Archaeology is literally digging up the past. Sometimes you find dinosaurs and sometimes you find humans and it is wondrous to know that just bones can tell so much about the past – of how hot the planet was, how green it was, what animals ate millions of years ago, how our ancestors lived. Archaeology is fascinating, and sometimes lucky scientists come across a dig that shocks even the most radical of them, with discoveries that bust myths and shine new light on something we didn’t even think of. The following are some of the spooky digs archaeologists dug up.

A tomb full of screaming mummies who were buried alive

Remember that horrifying scene from the movie The Mummy where they mummify a person alive?

Turns out that it actually happened in ancient Egypt. Archaeologist Gaston Maspero came across mummies that had tortured expressions on their faces. Most of them have the same expression – that of screaming in pain.

Archaeologists think that they were poisoned and mummified alive as a punishment.

Most of the mummified bodies aren’t tied at the jaw. So most of the mummies end up with an open jaw. But in this case, they were lying down, inside a sarcophagus, in a horizontal position.

Vampire mummies with bricks in their mouths

We all know that the best way to kill a vampire is to put a wooden stake through its heart and then completely sever its head. Thank god for Twilight that we know vampires are good looking hunks.

People in 16th-century didn’t read Twilight, so they did much more horrible things. The most chilling one was that they would stuff the mouths of these “vampires” with bricks and stones. This was supposedly done so that they may not feed even after they were dead and buried in this brutal fashion.

These graves were found in Venice with hundreds of such mummified vampires.