Buried Face Down with a Bag of Coins: Mysterious 17th Century Grave Discovered in Switzerland

An unexpected discovery awaited workers as they began to build a new underground garage near a cemetery wall in the Swiss town of Schüpfen: the subsoil was full of human skeletons. They were actually warned that something like this could happen because it was known that the plot of land was used as a burial ground in the Middle Ages. In fact, archaeologists located up to 342 bodies at the site dating from the 8th-17th centuries.

But the Spanish newspaper ABC explains that neither workers nor researchers were prepared to discover the remains of a man who was placed face down in his grave a little away from the other burials. They found a knife and the remains of a bag or purse alongside his skeleton. In addition, 24 corroded coins which form a single compact block of metal, were discovered.

The surprised specialists have developed various hypotheses in an attempt to explain the man’s strange burial position. Some believe that the burial had to be done in a hurry, leaving no time to prepare the body. If the body had been washed, as was customary by that time, the bag would have been removed. Is it possible that this man died from an infectious disease – requiring his immediate burial?