Wednesday Writing Hook Sure Hump-Day can suck, but we’ve decided to turn it into a *Hooray-Day* by releasing a new writing hook every week! Each edition will feature an image of an artefact, a complementary writing hook, and a little about its historical provenance, with a further reading option. We’d love to hear about the stories and adventures you wrote with them – be sure to detail them in the comments below! You can subscribe for more writing hooks, or find them on Facebook or Twitter.

The Writing Hook

Entering the dark misty valley you are greeted by a group of villagers from the local settlement. The villagers urged you to go were you came from and warn you of an ancient evil awoken in the middle of the ice-covered lake. The story they tell you talks of how eleven of their best warriors entered the frozen lake but two days have passed and the only things they heard or seen of the party were two stakes with heads on top of them at the edge of the lake. Nobody dared to get close, but they fear these two of the fallen warriors.

The Historical Facts of the Tomb of the Sunken Skulls

In 2009, archaeologists were excavating the bottom of a prehistoric dry lake bed in Motala, Sweden, when they stumbled upon the foundations of a mysterious stone structure … sealed at the bottom of an ancient ‘ lake. Rather than turning tail and running away so fast their legs spun uselessly in the air for a few minutes like a Scooby-Doo cartoon, the stupidly brave scientists started digging. They eventually unearthed the exact kind of stuff one expects from primitive mystery structures: animal bones, stone tools and, oh yeah — the 8,000-year-old skulls of 10 people, ranging in age from small children to the elderly.

And then they found an 11th skull buried deep within the ancient mud of the lake bottom.And then they found fragments of one of the other skulls … deliberately lodged inside the cranium of the 11th skull. For reasons that are unclear to us, some ancient society probably slaughtered 11 people in a stone hut (which is now at the bottom of a lake bed), and then put the pieces of one dead person’s skull inside the brain space of another person, like the world’s most god-awful horrifying nesting doll.

“deliberately lodged inside the cranium of the 11th skull”

The horror of the tomb of the sunken skulls doesn’t end there, not only had somebody perhaps bashed one person’s skull in with another person’s skull, but, before being interred inside the tomb, several of the bodies had stakes driven through them and were then set alight. This didn’t take careful deduction on the part of the excavators to discover: Two of the skulls were found with the stakes still embedded (and in one case, entirely melded with) them.-

The theories regarding the tomb of the sunken skulls range from bizarre funeral practices to a group of warriors mounting the skulls of their defeated opponents as war trophies.

Looking for some more cool fact and hooks? Check the Wednesday Writing Hooks series