Emily Chan
During the removal of tree roots for an ongoing renovation project, workers stumbled upon the skeletal remains of two medieval children in northwestern Poland. One of the burials showed signs of anti-vampire measures being taken.
According to the Lublin Provincial Conservator of Monuments, the graves were found at a site on Góra Chełmska, which is located near Koszalin.
The skeletons were buried in pits without coffins. They laid on their backs, with their skulls facing west.
Based on the sediment layers and pottery fragments within the burials, the skeletons dated back to the 13th century.
The graves were discovered in an area that was not associated with any of the known cemeteries on Chełmska, which was unexpected. But the biggest surprise was that one of them displayed evidence of a vampire burial.
A “vampire” burial is categorized under “revenant” graves. The term revenant refers to someone who comes back from the dead as a reanimated corpse or spirit to terrorize the living. Throughout the Middle Ages, local folk beliefs in vampirism spurred these types of burial customs.
Revenant graves from thousands of years ago have been found across Europe, particularly in Eastern European regions like modern-day Poland.
A number of these burials contained the bodies of suspected vampires, and the living took certain precautions to make sure the dead could not come back to haunt them.
They resorted to measures such as weighing down the deceased with large stones or piercing the bodies with a stake to pin them to the ground.
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