The child was buried face down, so that if it awoke it would bite the earth below rather than the people above. Its foot was held in a padlock so that it would struggle to pull itself from the grave.
Even this, it seems, was not enough for the locals. After burying the child, the top half of its body was stolen and presumably destroyed.
Here, in a dig from a 17th-century Polish cemetery, archaeologists believe they have found the first evidence for a child “revenant”; a corpse feared by locals to be at risk of reanimation.
At the time, those living around the grave site knew well the dangers of the undead. “In Hungary, Moravia, Silesia, and Poland they see, it is said, men
