The Scariest Little Girl

The Scariest Little Girl – Story by Liam Sweeny.

So maybe this is a Halloween story. Anyways, it rose like a ghost in my newsfeed. And would you rather hear Christmas stories this soon? Me thinks not. So the place is Poland. Pien, to be exact. A cemetery for rejected people, but I’m going to go ahead and assume that, in this case, “rejected” just means poor or other type of undesirable. So archeologists studying this cemetery found an interesting thing; a child’s body (skeleton?) with a padlock around her leg.

We’re talking the 17^th Century here, so this probably wasn’t the work of a deranged serial killer, though padlocking your victims in their grave is a very pro-level move for budding serial killers. No, this was a deranged citizenry, and the archaeologists believe they padlocked her to keep her in her grave.

We don’t always realize that vampires and werewolves was a real fear back in the 1600s in an Eastern European country like Poland. But it makes you wonder: why her? I mean, the whole cemetery wasn’t padlocked, just this one girl. Wouldn’t this be like a crazy backstory to know? Did she have a taste for porridge as a child, or blood? Was she biting her schoolmates? Or was she just like this wild kid and they figured she must have had the devil in her? I mean, how bad do you have to be for your prison sentence to run beyond your death?

The kid was buried facedown with a triangular padlock under her foot. She was about six or seven. And the cemetery, the “rejected people,” were the undesirable, as previously said, but also the type of people a rural Polish town in the 1600s might fear after death. So that Freddy Kruger kind of maintenance man that everybody looked at warily, he’s probably in there. And of course, real baddies, murderers, whatnot. I’m sure they had a place.

But the six- or seven-year-old girl was the one with the padlock. Of all the possible bads in the village of Pien, that little kid was the one they feared the most.

Creepier thing is that her grave was desecrated, and all her bones were stolen except the one with the padlock on it. So I’m sure someone is walking around cursed right now.

That’s it. On to Thanksgiving, and whatever weirdness we can pull up there.

More by Liam Sweeny…