Archaeologists discover remains of decapitated ‘vampire children’ believed to be ‘demonic’ beings

Salem’s Tot?

Archaeologists in Poland were stunned after discovering the alleged remains of “vampire children”, one of whom was decapitated to prevent them from rising from the grave.

“The burial clearly shows signs of anti-vampire practices,” said Dr. Stanisław Gołub, an archaeologist with the Lublin Voivodeship Conservatory of Monuments who led the excavations, said in a statement.

According to a translated Facebook post by the institution, workers were said to have initially stumbled across the skeletons while uprooting trees for an ongoing garden renovation project at the Uniate Bishops’ Palace in Chelm.

They were then exhumed for examination by Golub and his team.

Based on Earth, they were found in, and accompanied by ceramic fragments, the bones are believed to date back to the 13th century — a time when precautions were taken to prevent the resurrection of the dead, Jam Press reported.

According to the post, one of the macabre cemeteries had all the characteristics of an “anti-vampire burial” practiced in Europe at the time.

These included the fact that the child’s skull was removed and buried face down with stones on top of the torso.

Burial face down, cutting off the head or crushing the body with a stone are among the methods used to prevent a person believed to be a demonic being from leaving the grave, writes Dr. Golub.

The alleged baby Dracula was also buried in plaster soil and oriented on an east-west axis – both common practices during the time.

The burial site also had post holes, which were likely used to monitor the graves for signs of a vampiric revival.

Even stranger was the fact that both children were buried without caskets or traditional funeral finery in a location far from any known cemeteries, Popular Science reported.

This suggests that locals may have used the area for undocumented burials for a period of time.

Researchers are currently analyzing the remains to gather more insight into burial practices during the era.

Resurrection intervention was commonly practiced throughout medieval Europe, especially in Eastern Europe, where lore involving vampires and comers—reanimated corpses—was widespread.

Unfortunately, as with the infamous Salem witch trials of the 1600s, superstitious residents often blamed everything from rampant disease to misunderstood psychological suffering on said supernatural entities.

In many cases, some as far back as the 18th century, those struck with these scarlet letters were actually just suffering from tuberculosis.