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The Upiory & Strzygi Burying Ground | Poland’s “Vampire” Grave at Pień Cemetery · The Grim: Haunted Cemeteries & Graveyard Tales

0:13
Kristin: Grim morning and welcome to the Grim.
0:16
Kristin: I'm your host, Kristen.
0:18
Kristin: On today's episode, we'll be opening the gate and entering Pien Cemetery, located in Pien, Poland.
0:24
Kristin: The aroma of coffee mingles in the air.
0:27
Kristin: The gates stand open.
0:29
Kristin: So grab your favorite mug and cozy up.
0:31
Kristin: It's time to descend into the hauntings of history.
0:34
Kristin: One of history's most timeless hauntings is the vampire.
0:38
Kristin: Tales of the restless dead stretch back hundreds of years, and many trace their roots to Europe, to the Slavic lands in the east.
0:46
Kristin: In northern Poland, one graveyard tells that tale, not in ink but in iron.
0:51
Kristin: It's the burial ground for outcasts and suspected undead, and it's been waiting in the earth for some 400 years.
0:58
Kristin: In 2022, archaeologists brushed the soil away from a skeleton of a young woman.
1:04
Kristin: Across her throat lay an iron sickle, its blade turned toward her neck, and around the big toe of her left foot an iron padlock.
1:11
Kristin: The researchers gave her a name.
1:12
Kristin: They called her Zosha, and the more they learned about Zosia, the stranger her grave became.
1:18
Kristin: Pan is a small village in northern Poland.
1:20
Kristin: You won't find its old cemetery, though, marked on any map.
1:24
Kristin: For centuries the dead here were simply forgotten, left beneath the fields with no stone, no name, and no one to tend to them.
1:32
Kristin: That silence began to break when a team from Nicholas Copernicus University in Torin started digging.
1:38
Kristin: The excavations were led by archaeologist Professor Darius Polinsky, and what his team has found is not an ordinary village burial ground.
1:46
Kristin: One in her one graves have so far been identified, all dating to the 17th century.
1:51
Kristin: That alone would make PN worth studying.
1:53
Kristin: But it's what lies inside those graves that sets this place apart.
1:57
Kristin: At least a dozen of their burials are what archaeologists call atypical, bodies laid face down, bodies pinned beneath heavy stones, iron tools placed where they could do harm.
2:08
Kristin: That's far more than researchers usually find at sites like this one.
2:12
Kristin: It's led to seem to believe that Pien would be the largest burial ground in Poland for people their own communities rejected.
2:19
Kristin: The researchers suspect that the cemetery sat on unconsecrated ground, away from any church or chapel, a place set apart for the poor, the disgraced, and the feared, for the people no one wanted lying beside their own families.
2:32
Kristin: For generations, the people of Pien had kept their distance from a particular hill in their village.
2:37
Kristin: In 2022, a team led by Dario Spolinsky and Magdalena Zagrotska began to understand why.
2:44
Kristin: The excavations here weren't new.
2:46
Kristin: The team first began digging in Pien back in 2005.
2:50
Kristin: Over the years, they pieced together a picture of burial grounds used for about four generations during the 17th century.
2:56
Kristin: And it's a burial ground defined as much by what's missing as by what was found.
3:01
Kristin: There are no gravestones here, no markers of any kind.
3:05
Kristin: The deno Pian were placed in the earth and left unnamed.
3:08
Kristin: Even more telling, the graves are almost entirely without any devotional objects.
3:13
Kristin: No crosses, no religious medals, the kind of items that typically accompany Catholic burials of the period simply aren't here.
3:20
Kristin: The absence led researchers to a conclusion this was most likely a Protestant cemetery.
3:25
Kristin: The people buried within are probably mostly Lutherans, and perhaps some Mennonites living alongside their Catholic Polish neighbors.
3:32
Kristin: But then there's the question of where they were buried.
3:35
Kristin: The cemetery sits away from the village, on a slope beside a crossroads, far from any church or chapel.
3:41
Kristin: Even in the 17th century, the dead were expected to rest within church grounds.
3:46
Kristin: There's no record showing that anyone ever approved burials outside of them here.
3:51
Kristin: Professor Polinski notes that graves like these ones in Pian do turn up elsewhere in Poland, but usually they appear alone, a single unusual burial in an otherwise ordinary cemetery.
4:02
Kristin: What makes Pian different is how many there are gathered together in one place.
4:07
Kristin: Now a word on language.
4:09
Kristin: When we say vampire, we bring a log of baggage with us capes, castles, and fangs, and none of that belongs here.
4:15
Kristin: The word vampire wasn't widely used in this time and place.
4:18
Kristin: Archaeologists prefer the terms anti-vampiric and anti-demonic burial.
4:23
Kristin: Slavic folklore has its own names for the restless dead, the opior, a cursed spirit, something like the forerunner of a vampire, and the striga, a witch-like demon.
4:33
Kristin: Scholars believe graves like these were a catch-all protection, meant to guard against any of them.
4:38
Kristin: These are graves where the living took precautions against the dead, where a community that feared that someone, once buried, might not stay that way.
4:46
Kristin: And of all the graves in Pien, none speaks to that fear more loudly than Grave 75.
4:51
Kristin: Zosha was laid to rest sometime in the middle of the 17th century.
4:55
Kristin: Radiocarbon dating places her death most likely between 1620 and 1674.
5:00
Kristin: When she was first buried, someone fashioned a triangular iron padlock to the big toe of her left foot.
5:06
Kristin: Padlock is a strange thing to bury with the dead, and it didn't always mean the same thing.
5:11
Kristin: Professor Bolinski describes several possibilities.
5:14
Kristin: A lock in a grave could mark the end of an earthly life, the moment of crossing into the world of the dead.
5:19
Kristin: It could seal off contact between the living and the departed, could break a run of bad luck.
5:25
Kristin: It could protect a community from a corpse that might come back.
5:28
Kristin: Some even believed it could stop an epidemic from spreading.
5:32
Kristin: Whatever it meant to the people standing over Zosha's grave, its purpose was simple.
5:36
Kristin: It was there to hold her.
5:38
Kristin: But for someone it wasn't enough.
5:40
Kristin: When the researchers studied the layers of soil in Grave 75, they found something unsettling.
5:46
Kristin: Grave had been opened again after burial.
5:49
Kristin: Someone had come back, dug down Zosha's body, and added a second safeguard.
5:54
Kristin: An iron sickle laid across her throat with a blade facing her neck.
5:58
Kristin: The purpose of the sickle was brutally simple.
6:00
Kristin: If Zosha tried to rise from the grave, the blade was positioned to cut her throat or take her head.
6:05
Kristin: She wouldn't make it back to the world of the living.
6:08
Kristin: And then there is a detail that lingers.
6:10
Kristin: The joints of her skeleton were not displaced.
6:13
Kristin: If the grave had been disturbed after her body decayed to the bone, archaeologists would expect the skeleton to shift, but it didn't.
6:21
Kristin: And that'sn't just the sickle was placed while her body still held soft tissue.
6:25
Kristin: Not years later, perhaps not long after she was buried at all.
6:29
Kristin: Someone returned to a fresh grave, looked down at this young woman, and decided a padlock alone couldn't keep her here.
6:35
Kristin: Professor Polinsky said it was unusual to find two precautions in one grave.
6:40
Kristin: Two separate efforts to keep a body in the ground means the fear for coming back was greater.
6:44
Kristin: In his words, it showed the immense fear of Zosha.
6:47
Kristin: The newest research, though, suggests that there may have been a third safeguard.
6:51
Kristin: Within Sosha's mouth, researchers found a distinct green staining.
6:54
Kristin: It points to an object with a high copper content placed within.
6:58
Kristin: The stain was too extensive, they say, to be explained by a simple coin.
7:02
Kristin: What that object was, and what it was meant to do remains unknown.
7:06
Kristin: A lock at her foot, a blade at her throat, and copper in her mouth.
7:10
Kristin: Whoever buried Sosha wasn't taking chances.
7:13
Kristin: So who was she?
7:14
Kristin: To answer that, Professor Polinski and his colleagues turned to the tools of modern science: radiocarbon dating, DNA sequencing, isotope analysis, x-ray, and microscopic imaging.
7:25
Kristin: Their findings were published in 2026 and the Journal of Archaeological Science reports.
7:31
Kristin: What they found begins with her age.
7:33
Kristin: Zosha was between 17 and 19 years old when she died, barely more than a girl.
7:38
Kristin: And then there's the question of her place in the world.
7:40
Kristin: And this is where Grave 75 stops making sense.
7:44
Kristin: Near her skull, the team found traces of silk.
7:46
Kristin: Woven into the silk were threads of gold and silver.
7:49
Kristin: They appeared to come from a cap, the kind of luxurious headwear associated with nobility or wealth.
7:55
Kristin: Based on how rare such accessories were, the researchers believe Zosha came from an elite background, perhaps even a noble family.
8:03
Kristin: Sit with that a moment.
8:04
Kristin: A young woman of means, wearing silk and gold, buried in the cemetery for the poor and shunned, pained in place with iron, her grave reopened so she could be secured a second time.
8:15
Kristin: What would make a community fear someone like that?
8:18
Kristin: The researchers look for clues in her body, her microchondrial DNA, which traces the maternal line, hinted that some of her female ancestors, perhaps her mother, grandmother, or great-grandmother, may have had roots linked to Scandinavian populations.
8:33
Kristin: The researchers are careful here.
8:35
Kristin: The evidence is not definitive, and they were not able to recover her nuclear DNA, which would have told them far more.
8:42
Kristin: They also studied isotopes of oxygen and stronium in her remains, chemical signatures in where a person lived.
8:49
Kristin: Even so, it remains an open question whether Zosia grew up in the region or arrived there as a teenager.
8:55
Kristin: Was she an outsider, a newcomer in a village that didn't trust newcomers?
9:00
Kristin: For now, no one can say.
9:02
Kristin: The team also considered whether hers might have been a Jewish burial, since padlocks had turned up in Jewish cemeteries in Poland.
9:09
Kristin: But nothing about the site pointed that way, and researchers don't believe that explains her grave.
9:15
Kristin: What about illness?
9:16
Kristin: Professor Balinski believes Zosha may have been sick, or may have lived with a physical or mental disability, something that set her apart, something that led her neighbors to treat her badly in life, and to fear she would haunt them in death.
9:30
Kristin: An earlier examination has suggested she may have had a mengioma, a tumor in her breastbone, one that would have caused pain and visible deformity in her chest, but the newest study found no skeletal evidence of trauma, violence, or disease that would explain her treatment, and it found no evidence that such a condition killed her.
9:49
Kristin: How she died still remains a mystery, but in 2024, Zosha was given back a face.
9:55
Kristin: Swedish sculptor and artist Oscar Nielsen created a 3D reconstruction from measurements of her skull, included from her skeleton about her age, weight, and health.
10:04
Kristin: The young woman who looked back from that reconstruction has blue eyes, light brown hair, and a broad nose.
10:10
Kristin: Nielsen noted the irony himself.
10:13
Kristin: The people who buried Zosha did everything in their power to keep her from returning.
10:17
Kristin: Four centuries later, his work was an effort to bring her back, not as a monster, but as a person.
10:23
Kristin: Zosha, though, doesn't lie alone in PN, and her neighbors carry their own stories of fear.
10:28
Kristin: In 2023, the team returned to the ground around Zosha's grave.
10:32
Kristin: They wanted to know whether she was alone or whether there were others like her.
10:37
Kristin: On that very first day, a triangular padlock surfaced in the topsoil.
10:41
Kristin: Over the next days that followed, the grave beneath it came into view.
10:45
Kristin: It belonged to a child, somewhere between five and seven years old, buried just a meter and a half from Zosha, lay face down into the earth.
10:54
Kristin: Whether this child was a boy or girl remains uncertain.
10:57
Kristin: Some reports describe a boy, while others say the child's sex is unknown.
11:02
Kristin: Burying the dead face down has a purpose.
11:04
Kristin: If the dead woke, the belief was they would most likely bite into the soil instead of the living.
11:10
Kristin: And beneath the child's foot lay that padlock, almost identical to the one fashioned on Zosha's toe, but only the lower half of the child remains.
11:18
Kristin: At some point after the burial, someone dug into the grave and took the rest of the body away.
11:24
Kristin: Only the legs were left behind.
11:26
Kristin: Professor Balinsky says the padlock shows that people were afraid of this child after its death.
11:31
Kristin: Of all the graves in PN, this child is the only one buried in this way.
11:35
Kristin: Nearby the team found a pit holding the remains of three more children, a fragment of one child's job or a green stain, much like the staining found in Zosha's mouth.
11:45
Kristin: Whether these children were connected to the child in the padlocked grave or to each other is still unknown.
11:50
Kristin: There is also a third padlock.
11:52
Kristin: It was found in the cemetery only with scattered bones nearby.
11:56
Kristin: The person once held now impossible to identify.
11:59
Kristin: In 2025, the team uncovered another burial, probably that of a boy.
12:04
Kristin: They named him Vladimir.
12:05
Kristin: Stones had been placed on his collarbones and near his heart.
12:08
Kristin: Then near the edge of the cemetery lay a woman, somewhere between 30 and 50 years old.
12:14
Kristin: A stone had been set on her left hand, and smaller stones lined the left side of her body.
12:19
Kristin: Her bones show she had tertiary syphilis, the disease in its most advanced stage in her lifetime, an illness like that would have likely brought fear and isolation.
12:29
Kristin: Then there's the record of an older woman, believed to be around 60.
12:33
Kristin: Fieldstones had been pressed around her skull, likely to keep her from rising.
12:38
Kristin: On the inside of that skull, researchers found the trace of an aneurysm, a condition like that can cause severe pain, seizures, or sudden changes in behavior.
12:46
Kristin: To her neighbors, it may have looked like something far darker than illness.
12:50
Kristin: Then there's a young man buried with a child about two.
12:53
Kristin: The little one was laid across his lower legs, arms outstretched, with stones placed among them.
12:59
Kristin: Archaeologists say it's rare to find a man buried with a child that young at all.
13:03
Kristin: Whoever they were to each other, we don't know.
13:06
Kristin: There's also a woman between 20 and 30 buried while pregnant.
13:09
Kristin: Her baby's remains, around 24 to 25 weeks along, survived with her.
13:14
Kristin: Bones at Delicate rarely last 400 years in the soil, and in the most recent season of excavation, the team found four more graves.
13:22
Kristin: Among them were fetuses, newborns and teenagers around 12 to 15 years old.
13:27
Kristin: Look closely at that list and the pattern begins to emerge.
13:31
Kristin: Illness, unusual symptoms, bodies and minds that didn't behave the way people expected.
13:36
Kristin: In a world without medical knowledge to explain them.
13:39
Kristin: These were the people who became feared.
13:41
Kristin: Researchers have described the methods communities used against the dead they feared.
13:46
Kristin: Cycles around the neck, bodies crushed beneath stones, padlocks, burial face down so that if the dead woke, they would dig deeper into the earth instead of climbing out.
13:56
Kristin: Sometimes a grave was dug up again just to check whether the body had decayed.
14:01
Kristin: It was believed the dead could infect the living, so several graves in one cemetery might be open.
14:06
Kristin: In other religions, people tucked prayers into graves, placed coins into the mouths of the dead, or even removed the head and set it between the legs.
14:14
Kristin: They also note customs like these carried on in some parts of Poland even into the 20th century.
14:20
Kristin: To understand why, you have to understand the world these people lived in.
14:24
Kristin: The 17th century was a turbulent time.
14:27
Kristin: War, famine, disease.
14:29
Kristin: Death could arrive suddenly and without explanation, and medicine had few answers to offer.
14:34
Kristin: When misfortune struck a village, people looked for a cause, and sometimes they found one in the supernatural.
14:41
Kristin: It was also the era of the Little Ice Age.
14:43
Kristin: Older temperatures across Europe meant failed crops and hungry winters.
14:47
Kristin: Professor Polinsky ties that fierce scene in Pien to all of war, hunger, epidemic disease, and the cold.
14:54
Kristin: In postmedieval Poland, the restless dead, though, weren't thought of as elegant creatures of the night.
14:59
Kristin: Undead evil was believed to be the bold of the unfortunate, those who died young in an epidemic, those who died by suicide, and those who died before they could be baptized.
15:10
Kristin: Without an understanding of disease, communities searched for someone to blame and turned to rituals they believed would keep the living safe.
15:17
Kristin: The researchers behind the newest study suggest Zosia may have been blamed by the people around her for misfortunes like disease and famine.
15:24
Kristin: If the village believed one of its dead was the source of its suffering, then the solution was clear.
15:29
Kristin: Keep her in the ground by any means necessary.
15:32
Kristin: But researchers have offered a quieter possibility.
15:35
Kristin: They compared Pianne to the witch trials of the 17th-century Salem, Massachusetts.
15:40
Kristin: Villagers may have not needed much to brand someone as supernatural threat.
15:44
Kristin: Sometimes a grudge was enough, sometimes a scapegoat.
15:48
Kristin: It might have been even something very simple, like an argument between neighbors.
15:52
Kristin: The dig of Pian, though, isn't finished.
15:55
Kristin: The team plans to study many more of the burials, and researchers have said further DNA work may bring them closer to learning what killed Zosha, why she was so feared so deeply may take far longer to uncover, or perhaps we will never know.
16:10
Kristin: But here is what we do know.
16:12
Kristin: Four hundred years ago, a young woman died before she reached twenty.
16:16
Kristin: She wore silk and gold and she may have been sick.
16:19
Kristin: She may have been different.
16:20
Kristin: She may have come from somewhere else.
16:23
Kristin: The people around her were so afraid of her that they locked her into the earth and then came back to make sure she stayed there.
16:30
Kristin: They didn't mark her grave and they didn't want her remembered.
16:34
Kristin: They wanted to make her a prisoner, and yet here she is, her bones studied with care, her face rebuilt, a name given back to her.
16:43
Kristin: The people who buried Zosia were afraid she would rise.
16:46
Kristin: In a way she has, not as the monster they feared, but as the girl they bury.
16:51
Kristin: For now, the stories of Pien slip back into the soil, and the dead return to their uneasy rest.
16:57
Kristin: Thank you for walking with us through the veil into Pian Cemetery, descending once more into the hauntings of history.
17:04
Kristin: The gate is sealed, the veil drawn, yet death keeps no calendar, and so we shall return, as we always do, on the grim.