The dead, if you are to heed the warning of burials conducted hundreds of years ago, may not always lay so quietly in their grave.

Over a span of more than 1,000 years, in different parts of Europe, burials were conducted seemingly to keep the dead safely in their graves, and not walking about causing havoc among the living.

The formal name for practices of this kind is apotropaic burial rites. Informally, they have a more bone-chilling name: the vampire burial.