The researchers found the remains of what they believed to be a 17th-century “vampire” child buried facedown and chained to the ground to allay villagers’ fears that the boy would not come back from the dead. This was reported by Insider. The skeletal remains of the boy, whom anthropologists believe to be between 5 and 7 years old, were found in an unmarked mass graveyard in the village of Pen, near Ostrometsk, Poland.

The Necropolis, which literally means “city of the dead” in Greek, is also where archaeologists discovered a female “vampire” buried last year with a padlock on her big toe and a sickle that means cutting a sickle around her neck. head if he tries to rise from the dead.

Dariusz Polinsky, professor of archeology at Nicolaus Copernicus University, who led both excavations, said the two tombs were found just two meters apart in a cemetery, and his team believes it was a temporary burial ground for the “outcast” or the undesirable. Christian cemeteries for various reasons.

Polinsky said he and his researchers discovered about 100 burials at the cemetery, many of which demonstrate practices of disorderly burial, including “anti-vampire” tactics used to keep people from “come back from the graves.”

“There could be several reasons why a person might be buried in such a cemetery,” Polinsky said. “A person may have exhibited strange behaviors throughout their life that cause others to fear them, or they may suffer from an unusual physical condition that affects their appearance.”

“It could also be a person who died under strange circumstances,” Polinsky said. “Sudden death was often thought of as something people should be afraid of.” Seventeenth-century peasants tended to fear buried unbaptized children as well as people who died by drowning.