by LAURA GEGGEL
A new reconstruction of a woman from a 17th-century “vampire” burial reveals a young-but-sickly woman whom villagers feared so much they buried her under a blade and padlock.
Centuries ago, villagers buried a “vampire” — a young-but-sickly woman — under a lock and blade. Now, a new reconstruction of this individual, who possibly came from a wealthy family, reveals what she may have looked like.
Although buried in Poland, the woman likely grew up in Scandinavia, a chemical analysis of her remains found. A skeletal examination showed that she had several debilitating health conditions, including a painful cancer in her sternum.
When archaeologists found the woman’s burial in a cemetery in Pie?, a small village, in 2022, they quickly realized that the 17th-century villagers who buried her were fearful her dead body would reanimate and terrorize them.
“She was found with the once sharp blade of a sickle placed over her neck, and a padlock around her left big toe,” Oscar Nilsson, a Sweden-based forensic artist who sculpted the woman’s likeness, told Live Science in an email.
This unusual burial was intended “to prevent her from coming back after death and haunt the living,” Nilsson said. According to Polish folklore, dangerous people possess a good and a bad soul. If the good soul leaves, the bad could take over the body, “and a vicious creature could arise: a ‘striga'” — a demon akin to a vampire, Nilsson explained.
The villagers likely hoped that the padlock would keep the woman’s “good soul” in her body. However, archaeologists noticed that the padlock had been opened, Nilsson said.
Roughly one-third of the 100 burials in the cemetery were those of “deviants,” or individuals who receive different and often disparaging burial treatments. Across archaeological sites in Europe, people given deviant burials include suspected criminals, unbaptized infants, people with disabilities and supposed revenants, according to the book “Deviant Burial in the Archaeological Record” (Oxbow Books, 2008). In the case of the Polish cemetery, items such as stones and padlocks had been placed in those burials, with the intention of preventing the dead from rising, Nilsson said.
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