Vampire Burials in Europe: Sickles, Padlocks, Revenants

Revenant, Nachzehrer, vampire: three words, three ideas

The revenant is the umbrella term: a dead person who does not stay in the grave but returns bodily. Not a ghost, not a shadow, but the corpse itself. The idea is old and widespread. The Icelandic sagas of the 13th century know the draugr, a dead man who kills livestock, wrecks farms and strangles people; the most famous fight is Grettir's struggle with the revenant Glamr in Grettis saga. The English chronicler William of Newburgh reported around 1198 that the dead had risen from their graves at Berwick and Melrose, and that villagers dug them up and burned them.

The Nachzehrer, literally the one who "feeds after," is a special northern and eastern German, Silesian and Kashubian variant. It never leaves the grave at all. It lies in the coffin and chews: on its shroud, its clothes, its own flesh, and people claimed you could hear it smacking its lips. While it chews, the living die, its family first, one after another. The Nachzehrer is the epidemic imagined as a person. The word vampire, finally, is an import from South Slavic languages, and it reached Western Europe at a moment that can be dated almost to the day.

The returning dead compared

Figure	Region and source	What it does	Typical countermeasure
Draugr	Iceland, sagas of the 13th century	Walks, kills livestock and people	Beheading, burning, reburial
Revenant	All of Europe, chronicles from the 12th century	Returns bodily, torments the living	Staking, weighting, burning
Nachzehrer	Northern Germany, Silesia, Kashubia	Stays in the grave, chews, draws relatives after it	Coin or stone in the mouth, severing the head
Vampire	Serbia, reports of 1725 and 1732	Drinks blood, spreads death in the village	Stake through the heart, burning
Consumptive "vampire"	New England, late 18th century to 1892	Drains the health of surviving relatives	Exhuming and burning the heart

What lies in the graves: the archaeology of prevention

What makes this subject unusual is that it does not live only in books. It lives in the ground. At Pien, the team led by archaeologist Dariusz Polinski found more than the young woman, whom the researchers call Zosia; she died between 17 and 19 years old, sometime between about 1620 and 1674. They also found a child buried face down, likewise with a padlock at the foot, and dead weighted with stones. The study published in 2026 in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports, with DNA, isotope and radiocarbon analyses, showed more: the woman's grave had been reopened after burial, and the sickle was added later. Greenish staining in the mouth points to a copper object, perhaps a coin, placed between her teeth. Traces of silk and gold thread at the skull suggest a well-off family. No cause of death, injury or illness was found that would explain how she was treated.

Pien is not an isolated case. At the cemetery of Drawsko Pomorskie in West Pomerania, among roughly 285 graves of the 17th and 18th centuries, six dead lay with sickles over the neck or abdomen or with stones under the chin. Isotope analyses published in 2014 showed they were not strangers but people from the place itself. On the Venetian island of Lazzaretto Nuovo, archaeologists found in 2006, in a mass grave from the plague of 1576, a woman with a brick forced into her mouth, the classic defense against a Nachzehrer that would otherwise eat its shroud. And at Lugnano in Teverina in Umbria lay a child of about ten from the 5th century, who had died of malaria, with a stone in the mouth. The patterns repeat across centuries and countries: close the mouth, threaten the neck, hold the body down, weigh it, or turn it over.

1725 and 1732: how the word vampire reached the West

The word vampire entered German-language print, and from there French and English, through the Habsburg military frontier in Serbia. In 1725 the Vienna newspaper Wienerisches Diarium carried the report of the imperial official Frombald about the village of Kisiljevo. There, it said, the dead farmer Peter Plogojowitz had come at night to people who died afterward; the villagers dug him up, found fresh blood at his mouth, staked him and burned him. Seven years later, on January 26, 1732, the regimental surgeon Johann Fluckinger signed his report, Visum et Repertum, on the case of Arnold Paole and the exhumation of seventeen dead at Medveda, whom he declared to be "in the vampire state." The report was printed, reprinted and translated, and it set off the vampire debate of 1732: dozens of treatises by physicians, theologians and philosophers arguing about what was going on in those graves. The English word vampire appears in print in that same decade.

The debate had forerunners. As early as 1679, Philipp Rohr had lectured in Leipzig on the chewing of the dead in their graves, and Michael Ranft published De masticatione mortuorum in tumulis in 1725, with a German edition in 1734. Ranft took the reports seriously and explained them naturally: by decay, by imagination, by the fear of the living. The Benedictine scholar Augustin Calmet collected the cases in 1746 in a widely read treatise on apparitions and revenants. And in 1755 Empress Maria Theresa, after her physician Gerard van Swieten had investigated a case in Silesia, issued a decree forbidding laypeople to open graves, stake corpses or burn them. Folk belief had become an administrative problem.

What people saw, and why they were not fools

The reports from Kisiljevo and Medveda are remarkably accurate on one point: they describe what you actually see in an opened grave. In 1988 the American folklorist Paul Barber showed in Vampires, Burial, and Death that nearly every feature of the vampire is a feature of decomposition. A corpse bloats with gases and looks well fed, "sated." Blood-tinged fluid seeps from the mouth and nose: the fresh blood on the lips. The outer layer of skin slips off and leaves a pinkish new-looking skin beneath; nails and hair seem to have grown because the skin has drawn back. Stake a bloated body and air escapes with a sound, the dead man's sigh or scream. And the Nachzehrer's chewing? A shroud laid over the face sinks into the mouth as the tissue collapses. Whoever opens the grave sees a dead man who has eaten his shroud.

Then there is the connection that made the Nachzehrer so convincing: it appeared in times of epidemic. When one person in a family dies of plague, cholera or tuberculosis and shortly afterward the next one does, then in a world without germ theory it is not absurd to look for the cause in the first to die. The observation, that death spreads from one of the dead and strikes the closest first, is correct. Only the explanation was wrong. Within that worldview, the countermeasures were the rational steps of a community trying to protect itself.

New England, 1892: America's own vampire panic

American readers sometimes treat all of this as Old World superstition. It is not. In rural New England, from the late 18th century until the end of the 19th, families losing one member after another to tuberculosis, then called consumption, sometimes exhumed the first to die. If the heart or liver still held what looked like fresh blood, it was cut out and burned, and in some cases the ashes were given to a sick relative to swallow. The folklorist Michael E. Bell documented dozens of such cases in Rhode Island, Connecticut, Vermont and Massachusetts in Food for the Dead (2001). The people involved rarely used the word vampire. Newspapers did.

The best-known case is also the last widely reported one. Mercy Lena Brown of Exeter, Rhode Island, died of consumption in January 1892 at nineteen, after her mother and her sister. Her brother Edwin was sick. In March, with the local doctor present, the family had Mercy's body and those of her mother and sister taken from their graves. Mercy's body, kept in a crypt through a cold winter, was less decomposed and had liquid blood in the heart. The heart was burned on a rock in the cemetery, and the ashes were mixed into a drink for Edwin. He died two months later. Mercy's grave behind the Chestnut Hill Baptist Church is still visited, especially in October.

Connecticut has its own archaeological parallel. In 1990, in a sand and gravel pit in Griswold, archaeologists recovered a colonial family cemetery. One coffin, marked with brass tacks as "JB-55," held a man whose skull and thigh bones had been rearranged into a skull-and-crossbones after death, apparently some years after burial, most likely in the early 19th century. His ribs showed signs of lung disease. In 2019, DNA and genealogy work suggested his name was John Barber. The logic is the same as at Pien: a family losing its members, a dead man who seemed to be the source, and a body that had to be stopped.

The means of prevention and what they meant

European folklore scholars collected the customs against revenants in great detail, and they follow a logic of their own. Close the mouth: a coin, a stone, a brick or soil under the tongue or between the teeth, so the Nachzehrer has nothing to chew. Threaten the neck: a sickle or scythe blade across the throat, so the dead would behead themselves on rising. Hold the body: padlocks, bindings, heavy stones on chest and legs; Kashubian sources of the 19th century still mention nets or poppy seeds in the coffin, which the dead must count before they can get up. Confuse the way: bury the dead face down so they dig in the wrong direction, carry the coffin out through a hole in the wall instead of the door. Cut the tie: remove name tags from clothing, let no tear fall on the shroud, so nothing binds the dead to the living. Where nothing else helped came the extreme: dig up, behead, stake, burn.

Anyone reading this will see the kinship with ancient binding magic on curse tablets, which also bind, nail down and seal. The idea that the dead hold power over the living, as messengers of a curse, as those questioned in necromancy, or as revenants, runs through the whole history of European magic.

Why these dead?

Whom did the fear fall on? The sources and graves name the same groups again and again: people who died suddenly or unnaturally, the drowned and suicides, the first victims of an epidemic, women who died in childbirth and unbaptized children, people who in life were thought odd, quick-tempered or skilled in magic, or who had a birthmark, unusual teeth or a disability. Sometimes they were strangers or outsiders; at Drawsko, as the isotopes show, they were not. Looking at these graves today, you also look at a community's fear of what it could not explain, and at people who were excluded one more time in death. The padlock on Zosia's toe is a piece of magic, but it is also evidence that someone was afraid of her.

From the village graveyard to Dracula

With the Enlightenment the revenant left the court records and moved into literature. Goethe wrote "The Bride of Corinth" in 1797, John Polidori "The Vampyre" in 1819, Bram Stoker Dracula in 1897, and F. W. Murnau's film Nosferatu followed in 1922. The bloated, chewing peasant of folk belief became the pale, seductive aristocrat, and in America the figure moved again, into Halloween costumes and television. With the dead of Pien, Drawsko or Exeter that figure has almost nothing left in common. And whoever uses the modern phrase energy vampire is talking about something else again: relationships, not graves.

What we do not promise

We do not claim that the dead return, chew their shrouds or cause epidemics; decomposition explains what people saw in the graves, and germs explain the deaths that followed. We do not claim that sickle, stone or padlock ever did anything other than calm the living. And we give no instructions for rituals against the dead. If fear of someone who has died keeps you awake, that is grief, and grief needs people, not a sickle. A grief counselor, a chaplain or your doctor is a better first call than any charm.

In practice: how to handle it

1. Read the primary sources. Fluckinger's Visum et Repertum (1732), Ranft's treatise (1725) and Calmet (1746) are freely available as scans and translations, and they are shorter than you would expect.
2. Keep the terms apart. Revenant, Nachzehrer, draugr and vampire are not the same thing. Separating them lets you read the graves better.
3. Visit with respect. If you go to Mercy Brown's grave in Exeter or any old burial ground, remember that these are family plots, not attractions. The basics are in cemetery etiquette.
4. Respect the dead in the stories. The people in these graves were victims of a fear. They deserve dignity, even in fascination.
5. Turn the shiver into remembrance. The weeks around Samhain and All Souls' are, in many traditions, the time of the ancestors. A light and a name are worth more than any defense; ideas for that are in our Samhain ancestor altar and in All Saints' and All Souls' Day.

Frequently asked questions

What is a vampire burial?

An archaeologists' shorthand for a grave in which the dead person was treated so they could not rise: a sickle over the throat, a stone or coin in the mouth, a padlock or bindings, heavy stones on the body, or burial face down. Such graves are known across Central and Eastern Europe, especially in Poland, from the Middle Ages to the 18th century.

What is a Nachzehrer?

A figure of northern and eastern German, Silesian and Kashubian folk belief: a dead person who stays in the grave, chews on the shroud and their own flesh, and by doing so draws their relatives after them into death. The usual countermeasure was a coin or stone placed in the mouth.

What is the difference between a revenant and a vampire?

Revenant is the umbrella term for a corpse believed to return bodily. The vampire is a South Slavic form of that belief, whose name reached German, French and English readers through Habsburg reports from Serbia in 1725 and 1732.

Why were people buried with sickles?

The blade across the neck was meant to stop the dead from sitting up: anyone who tried would cut their own throat. Such burials are documented in Poland, for example at Drawsko Pomorskie and Pien in the 17th century.

Were there vampire scares in America?

Yes. In 18th- and 19th-century New England, families struck by tuberculosis sometimes exhumed a relative and burned the heart to stop the disease from taking more of them. The best-known case is Mercy Brown in Exeter, Rhode Island, in 1892.

How are the old vampire reports explained today?

Mostly by decomposition: bloating from gases, dark fluid at the mouth, loosening skin that makes nails and hair look longer, air escaping when a body is staked. Paul Barber laid this out in 1988. Epidemics that killed families one after another did the rest.

Sources and further reading

• Johann Fluckinger, Visum et Repertum on the so-called vampires, Medveda, January 26, 1732.
• Michael Ranft, De masticatione mortuorum in tumulis (Leipzig, 1725).
• Augustin Calmet, Dissertations sur les apparitions des anges, des demons et des esprits, et sur les revenants et vampires (1746).
• Paul Barber, Vampires, Burial, and Death: Folklore and Reality (Yale University Press, 1988).
• Lesley A. Gregoricka et al., "Apotropaic Practices and the Undead: A Biogeochemical Assessment of Deviant Burials in Post-Medieval Poland," PLOS ONE 9(11) (2014).
• Dariusz Polinski et al., study of the deviant burials at Pien, Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports (2026).
• Michael E. Bell, Food for the Dead: On the Trail of New England's Vampires (Carroll and Graf, 2001; Wesleyan University Press, 2011).
• Paul S. Sledzik and Nicholas Bellantoni, "Bioarcheological and Biocultural Evidence for the New England Vampire Folk Belief," American Journal of Physical Anthropology 94 (1994).

The spiritual readings in this piece are tradition, not scientific findings. Nothing here replaces medical, psychological or legal advice. Questions about an order: 28@templeofdesire.com.