A 17th-Century Teenage Girl Was Buried With ‘Anti-Vampiric’ Gear, Including a Sickle Across Her Throat, to Keep Her From Rising Again

The extraordinary grave reveals how seriously 17th-century Poles could fear the restless dead.

Someone went to unusual lengths to make sure Zosia stayed dead.

When the teenage girl was buried in 17th-century Poland, someone fastened an iron padlock around the big toe of her left foot. Then, apparently after the burial, her grave was opened again. A large serrated sickle was laid across her neck, its curved blade pointed directly at her throat.

Zosia’s startling burial made headlines when archaeologists discovered it at Pień, in north-central Poland, in 2022. Now, after four years of investigation, researchers have assembled the most detailed picture yet of what they describe as an anti-demonic, or “anti-vampiric,” burial. The combination of a sickle and padlock has not previously been reported together before in any known burial.

“The placement of the sickle and the padlock suggests that the purpose of these practices was to protect the living from Zosia after her death, including, without a doubt, preventing her from rising from the grave,” Dariusz Poliński, an archaeologist at Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń and the study’s lead author, told Science News.

A grave designed to keep someone inside from rising from the dead

Zosia, who died at around17 to 19 years old, lay on her back. Her leg bones remained in their natural anatomical positions, suggesting the padlock had been attached to her toe when she was first buried.

But when archaeologists looked at the mixed soil in the grave, they noticed that Zosia’s left arm had shifted into an unusual position — evidence, they argue, that the burial was disturbed after the initial funeral. The grave may have been reopened specifically to add the 36-centimeter sickle, positioning its serrated edge against her throat. The thinking probably was that if Zosia — whom others probably believed possessed supernatural abilities — rose up from the dead to torment the community, she’d immediately lose her head. But if that was such a big concern, one can only wonder why the Late Medieval villagers didn’t simply cut off the body’s head to begin with.

“It was unusual that there were two precautions, two methods of showing that this skeleton should be kept in the grave — so the fear of the body coming back to life was greater,” Poliński told CNN.

There may have been more to it. Green staining inside Zosia’s mouth and on nearby neck bones pointed to contact with copper. The researchers found elevated copper around the palate, which means some unidentified copper-bearing object or substance had been inserted into her mouth or nose.

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Such measures fit a broader tradition of protecting the living against suspected revenants — dead people believed capable of returning to trouble the community.

At the 17th- and 18th-century cemetery of Drawsko in northwestern Poland, for instance, five people were buried with sickles across their throats or abdomens. A 2014 biochemical study of the Drawsko burials found that the supposed “vampires” were local. In Venice, archaeologists found a woman from a plague cemetery with a brick deliberately forced into her mouth, another apparent attempt to neutralize a dangerous corpse.

“Vampire,” however, needs qualification some qualification in this case. The researchers are conjuring the Dracula-like image of fangs, bats and blood, which came much later in pop culture. The authors use “anti-vampiric” as shorthand for rituals directed against feared revenants or demonic dead. In 17th-century Polish folklore, such beings included the strzyga and upiór.

The mystery is why Zosia was so feared

Zosia’s tooth enamel — specifically ratios of strontium and oxygen absorbed from local food and drinking water during childhood — matches the region around Pień. In other words, she probably grew up nearby rather than arriving from some distant land.

But while she was raised locally, her heritage may have made her a bit of an outsider. After sequencing her DNA, researchers found that Zosia carried a mitochondrial lineage known as J1c2c1, which is passed down through the maternal line. This lineage has been found more often in Scandinavia and other parts of northern Europe and is rare among modern Slavic-speaking populations. It could point to Scandinavian ancestry somewhere on her mother’s side, perhaps generations earlier.

She was also probably rich; part of some elite. Fragments of her headwear contained silk, pure silver and gilded silver threads — costly materials that would have stood out in the 17th century. The researchers think she may have belonged to a wealthy, perhaps even noble, family.

Archaeologists found no fatal wounds and no skeletal disease that would explain how she died. Of course, many killers — infection, poisoning, organ disease — leave little or nothing behind once soft tissue disappears.

That leaves an uncomfortable question at the center of the grave: If Zosia was local, wealthy and showed no obvious physical signs of a violent or unusual death, why were people so afraid of her?

A cemetery for people feared even after death

Zosia was not alone.

Archaeologists have uncovered 101 post-medieval graves at Pień, many containing unusual features: padlocks, sickles, heavy stones or bodies arranged in atypical ways. One child was buried face down with a triangular padlock at the foot. The cemetery itself appears nowhere in surviving written records and lay away from the village, far from a known church or chapel.

So, it seems Pień may have served as a burial ground for people rejected by their community — including some suspected of being possessed by the devil.

Exactly what Zosia did, suffered or represented to inspire such fear remains unknown.

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But her grave preserves the reaction vividly. First came a lock. Then, apparently, someone decided a lock was not enough.

The findings appeared in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports.