10 Bizarre Methods of Capital Punishment

Immurement:

Immurement was a form of capital punishment where an individual was walled up within a building and left to die from starvation or dehydration. This was different from being buried alive, in which the victim usually died of asphyxiation. The legend of many Southeastern European people refers to immurement as the mode of death for the victim sacrificed during the completion of a construction project, such as a bridge or fortress.

Many Bulgarian and Romanian folk songs describe a bride offered for such purposes, and her subsequent pleas to the builders to leave her free. Later versions of the songs talk of the bride’s death, her fate to languish, entombed in the stones of the construction.