A mummy called the ‘air-dried chaplain’ has long been shrouded in mystery. Scientists say they now have answers

By Katie Hunt, CNN

(CNN) — Stored in a church crypt in a remote Alpine village, a set of unusually well-preserved human remains has long been a rich source of rumor and speculation.

Local lore suggested the mummified body, thought to be that of an 18-century clergyman who succumbed to an infectious disease, had been recovered from a grave a few years after death and transferred to the crypt at St. Thomas am Blasenstein, a church in a village north of the Danube River in Austria.

The body’s miraculous preservation — with skin and tissue intact — early on attracted pilgrims who thought the remains might bestow healing properties. Centuries later, a capsule-shaped object spotted in an X-ray scan of the mummy revealed that the cleric might have met a more sinister end, suggesting he may have been poisoned.

Now, a team of scientists is offering new insight into many of the unanswered questions surrounding the mysterious mummy, nicknamed the “air-dried chaplain.” The revelations come after a recent renovation prompted by a water leak in the crypt created an unexpected opportunity to perform a state-of-the-art scientific analysis on the corpse.

“We took the mummy for a few months for examination with our specialized teams, CT scans and so on. In the meantime, they had time to renovate,” said Andreas Nerlich, a professor of medicine at Germany’s Ludwig-Maximilians University of Munich, who led the research. “It was a win-win situation. We got the mummy for long enough to do a perfect analysis.”

Through CT scanning, radiocarbon dating and chemical analysis of bone and tissue samples, Nerlich and his colleagues were able to confirm the mummy’s identity and determine the unique way in which the body had been preserved for so long. The researchers reported their findings in a paper published Friday in the journal Frontiers in Medicine.

A previously unknown embalming method

The study’s biggest surprise came as a result of the CT scan: The scientists found the mummy’s abdominal and pelvic cavity packed with material such as wood chips from fir and spruce trees, linen, hemp and flax fabric, including some that was delicately embroidered. Additional toxicological analysis revealed traces of zinc chloride and other elements.

“It was really unexpected because the body walls were completely intact,” he said.

To explain this apparent contradiction, the team theorized that the material was likely inserted through the rectum. And the researchers believe it’s the mixture of materials that has kept the mummy in its apparent air-dried state.

“The chips and the fabric would have (bound) water. The zinc chloride would have had a drying effect and reduced the load of bacteria in the bowel,” Nerlich said.

This approach to embalming differs from better-known methods used in ancient Egypt in which opening the body is necessary. The technique seen in the clergyman also hasn’t been reported in scientific literature before, Nerlich added.

He said he believes the method, though it’s not recorded in any textbooks from the time, might have been widely used in the 18th century to preserve a corpse for transport or viewing.

Mummification practices were likely much more widespread and diverse in the past, said Gino Caspari, an archaeologist and editor of “The Book of Mummies: An Introduction to the Realm of the Dead.”

When examined with new interdisciplinary analysis techniques, mummies provide a richer source for studying the past than purely skeletal remains, Caspari added. “We can gain a lot of knowledge from mummified remains: This ranges from the study of disease and medical treatments to substance use and cultural aspects like attitudes towards death and the body,” said Caspari, who wasn’t involved in the research.

While it is clear that the “air-dried chaplain” is not a natural mummy, more detailed analysis is needed to say definitively whether zinc chloride was used to preserve the remains, said Marco Samadelli, a senior researcher at the Institute for Mummy Studies at Eurac Research, a private research institute in Bolzano, Italy, where Ötzi the Iceman is located.

Samadelli noted that small amounts of arsenic, a well-known embalming agent, were also detected in the mummy.

Decoding the mummy’s identity

The team concluded that the mummified body was that of Franz Xaver Sidler von Rosenegg, an aristocrat who was a monk before becoming the parish vicar at St. Thomas am Blasenstein for about six years.

He died while in that post in 1746 at the age of 37. Among locals, the mummy was rumored to be Sidler, although there was no written evidence to that effect, according to the study.

Radiocarbon dating of the specimen placed the year of his demise between 1734 and 1780, and analyses of the body suggested an age at death from 30 to 50 years, with the most plausible span between 35 and 45 years. The dates in both cases align with what’s known about Sidler’s end, the study noted.

Additionally, the study of chemical isotopes — variants of carbon and nitrogen that reflect plant or animal proteins consumed — from a bone sample taken from the mummy’s spine revealed a high-quality diet based on grain and a large proportion of meat.

“This is well in line with the expected rural food supply of a local parish vicar,” the study authors wrote in their paper, adding that the absence of stress on the skeleton fitted the life of a priest lacking in hard physical activity.

However, the study found that toward the end of the clergyman’s life, he may have experienced food shortages, perhaps caused by the War of Austrian Succession underway at the time.

What killed the ‘air-dried chaplain’?

The vicar, who had a long-term smoking habit, wasn’t poisoned, the study determined. Instead, the researchers believe he suffered from chronic tuberculosis, which may have killed him by causing an acute pulmonary hemorrhage.

Inside the mummy, the researchers found a small glass sphere with holes on both ends — perhaps part of a set of rosary beads accidentally trapped in the embalming material. This item, Nerlich said, was the bullet-shaped object picked up by an X-ray conducted in the early 2000s that had raised suspicions of a poisonous capsule.

The team likewise found no evidence that the body had ever been buried and exhumed, Nerlich added. More likely, the body had been prepared to travel back to the vicar’s “mother monastery” 15 kilometers (9.3 miles) away, but for reasons lost to time, the corpse was left in the church crypt, never to embark on its final journey.

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