Vampire Chickens?
by Strigoi
I recently wrote down in a notebook all I could
find in Barber's Vampires, Burial and Death
regarding Romanian beliefs and also beliefs in
general concerning animals.
In Romania, it was believed that a person born
with a caul (amniotic membrane still attached to
the head and forming a veil), a small tail, or with
hair covering his or her body was destined to
become a vampire after death. Such people were
called strigoi vii [singular: strigoi viu], which
means "living vampires". A "dead" (or rather, as we say, "undead") vampire
was called a strigoi mort. Romanians believed that the soul of a strigoi vii
had the ability to voluntarily leave its body at night. Sometimes such souls
appeared as a sparks traveling through the air, but it was also said that they
took the appearance of flying insects or higher animals. The strigoi vii were
usually not associated with blood sucking. But they could steal the vitality of
their neighbor's crops, bee hives, and even the leaven of their bread and
transfer it to their own. Sometimes it was said that they took animal form by
stealing the form from the animal itself.
The Romanian word strigoi derives from the Latin word stryx. The ancient
Romans believed in "witches" whom they called striges [singular: stryx] who
transformed into screech owls at night to prey on unattended infants by
drinking their blood and sometimes also eating their internal organs.
Regarding butterflies, Barber at least mentions a Serbian belief that a
"vampire can transform into a butterfly" as well as general belief among
Balkan people in general that the soul can leave the body in a form such as
a butterfly. Regarding chickens, all I can find in Barber's book
is that "among the Arumunes of Romania" it was believed that a black hen
jumping over a corpse would cause it become a vampire after burial. It is also
mentioned on the same page that some Romanians believed that a bat flying
over a corpse had the same effect.
Belief in the ancient Roman striges survived in the Balkans into the early
20th century, Albanians believed in the shtriga, an elderly woman who
preyed upon infants by drinking their blood, also caused adults to wither and
die, and who could change into a moth, fly, or bee at night. Albanians
typically blamed a shtriga for what we call "crib death" or SIDS (Sudden
Infant Death Syndrome"). In Higher Albania, Elizabeth Durham (originally
published in 1909 but reprinted in 1985 by Virago Press, London) writes how
she found that many Albanian infants ironically died in their cribs from being
so over-protected from the Shtriga with swaddling blankets - they grew pale
and sick from lack of fresh air and sunshine. She tried to persuade some
mothers to reverse this, but they could not be persuaded to depart from
tradition.
The "modern Greek" version was the strigla, an old woman who changed into
a crow. In regard to the original question, the most interesting example is
from Serbia and Montenegro - the veshtiza [plural: vestize] .
According to a description of the veshtize in an old book that I have, Hero
Tales and Legends of the Serbians by Woislav M. Petrovich, 'Late Attache to
the Serbian Royal Legation to the Court of St. James' (London: George G.
Harrap & Co., 1914), the veshtize "are supposed to be old women
possessed by an evil spirit." The soul of a veshtitza leave her body at night
while she sleeps and "wanders about till it enters the body of a hen, or, more
frequently, that of a black moth." In the body of such a creature, she flies
about until she finds a home where there are infants or young children - "its
favorite food is the hearts of infants." At midnight, the vestitze would
sometimes flock together in the branches of some tree and hold a meeting
while they snacked upon what they had gathered earlier in the night. "An old
woman having the attributes of a witch may join such meetings after having
complied with the rules prescribed by the experienced veshtitze, and this is
done by reciting certain stereotyped phrases."
The Vampire Book: The Encyclopedia of the Undead by J. Gordon Melton, p.
570, gives some more details concerning the vestiza. Melton's sources
include not only Petrovitch's Hero Tales and Legends of the Serbians but
also a 1924 article by Edith Durham published in the British anthropological
journal Man. Melton doesn't say anything about hens, but says that the soul
of a sleeping veshtitza "wandered at night and either inhabited a moth or a
fly. Using the flying animal, the witch entered into the home of neighbors and
sucked the blood of victims. The victim, over a period of time, grew pale,
developed a fever, and died."
It isn't clear if the word "hen" was used by Petrovitch in the narrow sense of
"a mature female chicken" or in one of the broader senses of the word
ranging from "mature female domestic bird" to "any female bird." But I do find
it conceivable in my own mind that mature female chickens might have
sometimes been suspected by Serbian peasants of being possessed by
veshtize. While growing up in a small town in rural Iowa, I found that
chickens, if not prevented from doing so, would roost on warm nights in the
low branches of trees and shrubs of groves which many farms had bordering
the farm yard. Also, if in the Balkans there was a general problem with
keeping chickens and other animals from entering the house and jumping
over a corpse laid out prior to the funeral, there must have also been the
possibility that a chicken hen could enter a house at night and find a
comfortable roosting place over a swaddled baby sleeping in its cradle.
Imagine the horror felt by a superstitious mother finding a chicken sitting on
the chest of her baby, or finding a hen frantically dashing towards an open
window when the infant woke up and began crying in terror. If the infant was
found dead or grew sick and died after a time following such an event, it
would be likely that the chicken - or whatever being might have possesed it
or otherwise tranformed into the chicken - was considered to be the cause.
Not only live witches might be associated with such belief.
The Gypsies believed that the vampire was the soul of a dead person (mullo)
who departed from the buried corpse at night. This concept was shared by at
least some Serbs, Romanians, and Bulgarians - and some Serbs believed
that undead vampires could take the form of a butterfly. Gypsies in Sweden,
at least, believed that a mullo could transform into a horse or a bird. Gypsies
in the Balkans believed also that animals could become vampires after their
death and that watermelons and pumpkins could become vampiric if kept too
long.
In Montenegro, north of Albania, the majority of people are ethnically
identical to Serbs. They believed not only in the veshtiza but also that a
corpse could become a vampire if an animal jumped over it, and that the
undead type of vampires returned to their graves in the form of mice. (The
soul leaving a sleeping body in the form of a mouse is a widespread motif).
One tribe of Montenegrans believed that vampires spent a part of their time in
the form of wolves. (It was once believed in old Livonia, in what is now Latvia,
that the souls of "werewolves" left their sleeping human bodies and took
possesion of a wolf's body.)
I could give many more examples and exotic elaboration’s. Anyway, I would
not be too surprised to find that somewhere, somehow there was once belief
in vampires
