A necropolis near Pien, Poland, holds over 100 burials, and at least 30 of them bear the unmistakable marks of a community terrified its dead would walk again.

• A pair of burials from 17th-century Poland reveal padlocks that had been placed on the feet of the deceased to keep them from rising.
• The strategy, often employed when villagers feared vampires would come back to haunt them, was used on small children and women.
• An entire graveyard for the “excluded” may have housed the most examples.

It may be a bit harsh to call a 17th-century burial of a 5-to-7-year-old child a “vampire burial.” It’s also potentially accurate. In Poland, there’s an entire necropolis featuring anti-vampire burial techniques employed during the 17th century, all aimed at keeping dead people... well... dead.

Of course, 400 years ago, folks had plenty of things to worry about other than vampires, but that fear was nevertheless very powerful—especially when they were burying children, young women, and others believed to potentially rise from the dead. To avoid this sort of vampiric revival, such bodies were buried with sickles on their chests and padlocks on their feet. The reasons, though, could vary.

Dariusz Poliński, a professor in the Department of Medieval Period and Early Modern Period at Nicolaus Copernicus University, serves as the lead on an excavation project at a necropolis near Pien, Poland, which started in 2005. He first made international news in 2022 with the discovery of a young woman padlocked in her grave. Then, a few months later, he found a child buried face down just a few feet away, also padlocked. While the media quickly latched onto the vampire aspect of the narrative, the reality may have been a bit more complex.

“I would prefer to consider these practices as activities protecting the living against the dead, traditionally considered anti-vampire procedures,” he said in a statement. “The woman could possibly have some physical impairment or mental disorder and was thus mistreated by her neighbors who thought she would scare them after death.”

“It might have also been a person died violently and suddenly in strange circumstances,” Polinski said, according to Business Insider. “Sudden death was often considered something people should be afraid of.” Children who hadn’t been baptized or children who drowned also frightened folks in the 17th century.

No matter the reason, the tactics were clear. By locking feet with the bulky weighted metal locks of the Early Modern period, villagers believed they’d be able to keep the dead in their graves. By placing a sickle on the chest and near the neck of the deceased, they thought that if the dead person revived and tried to get up, the sickle would slice their neck (not that a sliced neck would do much harm to someone able to rise from the dead).

“The padlock under the foot symbolizes the closing of a stage of life and is meant to protect against the return of the deceased, which was probably feared,” Polinski said, according to the Daily Mail. By burying people face down, they would “bite into the ground and not harm the living.” Other strategies included cutting off the deceased’s head or legs, smashing them with stones, or burning the body.

The necropolis, which has over 100 sets of remains, contains at least 30 burials that show some technique considered to be anti-vampire. The site has obvious “outsider” vibes, with villagers burying those they may have feared—in life, death, or both.

The woman with the triangular padlock wasn’t a complete outcast, though, according to CBS. She was buried with a silk headdress woven with thread made of precious metal—clearly a symbol of elevated status. As such, it may have been the cause of her death that troubled others enough to bury her with those known to be feared. Matteo Borrini, a forensic anthropology lecturer at Liverpool John Moores University, told Business Insider that hundreds of years ago, people often attributed pandemics or quickly spreading diseases to vampires. These undead creatures were thought to hunt down family members first and then move on to neighbors, matching the likely spread pattern of contagious diseases.

No matter the true cause of death, or how outlandish the panic over vampires was, the fear was real. So were the sickles and padlocks.