Decapitated Heads That Bite

Do human heads remain “alive” after being decapitated? And if so, what do these heads do that make us believe there is still consciousness within them?

Here is a disturbing newspaper report from 1870 that tells readers about decapitated heads that bite.

Horrible Statements

A French newspaper reports the statements of the executioners of Amiens and Arras in regard to experiments made with the heads of various decapitated criminals.

In 1854 the executioner of Amiens guillotines a young woman who, in order to inherit the insignificant sum of not quite three hundred dollars, had poisoned a whole generation of relatives. After the execution he found her head fastened to the border of the horrible basket by her teeth. Her jew bones were so strongly contracted that she had bitten holes through the willow texture of the basket.

At another time he executed a butcher twenty-five years of age. The scaffold was erected in an open field and the head did not fall into the basket, but rolled on the ground. When the executioner attempted to take it up he found that it was fastened to the ground. The mouth of the decapitated head, during its last convulsions, had seized a bunch of grass and, in taking it up, it still kept a piece of the sod between the teeth.

A third time he executed an Italian who struggled most terribly for life during the last few moments. After the operation was over, the head in the basket was found to be covered with a triple layer of sawdust and the mouth was filled with it. The head had evidently moved several times and turned itself around in the basket.

A fourth case is perhaps the most horrible of all yet reported. The same executioner had decapitated a laborer who did not struggle in the least against his decapitation. But when the body reached the cemetery and was taken out of the basket, not only was the whole frame most horribly distorted, but the head had bitten into the upper part of the leg with such force that a piece had to be cut out to enable the executioner to lay the corpse into a coffin which the family had furnished.

Source: The Idaho world. (Idaho City, Idaho Territory), 24 March 1870.