The skull of the "Vampire of Venice" was found in a mass grave with a brick stuck in its jaw. 
 
 Archaeologists in Poland believe they've made a startling discovery: a group of vampire graves. 
 
 The graves were discovered during the construction of a roadway near the Polish town of Gliwice, where archaeologists are more accustomed to finding the remains of World War II soldiers, according to The Telegraph. 
 
 But instead of soldiers, the graves contained skeletons whose heads had been severed and placed on their legs. This indicated to the archaeologists that the bodies had been subject to a ritualized execution designed to ensure the dead stayed dead, The Telegraph reports. [Famous Fangs: Tales of Our Favorite Vampires] 
 
 By keeping the head separated from the body, according to ancient superstition, the "undead" wouldn't be able to rise from the grave to terrorize the living. Decapitation was one way of achieving that; another way was hanging the person by a rope attached to the neck until, over time, the decaying body simply separated from the head. 
 
 There were other, equally bizarre ways of dealing with vampire burials, according to research published by forensic anthropologist Matteo Borrini. He cites the case of a woman who died during a 16th-century plague in Venice, Italy. The woman was apparently buried with a brick wedged tightly in her open mouth, a popular medieval method of keeping suspected vampires from returning to feed on the blood of the living. The woman's grave might be the earliest known vampire burial ever found. 
 
 Hers was a typical case of an accusation of vampirism following some calamity, such as a plague or a devastating crop failure. Accusing an individual of being a vampire was a not-uncommon way of finding a scapegoat for an otherwise unexplained disaster. 
 
 In other cases, the body of a suspected vampire might be staked to the ground, pinning the corpse into place with a stake made of metal or wood. In 2012, archaeologists in Bulgaria found two skeletons with iron rods piercing their chests, indicating they may have been considered vampires. 
 
 The practice of decapitating the bodies of suspected vampires before burial was common in Slavic countries during the early Christian era, when pagan beliefs were still widespread. 
 
 In fact, their belief in vampires stemmed from both superstition about death and lack of knowledge about decomposition. Most vampire stories of history tend to follow a certain pattern where an individual or family dies of some unfortunate event or disease; before science could explain such deaths, the people chose to blame them on "vampires." 
 
 Villagers have also mistaken ordinary decomposition processes for the supernatural. "For example, though laypeople might assume that a body would decompose immediately, if the coffin is well sealed and buried in winter, putrefaction might be delayed by weeks or months; intestinal decomposition creates bloating which can force blood up into the mouth, making it look like a dead body has recently sucked blood," writes LiveScience's Bad Science columnist Benjamin Radford. "These processes are well understood by modern doctors and morticians, but in medieval Europe were taken as unmistakable signs that vampires were real and existed among them." 
 
 There's no consensus yet on when the bodies found in Poland were buried. According to Jacek Pierzak, one of the archaeologists on the site, the skeletons were found with no jewelry, belt buckles, buttons or any other artifacts that might assist in providing a burial date. 
 
 Follow Marc Lallanilla on Twitter and Google+. Follow us @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on LiveScience.com. ||||| This teenage girl was buried in a Polish cemetery with a sickle over her neck, possibly to ward off demons. She was also buried with a copper headband and a copper coin, archaeologists found. 
 
 How do you keep a demon from disturbing the living? A blade to the throat should do the trick. 
 
 A few skeletons unearthed in a 400-year-old Polish cemetery have been discovered with sickles placed around their necks. Archaeologists believe this strange burial practice is evidence of a belief in magic and a fear of demons. 
 
 The sickle burials were found at Drawsko cemetery, a site in northeastern Poland that dates from the 17th to the 18th centuries. Archaeologists, including Marek Polcyn, a visiting scholar at Lakehead University in Canada, have excavated more than 250 graves there since 2008. 
 
 Among those graves were four skeletons with sickles placed at their throats, and a fifth skeleton with a sickle placed over its hips. Previously, these burials had been described as "vampire" burials, with the sickles interpreted as a way to prevent the dead from reanimating and terrorizing the living. But in a new study detailed in the journal Antiquity, Polcyn and co-author Elzbieta Gajda, of the Muzeum Ziemi Czarnkowskiej, now reject that characterization. ("We deliberately dismiss the interpretation of a revenant (i.e. vampire)," isn't something you read in an academic paper every day.) [See Photos of the Sickle Burials at Drawsko Cemetery] 
 
 Instead, the archaeologists prefer to use the blanket term "anti-demonic" to talk about these burials, partly because vampires weren't the only kinds of evil incarnations of the dead, according to traditional folk beliefs in the region. But also, the sickle graves were afforded funerary privileges that weren't usually extended to "vampires" buried elsewhere: They were given Christian burials in sacred ground alongside other members of the community, and their corpses do not appear to have been desecrated or mutilated. 
 
 In another sign that the people buried with sickles probably were not outsiders, scientists who studied chemical signatures locked in the teeth of these corpses found that all five individuals were locals. (They published those results in a paper in PLOS ONE last year.) 
 
 "The magical and ritual meaning of this gesture seems beyond doubt," Polcyn and Gajda wrote, adding, however, that the sickle might have had more than one ritualistic meaning. The tool may have been intended to keep the dead in their graves under the threat of cutting their throat, but it also might have been used to prevent evil forces from tormenting their souls. What's more, the use of a tool made of iron, which had to undergo a transformation in fire, could symbolize the passage from life to death, the authors wrote. [7 Strange Ways Humans Act Like Vampires] 
 
 Even though Christianity was the dominant religion in Poland at the time this cemetery was used, traditions from old Slavic pagan faith and folk belief systems still existed, including a belief in demons. Besides the sickles, there is not much that makes these graves unique, so the scientists aren't sure exactly what about these people made them demonic. They may have been thought to have supernatural powers in life, or they might have had physical characteristics considered suspicious (which might have included "an exceptionally hairy body," a unibrow, a large head and a red complexion, the authors said, citing traditional Polish folklore). 
 
 These people also might have died in a traumatic fashion, without any time for the appropriate rites and rituals to make for a smooth spiritual transition into death — a concept some archaeologists call a "bad death." While some of the people buried with sickles may have simply died of old age, one of them, a girl, died as a teenager. The authors speculated that she might have met a violent and untimely end, perhaps through drowning, suicide or murder. Unfortunately for archaeologists, however, this death didn't leave its mark on the girl's bones. 
 
 Polcyn and Gajda wrote that they hope further scientific tests on the corpses, such as biomolecular analyses, will help them understand more specifically what led the dead in Drawsko to be buried with sickles. 
 
 Follow us @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on Live Science.
– No word on whether they kept garlic or a crucifix nearby as they dug, but Polish archaeologists say they've unearthed four "vampire" skeletons. The remains were found with the head placed between their legs; folk tradition held that this burial arrangement would ensure that a possible bloodsucker couldn't find his head and come back to life. Though an archaeologist tells Polskie Radio that "it's very difficult to tell when these burials were carried out" due to their lack of jewelry or other items that could be dated, they likely occurred long before 1914—the date of the last recorded "vampire" burial in the country. The skeletons were found on a construction site near Gliwice, in southern Poland, and tests are being conducted on the remains. The Telegraph goes into greater (and gorier) detail about the ritual, which was said to be common in the Slavic region after the advent of Christianity there: Believed vampires would either be decapitated or hanged until their body naturally fell from the head due to decomposition. LiveScience points out that there were other ways to deal with suspected vampires, like using metal stakes to secure the corpse to the ground. Archaeologists in Bulgaria made just such a discovery last year.