Meet Zosia, the 17th-Century Vampire Suspect Buried With a Sickle at Her Throat

In 2022, Polish archaeologists encountered an unsettling burial site of a young woman. Her toe was caught in a triangular padlock, and a sickle—the blade pointed toward the body—lay across her throat. This was so bizarre that it took the team four years to find a plausible explanation: anti-demonic practices. A bit of a stretch? Maybe not. To build upon this interpretation, the researchers conducted a multidisciplinary investigation of the skeleton and previous literature on similar practices, publishing their findings in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports. According to the paper, the woman—dubbed “Zosia”—was likely of high social status but, at the time of her burial, had become feared by her community, who placed a padlock on her toe. Then, for good measure, the community reopened the grave some time later and added the sickle so she wouldn’t, say, come back to life and curse the living. “It was unusual that there were two precautions, two methods of showing that this skeleton should be kept in the grave—so the fear of the body coming back to life was greater,” Dariusz Poliński, the study’s lead author and an archaeologist at the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Pola