Mostly. . . only science fiction, really -- and maybe a lil' horror thrown in for good measure. Do read on, though -- just the same:
. . .If reports from the time are to be believed, 17th-century Poland was awash in revenants — not vampires, exactly, but proto-zombies who harassed the living by drinking their blood or, less disagreeably, stirring up a ruckus in their homes. In one account, from 1674, a dead man rose from his tomb to assault his relatives; when his grave was opened, the corpse was unnaturally preserved and bore traces of fresh blood.
Such reports were common enough that a wide range of remedies were employed to keep corpses from reanimating: cutting out their hearts, nailing them into their graves, hammering stakes through their legs, jamming their jaws open with bricks (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 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. . . .
“To our knowledge, this is the only example of such a child burial in Europe.” The remains of three other children were found in a pit near the child’s grave. In the pit was a fragment of a jaw with a green stain, which Dr. Poliński speculated was left by a copper coin placed in the mouth, an ancient and common burial practice. . . .
The book is one given to me by my mother some years ago. . . and it is a very worthy, if chilling, bedtime read -- all these years on. [And, in more trivia -- over the long weekend, this site passed 10 million discrete viewers. . . life to date. Hilarious. There will never be ads here -- or any monetization effort, ever. I write it because. . . I like to do so. Eclectic? Yes, guilty as charged.]
Smiling. . . ever smiling -- tomorrow early, a decade on. A "historian", indeed. Out.
नमस्ते
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