Mummies of Toledo - The Street of the Dead

tbm-horror-horror-tale-story-toledo-mummies-5

The mummies found in the underground of several churches, like San Miguel or San Andrés in Toledo (Spain) frame a terrifying story we can witness first-hand.

The whole hidden city underneath the buildings holds an innumerable amount of corpses from different sources who form a macabre army of forgotten dead souls. In their disturbing honor, they have called one of the streets plagued with under-corpses, The Street of the Dead.

Dozens of corpses have been mummified thanks to the perfect humidity and temperature conditions. What happened there?

Some of the corpses are carefully placed in crypts while others are just piled up and forgotten. Every church has claimed their own mummies, many of them belonging to nuns and monks, several sources affirm there’s the same Cristobal Colon (Columbus)’s corpse!

During the Civil War (1936-39) many of these improvised crypts were profaned, just for the sake of fun.

At the San Clemente’s convent, they discovered in 1785 the embalmed bodies of thirteen nuns, who were called the “Thirteen Venerable Ones”. Even nowadays we can visit them at the Capitular Room in the monastery.

In the Sant Cipriano Monastery, you can visit in a back door of the building the mummy of the count who in 1613 gave the money to reform the church.

In San Andrés, you can also find the little mummy of Sancho de Castilla y Sandoval who died at the age of 7 in 1371. He was the son of Peter I the Cruel, murdered by his brother. They thought for centuries this kid had been poisoned, but recent investigations on toxicology performed on the body, have brought to light he died of a lung infection.

The body is exposed in the church nowadays.

Dozens of ghost stories, listenings and apparitions have occurred in those streets. Several tourists have reported feeling observed and witnessed shadows moving around them. How many lost souls might be wandering those ancient streets, filled with medieval terror?

If those walls could talk…