Vampire grave found in Poland

The remains of a child buried face down, held in place with an ‘anti-vampire’ triangular padlock, were discovered near Pień in south-eastern Poland by researchers from the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń. The 17th-century burial was found near the grave of the ‘vampire from Pniu’ discovered a year earlier – a woman buried with a sickle around her neck and a padlock locked on her toe.

Vampires were feared not only in popular fiction, but in reality by people living several centuries ago. This is why those suspected of supernatural powers were often buried in very specific ways: with their faces downwards, tied with ropes in an embryonic position, with their heads cut off, pressed to the ground with a boulder or their chest pierced with a sharp tool.

Researchers from the University discovered the skeleton of a woman doubly protected from rising from the grave. The people burying the girl had placed a triangular padlock on her left big toe and additionally pinned her neck to the ground with a sickle. The bones were very quickly dubbed ‘vampire’ in the media.

“Our discovery does not necessarily indicate that a vampire was buried here”, said the head of the research, Dr Dariusz Poliński, Professor of the UMK Institute of Archaeology. I would treat these treatments more as ‘anti-vampiric’ activities. Maybe the woman had some kind of physical or mental defect, her fellow inhabitants treated her badly while she was alive and were afraid that she would haunt them after death.