This ‘anti-vampiric’ grave used two strategies to stop the undead

Someone in 17th century Poland really did not want one particular girl rising from the dead. In 2022, archaeologists unearthed an unsettling grave in a cemetery in Pień, north-central Poland. A young woman had been buried with the handle of a sickle driven into the dirt beside her neck so that its serrated blade hooked over her throat.

The woman, who the researchers call Zosia, also wore a triangular padlock on the big toe of her left foot. Poliński and his colleagues did a sweeping set of analyses on Zosia’s grave to piece together details of her life and burial. The team first reviewed other post-medieval European tombs where sickles and padlocks had been found and historical beliefs about such items.

Both types of artifacts appear to have been used to shield the living from the dead, the researchers report in the October Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports. But Zosia’s grave is the first discovered with both revenant prevention measures. Zosia’s skeleton suggests she was 17 to 19 years old when she died.

Based on the arrangement of her leg bones, the padlock was likely affixed to her toe when she was originally interred — hinting that someone immediately clocked Zosia as a flight risk from the afterlife. But mixed-up soil and the odd angle of Zosia’s left arm also give the impression that her tomb was later dug up, probably to place the sickle over her throat as extra anti-resurrection protection, the researchers write. A close look at Zosia’s skull also revealed greenish stains that could have come from some copper object — or objects — being shoved in her mouth or nose.

In Polish folklore, copper was thought to help ward off vampiric demons, or strzygi. I don’t know if [I’ve seen] weirder,” says Lauren Hosek, a bioarchaeologist at the University of Colorado Boulder, who has studied unusual graves but was not involved in this research. That, paired with the padlock as a restraint, “is a pretty good argument for this idea of fear of the dead.” Graves designed to fend off specters are sometimes known as “anti-vampiric.” But that doesn’t necessarily mean that people in the 17th century thought Zosia was out for blood, Hosek cautions.

To explain how Zosia earned this anti-vampiric treatment, Poliński’s team ran chemical analyses on her skeleton and burial accessories. The isotopes of strontium and oxygen in her teeth suggest that she grew up near Pień. But Zosia’s DNA shows that her mother’s family might have come from Scandinavia.