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Sickles, a Padlock, and the Polish Graves Called Vampire Burials

By Weird Burial Stories Editorial Desk · 2026-10-14

Two Polish cemeteries, three centuries apart from the newspapers that named them vampire graves. At Drawsko the sickles lay on local people, buried among everyone else. At Pień a young woman was locked at the toe, and the grave was opened again for a sickle.

By C. V. Wooster

"Vampire" is the word the headlines reached for. The archaeologists, when they are being careful, say apotropaic: a practice meant to keep evil from moving. Two cemeteries in Poland, published a decade apart, are the clearest recent files. Drawsko 1, in northwestern Poland, is a seventeenth- and eighteenth-century graveyard. Six burials there were set apart by objects, not by a separate row. Pień, north-central Poland, is a seventeenth-century cemetery where a 2022 grave held both a padlock and a sickle, a combination the authors say had not been reported before. Neither file proves that the neighbors used the word vampire. Both files show the living trying to keep a particular body down.

Drawsko: the sickle, the stone, and the teeth

Lesley Gregoricka, Tracy Betsinger, Amy Scott, and Marek Polcyn published the Drawsko study in PLOS ONE in 2014. Excavations from 2008 to 2012 recovered about 285 skeletons from a cemetery dated mainly by coins to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Six of those interments were classed as deviant because of anti-vampire hardware, in the authors' phrase. One was an adult man, one a late-adolescent woman, three were adult women, and one was a subadult. Of the six, five had a sickle across the throat or the abdomen, put there, the paper says, to cut the body if it tried to rise. Two also had large stones under the chin, read as a block on biting or on the throat. The graves were not in a ghetto of the suspect. The paper says they lay among ordinary burials.

The question the isotopes were built to answer was whether these six were immigrants. Post-medieval Poland took in outsiders, and folklore in the region treated the outsider as a likely revenant. Dental enamel from sixty people was sampled, including five of the six deviant burials. The sixth, an older woman, had lost her teeth and could not be tested. The strontium ratios of the five who could be tested fell with the local population. They were not migrants, on that measure. The paper's abstract says they were local individuals whose social identity, or whose manner of death, marked them in some other way. The authors offer cholera, which moved through eastern Europe in the seventeenth century, as one alternate explanation: the first person to die in an outbreak was thought more likely to come back. That is their suggestion. It is not a death certificate.

The paper is also frank that "vampire" here means the Polish folklore figure, an unclean spirit that reanimates a corpse, and that the archaeologists are using the word for people who were buried as if they were at risk of becoming one. Coins in the mouth and medals of St. Benedict show up in other graves at the same cemetery, including graves the team did not class as deviant. Fear of the dead was not confined to the six sickles. It was graded. A coin under the tongue is one degree. A sickle at the throat is another. The popular label flattens that. The NBC report on the paper, drawn from Live Science, carried the vampire word in the headline. The data underneath it are the isotopes and the grave plans.

Pień: the toe, then the neck

In 2022 a Nicolaus Copernicus University team led by Dariusz Poliński found grave 75 in a cemetery at Pień. The formal paper, in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports in 2026, is summarized on the Liverpool John Moores University repository, where a co-author is based. It describes a young adult woman. A triangular padlock was on the big toe of her left foot. The grave was later reopened. The authors say the reopening was presumably to add a sickle around the neck, a second lock on a grave that already had one. A sickle and a padlock in the same grave had not, they write, been reported in the published literature. They call the measures anti-demonic, meant to protect the living, and they say she would likely have been blamed for misfortunes such as disease or famine. "Likely" is doing the work of a hypothesis. CNN's report of the same paper quotes Poliński on the unusual fact of two precautions, and says the researchers call her Zosia. The nickname is theirs.

Science News, reporting the paper, adds the age the skeleton suggests: 17 to 19. It also says the padlock was probably on the toe at the first burial, and that mixed soil and the angle of an arm suggest a later opening for the sickle. CNN says the padlock was found unlocked, and that the sickle was placed while soft tissue still held the skeleton, because the joints were not scattered the way a late disturbance would scatter them. Those are the paper's readings as the journalists relay them. The isotope result is less decisive than Drawsko's. CNN reports that the chemical signatures in her teeth look like local food and water, and like other people in the same cemetery, but that other parts of central Europe could look similar. Mitochondrial DNA hinted at a maternal line that might connect to Scandinavia, and a geneticist not on the team, Shai Carmi, told CNN that a mitochondrial sequence this common across Europe is not very informative. A silk fragment near the skull, with threads of pure gold and silver, is the detail the authors use to call her high status. Wealth and a local childhood do not, by themselves, explain the padlock.

The cemetery is part of the argument. CNN, citing Poliński, says the field held 101 graves from about four generations in the seventeenth century, and that the team reads it as Protestant because Catholic devotional objects are absent. It sits away from the village, by a slope and a crossroads, far from a church. The paper treats that kind of ground as a place for people the community rejected: suicides, heretics, outsiders, people who died badly. Other graves at Pień were atypical too, including sickles, padlocks, and stones at the skull. Zosia is the one with both iron objects in a single grave, and the one whose grave was opened twice.

What the hardware does not prove

Drawsko answered the immigrant theory in the negative, for the five people whose teeth survived. Pień does not answer it cleanly, and does not claim a cause of death. The LJMU abstract says ongoing palaeopathological work may still change what can be said about how she died, which remains a mystery. Both papers are explicit that the objects are about the living. A sickle does not identify a criminal. It identifies a fear. The same fear, with fire instead of iron, is what the Wharram Percy team argued for a medieval English pit: the village that feared its dead would walk. New England's version, centuries later and tied to consumption, is JB-55 and Mercy Brown.

The contested point is the label. Call the burials apotropaic, or anti-demonic, and you are inside the researchers' own wording. Call them vampire graves and you are using a modern shortcut for an evil-averting burial. The shortcut is not a lie about the sickles. It is a risk of importing capes and garlic into a seventeenth-century field. Science News quotes a bioarchaeologist who was not on the Pień team, Lauren Hosek, on that exact point: in this historical context the word means a malevolent undead being, not the costume. The objects are the evidence. The motive is the hypothesis. At Drawsko the hypothesis that they were strangers failed. At Pień the hypothesis that she was blamed for a season of disease or hunger is still the authors' "likely," and they have not closed it.

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