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What this episode is about
In January 2004, six men in the Romanian village of Marotinu de Sus dig up a dead man, cut out his heart, burn it and give the ashes to a sick young woman to drink. That case opens my Carpathian trilogy. The strigoi may be Europe’s oldest and most persistent vampire, and it is behind the image of the vampire most people carry around.
The word
The word leads through the Romanian strigă, “witch” and “barn owl,” to the Latin strix, the Roman night bird that drank children’s blood. The augmentative ending -oi turns it into “the great screamer.” The same root is in the Italian strega, the Polish strzyga and the Albanian shtriga.
The two strigoi
The strigoi viu is a living person whose soul leaves the body at night. When he dies, he usually becomes a strigoi mort, a dead man who returns home and drains his own family’s strength. Tudor Pamfile was the first to describe this system in 1916, and Agnes Murgoci did so in English in 1926. People at risk included those born with a caul, the seventh child of the same sex, or someone whose corpse a cat had jumped over.
Spotting and stopping a strigoi
In an opened grave, people recognized a strigoi by a flushed face, blood in the mouth and a swollen body, all signs of normal decomposition. They rubbed garlic on doorframes, laid thorns on the grave and scattered poppy seeds, which the strigoi has to count until sunrise. If nothing worked, they dug him up on a Saturday and burned the heart.
Marotinu de Sus
Petre Toma was buried on December 28, 2003. Shortly afterward, the young Mirela Marinescu fell ill and screamed at night that someone was sitting on her. The men acted, and the dead man’s daughter called the police. In 2005 the court in Craiova gave all six men six-month suspended sentences. Investigators came across signs of around twenty similar cases in the region.
The earth gives it away
Archaeologists have found vampire burials in Drawsko and Pień and in Gliwice in Poland, in Čelákovice in the Czech Republic and on Lazzaretto Nuovo near Venice. The dead were mostly locals, not outsiders.
How the word “vampire” came about
In 1725 the word “vampyri” appears in a Habsburg report from Kisiljevo in Serbia, followed in 1731–32 by the case of Arnold Paole in Medveđa. Through these official reports, the vampire reached the European public. In 1755 Maria Theresa sent her personal physician, Gerard van Swieten, and after his report the opening of graves was banned.
Whitby, 1890
Bram Stoker’s Dracula has very little to do with Vlad Țepeș. Stoker only found the name in a footnote in William Wilkinson. His idea of the vampire came from Emily Gerard’s descriptions of Transylvanian folk belief. Count Dracula is more of a strigoi than a Wallachian prince.
Frequently asked questions
What is a strigoi?
A revenant from Romanian folklore. It exists both as a living person with dangerous powers and as a dead person who returns to the family.
What happened in Marotinu de Sus in 2004?
Six men exhumed a dead man, burned his heart and gave the ashes to a sick woman to drink. In 2005 they received suspended sentences.
More in the lexicon: Strigoi.
About this episode
In January 2004, six men in a Romanian village dug up a dead man. He had been in the ground for six weeks. They cut open his chest, removed his heart, burned it at a crossroads, mixed the ashes with well water, and gave it to a sick young woman to drink. They said they saved her life. They said the man had become a Strigoi.This is not folklore. This is not the Middle Ages. This happened in 2004 — with police reports, a court verdict, and evidence of at least twenty similar cases in the same region that never made it to the public.In this episode, we trace the Strigoi from its ancient Latin roots to the Romanian villages where it never stopped being real. We open the archaeological graves of Poland, Czechia, and Venice. We follow the Habsburg bureaucrats who accidentally invented the word “vampire.” And we unravel the most persistent myth in horror history: that Bram Stoker’s Dracula was inspired by Vlad the Impaler. He wasn’t. The true source is far older, far stranger, and far more disturbing — and six men with a pitchfork proved it was still alive.🔔 Subscribe for deep dives into folklore, the uncanny, and the stories that refuse to stay buried.
Keywords:
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