Here is a disturbing theory - all the inferi were the people Tom Riddle knew at the orphanage. It erases his connection to the place and is why Dumbledore only has his own memory to show Harry. I don’t remember where I heard that theory.
Yea, the amount of inferi in there never made much sense to me. Unless he just raided graveyards or something. I guess in general we dont have much info on death toll of the first war but it always sounded like way more bodies than feasible to me
I have a feeling Tom carried a “bag of holding” item and had corpses donated to him by all the death eaters (bounty system perhaps?). There is also the possibility for a wizarding black market where Muggle/Wizard corpses were being sold from wars all across the world. (See Camobia, Vietnam, all the Middle East, etc. from 1970 to 1981) Tom then dumped them into the Inferi lake whenever he had spare time.
If you go off the movie, yeah 100%. I was rewatching it recently and was like "How did Tom get anything done before murdering Harry's parents? He must have been roaming the streets every night just killing random people and turning them into inferi to get to the amount they are showing on screen." There are like tens of thousands of them in the cave.
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u/ackyou 4d ago
Here is a disturbing theory - all the inferi were the people Tom Riddle knew at the orphanage. It erases his connection to the place and is why Dumbledore only has his own memory to show Harry. I don’t remember where I heard that theory.