Archaeologist: Shakespeare's skull missing from grave

Evann Gastaldo

Newser

The grave of William Shakespeare, front with flower, near the altar inside Holy Trinity Anglican Church in Stratford upon Avon, England, on Thursday Jan 11, 2007.

It looks like Shakespeare's skull really is missing from his grave. That's what an archaeologist has concluded after researchers were allowed to use ground-penetrating radar to scan the Bard's final resting place, Reuters reports. "We have Shakespeare's burial with an odd disturbance at the head end and we have a story that suggests that at some point in history someone's come in and taken the skull of Shakespeare," says Staffordshire University archaeologist Kevin Colls, who says the findings are "very very convincing" that the long-standing rumors of a missing skull are true. He tells Fox News that analysis shows the "odd, strange" disturbance at the head end of the grave is a sign "of material being dug out and put back again."

Per those rumors, grave-robbers took the skull from Shakespeare's grave at the Church of the Holy Trinity in England's Stratford-upon-Avon in 1794. At the time, trophy hunters believed a person's genius would be apparent in his skull.

Rumors also claimed that Shakespeare's skull might be hidden in a sealed crypt at another church nearby, but Colls' team investigated and found the skull there was that of a woman in her 70s.

The team also discovered that Shakespeare was buried in a simple shroud, not a coffin, and that he and his wife were buried in shallow graves, not a deeper family vault as had been believed, Newsweek adds.

Researchers, who ignored a curse in Shakespeare's epitaph in order to do their non-intrusive analysis, present the findings in a documentary airing in Britain Saturday. (Click to see Shakespeare's entreaty for refugees, in his own hand.)