Polish Vampires, Sailor's Luck, and Babies Born Under a Curse
With the kind of headlines that immediately catch our eye, news reached us last week that the decapitated skeletons of four suspected vampires were discovered recently in in Gliwice, Poland during excavations for a road building project.
Archaeologists at the site suspect that the dead might have been accused of being less-dead than their neighbors might have liked. Found with their heads removed, and placed between their legs, this otherwise unusual arrangement was a relatively well-known anti-rising-from-the-dead measure taken in many countries, particularly during the Middle Ages. Strangely enough, anti-vampire burials in Poland have been recorded as recently as 1914.
Weirdly, finds like this are not as rare as it might seem. Other vampire burials have been uneathed around the world, including recent discoveries in the Czech Republic and Bulgaria, as well as our favorite: the brick-eating Vampire of Venice. So far, the burials and bodies found in Gwlice remain undated, so little is known beyond the physical evidence, but that got us to wondering: what might have led to the belief that these people were part of the undead? Possibly, it's because they refused to eat their amniotic sack like good children.
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