People in post-medieval Poland were a little bit obsessed with the dead. People used to think that early epidemic deaths, suicides, and even deaths just before baptism were caused by vampires possessing the souls of the deceased.

Due to this, a large number of tombs from the 17th century have recently been discovered by archaeologists. Recent discoveries include the final resting site of a "vampire child" who had been padlocked and buried face down as part of a tradition to prevent the dead from returning to torment the living.

Dariusz Poliski, a professor at Toru's Nicolaus Copernicus University, thinks that was "very typical for an anti-vampire security practice."

Additionally, it isn't the first of its kind. A young woman's body was again discovered in 2022 by Poliski's squad with a padlock this time on her toe. A sickle was also placed over her throat.

It is a tragic story. As part of an apotropaic funeral, the locks and sickle were intended to fend off evil. According to reasoning, if a vampire awakens, the lock could keep it in place. The sickle over the throat should be fairly obvious. But why did individuals harm one another in this way?

These types of apotropaic tombs have also been found in Slovakia, Hungary, Austria, and Romania. In some of the graves, the deceased were also beheaded, had stakes driven through their hearts, and had coins placed in their mouths. They typically originate from bad times like epidemics, wars, and other tragedies when people can be more inclined to think evil is all around them.

Such ideas were very prevalent in Poland in the seventeenth century.

War, crisis, and extremely cold weather characterized this century, according to Poliski. "There was a brief ice age."

Cholera epidemics that affected Eastern Europe were among the plagues of the 1600s and may have contributed to the growing dread around mysterious deaths. According to a 1674 report, a guy who was rumored to drink human blood terrorized a community to the point that they decapitated him.

Marek Polcyn, an anthropologist from Lakehead University in Ontario, proposed a different explanation for this type of burial. She said in a study that while Catholic priests fueled rumors of witchcraft and the devil, the growth of Catholic theology during the Counter-Reformation—a time when the Catholic Church resisted Protestants—led to a comeback of folkloric beliefs.

In the meantime, Polisky and his crew found three other children's remains in a trench close to the child's grave, with evidence of copper, potassium permanganate, and gold on the bone around the teeth. Poliski suggested that a remedy created to treat vampirism in people may be to blame.

"The main benefit of this site, yes, is that we can learn more about [what] the main traditions and customs were for the context of treating people who were 'different' and excluding people who were different," he stated.

"Everything about this suggests that this was a cemetery for the outcasts, for those who should be forgotten."

He did, however, add that it's also possible that the mother and child's graves were caused by something much more commonplace.

He adds, "It may have also been something pretty straightforward, like a dispute between neighbors.

His team is conducting more tests on the human remains in an effort to learn more. But just now, we are only in the dark.