Leg bones and mixed soil split Pień's anti-vampire grave into two episodes

The padlock and the sickle went into the ground at different times. From the arrangement of the leg bones, the team argues the triangular padlock was fixed to the left big toe when the young woman they call Zosia was first buried ^[9]. Above her, the soil was churned and her left arm lay at an odd angle, which the researchers take as signs the grave was opened again, probably so the sickle could be added ^[10]. How long the interval was is not reported.

"The placement of the sickle and the padlock suggests that the purpose of these practices was to protect the living from Zosia after her death, including, without a doubt, preventing her from rising from the grave," said Dariusz Poliński, an archaeologist at Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń ^[4]. His team first read the comparative record: other post-medieval European tombs with sickles or padlocks, and the historical beliefs attached to both objects ^[5].

Her DNA suggests her mother's family may have come from Scandinavia ^[18]. A maternal ancestry signal is not the same thing as being treated as a stranger in the village, and the tooth isotopes point to a childhood spent locally ^[17].

Sandra Garvie-Lok, a bioarchaeologist at the University of Alberta in Edmonton who was not involved, put the limit of the chemistry plainly: "we can rule out some commonly suggested explanations for this kind of mortuary treatment," she said ^[20]. Historical records show people were sometimes singled out for strange burial as outsiders or after hard lives, and Garvie-Lok notes that a wealthy woman raised near Pień fits neither category neatly ^[21].

The next candidate is a violent or unusual death. Her bones show no obvious marks of injury or illness ^[22]. "We're still looking at the DNA" for clues about how she died, said Tomasz Grzybowski, a forensic geneticist at Nicolaus Copernicus University and a coauthor of the paper ^[23].

Lauren Hosek, a bioarchaeologist at the University of Colorado Boulder who was also not involved, cautioned about the vocabulary. "Our modern connotations for vampire are very specific, with garlic and bats and capes," she said; in this period the word meant some sort of malevolent undead being ^[16]. On the grave itself, Hosek said she had seen weird burials before and was not sure she had seen weirder ^[14]. The sickle at the neck, paired with the padlock as a restraint, "is a pretty good argument for this idea of fear of the dead," she said ^[15].

The skull also carried greenish stains consistent with copper objects pushed into the mouth or nose ^[11], and in Polish folklore copper was thought to ward off vampiric demons, or strzygi ^[13]. "This may have constituted an additional protective measure against the deceased," Poliński said ^[12]. In the same cemetery, a boy was buried face down with a triangular padlock on his right foot, and his grave was later reopened and most of his remains taken out ^[24].