A vampire burial or anti-vampire burial is a burial performed in a way which was believed to prevent the deceased from reviving in the form of a vampire or to prevent an "actual" vampire from revenance.
Traditions and rituals
Traditions, known from the medieval times, varied.[1][2][3]
Associated aspects
By an association, the term "vampire burial" may also refer to burials apparently performed with rituals associated with beliefs that the buried may arise from the dead or evil spirits may come out of the grave, etc., and these rituals were intended to prevent this from happening. An example of this is believed to be the case of mid-5th century "Children's Necropolis" of Lugnano in Teverina, Italy.[4]
Vampire burials had other byproducts, whether intentional or not, that as well counteracted various outside forces that could be imparted onto a deceased body, such as protection from scavengers, erosion damage, and having the body resurface due to storms. [5]
Examples
Archeologists uncovered a number of burials believed to be of this type.
A mid-16th century burial of a woman on the island of Lazzaretto Nuovo in the Venice lagoon, Italy[3]
Some interments in a cemetery in Greater Poland, dated 1675–1880.[6]
Drawsko cemetery, Poland, dated to the 17th-18th centuries[7] However the theory about "vampire burials" there has been contested later.[8]
A 17th-century burial of a woman in a graveyard in Pień, Poland. The corpse had a padlock around the toe and a scythe positioned in such a way that if the corpse had risen from the grave, the scythe would have severed its throat.[11]
