Six medieval skeletons were found this year in Poland. There’s nothing unusual about that, they were part of 285 recently unearthed at a cemetery in the northwest of the country.
But these six were different.
They were set apart. They had stones under their chins. Sickles across their necks. Spikes rammed down their throats.
They’re the classic signs of attempting to ensure that a corpse does not reanimate and bite the living.
Vampires.
We knew the mythology. But not the reality.Legends from the region, which date back to the 11 Century, dictate that the first person to die from a new disease outbreak would most likely turn into a vampire.
It was a suspicion which fell upon many sick travellers.
Were these six unwanted strangers simply travellers who had suffered and died from a new, different disease?
A team led by University of South Alabama bioarchaeologist Dr Lesley Gregoricka sought to find the reality behind such superstitious behaviour.
In Polish folklore......the soul and the body are distinct entities that separate upon a person’s death,” Dr Gregoricka says. “Souls, the majority of which are harmless, leave the body and continue to inhabit the earth for 40 days after death. However, a small minority of these souls were seen as a direct threat to the living and at risk of becoming a vampire, particularly those who were marginalised in life for having an unusual physical appearance, practising witchcraft, perishing first during an epidemic, committing suicide, being unbaptised or born out of wedlock, or being an outsider to the community.”
The results of her research has been published in the open-access journal PLOS ONE.First they tested the bodies’ teeth by extracting isotopes from the enamel. They found they were born and bred locals. Not strangers. That just added an extra layer of mystery behind such ritualistic, paranoid burial practices.
But the dating of the bodies, when combined with local records, offers up a credible explanation.
It was an era of intense suspicion of foreigners — and deadly disease. Repeated cholera epidemics swept through the region in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
It appears that, as the epidemics came and went, communities treated new sufferers, even friends or family, with fear and suspicion — even in death.
“People of the postmedieval period did not understand how disease was spread, and rather than a scientific explanation for these epidemics, cholera and the deaths that resulted from it were explained by the supernatural — in this case, vampires,” Dr Gregoricka said.
But they’re still not certain.
“Because cholera kills quickly and does not leave behind visible markers on the skeleton, it is unclear if this is the case at Drawsko.”
