Scientists have recreated the face of a 16th-century woman with a brick jammed into her mouth, an object apparently wedged there to stop her from eating the dead — as Italian locals believed she was a vampire. The spooky story begins at a mass grave discovered on the Venetian island of Lazzaretto Nuovo, a location used as a bubonic plague quarantine in the late 1500s and 1600s. In 2006, archeological studies found some bodies that were buried centuries ago. “When they supposedly identified a vampire, one of those responsible for the plague according to popular myth at the time, they...