Archeologists in Poland have uncovered the remains of a 17th-century child padlocked to his grave to stop him rising from the dead, a discovery that turns the spotlight on beliefs in vampires as Halloween approaches.
The bones of the six or seven-year-old are the most recent find in a cemetery in the northern village of Pien dating from an era that viewed ghosts, zombies and other supernatural apparitions as more than merely fancy dress options.
“This is a cemetery for rejected people, who were certainly feared after death, and perhaps also during life ... who were suspected of having contacts with unclean forces, people who also behaved differently in some way,” said Dariusz Polinski, a researcher on medieval burials at Nicolas Copernicus University in the city of Torun.
Photo: Reuters
The child was buried facedown with a triangular iron padlock under its foot, in a probable effort to keep it from sitting up and leaving the grave to feast on the living, he added.
“These are people who, if it was done intentionally, were afraid of ... contact with these people because they might bite, drink blood,” Polinski said.
The child’s grave was desecrated at some point after burial and all bones removed apart from those in the legs.
Archeologists have found other methods used to stop the living dead.
“There were also a large number of graves with stones ... which were also supposed to protect against the deceased, placed in various places, for example on the elbow, on the larynx or on the neck,” he said.
Chinese authorities said they began live-fire exercises in the Gulf of Tonkin on Monday, only days after Vietnam announced a new line marking what it considers its territory in the body of water between the nations. The Chinese Maritime Safety Administration said the exercises would be focused on the Beibu Gulf area, closer to the Chinese side of the Gulf of Tonkin, and would run until tomorrow evening. It gave no further details, but the drills follow an announcement last week by Vietnam establishing a baseline used to calculate the width of its territorial waters in the Gulf of Tonkin. State-run Vietnam News
‘UNUSUAL EVENT’: The Australian defense minister said that the Chinese navy task group was entitled to be where it was, but Australia would be watching it closely The Australian and New Zealand militaries were monitoring three Chinese warships moving unusually far south along Australia’s east coast on an unknown mission, officials said yesterday. The Australian government a week ago said that the warships had traveled through Southeast Asia and the Coral Sea, and were approaching northeast Australia. Australian Minister for Defence Richard Marles yesterday said that the Chinese ships — the Hengyang naval frigate, the Zunyi cruiser and the Weishanhu replenishment vessel — were “off the east coast of Australia.” Defense officials did not respond to a request for comment on a Financial Times report that the task group from
Four decades after they were forced apart, US-raised Adamary Garcia and her birth mother on Saturday fell into each other’s arms at the airport in Santiago, Chile. Without speaking, they embraced tearfully: A rare reunification for one the thousands of Chileans taken from their mothers as babies and given up for adoption abroad. “The worst is over,” Edita Bizama, 64, said as she beheld her daughter for the first time since her birth 41 years ago. Garcia had flown to Santiago with four other women born in Chile and adopted in the US. Reports have estimated there were 20,000 such cases from 1950 to
DEFENSE UPHEAVAL: Trump was also to remove the first woman to lead a military service, as well as the judge advocates general for the army, navy and air force US President Donald Trump on Friday fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force General C.Q. Brown, and pushed out five other admirals and generals in an unprecedented shake-up of US military leadership. Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social that he would nominate former lieutenant general Dan “Razin” Caine to succeed Brown, breaking with tradition by pulling someone out of retirement for the first time to become the top military officer. The president would also replace the head of the US Navy, a position held by Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to lead a military service,
RSS