A coffin prepared correctly in the Carpathians carried more than the dead. A sickle across the throat, a thorn in the mouth, sometimes a handful of seeds that had to be counted — what you buried with a body was meant to keep it from coming back.
Not every burial in the Carpathians was simply a farewell. Some were precautions. Anyone who died a violent or sudden death, who remained unmarried, who was thought a witch or sorcerer, who had been excommunicated, who had taken their own life, or who was born with a caul — a remnant of the amniotic sac over the head — was suspected of becoming an uneasy corpse. Even an animal leaping over an open coffin, in village belief, could be enough to turn an ordinary body into something else.
Out of that suspicion, in the Carpathians, no mere story grew — action followed. Anyone who feared they were burying a strigoi, a dead man who did not consider the grave final, turned to practical, hands-on measures. Not at the end, when it was already too late, but beforehand, right at the open coffin, while there was still time.
One of the most widespread precautions was disarmingly simple, and ready to hand in every farmhouse: a sickle or small scythe laid crosswise over the corpse's throat, sometimes over the chest, just before the coffin lid was closed. The logic behind it left nothing to chance. Should the body rise and try to leave the grave, the blade would behead it — before it ever reached the earth above.
A tool of the harvest by day took on a second, far graver duty at the coffin. Precisely because a sickle sat in nearly every household, this precaution required no special effort — one reason it counts among the most widely recorded practices of all.
Alongside the blade, a thorn was often used, sometimes a needle: pushed into the tongue, tucked under the lip, or driven through the shroud at the level of the mouth. In folk belief, the mouth was where the revenant's malevolent power first stirred back to life — where it began to call, where it began to bite. Sealing it, even symbolically, was an attempt to stop the evil exactly where it would first break through.
A second method relied not on force but on time. Poppy or millet seeds were scattered into the coffin, into the grave, sometimes along the road from the house of death to the cemetery. Belief demanded something very precise of the revenant: before it could travel on, it had to count every single seed — and supposedly managed only one a year. By the time it finished, morning would long since have broken, and with the first light it lost its power regardless. A delaying tactic, built on the compulsiveness the dead were assumed to have.
Where the corpse was mistrusted from the moment it was laid out, a third measure helped: burial face down instead of on the back. The reasoning was as simple as the one behind the sickle. If the body clawed its way upward with bare hands, as folk belief held it would try, then in this position it only dug itself deeper into the earth — not out of it.
Some accounts combine the face-down position with a heavy stone as well, placed on the back, the chest, or directly on the head. Weight as a last safeguard, when sickle and thorn alone weren't enough for an especially uneasy family.
Rarely was any single one of these measures used in isolation. In the accounts fieldworkers gathered from Carpathian villages and neighbouring regions in the 19th and early 20th centuries, there are cases where all three precautions were applied to the same body at once — sickle across the throat, thorn in the mouth, corpse face down. The greater the suspicion surrounding the dead, the less anyone relied on a single method.
If none of it was enough — if the village kept seeing unexplained deaths, sick livestock, or nighttime apparitions — only one option remained: opening the grave again. What was read from the corpse's condition, and what followed from it, is described in full in the article on why graves in the Carpathians are reopened after seven years. Sickle, thorn and face-down burial were the prevention. Exhumation was what came next, once prevention was judged to have failed.
In the Carpathian Chronicles, a story rarely ends at the grave. Anyone who thinks a burial is the last precaution doesn't yet know the rules of these villages — where every family knows that a wrongly prepared coffin raises more questions than it answers. In Corben Vale's Carpathian Chronicles, the earth over a grave is rarely as settled as it looks.
What "The Village of the Hanged" only mentions in passing, but everyone in the village already knows, is exactly this kind of quiet expertise: who keeps a sickle within reach, who knows how a coffin is really prepared, and who knows better than to ask when a family insists on washing and dressing their own dead. The Chronicles never explain this knowledge — they assume it, the same way it was genuinely assumed in the villages the stories come from.
The sickle, the thorn, and face-down burial are among the best-documented apotropaic customs in Romanian folklore. The foundation remains Agnes Murgoci's essay "The Vampire in Roumania" (Folklore, Vol. 37, 1926, pp. 320–349), which draws together numerous field reports — collected in part by Tudor Pamfile — on burial practices against the strigoi. A fuller account, including the role of the thorn and poppy seeds as delaying magic, appears in Harry A. Senn's study "Were-Wolf and Vampire in Romania" (East European Monographs, 1982).
Both sources note the same caveat that applies to this whole page: the practices are attested unevenly by region — details such as the exact material of the thorn, or the choice between poppy and millet seeds, varied between Transylvania, Moldavia and Wallachia. What holds consistently is the underlying principle: to stop, delay or bind the dead, rather than trust the grave alone to hold them.
As with most customs collected here: the individual elements — sickle, thorn, face-down burial, seed-counting — are documented across different regions and decades, but were rarely all used together at a single grave. Which combination was customary in which village depended on the cause of death and on local tradition — and lives on, where it is remembered at all, mostly by word of mouth.
Corben Vale's Carpathian Chronicles tell exactly these kinds of stories – based on true events. „The Village of the Hanged“ and „Stafii“ release on 15 October 2026 in seven languages.