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Digging New England Vampires - Episode 40
434 Plays9 years ago
Today we're talking with Retired Connecticut State Archaeologist Nicholas Bellantoni and his work with an interesting Vampire burial. We talk the hows and why's of this burial and what it meant to people in the past to have a Vampire in the graveyard.
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Transcript
Introduction to the Podcast
00:00:01
Speaker
You are listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network. Ancient tools and burials, plants and seeds, Neanderthals. All these things we make no apology, are the study of archaeology.
00:00:24
Speaker
Welcome to the Archaeological Fantasies podcast, episode 40. I'm your host, Sarah, with my co-host, Ken Fader. And today we have special guest, Nicholas Bellatoni. And he's going to talk to us about JB the Vampire and all the fun things that they used to do to get rid of tuberculosis back in the 19th century. Get ready to think critically. You will see our staple of archaeology.
00:00:51
Speaker
But we don't do dinosaurs. No, we don't do dinosaurs. No, we don't do dinosaurs. Hey, everyone, and welcome back to the Archaeological Fantasies podcast. I'm Sarah. Ken, how's it going? Things are going splendidly, Sarah. It's like summer in New England. It's had to be pushing 90 degrees the last couple of days. So we went from winter to mid summer in like a week. I like that you guys think 73 is winter.
00:01:18
Speaker
Well, I mean, it is funny when you see it 73 degrees here, you got people walking around in Parkas because it's so cold. But we never dress appropriately in New England. That's all right. That's New England.
Meet Nicholas Bellatoni
00:01:32
Speaker
And today we have a special guest. We have Nicholas Bellatoni with us. He is the emeritus state archaeologist for Connecticut, which means he is the retired state archaeologist from Connecticut.
00:01:47
Speaker
Hey, hey, Nick, how are you? Good. Good. Thanks for having me on. Yeah. So people would, we would say that Nick is retired, but nobody would ever describe Nick as retiring. Um, he's an active guy. He was Nick became, how many years ago were you, did you become a state archeologist, Nick? Well, I would say state archeologist up at UConn for 27 years. So, uh, lady.
00:02:11
Speaker
It was one of the best decisions, absolutely, that we all made. I was part of that committee that decided, Nick, you still owe me some money for voting for you, I think. There were so many of you on that committee. I can't get to all of you. You're coming up by 2018. I'll hang in there.
Life after Archaeology
00:02:30
Speaker
Nick was absolutely incredibly active, incredibly important for the development of a whole bunch of programs in the state of Connecticut. I mean this very sincerely.
00:02:39
Speaker
He was absolutely spectacular. And you will never hear a better public speaker on all matters archaeological than Nick Valentoni. Really passionate, exciting speaker. And I'm just really glad that we got Nick. Nick, these days, this retired guy sleeps about, what, 20 hours a day? Nick, is that right? Yeah, I do now, yes. It's super relaxing.
00:03:01
Speaker
I was going to say, Nicholas, do you feel like you're having your eulogy read to you? Yeah, there you go. He was a good guy. He was a good man, Nicholas. Excellent archaeologist. Let's see him go. Nicholas, what did retired archaeologists do?
00:03:17
Speaker
Well right now I've got two book contracts so I'm trying to work on those and as Ken will tell you it's quite a it's quite a job and not sure what I got myself into but I am enjoying it. I'm also doing some consulting I still teach up at UCUM part time so
00:03:34
Speaker
I'm keeping very busy, but at a different pace. When I was state archaeologist, I was running around at 7 a.m. I was out the door going somewhere in the state of Connecticut. Now, 7 a.m., I'm drinking coffee, reading the paper, and my meetings are a little bit later now.
The Griswold Discovery
00:03:50
Speaker
So it's a whole different pace. It allows me to do things I couldn't have done before.
00:03:54
Speaker
Yeah, that's great. Now the reason we have Nicholas on with us today is because we were talking about a very fun topic, at least I think so. We are going to discuss vampires. Right, yes. I thought it was really important, but here we are in this archaeological fantasies podcast, where we're talking about all this fake stuff relating to archaeology, all this nonsense.
00:04:16
Speaker
But some of the stories that archaeologists have to tell about their research are every bit as bizarre. I was, Jeb, Jeb Card would call it spooky as the fake stuff. And this is real deal stuff. This is a story of Nick's excavation of what turned out to be the actual burials of vampires. Well, I'm kind of exaggerating a little bit.
00:04:41
Speaker
No, no, you're really not though. They really were vampires as far as the people who buried them were. So Nick, let's just kind of hand it over to you. I will ask some, some, some general questions, but first why don't you tell our audience, how did this thing come to your attention in the first place? I mean, somebody did call up your office and say, Dr. Bell and Tony, we've got vampires in our backyard. So what exactly happened?
00:05:06
Speaker
No, but the state police and the medical examiner's office called me because a colonial graveyard, a family burial ground in Griswold, Connecticut, was kind of accidentally uncovered by a sand and gravel operation.
Investigation of the Burial Site
00:05:21
Speaker
And actually, it happened like this. They stopped work on a Friday. Saturday, there was a light rain. On Sunday, two 10-year-old boys came to the gravel pit to play and have a good old time, sliding down the slopes and
00:05:34
Speaker
Well, one slide down, two skulls dislodged and tumbled down the hill with the boards. And they freaked right out, you know? And one kid goes running home to his mother, mama, there's skulls in the gravel pit. And she says, get out of here. You watch too much television. So the kid went back to the gravel pit, picked up the skull and brought her home to her. That sounds like something a 10 year old would do. Absolutely. So she did, after she's bounced off the wall, of course, she, uh,
00:06:02
Speaker
She called the police and the police came down and roped it off as a crime scene and sent the skulls to the medical examiner's office in Farmington. They gave me the call when they realized that these were not part of a modern criminal investigation, but in fact, the bone was old. There were cortical loss and you could see decomposition. So they realized it was old and by state statutes, they turned the investigation over to the state archaeologist.
00:06:28
Speaker
So really what happened was I was put in a position to rescue, if you will, a colonial era burying ground that was literally collapsing off a gravel bank. And that's when we came upon one of the burials that turned out to be quite unusual, actually.
Unusual Burial Findings
00:06:50
Speaker
Right. Now, because this is private property, right, Nick, where this gravel pit was?
00:06:58
Speaker
Say that again and again. So this was private property, right? Yes, it was. As a matter of fact, yes, it was a standard gravel operation mining. The miner was very cooperative. He was kind of shocked by what was found and so forth. But in fact, you know, the first impression by the state police when they roped it off was that this might a couple of victims of a serial killer at that time by the name of Michael.
00:07:26
Speaker
That was a famous case in Connecticut. Yeah. Can you say the name one more time?
00:07:31
Speaker
Michael Ross, he's the last person put to death by the state of Connecticut. And I believe back in the early 80s, he killed about eight or nine women in New England. And at that point, not all of the victims have been discovered. So they thought at first it was a criminal investigation, but it turned out to be a farming family cemetery. And that's why we were called in to assume the investigation.
00:07:58
Speaker
So we ordinarily think of colonial cemeteries in this part of the world as having nice, neat gravestones with erd and willow designs or cherubs. So there's nothing on the surface that indicated there was a cemetery here.
00:08:13
Speaker
That practically right basically there are a lot of unmarked graves most people could not afford a tombstone These are hard-working farmers What we believe they did have were flat field stones that were set in some cases only a couple of inches off the ground But certainly not engraved. So the miners when they cleared the land never recognized that these stones might in fact grave markers and
00:08:41
Speaker
So it didn't look like a typical cemetery, so they just said, it just rocks, so let's dig it all up. Yeah, they had no idea until the skulls actually started to be rolled down the bank. So initially, this starts off as a salvage operation, right? You know, you say, well, we'll get some people in there, we'll excavate these burials and then rebury them. So what was so strange about these graves as you uncovered them?
00:09:08
Speaker
Well, a number of things. First of all, when I arrived at the gravel bank, I looked up and I saw six dark features coming down the edge of the cliff. Of course, we recognized those as burial features. At the bottom of which, I could see coffin parts and human remains poking out of the
00:09:32
Speaker
So, you know, we had a whole series of individuals we had to deal with in that first row that were literally on the bank. So when I did that, I looked up and I saw some bricks. And when we started to excavate down onto the bricks, it turned out to be a crypt. And inside was a coffin that had been laid down, a row of bricks built around it.
Vampire Mythology Practices
00:09:59
Speaker
with flat field stones enclosing it in the crypt form. When I opened the stone to look down onto the coffin lid,
00:10:11
Speaker
I could see that the coffin was wooden and painted black, and they had hammered Brack's tax into the lid of the coffin in the initials of the person laying there and their age of death. I wasn't too thrilled because the initials were N-B, and those are my initials.
00:10:32
Speaker
It sounds like this has got to be a movie. This has got to be a made for TV movie with Eddie Lorraine Warren and you're the guy in the coffin and you know, oh my gosh. I have a question about the tax. I have a question about the tax. Is that a normal thing or was that something unusual?
00:10:51
Speaker
No, that was a funerary option, if you will, for coffins in the late 18th, early 19th century. You get into the 1830s, 1840s, they start switching to nameplates on the coffins to a demo. So there's nothing up to this point to make you think there's anything unusual going on yet.
00:11:18
Speaker
No, other than my initials, that's enough. Yes, no, at this point, this is pretty normal stuff. And it turned out the individual underneath was 13 years old, based on the tax number. And of course, when we did the forensic analysis of that individual, it corresponded to the forensic course.
00:11:44
Speaker
Yeah, a young teenager. Next to him was another burial, the initials on her coffin where I be, and she was not in a crypt.
00:11:56
Speaker
But next to her was an adult male in a stone-lined coffin where they set flat field stones on end and bridged them, if you will, arch them to enclose the coffin. And initials on his coffin were J.B. 55, an adult male, 55 years of age. So we think we have a nuclear family there, where a husband, a wife, an adolescent, probably a son.
00:12:25
Speaker
So JB is our interesting character because when I first saw those stones coming out, I went along the edge of the gravel bank, and it's very, it was eroding, and the part of the arch at the head was open. So I peered in and looked, and instead of seeing the back of the skull that I expected to see coming from that angle,
00:12:53
Speaker
The skull was facing me, and I thought that was quite odd because of the fact that, you know, he should be laying on his back with his head, you know, on the back, so facing outward. So I thought that was unusual. When we started excavating down on JB's crypt,
00:13:14
Speaker
I found two skeletal elements on top of the stones. That was a lumbar vertebrate and a lower arm bone, an oleum. And I said to myself, gee, this guy's supposed to be inside the crypt. Why am I finding stones outside the crypt?
00:13:31
Speaker
And when we opened up the stone arch at the foot of the coffin, there was the feet in perfect anatomical position along with the shin or tibia. But then as we continued to open up the crypt and moved up to where the thigh bones or the femurs should be, they were missing.
00:13:52
Speaker
And as we continue to do this, we found the femurs have been crossed over the chest area. They've been uprooted, crossed over the chest area. And the skull was clearly at this point deliberately decapitated. And the rib bones showed that he had been violated and so forth. Looking at the
00:14:20
Speaker
the bones, if you will, the lathe bones, the femurs, we could see a fracture that occurred. And based on the signature of that fracture,