In 17th-century Europe, the dead were a constant threat to rise again and bedevil the living. Now archaeologists have found the remains of a suspected child revenant.
If reports from the time are to be believed, 17th-century Poland was awash in revenants — not vampires, exactly, but proto-zombies who harassed the living by drinking their blood or, less disagreeably, stirring up a ruckus in their homes.
Such reports were common enough that a wide range of remedies was employed to keep corpses from reanimating: cutting out their hearts, nailing them into their graves, hammering stakes through their legs, jamming their jaws open with bricks (to prevent them from gnawing their way out).
While excavating an unmarked mass cemetery at the edge of the village of Pień, near the Polish city of Bydgoszcz, researchers from Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń unearthed the remains of what has been widely described in news reports as a “vampire child.” The corpse, thought to have been about 6 at the time of death, was buried face down, with a triangular iron padlock under its left foot, in a likely effort to bind the child to the grave and keep it from haunting its family and neighbors.
The necropolis, a makeshift graveyard for the poor and what Dr. Poliński called “abandoned souls excluded by society,” was discovered 18 years ago beneath a sunflower field on the slope of a hill.
The strzyga was more like a witch — “that is, in the old fairy-tale sense, a malevolent female spirit or demon that preys upon humans, may eat them or drink their blood,” Al Ridenour, a Los Angeles-based folklorist, said.
Perhaps the cause was some social stigma, such as being unbaptized or dying by suicide, exhibiting strange behavior while alive or having the bad luck to be the first to perish in an epidemic, said Lesley Gregoricka, an anthropologist at the University of South Alabama, who was not involved in the excavation.
The original article contains 1,366 words, the summary contains 298 words. Saved 78%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
This is the best summary I could come up with:
If reports from the time are to be believed, 17th-century Poland was awash in revenants — not vampires, exactly, but proto-zombies who harassed the living by drinking their blood or, less disagreeably, stirring up a ruckus in their homes.
Such reports were common enough that a wide range of remedies was employed to keep corpses from reanimating: cutting out their hearts, nailing them into their graves, hammering stakes through their legs, jamming their jaws open with bricks (to prevent them from gnawing their way out).
While excavating an unmarked mass cemetery at the edge of the village of Pień, near the Polish city of Bydgoszcz, researchers from Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń unearthed the remains of what has been widely described in news reports as a “vampire child.” The corpse, thought to have been about 6 at the time of death, was buried face down, with a triangular iron padlock under its left foot, in a likely effort to bind the child to the grave and keep it from haunting its family and neighbors.
The necropolis, a makeshift graveyard for the poor and what Dr. Poliński called “abandoned souls excluded by society,” was discovered 18 years ago beneath a sunflower field on the slope of a hill.
The strzyga was more like a witch — “that is, in the old fairy-tale sense, a malevolent female spirit or demon that preys upon humans, may eat them or drink their blood,” Al Ridenour, a Los Angeles-based folklorist, said.
Perhaps the cause was some social stigma, such as being unbaptized or dying by suicide, exhibiting strange behavior while alive or having the bad luck to be the first to perish in an epidemic, said Lesley Gregoricka, an anthropologist at the University of South Alabama, who was not involved in the excavation.
The original article contains 1,366 words, the summary contains 298 words. Saved 78%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!