A female 'vampire' who was padlocked and tied down was found in a 17th-century graveyard

Be careful, you're about to get scared.

Archaeologists have found the bones of a "female vampire" in a graveyard in Pie, Poland, that dates back to the 17th century.

Professor Dariusz Poliski and a group of researchers from Nicolaus Copernicus University were doing the dig when they found the bones of a woman who had been pinned to the ground with a sickle across her throat.

In the 1600s, superstitious Poles often used the popular farming tool to try to stop a dead person they thought was a vampire from coming back from the dead.

Poliski told the Daily Mail, "The sickle was not laid flat, but was put on the neck in a way that if the dead person had tried to get up, the head would have been cut off or hurt."

The professor also noticed that the dead woman had a padlock around her toe. This added to the idea that she was thought to be a vampire when she died.

Poliski said that the lock would have been used during the burial process to show "that it was impossible to go back."

The researchers didn't say how old they thought the dead person was, but they did say that a silk cap found on her head shows that she had a high social status.

Smithsonian magazine says that people in Eastern Europe first started to be afraid of vampires in the 11th century. They thought that "some dead people would claw their way out of the grave as blood-sucking monsters that scared the living."

Science Alert said that by the 17th century, people in Poland were burying their dead in strange ways because there were rumors of a vampire outbreak.

There is still no agreement among scholars about how people came to be called "vampires," but Poliski says that they were often killed violently in different parts of the continent.

Even after they were killed, their bodies were cut up more to make sure they wouldn't come back to cause trouble for the villagers.

Poliski said, "Other ways to keep the dead from coming back are to cut off their heads or legs, put them face down so they can bite into the ground, burn them, or smash them with a stone."

The "female vampire" was found in Pie, which is in the south of the country. This was seven years after the bodies of five other people who were thought to be vampires were found 130 miles away in Drawsko.

All five of the people who were found there had a sickle across their throats.

The Post reported in 2013 that archaeologists had found a "vampire gravesite" outside of the town of Gliwice. There, they found several skeletons with their heads cut off and placed next to their legs.

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