we should just suppose it has been removed by someone who get in the mansion (Michel or anybody bought it before, like Antonin and who works for him), and the observation tower is one of those rooms which were sealed off...
And about the poem, it is written in the stone, you cannot remove it, so thats why you find the poem and not the body.... i think is very clear XD
Anyway, Maria gets cursed because EVERYBODY in the city get cursed, everyone who stay too close, indeed that is the famous city that Amedee will turn into a village centuries later (he will tell the story of the witch to Giselle, when she will arrive)

1. What happened to her? If the disease was spread by Morgana's blood being consumed, how did she get it? Did one of her clients pass it to her?

If you look at the last disturbing image of Maria, you would notice she vomited blood, but most importantly her hands and her neck are black. She was also coughing and had breathing difficulties.

A quick lookup on google and you will find it points towards the "Black Death", or the most famous & known pandemic in human history, it wiped out nearly 1/3 of the Europe population, it being most severe in Italy, France (where requiem took place!) and Spain.

You can read the entire wikipedia for more information, but how the pandemic spread has a few theories, namely through air, respiratory, lack of hygiene and could be transmitted due to fleas or rats.

So take your pick on how Maria got it. Though if you read carefully, she is already coughing pretty badly when she was running away from her pursuers, rather than catching it in the cellar.

2. Also, what happened to her corpse? Michel found Morgana's skeleton in the tower (presumably because Michel was the first person to enter the mansion since Morgana's death), but Maria's body remains unaccounted for-even though the poem was found in the cellar, Maria's remains were not. Why?

If you think about it, the church was having a festival on that fateful day and a lot of people died in the church.

So where did all that corpses go?

I guess it's reasonable that their corpses (and later Maria once she's found dead?) were taken and burnt.

It could also be 'cleaned up' by people in Michel's era when his father bought over the place. The tower could be locked, or they may have felt a malevolent presence and therefore they do not dare to venture further.

Take your pick.

Though if you think about it, it's pretty amazing how the game came out with a 'fiction' reason on how the Black Death occurred.

If it's true, it would really be worthy to be known as a curse from the witch that killed so many people...

The tower was supposedly sealed off by Jacopo after Morgana died. The rest of the church wasn't.

Originally posted by jkly:

The tower was supposedly sealed off by Jacopo after Morgana died. The rest of the church wasn't.

Considering Jacopo was jumped and killed immediately after leaving the tower when Morgana died, it's impossible that he sealed anything off. Tbh, I think it's impossible that they didn't check the tower - the rumor was that the lord was keeping his money up there. Then again, since everybody died, that rumor probably died with them, and the cleanup crew might have taken a look at all the stairs in the tower and decided that was enough work for the day lol.

It's also possible that Morgana's body wasn't there at all. Michel talked to her bones for eight years before waking her up inadvertently, and as soon as he did, her body physically ceased to exist. Seems she can hide her body when she's in ghostly boss of the mansion mode, so maybe when they were disposing of the bodies she simply wasn't there, then went into stasis, revealing her body, until Michel got her going again a century or two later.

It is said they sealed the tower off as a method to stop the outbreak, and when that failed started the witch-hunt of hunting down people who knew her.

It literally tells you that in the lead up to Maria's death...

Thanks for the spoiler alert, while putting the spoiler right in the title.

Originally posted by Sciron:

Thanks for the spoiler alert, while putting the spoiler right in the title.

lol

Originally posted by twitch.tv/magdalenez:

Though if you think about it, it's pretty amazing how the game came out with a 'fiction' reason on how the Black Death occurred.

If it's true, it would really be worthy to be known as a curse from the witch that killed so many people...

It seems to me that that is never definitively established. It's possible there was a curse, but it's equally possible that there just happened to be an outbreak of the plague during that festival. In the latter case, the characters in the story would still very much be a victim of fate. Heck, that would account for Maria getting it in spite of not having any of Morgana's blood, because it wouldn't be the blood that actually spread it. But, I think that's intentionally left open to interpretation.

Originally posted by Sciron:

Thanks for the spoiler alert, while putting the spoiler right in the title.

Lulz. Well, Maria is established as being a character who lived centuries prior to the time the story of the first game takes place. Ergo, it was all but certain that she died at some point. Granted, Giselle might have something to say about that...