Macabre Roman Mystery

As well as writing history for the web, I have a sideline in ghost stories, so I was fascinated by the potential of this unusual story. Basically, archaeologists in York, UK, have uncovered forty-nine skeletons buried during the town’s Roman occupation, thirty-six of which had been beheaded. The ‘mystery’, such as it is, was that the Roman’s didn’t have any tradition in beheading, legal or otherwise, leaving historians to fall back on educated guesses (or speculation) for an explanation, the most plausible of which was an attempt to stop the victims coming back as ghosts...