Modern people aren't exactly without our flaws, but for the most part we're less willfully creepy than our forebearers. Sure, there are a lot of people who still can't be bothered to wash their hands after using the toilet, and there are evidently loads of people who send unsolicited photos of certain body parts to total strangers, but at least we collectively understand that These things are not normal and as normal people, we try to call out the worst offenders.
A thousand years ago, though, there were a lot of super creepy things that people did that were considered just another day at the rodent-infested hovel, or the castle, or whatever drafty and unpleasant structure it was you found yourself living and or working in. This was partly due to people's not very sophisticated understanding of, like, everything and partly due to people just making stuff up because it was the only way they felt like they could control their not-very-controllable existence on planet Earth. So sit down and poor yourself a nice glass of poo water, here are some of the creepiest things people thought were totally normal 1,000 (or so) years ago
Ask any four-year-old if corpses can solve their own murder, and the answer will be, of course not. Ask a modern forensic scientist and the answer will probably be "kind of," since clues found on a corpse quite frequently lead to a suspect, but that's not really the same thing as corpses solving their own murders.
Well, 1,000 years ago, people did actually think that corpses could speak, in a sense, anyway. According to National Geographic, the practice was known as "Cruentation," and it was basically what people did because they didn't know about DNA and they were otherwise pretty hopeless at things like gathering evidence and interviewing witnesses and caring whether or not they found the actual perpetrator or not. It was more important to execute someone (anyone) than it was to make sure you were executing the right person.
In those days, people believed that dead people were actually only "mostly dead," which means that Miracle Max wasn't really a radical thinker. Early crime investigators thought that if you put a corpse into the presence of its killer, the body would start to bleed. Now, this makes for really dramatic forensics, but the problem was that corpses don't really bleed much after death, so this technique probably didn't lead to a guilty verdict very often. But never mind, there was always a lake they could throw the accused into instead, since buoyant people are clearly more guilty than the ones who sink.
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