If accounts from the time are to be believed, 17th-century Poland was overrun with revenants — not vampires, exactly, but proto-zombies who harassed the living by drinking their blood or, less disapproving, stirring up trouble in their homes. In one account, from 1674, a dead man rises from his grave to attack his relatives; when his grave was opened, the body was unnaturally preserved and had traces of fresh blood.
Such reports were so common that a wide range of remedies were used to keep corpses from coming back to life: cutting out their hearts, nailing them to their graves, hammering stakes into their legs, blocking their jaws with bricks (to prevent them from gaping their way. out.) In 1746, a Benedictine monk named Antoine Augustin Calmet published a popular treatise which sought, among other among other things, to distinguish real revenants from frauds.
Four centuries later, archaeologists in Europe discovered the first physical evidence of the alleged child revenant. While excavating an unmarked mass cemetery on the edge of the village of Pień, near the Polish city of Bydgoszcz, researchers from the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń unearthed the remains of what was widely described in news reports as a ” young vampire.” The body, thought to be around 6 at the time of death, was buried face down, with a triangular iron padlock under its left leg, in a likely effort to tie the child to the grave and make it less ominous for the family and neighbors this. .
“The padlock is locked on the big toe,” said Dariusz Poliński, the lead archaeologist on the study, through a translator. Shortly after the burial, the grave was desecrated and all the bones were removed except for the lower legs.
“The child was buried in a prone position so that if it came back from the dead and tried to climb up, it would bite the dirt instead,” said Dr. Poliński. “To our knowledge, this is the only example of such a child burial in Europe.” The remains of three other children were found in a pit near the child’s grave. In the pit was a fragment of a jaw with a green stain, which Dr. Poliński was left with a copper coin placed in the mouth, an ancient and common burial practice.
The necropolis, a temporary burial ground for the poor and what Dr. Poliński “abandoned souls excluded from society,” was discovered 18 years ago under a sunflower field on the slope of a hill. It was not part of a church or, as historical local records show, on consecrated ground. So far, about 100 graves have been discovered at the site, including one just a few feet from the child trapped in the skeleton of a woman with her legs padlocked and an iron sickle around her neck. “The sickle was meant to cut off the woman’s head if she tried to get up,” said Dr. Poliński.
A green stain in his mouth was shown by chemical analysis not to be from a coin, but from something more complex. The residue has traces of gold, potassium permanganate and copper, which Dr. Poliński may have left a potion made to cure his ailments. The cause of the woman’s death is unclear, but whatever it was must have terrified those who buried her.
The woman and child do not qualify as vampires, said Martyn Rady, a historian at University College London. Vampires, he says, are a certain type of revenant; their characteristics were first identified in the 1720s by Austrian Hapsburg officials, who encountered suspected vampires in what is now northern Serbia and wrote reports that found their way into medical journals at the time.
“It is very clear to them that, in popular local folklore, the vampire has three characteristics: It is a revenant, it feasts on life and it is contagious,” said Dr. Rady. The Austrian definition is shaped by literary vampire mythology.
Polish legends feature two types of revenants. The upiór, later replaced by “vampir,” is similar to the cinematic Dracula, represented by Bela Lugosi. The strzyga is more like a witch – “that is, in old fairy-tales, an evil female spirit or demon who hunts people, either eating them or drinking their blood,” Al Ridenour, a Los Angeles-based folklorist , said. In Pień, locals sometimes refer to the sickle woman as a strzyga, a wraith usually born with two souls. “The evil soul cannot find rest in the grave, so it rises and causes havoc,” said Mr. Ridenour.
He points to the chaotic nature of the Counter-Reformation in Poland for allowing pagan belief in the undead to persist. “As a reaction to the Protestants, the Catholic Church showed drama and emotion, as you can see in Baroque art, in memento mori paintings and so on,” he said. The sermons became more fiery, and caused fear of the devil and demons, which translated into a fear of revenants and reanimation of the dead.
By the end of the Middle Ages, placing padlocks on graves became a tradition in Central Europe, particularly in Poland, where lock-and-key assemblages have been found in the graves of about three dozen necropolises for Ashkenazi Jews. In a 16th-century Jewish cemetery in Lublin, iron locks were placed on shrouds, around the head of the deceased or, if there was no coffin, on a board covering the corpse. To date, the cache from Lutomiersk is the largest: Of the 1,200 graves investigated, nearly 400 contain padlocks.
Although the significance of this ritual is now obscure, a Talmudic term for the tomb is “a lock” or “something locked,” leading some scholars to conclude that the custom symbolizes “locking the tomb forever .” The custom continued in Polish Jewish communities until World War II. Kalina Skóra, a researcher at the Institute of Archeology and Ethnology of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Łódź, said that the purpose, according to practitioners in the mid-20th century, was to “prevent the dead from speaking, speaking evil or instead. talking about this world in the next world.”
Dr. doubted. Poliński that the woman and child buried near Pień were Jewish. “If they were, their bodies were buried in a Jewish cemetery,” he said.
So why were they chosen? Perhaps the reason is some social stigma, such as not being baptized or dying by suicide, exhibiting strange behavior during life or having the misfortune of being the first casualty of an epidemic, said Lesley Gregoricka, an anthropologist at the University of South Alabama. , which is not included in the excavation. “Since Poland was only partially affected by plagues such as the Black Death, other epidemics such as cholera can be blamed,” said Dr. Gregoricka. “This may explain why children are sometimes targeted as potential death revenants.”
In severe plagues, cemeteries were sometimes searched for “patient zero.” Up to a dozen corpses could be disentered, said Dr. Score. Like the villagers in Shirley Jackson’s terrifying short story “The Lottery,” the entire community will participate in the activity. “Some of the local people are involved in finding out who caused the death, while others, mostly adult men, sometimes accompanied by a priest, are involved in digging up the deceased and finding to the perpetrator,” said Dr. score
When sniffing a revenant, the lack of decomposition is, literally, a dead giveaway. “Several weeks or months after death, the body is still ‘fresh’,” said Dr. Score. “Usually the grave of the first person to die – the alleged culprit – is dug up and, to prevent it from causing further deaths, the face is laid down, the head is cut off, the legs are amputated.” Padlocks, sickles and other items made of iron, a metal said to possess anti-demon powers, were kept in the tomb as a precaution. If that was not done, the body was removed and burned, the ashes scattered or submerged.
As horrific as the treatment of these supposed revenants was, the belief may have at least provided closure to their often sad deaths. To quote Mr. Lugosi in “Dracula”: “To die, to really die, that should be glorious.”
