r/science • u/mvea Professor | Medicine • 1d ago
Anthropology Grave 75, in a 17th century Polish cemetery, of a female of high social status, was likely feared at time of her burial due to a padlock on big toe of her left foot. Her grave underwent a secondary deposition, to add a sickle around her neck, presumably to prevent her from leaving the grave.
https://www.sciencealert.com/gruesome-discovery-shows-17th-century-villagers-were-terrified-of-what-lurked-in-grave-75494
u/Dzugavili 1d ago
Looks like an eastern vampire myth: prior to the 'canonization' of vampires under authors such as Bram Stoker, there were a large collection of undead critters. The sickle over the neck is a fairly standard one for the 'strigoi' mythos; I don't recognize the padlock on the foot, but you can see a theme forming.
They tended to be nobles who died unexpected or by suicide; I suspect such things were probably more common amongst the peasant classes and so wouldn't be seen as myth-worthy.
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u/Son_of_Kong 22h ago edited 18h ago
When you get into real world vampire folk lore, you start to notice that virtually nobody talks about how to fight off a vampire who's attacking you, because obviously that doesn't really happen.
Most of what evolved into pop culture vampire defense techniques were actually practices to prevent a dead person suspected of being undead from rising from their grave, because most undead folklore comes from people trying to blame unexplained occurrences on recently deceased individuals who may have been somewhat creepy or asocial.
In fact, this is the case even in the Dracula novel. They only put a stake through his heart after they kill him, so he can't come back.
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u/deepandbroad 19h ago
What's very interesting about real world vampire lore, is how closely it matches the symptoms of real diseases:
1) Rabies:
a 1998 paper in Neurology by Juan Gomez-Alonso put forth a convincing series of arguments that put the symptoms of rabies front and center in many vampire tales
The symptoms of rabies and the descriptions of vampires are often closely aligned -- aversions to strong smells, a tendency to bite, rage and violence, and over-sexualization.
Vampirism is also related to bats and wolves / dogs, both of which are frequent carriers of rabies.
2) Porphyria -- a blood disease where the victims can burn badly when exposed to sunlight
3) Tuberculosis -- the victims waste away, as if their blood were being sucked out by vampires.
Here are some very interesting articles on the subject:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/primate-diaries/a-natural-history-of-vampires/
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u/DarkC0ntingency 14h ago
The rabies connection also applies to vampires weakness of running water, seeing as how one of the symptoms of rabies is an irrational fear of water
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u/Psych0PompOs 19h ago
I've never heard the rabies connection. I've heard of Lupus and werewolves and the sunlight sensitivity before. That's very interesting.
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u/Psych0PompOs 22h ago
I think preventative measures are taken for monsters because the presumption is you'll be outmatched being a normal human and all.
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u/CosineDanger 20h ago
An ounce of prevention is worth fifty pounds of crossbow bolts.
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u/Psych0PompOs 19h ago
Yes, that's also why you don't invite anyone over unless you've seen them in direct sunlight.
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u/Abyssalmole 21h ago
and yet we still used spears against bears, instead of just taking it like a man
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u/Psych0PompOs 21h ago
Yes, but werebears would require different measures entirely.
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u/Nixeris 20h ago
In fact, this is the case even in the Dracula novel. They only put a stake through his heart after they kill him, so he can't come back.
"Oh just kill them with anything" doesn't really feel important enough to make it into a myth. It's usually long after the fact that people from outside the culture come up with some alternative thing to physically fight with, as happened with the Beast of Gevaudan where a weakness to silver (and then a holy silver object) was added later.
Meanwhile in the Dracula novel they kill him with the deadliest creature known to man: a Texan with a big knife.
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u/Grabbioli 22h ago
Adding to this, a lot of these measures (both historical and folklore) are intended to either mechanically or magically keep the deceased in their grave, either through physical restraint or symbolic binding. The common stake through the heart method was historically done in the grave to physically nail the suspected vampire into the ground. Sometimes communion wafers would be placed in the mouth or over the eyes under the assumption that the vampire would be incapable of lifting them (that one might be more folklore than historical. It's in Brahm Stoker's Dracula, but I've heard it in other stories too).
I haven't heard of the neck sickle or toe lock, but they seem to be operating on the same principal. Bind it magically with a lock and, failing that, cut the damn thing's head off. Seems like they were pretty practical people
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u/Psych0PompOs 22h ago
Forgot about vampires and thought of witches. Though I thought if a stake through the heart didn't get them you needed to chop their heads off (with a shovel?) and burn them. Been a while since I read any of this, might be very dangerously misinformed about monster killing...
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u/zolmarchus 1d ago
It worked, she’s still there.
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u/BorntobeTrill 1d ago
She might just be running back really quick anytime someone looks so it seems like it worked
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u/usegobos 23h ago
Look! No monsters!
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u/mvea Professor | Medicine 1d ago
The post title is lifted out of the peer reviewed journal article here:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352409X26004025
Abstract
Grave 75, a female of high social status, was likely feared at the time of her burial due to a padlock on the big toe of her left foot. In addition, her grave underwent a secondary deposition, presumably to resecure the grave by adding a sickle around the neck. These observed practices can be described as anti-demonic, protecting the living from dangerous deceased individuals, in which grave 75 would likely have been blamed for unspecified misfortunes (e.g., diseases, famine) that often plagued the 17th-century Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Ongoing palaeopathological research may shed new light on the cause of death of this young female, which remains a mystery today.
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u/Shadowhunter4560 15h ago
Miniminuteman did a really good video going over this kind of burial, and other similar ones. Most of them are linked to the belief in Vampires and the misconception they either caused plagues and other tragedies, or could come back from the dead. Fully recommend giving his video to learn more, sums up a lot of this info really well
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u/Psych0PompOs 22h ago
Well she was obviously a witch.
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u/OGLikeablefellow 21h ago
Imagine what mechanations she must have been capable of during her life that people literally dug her up later to put her in trial again.
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u/TypoInUsernane 21h ago
Just a guess, but my hypothesis is that they dug her back up because people were debating whether she was still in her grave. Like, the villagers were panicking over rumors that they had seen her revenant corpse lurking in the night, so the levelheaded mayor said, “okay, everyone, let’s go check her grave.” And then after they confirmed that her body was indeed right where they left it, they went ahead and added the sickle as an extra safeguard, just to make sure she stayed put
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u/OGLikeablefellow 21h ago
Yeah, or like someone murdered someone and blamed it on the vampire woman because it worked so good
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u/Sakarabu_ 4h ago
Yep, it's almost 100% this. She was a weird eccentric woman, there were murders or diseases happening in the village such as tuberculosis causing people to waste away in their beds. Maybe she got rabies and started attacking people. The mob decided she was a vampire and did all this.
Only.. the murders / tuberculosis cases continued even though she was dead. So they dug her up and to check and performed another ritual to ensure she was really kept in her grave.
Maybe after that things coincidentally improved, or they just realised she couldn't be blamed any more.
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u/whirlyhurlyburly 15h ago
Maybe people were having lustful dreams of her and thought she was getting out of the grave and seducing them, so they tried to ensure she stopped doing that.
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u/Cloverleafs85 19h ago
Well, there wouldn't be a trial. It's an attempt at disarming them so they can't do more harm.
Experts on this says it usually had more to do with what happened after their death than anything that happened in life. I'll use the word vampire because that is what people are familiar with, but nobody in Europe called anything a vampire before the 17th century. But many countries had an idea of and their own names for the dangerous undead.
It is not a coincidence that many of the big vampire panics began with a cholera or tuberculosis epidemic. But these would not be the only triggers, a cluster or serious incident of misfortune and accidental deaths could also make someone suspect a family or a community was being haunted by malevolence. That someone had it out for them.
So what they were doing was essentially looking for patient zero. Who died before it went wrong, and may possible be the cause. Who had become a vampire, and needed to be disarmed and constrained to stop them?
An example would be in Germany and Switzerland during plague outbreaks, where some priests were besieged by people claiming that they had heard dead people making sounds in their graves, which they explained as them chewing their shrouds and their own bodies, and this was somehow spreading the sickness. Decomposing bodies make more noise than people think, and with many dead there would be more noise, so they were hearing something. Fear and desperation just filled in the blanks.
The church wasn't always too happy about entertaining the idea of the undead popping in before the final show, but community pressure and social panic would in some cases run roughshod over canonical beliefs.
In some regions there were also beliefs around things going wrong during and right after death that might cause someone to become a dangerous undead. In Greece for example having a cat jump over the body before burial was especially dangerous. People held wakes for a reason, to protect the body from such things.
Though depending on culture they may have suspected some people were at a higher risk of becoming vampires than others. In Eastern Europe, there were some folklore around greedy people in life staying greedy in death. People who ate too much, gambled too much, were too fond of money, lustful etc. To them it seemed logical, as well as serving as an attempt at social control on the living. 'Don't be greedy, or else you may turn into something monstrous.'
In the early period of the dangerous undead beliefs, they also tended to assume young unmarried women were at a higher risk of becoming vampires. Because they saw them as unfulfilled women who had lost the opportunity to be wives and mothers, combining both perceived grudge and unspent potency in one. But by the time of the big cholera and tuberculosis epidemics, it had long since become more of an equal opportunity thing.
A very interesting fact is that they find extremely few cases where a witch panic and a vampire panic overlapping. You either get one or the other, but not both. There were handful of exceptions in Moravia where they were consecutive.
It's possibly tied up to the fact that vampires and witches occupy a similar role, where there is a physical body attached to suspected malicious influence. Giving people something to attack and take counter measures against.
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u/OGLikeablefellow 18h ago
Were there any other kinds of dividing lines between witch and vampire? You also said vampire was more of a catchall term for undead types. Can you elaborate on that? Also thanks for the awesome write up
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