Chilling Secrets Unearthed: Cathedral in Belgium Reveals Macabre Wall of Human Bones

The wall was constructed primarily with thigh and shin bones of adults. Mature skulls were also found within the construction. Some skulls were shattered and placed between other bones to fill in spaces.

“This is a phenomenon we’ve not yet come across here,” said Janiek De Gryse, the excavation project’s leader. Archaeologists believe the bones were sourced from an old graveyard near the church. The skeletal structure was low enough that full human skeletons had already been discovered on the ground level above the wall.

WIkimedia CommonsSaint Bavo’s Cathedral stands on the site of 10th-century church as well as a 12th-century church.

This suggests that the wall was built when the graveyard was still in use, leading experts to believe that people were perhaps making space for new burials in the graveyard. But in order to make more room for new burials, they had to get creative with the old bones.

“When clearing a churchyard, the skeletons cannot just be thrown away,” De Gryse explained. “Given that the faithful believed in a resurrection of the body, the bones were considered the most important part.”

The religious belief that skeletal remains were not allowed to be disposed also led to the common practice of building stone houses against the walls of town graveyards so that the houses — known as ossuaries — could act as a storage space for bones if needed.

The snaking network of the Catacombs in Paris (which holds the skeletal remains of more than 6 million people) and the basement ossuary at St. Leonard’s Church in the United Kingdom (which contains the remains of about 4,000 people) are among the world’s largest and most well-preserved collections of human bones.