Nỗi kinh hãi dai dẳng: Xác chết 400 tuổi bị nhốt trong mộ

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If reports from the time are to be believed, 17th-century Poland was awash in revenants (ma hiện về) — not vampires (ma cà rồng), exactly, but proto-zombies who harassed the living by drinking their blood or, less disagreeably, stirring up a ruckus (khuấy động gây náo loạn) in their homes. In one account, from 1674, a dead man rose from his tomb (ngôi mộ) to assault (hành hung) his relatives; when his grave was opened, the corpse (xác chết) was unnaturally preserved and bore traces of fresh blood.

Such reports were common enough that a wide range of remedies was employed to keep corpses from reanimating: cutting out their hearts, nailing them into their graves (đóng đinh vào mộ), hammering stakes through their legs (đóng cọc vào chân), jamming their jaws open with bricks (dùng gạch giữ hàm của họ mở) (to prevent them from gnawing their way out). In 1746, a Benedictine monk named Antoine Augustin Calmet published a popular treatise that sought, among other things, to distinguish real revenants from frauds.

Four centuries later, archaeologists (nhà khảo cổ học) in Europe have discovered the first physical evidence of a suspected child revenant. While excavating an unmarked mass cemetery at the edge of the village of Pień, near the Polish city of Bydgoszcz, researchers from Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń unearthed the remains of what has been widely described in news reports as a “vampire child.” The corpse, thought to have been about 6 at the time of death, was buried face down, with a triangular iron padlock under its left foot, in a likely effort to bind the child to the grave and keep it from haunting its family and neighbors.