Still from the film Let The Right One In
Workers on a construction site in the town of Gliwice in southern Poland were somewhat disturbed last week when they uncovered a number of skeletons of people that had been decapitated, with their skulls placed between their legs.
Some media organisations have decided that this is a sure sign that local people at the time were attempting to prevent these people returning from the dead as vampires. But local media are somewhat less frenzied in their accounts, describing the bodies as likely from people executed at the nearby gallows. So who should you believe?
Belief in vampires was prevalent in the middle ages for a variety of reasons, but was mostly due to a misunderstanding of how certain diseases were spread and affected people. In some areas, people who fell ill with tuberculosis were accused of being vampires as they turned pale and became very thin from the disease, looking more and more like a member of the undead. When the people around them then contracted the disease and followed with similar symptoms, people jumped to the belief that the original vampire had been feeding off their blood and caused them to also become vampires.
Moreover, as middle ages medicine could not check for a variety of signs of life that we check for today before buring a person, a number of people were buried alive. As they awoke in their coffin, with arms crossed over their chest and their movements severely restricted, many have proposed that people may have scratched deeply into the sides of their own neck with their fingernails as they attempted struggled before running out of oxygen. When these people were later dug up to be moved, people would notice the punctures on their neck, and again attributed this to the work of vampires.
Removing the heads of people to prevent them roaming the earth undead was a burial technique practiced during the middle ages in Poland as well as many other areas, along with other practices we may be more familiar with from horror movies today such as driving a stake through the heart of the deceased. The problem with these skeletons, however, is that without any markings or identifying features, it is near impossible to discern the real reason for the way their bodies were buried.
