Deviant Burials? The Archaeology of Vampires

Anti-vampire mania, early medical explanations and the archaeology of unusual burial practices

In 2007 the Archeological Superintendent of Veneto began excavating mass graves in Nuovo Lazzaretto, Venice. The pits held the bodies of plague victims buried during the 16th and 17th centuries. Many of these were jumbles of bones, sometimes broken by previous gravediggers adding to the numbers, but there was an intact skeleton. This person, a woman given the number 6, would have been unremarkable except that someone had opened her mouth and forced a large piece of brick inside, almost to the back of her throat. Since handling infectious corpses was not encouraged without good reason the archaeologists listed it as an ‘anti-vampire burial’. Bricks in the mouth is far from the strangest European burial practice of the last few hundred years - being pinned down with stones, tied with a padlock, having a sickle placed over the throat or being punctured with wooden stakes or iron nails all belong on the ‘anti-vampire burial’ list. Surely though, vampires are more fiction than fact? Surely not that many people were killed and buried as vampires?

Anti-Vampire Mania (1600-1755)

That the dead might harm the living is probably one of our oldest fears. Death is not simple for an animal that can both think abstractly, form complex religious ideas and engage emotionally with the loss of a loved one. What archaeologists call ‘deviant’ or unusual burials occur throughout human prehistory, such as the 12,000 year old Natufian Hilazon Tachtit grave, where a ‘shaman’ had heavy stones placed over their limbs, perhaps to stop them reanimating and returning. Vampires though are a specific being, related of course to all the demonic nocturnal creatures that engage with the dead and human blood in human culture, but one which comes from Eastern Europe around the mid-17th century. The Serbian word vampir has some parallel across most Slavic and Turkic languages, and possibly originated with the upiór myth from the Kipchak-Cuman migrations across the Eurasian steppe, or from the Slavic strzyga folklore demon. Other similar creatures include the Norse draugr, the Indian pishacha and the Greco-Roman strix.

To be sure that a dead body did not reanimate and return to attack the living, it is safer to burn them. At least one explanation for the progressive growth in anti-vampiric fear across Europe was the switch from a pagan cremation to Christian burial:

People probably started using anti-vampire practices when inhumation was introduced in Christian times. The inhumation ritual, characteristic of Christianity, resulted in uncertainty about what would happen to the spirit of the dead person (Żydok 2004; Barber 2010). Therefore, the cultural change associated with a belief in the further existence of the spirit after death made the fear of dead people more intense and led to the use of practices that were aimed at protecting the living against the dead. Cremation was practiced on Polish lands during pre-Christian periods, called Roman influence period and Migration period, and even in the beginning of medieval times, though no anti-vampire graves were practiced. Inhumation was introduced in the Middle Ages, and this is also the time when anti-vampire burials appeared on Polish lands (Żydok 2004). Anti-vampire practices may have been ‘the result of the clash of native Slavic culture with Christian culture’

-A multidisciplinary study of anti-vampire burials from early medieval Culmen, Poland (2021) Matczak et al.

The core area which became synonymous with vampirism during the 18th century, the height of the European craze for vampires, ran from Poland to Greece. Hungary and Transylvania in particular were perceived as central regions, a kind of vampire-heartland, although in reality the fear of vampires was much wider.

The Slavic strzyga was a person believed to be born with two souls, only one of which was baptised by a priest. When the person died, the second soul would remain on Earth to cause trouble, primarily by animating the person’s corpse, leaving the grave and killing people or animals. Of course rural folklore like this is not a consistent creed, but is rather an overlapping and morphing series of ideas and fears. People wrongly buried alive during epidemics might genuinely climb out of the grave, and quiet nights in graveyards might be startled by the noises of decomposition underground. But we also have the terror of the dark, the forest, the traveler on a nighttime road, we have the agony of childhood mortality, failure to thrive or the persistent illnesses of the time, we have owls, bats, nocturnal things which could be malicious and sinister. All combine into rich lores of demonic beings which attack when the sun goes down.

The first reports of vampires-proper emerge in 1591 (Silesia), 1618 (Bohemia) and 1624 (Kraków). These had in common the resurrection of dead men who had passed in an unnatural way - suicide, unbaptised or excommunicated. To stop them hurting locals and their livestock they were dug up and decapitated, burnt or stabbed with a sharp pole. In 1706 the first book on the subject was published, De magia postuma, by Karl Ferdinand Scherz, which informed readers of similar cases in Moravia. By 1709 Hungarian doctors were documenting cases of vampires being exhumed and impaled in Transylvania, and soon the reports turned into an outright panic. Cases with named individuals now arrive to us in