For example, medieval graves in Poland have shown some of the dead with stones jammed under their chins and sickles laid across their necks. In Bulgaria, bodies were interred with stakes through their chests.
Do we know why some burials were singled out in this manner?
My area of research is medieval/early modern English death rituals rather than Poland specifically. Your question states that you are interested in 'Europe', so I hope an answer based on English practices is of at least some help.
In terms of English burial practices, these 'vampire' burials are often the result of a suicide. A key bit of context here lies in understanding beliefs about the dead body. In both pre and post Reformation theology, the body continues to be of great importance even after death, as it is the earthly remains which will be resurrected into holy bodies on Judgement Day (see 1 Corinthians 15:35-58). Though body and soul have been separated, the body is still of central importance to the departed (one of the reasons that Catholic funerals tend to involve burial, not cremation, in order to receive the best chance of resurrection).
This leads to a situation which can seem a little bizarre to the modern mind, wherein individuals can be punished after their death through ill-treatment of their corpse. Famously, Oliver Cromwell and other figures involved in the regicide of Charles I were disinterred from their graves in order to be 'posthumously executed' (in this case, by beheading). ^1
Suicide was regarded as one of the most unforgivable crimes in early modern England. It represented a rejection of God's gift of life, with no opportunity to repent - it was an assured route to Hell, and an enormous shame to the community, where even the living relatives of the suicide would be punished. A posthumous coroner’s jury would try cases of suicide, and if found guilty, the individual in question would have all of their movable goods and any leases on land surrendered to the crown, or a holder of a royal patent which granted them the right to such windfalls. ^2
When it came to interring the body of a suicide, several considerations are at play. It was considered so important to be buried 'decently' (involving proper covering of the corpse in a shroud, a peal of bells, and a minister to officiate) that even if a corpse of a stranger were to be found within the parish, funds would be raised to have them buried decently in consecrated ground. ^3 This decency was not afforded to a suicide. At best, they could be expected to be buried just outside of the consecrated land of the churchyard, but there are also numerous cases of the 'vampire burials' you describe.
Burial at a crossroads was considered to be a particularly apt site for the burial of a suicide. It lacked the respect and reverence of a consecrated site, where the body would constantly be travelled over by traffic. A stake was often driven through the body in such burials. Two factors are at play here - the denial of Christian burial, and the playing out of superstitious beliefs about the unquiet dead. This process of 'vampire'-style burial served as a warning to the community and defiled the sinful body, but also had practical considerations designed to ensure that the harmful influence of suicide did not remain within the community – the stake prevented the ghost from walking, and the crossroads were intended to diffuse the evil influence of the defiled body in order to reduce the harm it could cause.^3
It's outside the scope of my field to answer what other causes may produce this type of burial, and whether the motivations were significantly different in other parts of Europe. However, in England at least, these style burials are closely associated with punishing a suicide, and preventing harm to the remaining community.
Let me know if you have any questions!
^1 Sarah Tarlow, Ritual, Belief and the Dead in Early Modern Britain and Ireland, (Cambridge: CUP, 2010), p 118.
^2 Michael MacDonald and Terence R. Murphy, Sleepless Souls: Suicide in Early Modern England (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1990), p. 15.
^3 Claire Gittings, Death, Burial and the Individual in Early Modern England (Beckenham: Croon Helm, 1984), pp.60-2.
^4 Gittings, pp 72-3.
Edit: thank you for the gold! I've had a blast chatting to people about the weird and wonderful ways we treat dead bodies. You guys are great :)
In addition, some pre-Roman British Medieval British cultures would bury their dead in similar ways to prevent them rising up after they died, but from what I have gathered, this is more akin to a zombie than a vampire. Would they have been buried with similar motivations, or did two cultures perform a similar ritual with different motivations?
Not only were burials of suspected “vampires” occurring in Europe during the Middle Ages, perhaps one of the most widely circulated stories concerning vampire burials came from nineteenth-century Rhode Island. In fact, the story of Mercy Brown was so widely circulated that a recently uncovered journal of Bram Stoker contained a newspaper clipping from Exeter, Rhode Island about the vampire craze.
In the 1880s, the Brown family of Exeter, Rhode Island suffered an outbreak of tuberculosis, which ended up killing four members of the family: Mary (the mother), Mary Olive and Mercy (daughters), and Edwin (son). You have to understand that tuberculosis was an incredibly misunderstood disease through the nineteenth century. Called “consumption” (or sometimes “White Death”) due to its slow debilitating crawl through an individual, family, and even entire communities, the bacteria that causes TB was not isolated until 1882; ironically this was the same year Mary Brown died of the disease. As the disease swept through the family, local town’s people began to suggest that there was a vampire stalking the Brown family and potential a danger to the entire community of Exeter. Enough uproar eventually caused George Brown (father) to agree to have the bodies of his family exhumed for inspection. While Mary and Mary Olive’s bodies had decomposed, the more recently deceased Mercy had been fairly well preserved due to subfreezing temperatures since her death. Further exacerbating fears, there was still blood in her heart and other organs leading even the coroner to be perplexed. Many believed Mercy was a vampire and according to superstition, her heart was removed, burned, and the ashes mixed with water and fed to the then sick Edwin as a cure for his vampire sickness. Needless to say, the cocktail was unsuccessful and Edwin died weeks later. The story of Exeter spread across New England and the region that had been notorious for its famed witch trials once again broke into a “vampire craze” that some suggest led to the exhuming of more than 80 bodies! While other hearts were burned and the resulting concoction fed to other sick individuals, there is no indication that stakes were driven through hearts. There were, however, a few coffins nailed shut.
While that story is fairly well known, the answer to “why late nineteenth-century Rhode Island?" is less commonly understood. Rhode Island was unique in colonial New England for its stance on religious tolerance. Founded by Massachusetts exile Rodger Williams, the towns of Rhode Island boasted congregations of Baptists, Quakers, Evangelicals, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, and even a Jewish community in Newport. The perceived blasphemy of such a religiously tolerant society led many surrounding New Englanders to refer to the colony, and later state, as "Rouge’s Island." The result was a largely insular society that vehemently guarded their tradition and freedoms. (The state was the first to declare independence from Britain in May, 1776, but last of the thirteen colonies to sign the Constitution and come into the Union, which they eventually were forced into in early summer 1793.) While the Mercy Brown incident occurred during the late nineteenth-century, it was indicative of the superstitious, wary, and inward-looking society that had developed over centuries in Rhode Island. Furthermore, in the same way the witch trials of Massachusetts (and to a lesser extent Rhode Island and Connecticut) caused uproar in the less totalitarian societies of the other American colonies of the time, the other regions of the United States once again looked upon the practices of the “vampire craze” in Rhode Island as backward.
TL;DR: Rhode Island had a vampire craze in the late Nineteenth Century where people with TB were fed heart ashes as an attempt to save them from their vampire sister.
Sources: Surprisingly, there is very little on the Exeter case; however, here is some stuff about RI and its history along with a few popular links about the Exeter story:
Elaine Forman Crane, A Dependent People
Joan Axelrod Contrada, A Primary Source History of the Colony of Rhode Island
Harry S. Stout, The New Soul
Perry Miller, The New England Mind
Ibid, Errand into the Wilderness
Lore Podcast "They Made a Tonic" The very first episode of an amazing podcast!
Follow up question. Did any societies who practice "locking up" the dead do it not only out of superstition, but as a simple way to prevent grave robbing?
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I cannot speak so much about Polish or Bulgarian folklore, but in German folklore, there is a type of Wiedergänger (=one who walks again, revenant) which would warrant such a 'vampire burial' as described in the OP.
It is a Nachzehrer - a recent buried person which would, without leaving the grave, zehrt = sap/ feed on the life force of the living. Typically, they would feed on their relatives or on their friends. Of course, after the family of a deceased had more dead or sick members, one would typically look into the grave of the supposed Nachzehrer, and normally he would look rather healthy, or it would look as if he ate his burial shroud or some part of his body or would have blood around his mouth or a combination. Also, open eyes or an open mouth was seen as an indicator. There is also a high possibility, that, if one listened, he would have schmatzen = slurped/smacked in his grave. To prevent this, the dead would have been given something into his mouth, sometimes coins, sometimes bricks. Sometimes this didn't help or the community didn't want to take the risk, and had the body decapitated or buried upside down or staked. Wiegelmann notes that this extreme measures were only taken, when there was consensus about the extreme danger of the relatives, only when several relatives died shortly after someone.
As one could think, this was typically in times of a epidemic. But in some areas, every "bad" dead could produce such a thing. Unchristened children, robbers, murders, mothers who died in childbirth and even people who were simply not buried properly.
This is obviously a variation of the slavic beliefs of some revenants, as nearly all of the extremer German cases (exhumation, decapitation) are in the former slavic settled territories. There were some people who were charged with desecration of a corpse in the Prussia of the late 19th century (!!!), because they tried to stop a Nachzehrer in the traditional way.
A good overview of different German conceptions is:
Günther Wiegelmann: Der Lebende Leichnahm im Volksbrauch
Although you've asked about medieval Europe, there has been some research over the past few decades connecting "vampire" burial practices and the cause of death in both Europe and the Americas.
For example, from "Bioarchelogical and biocultural evidence of the New England vampire folk belief" a skull and cross bones orientation of ribs and vertebrae was found of one grave among a group of 29 from the 1750s whose coffin was marked JB-55. The skeleton of this one male had periostitic lesions of the ribs similar to those found in primary pulmonary tuberculosis. In that group, two other graves were buried similarly, both with the same last initial marked on the coffin lid (IB-45, NB-13) with the numbers closely related to the age-range expected by their skeletal growth. It is speculated they be related, which may explain the burial method although these were free of the same periostitic lesions.
Tuberculosis has a spectrum of effects, ranging from coughing blood, skin pallor, progressive weight loss, and increased hunger.
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ajpa.1330940210/abstract
In Neurology, Dr. Gomez-Alonso published an article title "Rabies: A possible explanation for the vampire legend"
In it, Dr. Gomez-Alonso speculates that the tendency of rabies to manifest with "wandering tendency, restlessness, signs of autonomic dysfunction, hypersensitivity to stimuli, a feeling of terror, persistent insomnia and an increasing agitation" along with "characteristic spasms involving facial, laryngeal and pharyngeal muscles" causing "emission of hoarse sounds and an appearance with the teeth clenched and the lips retracted" while "the saliva cannot be swallowed so frothing at the mouth and vomiting of bloody fluid frequently occurs." He speculates that this combined with an aggressiveness and transmission vectors such as bats and wolves may be part of the origin of the vampire myth.
In Sweden, and probably in all of Europe during the Early modern period, great Care was taken to make sure that dead did not walk again. In the case of "normal" burrial this was made through the common Christian ritual. If the rituals were performed by the rules and the Body was buried on hallowed ground everything was fine.
The bodies of Criminals however (including suicide victims) were not allowed to be burried on hallowed ground. Therefor, there heads were often cut of and placed between their legs and/or the Body was pierced with a stake through the heart.
Source [in Swedish]: Sandén, Annika: Bödlar, liv död och skam i svenskt 1600-tal. Åhren Snickare, Eva: Döden kroppen och Moderniteten
Edit: to clarify: nothing was wrong with them, bit they might have been Criminals or other people who did not get a proper Christian burrial.
Follow up question (sorry if this is against the rules!)- similarly to the TB response above, were there other medical conditions poorly understood that resulted in vampire type burials?
I'm late to the thread and there are a lot of good books thrown out there but it was odd not seeing Montague Summers' works mentioned. The Vampire in Europe reprinted under the title of The Vampire in Lore and Legend is a very good primer on the history of vampires.
It is believed that Summers himself believed that vampires existed, which is odd seeing how he was a clergyman.