This week’s post will be a little spooky, so consider yourself warned! (Disclaimer: There will be an image of human remains.) 

Imagine it’s a snowy winter night in your medieval village. For weeks you and the rest of the town have been living in terror, afraid that one of you will be the next person taken and killed in the night. But this morning a group of townspeople confronted a man in the village who everyone suspected to be a vampire. You’re following the torchlight of your father as he and the other men head into the forest, carrying the body of the killer. The men begin digging and place the dead body in the hole. To ensure he doesn’t rise again and kill more people, they place sickles across his neck so his head will be cut off if he wakes. They cover the body and pray this is the end of the nightmare you all have been living in.  

While that may sound a little silly to a 21st century reader, this was the reality for many people in the Middle Ages in Europe, especially in Slavic countries. There are many examples of so-called “vampire burials” across Europe that have been found in archaeological surveys. “Vampire burials” refer to any internment where the living were trying to stop the dead from rising again; it does not mean in every instance people believed they were burying a vampire.  

A skeleton with a sickle over its neck unearthed in Poland.
Source: Slavia Field School in Archaeology

People truly believed their lives were at stake if they did not stop evil people from rising again. There were various ways to ensure this. Some common examples include placing a sickle over the neck, putting padlocks on appendages, staking down the body, cutting off the head and placing it out of reach, placing iron or rocks in the mouth, burying the body face-down, or a combination of these. Males, females, and children have been found in vampire burials.

Some of the vampire burials are people who had diseases that would have made them stand out in their community, such as rickets, scurvy, and tuberculosis. Bioarchaeologists can study the remains of the deceased to understand more about their life, but all archaeologists should consider what these burials meant to the living. Why were beliefs that the dead could rise again so prevalent? Who decided which people were a danger after death? If you see a vampire on Halloween, consider these questions and remember our complex human past.

Happy Halloween!

Department of Anthropology, Geospatial and Earth Sciences at IUP