undead fear
‘Vampire child’ with padlock on ankle unearthed in Poland
In front you can see the lock that was supposed to secure the child.
© Łukasz Czyżewski
The remains of a 17th-century child have been discovered in a cemetery in Poland. The girl was buried with a vampire fuse. A padlock on the ankle was supposed to secure the dead body. The body of a woman who had been secured in a similar way was found nearby last year.
Researchers believe the 17th-century burial site in the village of Pień, near the city of Bydgoszcz in northern Poland, was no ordinary cemetery. Those who were excluded from society were buried here. “There is no mention in written sources or on maps,” said Dariusz Polinski of the Nicolaus Copernicus University and leader of the excavations. This is typical of cemeteries where people are not only buried when they die, but also after death in order to be excluded from a certain community. They were away from buildings, outside city walls, at crossroads, in pastures and wastelands.”
Fear of a little girl
The girl was around five to seven years old and was found face down. “The disposition of the body suggests that the deceased and his ‘activity’ after death were feared. […]Turning it over was intended to trick the deceased into biting the ground so that it would no longer pose a threat to people.” A triangular padlock was found under the child’s skeleton. Presumably another precaution to ensure that the “child vampire ” did not leave the grave. These measures do not seem to have been sufficient. The grave was churned up, the dead woman desecrated and the upper half of the corpse taken away. The fear of the girl must have been great.
Graveyard of the Outcasts
Just two meters away in 2022, the remains of a young woman were found wearing a triangular padlock on the big toe of her left foot. She was buried with a sickle around her neck. Again, it is believed that the padlock and sickle were intended to prevent the woman from dealing. Polinski explained that his team found other unusual grave sites in the cemetery. There is also an “enigmatic collection” of several children’s skeletons and the remains of a pregnant woman with a preserved fetus in her womb, buried in a hard, stony mass.
“Due to the large number of these atypical graves with their strange practices, which clearly indicate fear of the deceased, one can assume that this is also a whole cemetery of the abandoned.”
Source: UMK
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