Strigoi

The strigoi predates Bram Stoker's Dracula by at least a thousand years and bears only a passing resemblance to the cape-wearing aristocrat of Western fiction. Romanian tradition recognizes two distinct varieties. The strigoi viu is a living person, often born with a caul or a tail of hair, who unknowingly drains energy from those around them and whose spirit can leave the body at night. The strigoi mort is the more dangerous form, a corpse that refuses to stay buried and returns to torment its own family, feeding on their vitality until they sicken and die. The word itself derives from the Latin strix, a screeching night bird associated with blood-drinking in Roman antiquity.

Romanian burial customs developed around the assumption that the strigoi was a real and present danger. Bodies were sometimes buried face down, with thorns pressed into the mouth, or with a sickle placed across the neck so the corpse would decapitate itself if it tried to rise. Certain deaths were considered high-risk: suicides, people who died unbaptized, seventh children of seventh children, and anyone whose life had ended violently or without confession. Villages kept close watch on fresh graves for the first forty days, and any unexplained illness among livestock or relatives could prompt an exhumation.

The practice has not fully disappeared. In early 2004, in the Romanian village of Marotinu de Sus, the family of a man named Toma Petre became convinced he had returned as a strigoi after several relatives fell ill following his death. Six of his male relatives went to the cemetery at night, dug up the body, cut out the heart with a pitchfork, burned it on a nearby crossroads, and mixed the ashes with water for the sick family members to drink. The relatives reportedly recovered. Romanian police charged the men with disturbing the peace of the dead, and the case drew international attention because it demonstrated that strigoi belief was not a museum piece.

What makes the strigoi distinct from its literary descendants is the intimacy of the threat. Dracula stalks strangers in foreign cities. The strigoi comes home. It is always someone you knew, usually someone you loved, returning to drain the life out of the household it once belonged to. That domestic horror is what kept the tradition alive in rural Transylvania and Oltenia long after the rest of Europe had folded its vampires into paperback fiction.