image of the vampire, are very different from...
In Ancient Rome, Valeria Messalina was a symbol of vanity and immorality. For centuries, people identified her as one of the most demoralized women in history, but how much of what we know about...
I was reading through an article yesterday from the International Journal of Osteoarchaeology titled The Non-Adult Cohort from Le Morne Cemetery, Mauritius: A Snap Shot of Early Life and Death after...
Death is inevitable, but what death shows us about the social behaviors of the living is not. And recent University of Cincinnati research examining the ancient bereavement practices from the Central...
A well-known medieval tale talks about the three living and the three dead. As the story goes, three young men meet three undead walking, talking corpses. The dead tell the living that they must mend...
By Tara MacIsaac , Epoch Times The Nekromanteion, or the “Oracle of Death,” was an ancient Greek temple in Epirus, Greece, in which supplicants sought to consult shades of the dead. Sensory...
In pre-Columbian America, the Incas had the largest empire and a flourishing civilization. They called their empire Tawantinsuyu , meaning The Four United Provinces , and they worshiped the sun god...
There is a Church of San Francisco found in the Portuguese city of Évora, 140 km (87 miles) from Lisbon. Inside this church, next to the cloister of the former Franciscan monastery, in the place...
India is renowned for having distinctive religious practices that coexist with one another. The numerous shrines and monuments allow one to contemplate the importance of faith for many. One of the...
As far as crowd-pleasers go, it is hard to beat mummies. When Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs opened at the Melbourne Museum in 2011, it broke all previous records for touring...
A report in the Hürriet Daily News published in July of this year announced that the world’s earliest pictogram had been discovered at the archaeological site of Göbekli Tepe, Southeast Turkey. It...
The Plague is far older than previously known and later changed to become much more virulent—so virulent that it may have contributed to the decline of Classical Greece and the Roman and Byzantine...
By Anna Liesowska / The Siberian Times A crypt with up to 30 burials is giving archaeologists fresh insights of intriguing ancient Siberians famed for their death masks which give us a clear idea of...
Edgar Allan Poe is considered a literary genius and one of the fathers of horror literature as well as the inventor of the detective story. Poe was gifted with an undoubtedly brilliant mind able to...
A new analysis of Tutankhamun’s golden death mask has led to a radical new theory – the mask was originally made for Nefertiti, step mother of Tutankhamun , as a co-regent to her husband king...
Mummification may have been more common in Bronze Age Britain than previously believed, and the ancient Britons may have purposefully mummified their dead with unknown funerary rituals—but why and...
Three men have died and others were incapacitated while grave robbing an ancient tomb in China. The three men died of suffocation in the airless gravesite. Two other men in the tomb called for help,...
Read Part 1 Science had to wait until the nineteenth century to banish the idea of a supposed supernatural origin of the plague. The fear of a pandemic on a global scale persisted for four...