When Giuseppe Fiorelli took over as head excavator on the ruins of Pompeii in 1863, he decided to do things a little

differently than his predecessors. Up till then, the go-to move had been to clear the streets

first, then dig out the houses from the ground floor up, but Fiorelli flipped that on its head,

literally. That is, instead of digging from the bottom up, he decided to uncover the city from the

top down. As it turned out, this technique would be revolutionary. It allowed excavators

to preserve the relics of the lost city with more delicate precision than ever before,

and it also made way for an entirely new sort of discovery, one that continues to haunt visitors

to this day. You see, as Fiorelli dug, he began to notice something strange.

Within the hardened layers of ash, he started to come upon odd twisting holes, but these

holes weren't entirely empty.

No, piled in the bottom, were bones, human bones.

Soon, with what I imagined to be a blend of horror and scientific excitement,

he realized what he had found. These were none other than the voids left behind by decomposed bodies.

In short, when victims died under the ash, they slowly rotted away, leaving perfect,

person-shaped hollows in their wake.

And this gave Fiorelli an idea.

He began by injecting plaster into these hollow spaces before cracking away the sediment around them to leave a sort of statue.

The result?

Terrifyingly detailed plaster casts of Pompey's residence,

frozen forever at the very moment they died,

2,000 years before. The technique became known as the Fiorelli process, and it's still in use to this

day. And I have to say, as creepy as they are, it's worth looking up photos of these casts if you

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