There are two Windeby bodies, known as Windeby I and Windeby II. Windeby is an estate near Schleswig that contains a small bog. In 1952, the owners decided to cut the peat and sell it for fuel. Shortly, workers discovered the body of a fourteen-year-old girl who became known as Windeby I. Although the peat-cutting machinery had already severed one of her legs; a foot, and a hand, work was stopped immediately to study the discovery.

P. V. Glob in The Bog People described the girl's position in the peat:

She lay on her back, her head twisted to one side, her left arm outstretched.... The right arm was bent in against the chest, as if defensively, while the legs were lightly drawn up, the left over the right. The head, with its delicate face, and the hands, were preserved best: the chest had completely disintegrated and the ribs were visible.... The hair, reddish from the effects of the bog acids but originally light blond, was of exceptional fineness but had been shaved off with a razor on the left side of the head.

Her eyes were blindfolded with a strip of cloth woven from brown, yellow, and red threads. She had drowned in the first century A.D. and her death was not an accident--her body was anchored by a large stone and branches from a birch tree. Glob imagined her being "led naked out on to the bog with bandaged eyes ... and drowned in the little peat pit, which must have held twenty inches of water or more."

A short time after the discovery of Windeby I, a man's body (now known as Windeby II) was found sixteen feet away. Unlike Windeby I, he had been strangled first and then placed in the bog. Sharpened, forked branches had been jammed into the peat around him to make sure that he stayed put.

(This account is taken from How to Make a Mummy Talk (Houghton Mifflin, 1995; Dell, 1997)

 

1. Scientists found that the girl had died an unnatural death during the First Century A.D. She had been prepared for death in a number of unusual ways. First, like some other bog bodies that have been found, half of her head had been shaved of hair. Second, a woolen headband had been used to blindfold her eyes. Finally, a collar had been placed around her neck. As a result of these special preparations, most researchers agree that the Windeby Girl was not sacrificed to the gods. Although they could not find any wounds on her body, scientists suspected that she was drowned in the bog, held down in perhaps twenty inches of water by some branches and a large stone. But they had no idea why the girl was killed. Could she have been a criminal who was being executed in a gruesome way? Could she have been afflicted with some type of disease that may have marked her for an early death? No one will ever know, though many theories have been proposed. One German scholar, for example, suggested that she may have been blindfolded because people afraid of her evil eye. 

2. In 1970, when the body was reexamined, so little of it remained that scientists could not say with certainty that the body was female. Windeby Girl could actually be Windeby Boy.

 

The Landesmuseum (Schleswig, Germany) displays Windeby Girl and four other bog bodies in separate dioramas: men from Damendorf, Rendswühren, and Dätgen and a very interesting skull from Osterby. All are named for the areas where they were discovered and, like Windeby I and II, all were sacrificed.