What happened
From 2008 an international team of archaeologists excavated a 17th- and 18th-century village cemetery at Drawsko on the Noteć river (not to be confused with Drawsko Pomorskie). Of about 285 burials, six were strikingly different. Iron sickles had been laid across the necks or abdomens of the dead – so that they would injure themselves if they tried to rise. Some had large stones placed under their chins to keep their mouths shut so they could not bite; one had a stone on the throat. Otherwise the graves were no different from the rest: the dead lay in the same cemetery, positioned the same way. Published in “PLOS ONE” in November 2014, the findings went around the world's media as “Poland's vampire graves.”
Witnesses
A team of researchers from Poland and the USA; the 2014 “PLOS ONE” paper was written by Lesley Gregoricka, Tracy Betsinger, Amy Scott and Marek Polcyn.
Explanations and hypotheses
The researchers expected the “suspects” to have been outsiders, but strontium isotope analysis of their teeth showed they were local. The authors therefore suggested another possibility: the 17th century saw cholera epidemics, and folk belief held that the first victim of an epidemic was more likely to return as a revenant. Because cholera leaves no marks on bones, the hypothesis cannot be confirmed. The practice itself – securing graves against the return of the dead – is well known to ethnographers.
Explained The phenomenon has a widely accepted, down-to-earth explanation.
Sources
- Lesley A. Gregoricka, Tracy K. Betsinger, Amy B. Scott, Marek Polcyn, Apotropaic Practices and the Undead: A Biogeochemical Assessment of Deviant Burials in Post-Medieval Poland (PLOS ONE, 2014)
- Live Science – Mystery of 'Vampire' Burials Solved (2014)
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