A team working for the Lublin Voivodeship Conservator of Monuments have unearthed the remains of a child who buried as a vampire in the gardens of the palace of a bishop in Góra Chełmska who belonged to the Ruthenian Uniate Church, an eastern Church in communion with Rome.
The child was decapitated and the skull placed faced down before heavy stones were placed on top of the body.
The measures were intended to stop the child from rising as an undead animated corpse and terrorising the local population.
Two postholes were identified as possible grave markers that enabled church officials to monitor grave for any signs of the “vampire” coming back to life.
According to Heritage Daily, a UK-based archaeology news website, the mangled skeleton belonged to one of two children buried within the cathedral complex of the Basilica of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, which was constructed during the early 18th century on the site of a former Orthodox church and Basilian Monastery.
Archaeologists believe, however, that the grave dates from the 13th century.
Throughout the Middle Ages it was a common superstition in Central and Eastern Europe that people who committed suicide, witches or corpses of those diabolically possessed could come back as a vampire after death.
Numerous “vampire” burials have been discovered throughout Poland, including the remains of a woman in Pień, who was buried with scythe across her throat and a padlock on her toe.
Vampires are most commonly associated with Transylvania in modern-day Romania because of Bram Stoker’s Dracula.
The word comes from the Serbian vampir, with earliest folklore for the modern stereotype going back to 17th century Croatia where a man called Jure Grando was said to have come back from the dead to sexually assault his widow and drink human blood until a stake was driven through his heart and he was decapitated.
Tales of vampires spread throughout the region in the ensuing years and became so prevalent that in 1752 Dom Augustine Calmet, a distinguished French Benedictine who was admired by Voltaire published his Treatise on the Apparitions of Spirits and on Vampires and their Revenants.
He collected volumes of unverified anecdotal accounts before he concluded that vampires existed, that they were people who rose from their graves months after their deaths to feast on the blood of relatives, and could be killed only by a stake through their hearts, by decapitation and by burning.
Empress Maria Theresa of Austria finally put the hysteria to it all by asking Gerard van Sweiten, her personal physician, to conduct an inquiry.
He concluded that vampires were not real and the desecration of graves and corpses was subsequently forbidden.