The Bog Bodies are not truly haunting. Only when they are taken out of context; out of the setting of the time.

In the late Neolithic and on through the Iron Age, not many folks had the luxury of living to the ripe old age of 35 or 40. There were many ways to die, most of them very unpleasant. Inter-tribal battles were common, disease or injury were most always fatal, and famine reared its ugly head with amazing regularity. It wasn't a pretty world!

The beliefs of the time (as it seems to me) were quite shamanistic. How do you propitiate Mother Nature? You send her a sweet young virgin! How do you keep the enemy at bay? You plant one of their finest warriors on the boundary line. The King was "wedded" to the land. If he was a bad king, the land suffered. To appease the Powers and set things to rights, sometimes the king had to be sacrificed.

The way I look at it, there are much worse ways to die. These people do not appear to have suffered much. Hanging, strangulation or an axe to the skull, are relatively quick ways to go. Better, I think, than bleeding to your life away on a battlefield, wasting away with some unknown sickness, or simply starving to death in your village because the food ran out before spring arrived.

In a way, I think the Bog People had a relatively easy trip to The Otherlands.