The Shroud Eaters

In the annals of the undead there was never anything to match the Shroud Eaters for pure horror.  They came from the Great Plague of the 14th Century.  Their particular brand of absolute horror was to come to their victims in the dark of night to drink the victim’s blood through a hole that they sucked through their shroud where it covered the undead’s mouth.  Not only did they suck their victim’s blood but they also spread the plague to others.  This came in an era where three quarters of the human race perished from the ravages of the Great Plague in a single year.  It has been estimated that the casualties in Europe alone were fifty million souls.  Worldwide the toll was even greater and has been estimated to be over 100 million souls.  Not only that the plague returned every generation until well into the 1700s.

The Shroud Eaters were especially active in the spine of Italy known as the Apennine Mountains.  The dead from the plague were so numerous that there was no longer any civilized way to bury them.  The victims of the plague were just thrown out into the street in front of their houses.  Later the body gatherers of the new dead would come with a horse and wagon to collect them for burial.  As they clattered along the streets they were preceded by the cry, “Bring out your dead!”  Burial of these victims was more often then not a mass grave somewhere out of town.  Their bodies were tumbled into the mass grave helter skelter to lie where they fell.  The grave diggers filled in the mass grave, and waited for the next wagonload of victims.

Some of the plague victims were wrapped in a burial shroud when they died.  They were the fortunate ones as most of the plague victims died alone and had no one to wrap them in a shroud for the dead.  It was these wrapped dead that gave rise to the tales of the shroud eaters.  They even gave rise to our modern belief that ghosts are wrapped in a shroud.

The belief spread among the peasants in the hill towns of Italy that the shrouded ones rose every night to partake of human blood.  Their shrouds were rent over their mouths to facilitate their blood drinking ways.  It was no doubt these tales that later gave rise to the tales of vampires, and other stories about other undead creatures like werewolves.

The village men would go out at dawn to find these undead.  They did this by exhuming the dead from their mass graves.  This must have created an awful stench as they dug their way through the rotted flesh of the plague victims.  Anytime they found a shrouded body with a hole over its mouth they believed they had found one of the despised Shroud Eaters.  They even developed a way of dealing with these creatures – by sticking a brick or stone between their jaws so they were no longer able to partake of living man’s blood or spread the plague.

The Plague is still endemic throughout the world waiting to strike again.  It has even reached the New World.  A pool of plague is established among the Ground Squirrels and Prairie Dogs of the American West.  Hardly a year passes when someone in America doesn’t come down with the Plague.