♪♪ -Hidden away in rural Poland, archaeologists have made a shocking discovery.

-The burial is so spectacular that it looks like nothing I've ever seen before.

-A grave unlike any other.

-We're going into a world which is not safe.

♪♪ -A woman buried as a vampire.

♪♪ An international team has spent two years using cutting-edge science... -We never did it before, this kind of experiment.

-...and historical research to find out who this woman was... -It's likely the person suffered.

-...and why she was so feared, even in death.

-She had headaches, she would faint.

She was strange.

-They delve into the murky world of vampirism from centuries past.

-We are essentially talking about a court procedure against a corpse.

-And, incredibly, they discover this woman was not alone.

-This place is written out of the history.

It is for people that are abandoned.

-This is an epidemic of fear.

-Until they come face to face with the woman so feared, locals made sure she could never rise again.

-Yes.

-[ Chuckles ] [ Crow squawks ] -What secrets lie in this... ♪♪ ♪♪ -I have to admit, this is intriguing, to say the least.

I've been waiting for this journey something like one and a half year.

♪♪ -Oscar Nilsson is one of the world's most renowned forensic facial reconstructors.

He's worked alongside Swedish police forces for decades.

Now he's come to Poland to visit a very different kind of crime scene and to reconstruct the face of a woman 350 years old.

-I will try to get as much forensic evidence as possible collected at this journey to get started with, with reconstructing her face.

We are lucky that human skeletons leave traces for us to -- to read almost like a book of the life that that person has lived.

-But this woman, and the condition of her grave when archaeologists found it, are unlike anything he has ever encountered before.

-When I first heard about this woman being buried as a vampire... ♪♪ ...I thought perhaps it was a bit exaggerated, but then I saw the photos, and I -- [ Chuckles ] It's shocking to see the sickle over the -- her neck.

That is, err, unsettling to -- to watch, and it's certainly affected me emotionally.

-Oscar is heading nearly 200 hundred miles northwest of the Polish capital, Warsaw, to the tiny village of Pien.

♪♪ Hidden away from the main roads, even today, it's not an easy place to find.

♪♪ For generations, the villagers of Pien have avoided this hill.

It's never been built on, and children are taught to avoid it.

♪♪ In 2022, a team of archaeologists, led by Dariusz Polinski and Magdalena Zagrodzka, heard strange stories about skulls washing down a hillside.

And they made a shocking discovery -- a burial unlike any they had ever seen before.

-The first thing that we found was something with the sound of iron or metal.

After delicately brushing it, it turned out to be convex and, after a while, we knew it was a sickle.

-The sickle was deliberately placed across the neck of the deceased, seemingly to restrain the dead woman.

But that's not all they found, as translator Marcin reveals.

-They found another metal object, which was surprising because they already found the sickle.

♪♪ -A chunk of rusted metal was found attached to the woman's toe.

Investigations revealed that it was a padlock.

But not just any padlock.

This triangular shape is incredibly rare.

Before this excavation, only one had been found in the whole of Poland.

Unusually, the padlock was found open.

Together, the padlock and sickle make this burial unique in Poland, if not the world.

This extraordinary discovery has also caught the attention of historian Dan Jones.

He has long been fascinated by Eastern-Central European ritualism.

-I have to admit, when I first saw the pictures, I was incredibly excited.

I've never seen anything like this before.

Is this a crime scene?

Is this evidence of the supernatural?

Is this evidence of a unique craze?

Or are we, in fact, stepping back into an entirely different world in which Europe was governed by totally different rules?

-Carbon dating reveals this woman was buried in the 17th century, at a time when the people of Poland were fighting for their very survival.

-There was the Thirty Years' War, which occupies a lot of Central Europe, hundreds of thousands of deaths, and all set against a period of climate change, in which temperatures dropped, harvests failed, disease rose.

For ordinary people, they were really living on the edge.

-Oscar's first priority is to determine whether he's looking at a crime scene.

-It must have been a -- almost a shock to find it, with a sickle and everything.

Was there anything unusual with the body when you found it?

-What's interesting, she was turned a bit, so the head was, otherwise, but northwest, so the legs were, like -- is south a bit, which was not very typical.

-The twisted spine, alongside telltale marks in the soil, suggest this body did not rest in peace.

-The soil's been disturbed.

So it appears that this woman has been, in effect, buried twice.

The first burial seems to have been with a padlock attached to her toe.

There seems to have been an attempt at a second burial, in which the grave has been disturbed, at least partially opened, and there's been an attempt to turn her over.

Presumably it was an absolutely repugnant task.

So she's been left lying on her back, and a blade has been placed over her throat.

-When Dariusz turned his attention to the woman's skull, something caught his eye.

-Something began to flash near the skull because it was such a sunny day.

It was clear it was something precious.

-Dariusz suspected this was some kind of skull adornment, but it was too fragile to examine onsite.

Rather than risk damaging the precious find, the team cut the skull out of the earth, whole, and took it back to their lab to test it.

The discovery of the sickle and padlock, together with the skull adornment, led Dariusz and the team to believe the burial had ritualistic connotations.

-She was a person who was not necessarily feared in life, but because of certain beliefs and superstitions, I think that maybe, after death, she might have been a problem.

-There were many local beliefs of different types of demons, different reasons why they could come back, so that's why there were these types of protection.

-The padlock in particular is a vital clue to understanding what kind of demon the locals feared this woman was.

-Originally, the burial contained this padlock, which was hung on the big toe of the left foot.

-In Polish folklore, people who were feared were thought to have two souls.

-The bad soul can go about causing mischief and destruction and visiting terror on individuals.

-People believed padlocks would keep the good soul locked in the body and stop the bad one from acting out.

If the bad soul was ever allowed to take over the body, it could become the most feared of all supernatural beings -- a vampire.

The belief was so entrenched, historical records reveal that graves were regularly reopened to check on the deceased.

-It's hard to say what they wanted to do.

Maybe they wanted to remove her remains from the grave.

Perhaps they wanted to turn her to face the ground.

-Dariusz suspects that when the woman's grave was reopened, they found this padlock open, leading to fears that someone -- or something -- was trying to break out.

-Imagine opening that grave and finding that the restraint, the shackle, the padlock that had been attached to her with the intention of stopping her from rising up, had been opened.

That would've been a heart-stopping moment, utterly chilling, because this meant, that all your fears were probably true.

-This serrated blade would behead the woman if she ever tried to escape.

-As an insurance, this blade has been placed over her neck so that even if they can't turn her over, facedown, which would have been part of the culture of preventing her from rising, they can at least mean that when she tries to do it, she'll chop her own head off.

-The evidence paints a shocking image of locals so terrified of a dead woman, they had gone to extreme lengths to prevent her from rising from the grave.

But most incredibly, this woman was not alone on the hillside.

Her grave, numbered 75, was just one of around a hundred the team unearthed.

Around a third were designated "deviant burials," buried in strange ways or with objects intended to keep them in the grave.

Chillingly, numerous children were uncovered, including one between 5 and 7 years old, found with the majority of its body missing.

♪♪ Nearby, a man was found with a child at his feet, laid out in the shape of a crucifix.

♪♪ Others were weighed down by rocks to prevent them from rising again.

♪♪ There was a pregnant woman.

The grave next to hers was mysteriously empty.

Taken together, these bizarre burials, with their anti-vampiric talismans, raised a frightening question -- had the archaeologists discovered not one but a whole field of vampires?

♪♪ -This is not just an isolated fear of one person, this is a real craze.

This is an epidemic of fear.

The big question for me is, what is going on in this area that has driven people to such levels of fear?

♪♪ ♪♪ Something is really going on there because the number of things they have buried her together with, it tells a story that the people burying her must have been absolutely terrified about her.

♪♪ I think the key could be to understand this specific woman in grave number 75, to start with.

♪♪ ♪♪ -The next stage in Oscar's investigation takes him to the ancient city of Torun, 26 miles from Pien and its mysterious field of vampires.

It's here, at the Mikolaja Kopernika University, that he comes face to face with the woman buried as a vampire.

♪♪ He's meeting anthropologist Alicja Drozd-Lipinska, who's reassembled the 206 bones in the woman's body.

♪♪ And she's noticed something unusual about the spine.

♪♪ -This is, err, cervical vertebrae, and we have this part of bone.

-Mm.

-It's the sign of Kimmerle anomaly.

-A Kimmerle anomaly is a bony ridge on a cervical vertebra that occurs in 3% to 15% of the population.

It can lead to headaches, neck pain, and even strokes.

This woman would have suffered.

-She had headaches, she would faint.

-Mm, yeah.

-So, she was strange... -Mm, mm, yeah.

-...for people.

-Yeah.

What you tell me about the deceased, that she faints, things like that, it gives so much to the whole image of this woman and our understanding why she was treated the way she was.

-The bones reveal that the woman was only around 18 years old when she died in the mid-17th century.

-Would you be able to tell how she died?

Is there any clue to her cause of death?

-No, I have no idea why she died.

-But she was sick?

-She was sick.

-Poor woman.

-Tak.

-Mm, or child, almost.

-Yeah.

-It's not known how people reacted to this woman when she was alive, but after she died, their treatment of her corpse was cruel.

-I feel actually quite sad when I see it, for real, both when I hear of the -- about her diseases, but also when you -- when I actually see the sickle and the padlock, and the size of them, it's quite brutal.

So, all in all, it's such a sad story.

It's emotional, yeah.

I feel very sad for her.

And she -- I think, she deserves something better.

♪♪ -The skull is the focus of Oscar's attention.

He will use it, he hopes, to re-create the woman's face.

-I think she's got a rather nice face, actually, if I, at this point, could have a guess, but we'll see.

The muscle attachments, they are so tiny, they are hardly visible.

I think her muscles were not that well developed.

I think she's got a rather broad nose, I would say.

Her mouth is probably not dominating, but certainly a feature that will take its place in the face as a whole.

I can see the details, in a way, but even the final result will be a bit of a surprise to me.

♪♪ ♪♪ -For archaeologist Dariusz Polinski, finding a potential field of vampires in Pien is a dream come true.

-It seems to me that people like to be afraid.

♪♪ -Dariusz has been fascinated by vampires since he first watched a Dracula film as a child.

Since then, he's amassed a collection of vampire memorabilia.

But it's the original vampire movie, "Nosferatu," he loves most.

-This film makes a great impression on me.

I think this film is a work of art, when it comes to using moods and images.

♪♪ -Made in Germany in 1922, "Nosferatu" was an instant classic.

♪♪ Based on Bram Stoker's "Dracula," it tells the story of an aristocratic count who, in the dead of night, preys on women for the fresh blood he needs to stay alive.

But that's not how the people of Pien would have seen the woman in Grave 75, 350 years ago.

♪♪ These vampires, known by multiple names, were the undead -- a terrifying mix of ghost, witch, and zombie.

-The vampire combines a lot of very scary things to a 17th-century peasant.

This is demonic.

This is somebody who can cross that boundary between life and death, who can come back and visit almost unlimited terrors on you.

So, given that a vampire is really a reflection of fear, the more fear you have, the more fear the vampire reflects back on you, because the more power the vampire has.

-Today, the legend holds that vampires drink the blood of innocents, but in the 17th-century, the opposite was true.

-People who were suspected of being demons had their graves opened and body parts, or blood, taken from them.

People drank this blood in order to protect themselves, as drinking blood was believed to be a protection against vampires.

-At the time, people in Eastern-Central Europe were always on the lookout for signs of vampirism.

Anything unusual, any aberration or event outside the ordinary -- anything -- could be a sign of the undead.

-"The master is dead."

♪♪ -For the archaeologists, finding this strange burial in Grave 75 is just the first step.

-There is a whole range of forensic and scientific tests that you now need to do to really dig down to -- into the big questions -- Who was this?

Where did they come from?

What happened to them?

And, I mean hopefully, why?

-To begin their investigation, Dariusz and Magdalena are having the bones X-rayed.

Funds are tight, so they're having it done at the local veterinary clinic.

-Should we lay out the bones on their own or comparatively?

-Comparatively.

I think that'll be the best solution.

-Okay, we'll do it in pairs.

-Magdalena has given the woman in Grave 75 a name, to restore the dignity and humanity she was denied in death.

-So, now we'll enter the patient information.

What should we call her?

-Zosia.

-Okay, Zosia.

I'll now get ready to take the photo.

I'll put on my apron and ask you to leave the room for a moment.

-X-rays are a formidable weapon in an archaeologist's armory, revealing crucial insights into how someone might have lived and how they died.

Magdalena has spotted something unusual on Zosia's shin bone.

-Doctor, what are the visible lines there?

What are they?

-They're probably Harris lines.

They're more visible on the left bone, clearer, and more blurred on the right.

-The leg bones of a healthy person grow continuously through childhood.

These Harris lines indicate points where the growth paused and restarted.

-It may caused by the environment or perhaps some medical issues.

-They suggest Zosia went through periods of malnourishment, trauma, or disease during her childhood.

Historical records provide a possible explanation.

Zosia lived during a period known as the Little Ice Age.

-We see temperatures drop, we see harvests decline, we see disease, you see, possibly not coincidentally, an uptick in war and rebellion.

I mean, this is a time of real human suffering, it's a time where life gets very, very dicey for ordinary people.

-Zosia would have known periods of real hardship as a child, potentially affecting her physical development.

-In a time when people are looking for answers to confusing and confounding questions, such as, "Why is it suddenly colder?

Why is nothing growing?

", it's very natural to go looking for somebody to blame, for people to blame, and as we know, from the whole of human history, who do you look to when you're searching for scapegoats?

Outsiders.

-Can the bones reveal more about why Zosia was singled out by her community?

To answer that, they need cutting-edge forensic insight, which will take the investigation across the Atlantic.

♪♪ In order to look deep inside the bones, forensic anthropologist Heather Edgar has arranged for CT scans to be sent to the New Mexico Office of the Medical Investigator, where she works.

And she's seen something unusual in the woman's breastbone.

-If we look at the edges, right in the middle here, you can see some bone that looks empty.

It could be a cancer, it could be something like a haemangioma, which is a benign tumour, or it could be an aneurysmal bone cyst.

♪♪ -This wouldn't have killed the woman in Grave 75, but it wouldn't have been pleasant, either.

-All the reports that I've read of conditions that are like this describe a lot of pain.

So, yes, it's likely the person suffered.

♪♪ -This growth might also have fueled suspicion that Zosia was a vampire.

♪♪ -There's a variety of ways that something like this could present on the external surface.

One way it could present would be with a red mark.

It might actually have been very bright red.

Another way it could present would be with a very, very big swelling, imagine the size of a softball.

So if her chest could be seen, it is the center, where the heart is, and it couldn't be known that this wasn't coming directly from the heart, and I suspect that anything different would have marked this person in a negative way.

-In an age where any visible difference could put a target on a person's back, this was a dark mark against this woman.

The discovery is a real breakthrough in understanding more about why she may have been so feared and suffered such a strange burial.

♪♪ ♪♪ Back in Sweden, Oscar starts the process of reconstructing Zosia's face.

-This is the scientific part of the process where I try to be objective.

I really try to forget everything I know about the burial, about her fate.

-With information about Zosia's age, weight, and health, Oscar can consult standardized anatomical measurements of tissue depth.

These details will enable him to create an accurate model of Zosia's face.

-These measurements I then transfer to these plastic pegs and then glue them to the skull.

♪♪ -Oscar begins to rebuild the woman's facial muscles using clay.

It's a skill he's perfected over 30 years of forensic facial reconstruction.

-I'm used to reconstructing faces, but in this case, also, I'm looking forward to give her some -- [ Sighs ] -- human dignity back.

♪♪ -There's growing evidence the woman's physical appearance, potential malnourishment, striking facial features, and a large visible mark on her chest, may have played a major role in her ultimate degradation of being buried as a vampire.

♪♪ But as the team examines her skull, they find evidence that not everything in her life was miserable.

♪♪ These delicate strands of fabric potentially reveal a different side to Zosia's story.

♪♪ In Lodz, 125 miles south of Torun, Dariusz and Magdalena have asked textile expert Maria Cybulska to investigate.

♪♪ The fragile fibers are loaded into a special microscope, which uses electrons rather than light to produce super-magnified images.

♪♪ Maria and her colleague, Jacek Grabarczyk, zoom in to explore the tiny threads.

-You can see them clearly.

Here we have some... -Okay, we have some.

-...it measure the diameter of the single fiber, 8 micrometers.

-Mm-hmm.

-So it cannot be any fiber but silk.

It's just so fine.

-In 17th-century Poland, silk would have been an incredibly expensive fabric, a material that most locals could never afford.

And it isn't the only precious commodity found in Grave 75.

-But the most interesting for me are these metal thread.

What is chemical composition of this thread?

It's silver.

Actually, it's only silver.

It's pure silver.

-Yeah, it's clearly silver.

-Very high quality.

No copper, no other cheaper materials.

Very nice.

-Several of the silk fibers have been carefully wrapped in silver, to produce metallic thread.

But what Maria finds next is a real surprise.

-So we need to check in many places, because if -- if -- Oh, here we have something.

Okay.

Oh, yeah.

Oh, here you can see some gold.

It appears, like, that our strap was gilded.

-So, while she was condemned by her community as a vampire, this woman was also decorated in death with silk threads wrapped in silver and gold.

-If this was made of silk and gold and silver threads, it means it was quite luxurious product.

And it says something about status, social status of this girl.

She couldn't be poor, because poor people couldn't afford buying such expensive goods.

-It appears the woman, so badly treated after death, may have been wealthy in life.

But even wealth and status, it seemed, offered little protection against being labeled a vampire.

♪♪ ♪♪ High above the village of Cachtice, in what is now Slovakia, is Cachtice Castle.

♪♪ Just before the woman in Grave 75 was born, in the early 17th century, this castle was home to a woman later dubbed "Countess Dracula."

♪♪ Local historian Marian Imriska has lived in the castle's shadow his entire life.

He knows its dark past better than anyone.

-This is the home of Elizabeth Bathory, otherwise known as the blood countess.

-Stories of Bathory's alleged crimes have been passed down through generations.

-The legend is saying that Elizabeth tortured over 650 young girls, and she killed them.

And she was drinking the blood to gain the power of the young girls.

-But before any accusations were made, Elizabeth had been one of the most loved and respected members of the community.

-She was a really inspiring woman because she was really educated.

She was meeting with all kinds of people here on the castle, with teachers, with philosophs, or with alchemists.

So, for my opinion, she was a one of the most impressive women in the whole world.

-Things began to change after her husband, Count Ferenc Nadasdy, died in 1604.

Rumors soon began to spread about the widow Bathory, living alone in her castle.

-People started to tell stories about vampires and about that Elizabeth is actually a vampire, and she's leaving the castle to frighten the people from the village.

And the priests started to tell these crazy stories about Elizabeth.

-Encouraged by Bathory's enemies, it wasn't long before these horrific stories took on a life of their own.

According to some accounts, Countess Bathory even bathed in the blood of her young victims.

♪♪ Few people ever visit this place.

It's in these very tunnels that Elizabeth is said to have tortured and killed hundreds.

But can these lurid tales be trusted?

Behind much of the "evidence" was a man who had a lot to gain from denouncing the so-called "blood countess."

In 1610, King Matthias of Hungary ordered a secret investigation into the stories about Elizabeth.

He also happened to owe Bathory a huge amount of money.

-Investigators came to these tunnels and discovered all about torturing the girls.

The investigators were asking the servants what they did to the young girls.

-The servants were arrested, tortured, and then put on trial.

All were found guilty.

Three were burnt alive and another beheaded, then burnt.

Elizabeth Bathory was condemned to house arrest.

-She was imprisoned in the castle.

She could walk around the castle but never leave the castle at all.

♪♪ -The countess died in this room on August the 21st, 1614.

♪♪ But today, some historians have suggested that Elizabeth Bathory was less a vampire and more a victim of malicious gossip.

-Elizabeth was one of the most powerful women in that time, and, for sure, the people or the other counts were frightened of this power.

-She was female at a time of rampant misogyny.

She was intelligent, she was clever, and perhaps, most importantly of all, she had powerful enemies, including the King of Hungary, who owed her money.

And those things combined made her a very viable target for a political attack, which, in this case, was obviously accusations of the most scandalous and shocking and violent sort.

♪♪ -Once she was convicted of the crimes, King Matthias's debt was conveniently written off.

Elizabeth Bathory shows how fear and the suggestion of vampirism could be powerful weapons that could bring down anyone in the 17 century and feed a hysteria across Europe about the threat of the undead.

♪♪ Back in Lodz, textile expert Maria Cybulska has continued her study of the fabric found in Grave 75, and she has something striking to show Oscar.

-So, this is the only, uh -- -Everything from the cloth.

-Yeah.

-These silk fibers are so crispy, every time you try to remove them from the fabric, they just turn into dust.

-Maria believes these gold- and silver-wrapped silk threads once formed part of a decorative band around a head cap.

-So, the first basic thing is the cap we know she had, almost for sure.

Yes.

And this cap, it was trimmed in the front with this band we found.

-With her analysis, Maria can describe what the head cap might have looked like.

It's an impressively fine piece of clothing.

What's striking is, the pattern is not local to Pien and neither is the silk.

-There was a lot of mills weaving wool, high-quality wool.

But about silk, probably was important.

-But there's another explanation.

The woman in Grave 75 might have brought this cap with her from her place of birth.

She might not have been from Pien at all.

To find out more about where she might have come from, the team is turning to chemical analysis.

They've extracted her teeth and sent them halfway across the world to the United States.

♪♪ In Albuquerque, New Mexico, anthropologist Paige Lynch is an expert at drawing evidence out of ancient bones.

-First thing I do after I bring the samples back to our lab is I have to clean the bones and the teeth.

I will use a Dremel to remove any contaminants that might have infiltrated the surface of either the bone or the tooth within the past 200, 300 years.

-Paige drills down to extract powdered enamel for testing.

This tooth's enamel would have developed when Zosia was between 2 1/2 and 8 years old.

The enamel in a child's teeth absorbs the strontium isotopes present where they live.

Analysis of the strontium ratios can indicate where the person grew up.

-There's a couple possibilities of where this individual likely was from.

-The results are marked onto this map of Europe with different colors indicating different ratios.

-For our individual, we're looking around the green and the yellow areas.

She could have come from several regions across Poland.

But the woman's unusual grave leads Paige to suspect it might be further afield.

-So, the Upper Rhine region of Germany, modern-day Germany, is a possibility, as well as southern Scandinavia or modern southern day Sweden.

-The fact that Zosia might have been Swedish is significant and might account for the way she was treated.

Today, Sweden is famous for being at peace for the last 200 years.

But in the 17th century, it was one of the great European powers.

Around the time Zosia died, Sweden invaded Poland.

3,000 people died during a bitter, three-month siege of Torun, just 20 miles from Pien.

If Zosia was Swedish, she would have been very unpopular.

-The fact that she might have been from Sweden is -- it's really interesting.

[ Sighs ] I do feel a bit -- perhaps a bit closer to her than I would have been if she was not from Scandinavia.

-After 150 hours of work, Oscar has almost completed the first stage of the reconstruction.

-I am applying the last tiny details with -- with a needle, uh... to create small wrinkles and pores and even out surfaces.

♪♪ -Next, Oscar casts the face in silicone, a realistic-looking skin substitute.

-This is where she comes to life.

When you look at the face of that, you should be convinced that this is actually a real person.

-After waiting 24 hours for the cast to dry, Oscar can find out if his hard work paid off - or if he has to start all over again.

♪♪ -It looks good.

It's always a bit of nerve -- nerve-cracking job to get the face out of the mold.

But it was successful, so I'm very pleased.

-Next, Oscar will use his artistic skills to bring Zosia back to life.

♪♪ -It's really quite ironic -- isn't it?

-- that we're doing the exact opposite of what people of Pien were doing.

-The team now has a much better understanding of why the Pien locals might have been so keen for Zosia to remain buried.

-This is a woman who would have stood out as different in so many -- so many ways.

She looked different to everybody else.

She was wealthy, so she would have stood out for that reason.

She was quite possibly Swedish, so you would have stood out like a sore thumb.

I think that fear of the other, that fear of the neighbor, of even the conqueror, the invader, would have been something that stirred very strong emotions in ordinary people.

I think that there would have been a lot of hostility in the air towards her.

-But that doesn't explain the rest of the strange graves found in the field.

Further analysis of the other deviant graves has revealed that Zosia wasn't the only one treated brutally.

No one in Pien, it seems, was safe from being labeled a vampire, even small children.

Disturbances in the soil indicate the people of Pien opened this child's grave and turned the body facedown.

But that's not all they did to this child.

The top part of the body is entirely missing.

-Most of the remains were taken away.

Why was it done?

It's impossible to say exactly.

-It's possible that the legs were left so that this padlock didn't have to be removed.

This isn't the only child buried with a padlock.

This 1-year-old baby was found with a lock in its grave.

-What could such a child do?

Not only was it small, it could barely walk.

Why are they so afraid of such a child?

-This child was clearly deeply loved in life.

They're one of the few who was granted the privilege of being buried in a coffin.

But in death, precautions were taken against them.

The presence of another distinctive triangular padlock suggests there might have been a link with the woman in Grave 75.

♪♪ Bizarre as it may seem, one Polish belief was that vampires could come back from the dead and reproduce with their still-living partners.

Were these children in some way related to the woman in Grave 75?

♪♪ Pien was not the only center of a vampire outbreak in this part of Poland.

Archaeologists have unearthed numerous deviant burials all over Eastern Europe, although the practice seems to have been more widespread in Pien than anywhere else.

Now it appears these outbreaks were part of a hysteria that swept across early-modern Eastern and Central Europe, often involving church and state, sometimes leading to bizarre trials of the dead.

One of the most spectacular happened in the tiny village of Frei Hermersdorf, in the modern-day Czech Republic.

Historian Adam Mezes thinks a visit to this town might provide insight into what the people of Pien were thinking.

It all began here, shortly after one woman, a healer named Marianna Saliger, died and was buried in this cemetery.

-Villagers started experiencing strange nighttime attacks.

We are essentially talking about poltergeist phenomena.

Objects moving by themselves, strange noises, apparitions of animals that shouldn't be there.

-Church authorities soon began to investigate.

29 bodies were dug up and put on trial in a strange spectacle.

19 were convicted of being vampires.

Townspeople suspected Marianna of infecting the graveyard with vampirism after her death.

-What changes during this vampire panic is the belief that the dead can infect the dead.

So that within one cemetery, one vampire can start turning the rest of the cemetery into vampires, and, suddenly, you're faced with the possibility of an army of the undead.

♪♪ -The bodies were loaded onto carts and taken to be executed, despite already being dead.

But exactly where has never been found.

Adam hopes an extraordinary historical document -- a military map from the time -- along with new research from a local historian, might help him find the site.

He believes it could shed light on the events at the field of vampires in Pien.

♪♪ Following the old road, Adam arrives at a clearing near where he believes the executions must have happened.

-We can be fairly certain that the execution site was somewhere here on one of these little hills along this path.

♪♪ -Government records from the time state corpses arrived here at dawn on January 31, 1755, accompanied by more than 100 armed watchmen.

The executioner set up three stakes and not only burnt the corpses but everything that had come with them from the graveyard, including shrouds, wooden crosses, and even the soil that was dug up with the bodies.

-In the beginning, the fire was watched by a great number of people.

But according to our sources, the crowd dispersed very fast because of the stench.

-Adam can see parallels between this site and the field of vampires in Pien.

-Both were situated at the border of a given community.

They are both locations for those kinds of people who had been rejected by the community and ousted, for whatever reason, to the borders, to the no-man's-land.

♪♪ -And this mass re-execution site could help explain why the people of Pien kept reopening the graves and adding anti-vampiric safeguards to the bodies.

♪♪ -Frei Hermersdorf represents, I think, what happens if you let a vampire crisis get out of control.

And so, I think the field in Pien shows a community who are trying to stop a problem from spreading, until it takes over the whole region, I mean, and who knows what beyond.

♪♪ ♪♪ -New evidence has revealed that there may have been some basis to that fear.

♪♪ A ground survey has picked up potential graves outside the excavated area.

♪♪ -The concentration of anomalies is located just to the east of your excavation works.

-The results indicate that this entire hill may be covered in graves.

It suggests that Pien's vampire problem might have been even bigger than previously thought.

And it means the archaeologists will be busy at this site for years to come.

-Guys, get ready!

There'll be more research!

-You can start right there!

[ Both laugh ] -The field of vampires has many more secrets to reveal.

But now, 350 years after her death, this woman, who was buried as a vampire, will have some dignity restored, thanks to Oscar Nilsson's facial reconstruction.

-Yes.

Here she is.

After all these hours of hard labor, uh, finally, we have a result.

-As Oscar adds the finishing touches, Magdalena and Dariusz are on their way.

-Every day, we wondered what her face looked like, and now we have the opportunity to find out if our imaginations match what we'll see.

-She feels a bit like my own daughter or something at this point.

She's special.

♪♪ -With time slipping away, Oscar has finally finished.

-I'm very, very eager now to see the reactions from Magdalena and Dariusz.

I can't wait.

♪♪ -This moment is something Dariusz and Magdalena have been dreaming about for two years.

♪♪ -Yes.

-How is something like that possible?

-[ Crying ] -Calm yourself.

-Oscar, you're a master.

♪♪ -This is the first time Zosia has been seen in 350 years.

-It's hard to find the right words to express my feelings.

It's just something extraordinary, amazing.

♪♪ -I absolutely feel we have given her humanity back, especially when she is able to create such emotional reactions.

-She was special to me from the very beginning, and now she's even more special.

♪♪ -We know that this woman was an outsider.

She was an outsider partly because she was a woman in a misogynistic age, when women were often the target of fear and suspicion.

We know, or we suspect, that she was wealthy, which would have marked her out from ordinary people.

She may well have been a foreigner, which would have made her the target of suspicion, even hatred.

She was, in a sense, the archetypal target for accusations of being a vampire.

♪♪ -You want to take care of this young woman, and you wish you could take care of her and -- and tell her it's going to be all right.

♪♪ ♪♪ -A vampire is a response to fear.

It doesn't take very much to go from being an outsider to being somebody that haunts the nightmares of the living until they're prepared to do almost anything to keep you in your grave.

-Zosia's fate was a product of the worst fears and behaviors of 17th-century society.

Now, three centuries after she was condemned as a vampire and had her final resting place desecrated, her humanity has at last been returned.

♪♪