Drekavac

Region/Culture: Central and Eastern Europe
Mythos: Slavic, Balkan
Primary Type/Nature: Undead/Cursed Beings
Mythical Attributes: A screaming revenant whose nightly cry foretells a coming death, and whose very shadow brings sickness to anyone it touches.
Role in Mythos: The restless soul of an unbaptized child or a sinful dead man, condemned to wander the dark outside the village and announce death with its voice.
Relation to Humans: The drekavac frightens travellers and empties whole stretches of countryside after dark, and to hear it cry is to fear that someone nearby will soon die. An unbaptized child in this form can be given peace if a passerby baptizes it, which ends both its misery and its screaming.

A sound starts up somewhere past the last cottage, out where the graves are, and it will not stop. It is not quite a child crying, not quite a goat, not quite a cat caught under a wheel, but something with all three in it, rising and cracking and rising again across the frozen fields. The dogs set to barking. Doors get barred from the inside. In the highland villages along Zlatibor, a noise like that in the dark has only one name, and nobody wants to be the one who says it aloud.

The drekavac is the screamer, and it earns the name nightly. The word comes straight from the verb for screeching, and the creature is built around that single act. It carries other names in other valleys, drekalo and krekavac, zdrekavac and zrikavac, but the cry stays the same wherever it walks. Everything else about it shifts and blurs. The voice does not.

It comes from the dead who were never settled. Folk belief made it the soul of a sinful man, or more often the soul of a child who died before baptism, locked out of heaven and turned loose to wander. Such a child rises from its small grave at night and drifts to the edge of the churchyard, and there it waits. People crossing near the graves after dark have claimed to hear it pleading with them to baptize it, to give it a name and a rite, so that it can stop and rest. Until someone does, it screams.

What it looks like when the screaming stops long enough to see is another matter, and here the stories scatter completely. Around Gruža they describe a dappled, elongated body thin as a spindle, topped with a head much too big for it, a thing that cannot fly and is plainly the ghost of a child. Near Arilje it grows a long neck and long legs and wears the face of a cat. In eastern Serbia it walks upright on its hind legs like a dog turned man. Around Sredačka župa it hops on a single leg, its eyes burning in the dark. Elsewhere again it slips by as a dappled foal, a dog, a cat, a bird, and in the old card-lore of the whirlpools it is big-headed and long-necked, leaping out of the water at men walking home from the mill. The only thing every version shares is the voice.

The cry is not just noise. When the drekavac takes the shape of a child, its scream foretells a human death; when it comes in animal form, it warns of plague among the cattle. Worse than the sound is the shadow. If the shadow of a drekavac falls across a person, that person will sicken and die. It keeps to the night, and it is at its boldest during the twelve days between Christmas and Epiphany, the unbaptized days, and again in the first thaw of spring, the seasons when the whole demon-world was thought to stir and press close to the living.

The belief held on stubbornly, and the countryside kept producing it. The writer Branko Ćopić built a children’s tale around a pond where fishermen heard strange yells rising out of the reeds and put down their nets in fear, certain a drekavac had taken the water, until the village began to go hungry. A boy named Mita waded in to settle it and came back holding the monster: a great bittern, a marsh bird whose booming call carries for miles. The real sightings ran the same way. In 1992, near Krvavica, villagers found a carcass like nothing they knew, a dog-shaped thing with a snakelike head and hind legs they compared to a kangaroo’s, and called it a drekavac before someone identified the rotted body of a fox. In 2003, sheep were killed at Tometino Polje and some swore a drekavac had done it, though others pointed out that the attacks came in daylight, when no proper drekavac would ever walk.

That last objection is the key to it. The drekavac is a creature of the dark and cannot bear the light; daybreak ends its walking, and a bright flame will turn it back. It also cannot abide dogs, which drive it off, the same dogs whose barking first announces it. And the saddest of its enemies is mercy. The unbaptized child at the heart of so many versions is not unkillable so much as unfinished, and the cure for it is not a stake or a blade but a baptism. Name the thing, bless it, and the screaming stops. The soul goes where it was always meant to go, and the fields fall quiet.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a drekavac in Slavic mythology?

A drekavac is a screaming undead creature from South Slavic folklore, found across Serbia, Bosnia, Croatia, and the wider Balkans. Its name means “the screamer,” and it is usually understood to be the restless soul of a child who died unbaptized or of a sinful dead man, condemned to wander at night and announce death with its cry.

What does the drekavac’s scream mean?

The drekavac’s scream is an omen. When the creature appears in the form of a child, its cry foretells the death of a person, and when it appears in animal form, it warns of disease among the cattle. The sound has been compared to a wailing child, a bleating goat, and a screeching bird.

What does a drekavac look like?

There is no single agreed appearance, because each region describes it differently. The most common form is a dappled, spindle-thin body with a disproportionately large head, said to be the soul of a dead child, but others describe a long-necked cat-headed creature, a dog walking on its hind legs, or a one-legged being with glowing eyes.

How do you get rid of a drekavac?

A drekavac cannot bear bright light or dogs, and daybreak forces it to stop walking, so both fire and barking dogs were used to drive it off. When the drekavac is the soul of an unbaptized child, the lasting cure is baptism: naming and blessing the child releases its soul and ends the screaming for good.

Where is the drekavac most often reported?

The drekavac is most strongly associated with the mountain villages of Serbia, especially around Zlatibor, where inhabitants have long claimed to hear and see it. Modern incidents, such as a mysterious carcass found near Krvavica in 1992 and sheep killings at Tometino Polje in 2003, were locally blamed on the drekavac before more ordinary explanations emerged.