Buried with a padlock on her foot and an iron sickle across her neck, 'Zosia' was never supposed to come back from the dead. Entombed in an unmarked cemetery in Pien, northern Poland, the young woman was one of dozens feared by her neighbors to have been a 'vampire.'
Now, after 400 years, a team of scientists has used DNA, 3D printing and modeling clay to reconstruct her face – and to reveal a human story wrapped in supernatural beliefs.
"It's really ironic, in a way," says Swedish archeologist Oscar Nilsson, "these people burying her, they did everything they could in order to prevent her from coming back from the dead… we have done everything we can in order to make her come back to life."
Zosia, as she was named by locals, was found in 2022 by a team of archeologists from Torun's Nicolaus Copernicus University. Analysis of Zosia's skull suggests she was aged just 18-20 when she died, having suffered from a health condition which would have caused her to faint and experience severe headaches, Nilsson says, as well as possible mental health issues.
Zosia's was Grave No.75 at the unmarked cemetery in Pien, outside the northern city of Bydgoszcz. Among the other bodies at the site was a 'vampire' child, buried face down, and similarly padlocked at the foot.
The skeleton of Zosia, a woman buried as a vampire, lies in a grave in Pien, Poland, August 2022. /Nicolaus Copernicus University, Torun/Handout
Little is known of Zosia's life, but Nilsson and the Pien team say items she was buried with suggest she was from a wealthy, possibly even noble, family. The 17th-century Europe she lived in was ravaged by war, something Nilsson suggests created a climate of fear in which belief in supernatural monsters was commonplace.
Nilsson's process begins with creating a 3D printed replica of the skull, before gradually building layers of plasticine clay "muscle by muscle" to form a life-like face. He uses bone structure combined with information on gender, age, ethnicity and approximate weight to estimate the depth of facial features.
"It's emotional to watch a face coming back from the dead," Nilsson says, "especially when you know the story about this young girl."
Nilsson says he hopes to show Zosia "as a human and not as this monster that she is buried as."