400-Year-Old 'Vampire' Grave of a Wealthy Young Woman Found in Poland

Archaeologists near the village of Pień in northern Poland unearthed a 17th-century woman buried with an iron sickle across her neck and a padlock on her toe — a rare anti-vampire ritual reserved for the feared dead.

A 400-year-old grave in northern Poland has given archaeologists a rare look at how fear shaped burial in the 17th century. Near the village of Pień, researchers found the remains of a young woman laid to rest with an iron sickle across her neck and a padlock clasped to her left big toe — two anti-demonic defenses meant to keep her from rising as a vampire.

The woman, catalogued as Grave 75, was discovered in 2022 and has now been studied in detail. Radiocarbon dating places her burial between 1620 and 1674, when she was roughly 17 to 19 years old. Thin metallic threads of gold-gilded silver found near her skull came from a fine silk cap, a costly accessory that marks her as wealthy. Yet her bones tell a harder story: carbon and nitrogen measurements point to periods of poor nutrition despite her high standing.

DNA testing adds another twist. Her maternal lineage belongs to haplogroup J1c2c1, a rare line with roots in Scandinavia that is now almost absent among Slavic populations — even though isotope analysis of her childhood teeth shows she grew up near Pień. A green stain on her palate and neck bones suggests a copper-rich object or substance was placed in her mouth near the time of death.

The grave itself had been disturbed before her body fully decomposed. Soil layers were shifted and the skeleton repositioned, with the sickle laid across her throat after burial, blade facing inward. Its handle was made of birch, a wood linked with protection in regional folklore. The cemetery, unmarked on historical maps and set near a crossroads outside the village, may have served as a "false cemetery" for a community's shunned. During the 17th century, waves of disease and famine swept the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and the recently dead were sometimes blamed for misfortune — making this wealthy young woman a possible scapegoat for her neighbors' hardship. The findings were published in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports.

Sources: Popular Science, Archaeology News