In 1950, police in Denmark found the body of a man buried in a peat bog, a swampy area covered with decayed plant matter. They called in a scientist to investigate, fearing that the man had been murdered. And that’s exactly what the investigator discovered, except the man had been killed 2,000 years ago!
The body of the man had been so well preserved in the peat that his facial features could be plainly recognized. There was a rope around his neck, still intact. It was thought that the man had been hanged, then tossed into the peat bog and pinned down with a wooden stake.
Scientists believe that the man had been killed as part of a religious sacrifice and then pinned down with the stake so that his spirit could not escape to haunt others.
But in a way, the “Tollund Man”, as he is called after the site where his body was discovered, did have his revenge. When his preserved body was being removed from the peat bog, a worker had a heart attack and died on the spot!
