The remains of a woman thought to be a “vampire” were discovered by archaeologists in a graveyard in Poland dating from the 17th century.
Wait, Vampires are real?
According to the New York Post, researchers who discovered the remains last month have now released their results, which showed that the victim was discovered with a sharp sickle around her neck and a padlock on the big toe.
In the 1600s and 1700s, a sickle was most frequently used on those who were supposed to be “vampires” to stop them from reviving.
“The sickle was not set flat but placed on the neck in such a way that if the victim had tried to stand up… the head would have been chopped off or wounded,” lead researcher Professor Dariusz Polisk told Daily Mail.
He added that people would frequently go to great efforts to stop those who were thought to have “paranormal powers” from reviving the dead.
According to him, “ways to prevent the return of the dead include cutting off the head or legs, placing the corpse face down to bite into the ground, burning them, and smashing them with a stone.” He made this statement to The Washington Post.
According to Stacey Abbott, author of Undead Apocalypse: Vampires and Zombies in the 21st Century, there was a significant amount of “fear” of vampires throughout the 17th and 18th centuries.
She claimed that akin to allegations of witchcraft, paranoia would follow any individual who was different or didn’t “fit in.”
Similar to the witch hunts, she claimed that if you stood out in any manner, people would become hysterical about you.
It would have been a case of accuse first, else you would be accused yourself, Abbott continued.
As ‘corpses’ had clawed their way out of their graves and resurfaced as’monsters,’ fears of blood-sucking creatures extend as far back as the 11th century.
Dr. Lesley Gregoricka from the University of South Alabama, however, asserts that this was not a result of “superpowers,” but rather, the spread of deadly diseases like cholera throughout Europe.
She told Metro: “People of the post-medieval 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.”