The Wildcard · Calgary Morning Wire

Your Roman ancestors had a wild way to keep spirits from haunting you.

Your old Roman ancestors sure had some *ideas* about the afterlife

Alright, listen up, because this one just about knocked my Stampede breakfast pancake right off my plate this morning. You ever hear about those old Roman burial sites? Yeah, me neither, much. But apparently, archaeologists digging around in Rome's Ostiense necropolis just found three skeletons from like, 1,800 years ago, and get this: they had iron nails hammered into their chests. *Nails.* On their chests! My first thought was, "Man, talk about a rough day at the office." But for real though, the experts reckon these folks were doing some kind of ritual to keep restless spirits from, you know, roaming around and bugging the living. Sounds like a whole lot of extra work just to make sure ol' Uncle Tiberius wasn't gonna come back to complain about the price of chariot repairs.

Can you even imagine that? Over here in Calgary, if you want to keep a spirit from bugging you, you just leave out a Tim Hortons double-double and they usually move on. We don't have time for hammering nails into ancient chests, we're too busy arguing about whether the Flames are gonna make the playoffs *this* year. It's wild to think about what people believed back then, how far they'd go just to feel a bit safer from the unknown. Makes you wonder what future archaeologists will find of *our* weird rituals, eh? Probably a bunch of leftover Saddledome beer cups and a few too many cowboy hats.

This is Calgary — we've seen the boom, we've seen the bust, and we showed up anyway. Cassidy Redcloud, MiTL Sports Desk.

You gotta hear Keith and the crew unpack stuff like this every morning. Catch it live at mornings.live.

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