"a 17th-century ‘vampire child’..."
Researchers have unearthed the remains of what they believe to be a 17th-century "vampire" child who was buried face down and padlocked to the earth in a likely effort to assuage villagers' fears that the child would not return from the dead, the lead archaeologist on the dig told Insider.
The skeletal remains of the child, who anthropologists believe was 5 to 7 years old, were discovered in an unmarked, mass cemetery in the Polish village of Pień, near Ostromecko.
The "necropolis," which literally translates from Greek into "city of the dead," is also where archaeologists discovered a "vampire" woman last year, who was buried with a padlock attached to her big toe and a sickle laying across her neck meant to sever her head should she try to rise from the dead.