400-year-old ‘vampire child’ found buried with its foot padlocked to stop it rising from the grave

Live Science

By Tom Metcalfe

August 10, 2023

Archaeologists in Poland have unearthed the 400-year-old skeleton of a young child buried face-down with an iron padlock on its foot – seemingly to stop its rising from the dead.

The child was buried in the 17th century in the village of Pień near Poland’s northern city of Bydgoszcz, in what seems to have been a graveyard for “abandoned souls” and the poor who could not afford to be buried in a churchyard.

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