In 2022, in a field at Pień in northern Poland, near Bydgoszcz, a team from Nicolaus Copernicus University led by Dariusz Poliński opened an unmarked grave from the seventeenth century and found a young woman with a farmer’s sickle laid across her neck. On the big toe of her left foot was a small iron padlock. Neither object was an accident of the burial. The sickle was placed so that if she sat up, the blade would catch her at the throat. The padlock was there to keep her foot, and so her body, shut in the ground.
Someone had buried her carefully and then made sure she could not get up. The grave was dug properly and the body was laid out properly, and the sickle and the padlock were added on top of that, by the same hands.
Two years later, in 2024, a team gave her a face. Working from the skull, using measurements, 3D printing and modelling clay, the Swedish forensic artist Oscar Nilsson and researchers connected to Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń built up the muscle and skin of a woman in her late teens or early twenties. The reconstruction traveled the world under a name the team gave her: Zosia. The press ran her as a vampire, and the photograph they ran is of an ordinary, tired-looking girl.
The word we reach for is wrong
Call her a vampire and you have already lost the seventeenth century. The vampire most people carry around is a nineteenth-century literary figure with a cloak and an aristocratic address, assembled long after Zosia was in the ground. The people at Pień had a different vocabulary. In the Polish and wider Slavic world the returning dead were the strzyga or the upiór, and in the South Slavic lands the vukodlak, a body that would not stay dead, that came back to its family and its village and drained the living.
The distinction is not pedantry. The literary vampire seduces. The strzyga was your own recently buried relative, still hungry, and the danger was that she would start with the people who had loved her. That is a fear about the household, not about a stranger at the door.
Paul Barber, whose Vampires, Burial, and Death is still the clearest book on the subject, spent much of it showing that the folk descriptions of a vampire match, point for point, what an ordinary corpse does as it decomposes. The blood at the mouth, the bloating that looks like a well-fed body, the skin slippage that exposes what seems like fresh growth. People dug up the recently dead during an outbreak, saw a body behaving the way bodies actually behave, and read it as life. The response was to stop the body from doing anything more.
The hardware of keeping the dead down
Zosia’s sickle and padlock are not unique. They belong to a whole grammar of what archaeologists call apotropaic burial, from a Greek word for warding off. Across post-medieval Poland the dead who worried their communities were pinned, weighted and locked.
The catalogue is consistent enough to read as a practice rather than a series of one-off panics. At Drawsko, a cemetery in the northwest used through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a 2014 study looked at six such graves. Five had a sickle placed across the throat or the abdomen. Two had large stones set under the chin, to hold the jaw shut or the head down. A more recent study of cemeteries in Greater Poland, published in 2025, records bodies weighted with stones and immobilised with padlocks, and names Pień directly among the sites where a person was locked and a person was weighted this way.
Iron runs through all of it. The sickle is iron, the padlock is iron, and iron was widely held to have power over the undead in Slavic folk belief, the same logic that put iron over thresholds and into cradles. A farm tool laid on a corpse was not improvised. It was the material people already trusted, used for the job they most feared.
The sickle was a practical choice as well as a symbolic one. It was the tool most households actually owned, a curved iron blade already associated with the harvest and with cutting down. Laid across a throat in the grave, it turned the act of rising into an act of self-injury.
They were not strangers
The obvious guess about who gets buried with a sickle at the throat is the outsider. The stranger who came to the village and died there, the migrant, the person no one could vouch for. Fear the unknown, mark the unknown grave. It is a satisfying reading and it appears to be wrong.
The 2014 Drawsko team tested it directly. They measured strontium isotopes in the teeth of the apotropaically buried dead, a technique that records the geology of the water a person drank while their teeth were forming, and so shows roughly where they grew up. If these were feared outsiders, their chemistry should have come from elsewhere. It did not. Every individual they sampled showed local ratios. The researchers rejected the migrant hypothesis in plain terms. The people held down in their graves had grown up in the community that held them down.
So the sickle was not laid on a stranger. It was laid on a neighbour, a daughter, someone whose face the mourners knew, and the same study offers a reason. The people singled out, the authors suggest, may have been the first to die in an outbreak of disease. The first corpse of an epidemic was the one most likely, in local reckoning, to come back and pull the others after it. When several deaths follow one death in quick succession, the mind reaches for a cause, and the cause it reached for here was the returning dead.
That result comes from Drawsko, not from Zosia, and her own case is less settled. The excavators reported that her grave held signs of standing, traces of a pillow and fragments of silk, the burial of someone who mattered to the people who dug it. Her DNA has been read as pointing to possible Scandinavian ancestry, which would place her origins at least partly further off than the graveyard she lies in. So the neat rule fits the practice better than it fits the woman. She had status and perhaps came from somewhere else, and she was still given the sickle. Whatever singled her out, poverty and foreignness do not cover it.
What the plague study actually says
The 2025 headlines went straight to “vampire had the plague,” and the paper underneath is more careful than that.
In 2025, a study in Scientific Reports examined atypical burials from cemeteries in Greater Poland and found the DNA of Yersinia pestis, the plague bacterium, in one of the dead. It ties this class of burial to epidemic disease with physical evidence rather than inference, which is new and worth having.
But the plague was found in a specific person: a boy of fourteen to seventeen, from the cemetery at Skoki, buried beside an older woman who tested negative. It was not found in Zosia, and it was not found at Pień. What the study establishes is a link between the practice and the disease, across the region and the period. It does not tell us what Zosia died of. Her own cause of death has not been settled in the peer-reviewed record, and the honest sentence is that we do not know it.
The link still matters for her, because it explains the shape of the fear she was caught in. Communities living through waves of plague, with no germ theory and no defence, watched the disease move from house to house the way a revenant was said to. The apotropaic grave was a technology for a crisis. Something was really killing them, faster than anyone could explain, and they answered it with the belief and the tools they had, aimed at the wrong target.
Zosia and the man at Račeša
She has a close cousin further south. In a former Hospitaller estate in western Slavonia, at Račeša, a man buried between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries was dug up by his own community after burial, decapitated, his torso turned face-down, his head moved and weighted with stones. In 2026 a forensic team unveiled his reconstructed face too, and the English press reached for the same word, vampire, when the word his community would have used was vukodlak.
Put the two cases together and the pattern is not about one country or one century. A body that frightens a village gets handled, whether that means a sickle on the throat in Poland or a head twisted off and weighted in Croatia. The details follow what people own and what they believe. The impulse underneath is the same one, to make sure the dead stay dead.
The written proof that this belief was taken seriously by more than villagers comes a little later and a little to the east. In 1732, Austrian military surgeons in the Serbian village of Medveđa opened seventeen graves, signed a report on what they found, and sent it up the chain. That document, the story of Arnold Paole, carried the word vampir into German, then into the salons of Western Europe, and turned a Balkan folk fear into a subject of learned debate. Zosia is the archaeology of that fear. Paole is the paperwork.
What we are left with
We have a grave, a sickle, a padlock, and a face. We have plague DNA in the same practice a few towns over, and isotope chemistry saying the people buried this way at Drawsko were the community’s own. We do not have Zosia’s cause of death, and we do not have her name. Zosia is a name we gave her.
What the villagers believed, in the fullest sense, we cannot reach. We can see what they did, and we can see the pressure they were under, and we can see that they were not simply frightened of the outside world. They were frightened of what was happening inside it, in their own beds, and they answered it by locking a young woman into the ground so she could not come back to them. The sickle stayed where it was laid for four hundred years, and now she has a face, and she looks like anyone.
Sources
Bibliography. The same list is held in the article’s frontmatter for the citation tools that read it programmatically.
- Karczewska, Magdalena, et al. ‘The outcasts, the sick, and the undead: atypical burials of the late medieval to modern Greater Poland.’ Scientific Reports 15 (2025): article s41598-025-04425-2. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-025-04425-2
- Gregoricka, Lesley A., Tracy K. Betsinger, Amy B. Scott, and Marek Polcyn. ‘Apotropaic Practices and the Undead: A Biogeochemical Assessment of Deviant Burials in Post-Medieval Poland.’ PLOS ONE 9, no. 11 (2014): e113564. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0113564
- Betsinger, Tracy K., and Amy B. Scott. ‘Governing from the Grave: Vampire Burials and Social Order in Post-medieval Poland.’ Cambridge Archaeological Journal 24, no. 3 (2014): 467–476.
- Reuters. ‘Scientists rebuild face of 400-year-old Polish “vampire”.’ 30 October 2024.
- NBC News. ‘Scientists rebuild the face of a 400-year-old “vampire” woman named Zosia.’ 1 November 2024.
- Barber, Paul. Vampires, Burial, and Death: Folklore and Reality. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988; expanded edition 2010.
