Strigoi

In Romanian mythology, strigoi (English: striga, poltergeist) are the troubled spirits of the dead rising from the grave. Some strigoi can be living people with certain magical properties. Some of the properties of the strigoi include: the ability to transform into an animal, invisibility, and the propensity to drain the vitality of victims via blood loss. Strigoi are also known as vampires.

The word is generally thought to originate in the Ancient Greco-Roman concept of the strix (Late Latin , Greek στρίγξ), which denoted either a witch or a type of ill-omened nocturnal flying creature or a hybrid of the two that was said to crave human flesh and blood, particularly of infants.

The Croatian Jure Grando, who died in 1656, is often considered the first alleged vampire whose existence is documented. In the earliest published description of the Grando case (in German), from Valvasor's The Glory of the Duchy of Carniola (1689), the local term was given as strigon.

Dimitrie Cantemir mentions the striga as being a Moldavian and especially Transylvanian belief in his (1714–1716), though his version corresponds more closely to the classical notion of a witch or sorceress than a blood-drinking vampire and includes a very typical description of dunking as a test for witchcraft.

Strigoiulu (the Strigoi) was the name of a Romanian-language satirical magazine published briefly in 1862 in Pest.

The modern form, strigoi, is cited in an 1865 article on Transylvanian folklore by Wilhelm Schmidt, who describes them as plaguing infants. He reports a tradition in which, upon the birth of a child, one tosses a stone behind oneself and exclaims "this into the mouth of the strigoi!"

In 1909, Franz Hartmann mentions in his book An Authenticated Vampire Story that peasant children from a village in the Carpathian Mountains started to die mysteriously. The villagers began to suspect a recently deceased count was a vampire, dwelling in his old fortress. Frightened villagers burned the castle to stop the deaths.

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