female demon of Slavic folklore, a vampire-like creature
Strzyga
The strzyga is a female demon of Slavic folklore, especially Polish and Silesian, similar to a vampire. Its name stems from the Latin strix, the owl-like creature of Greek and Roman myth, and it remained a living presence in rural Polish folklore into the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
The myth
Popular belief held that some people were born with two hearts, two souls and two rows of teeth. When they died, only one soul departed; the other brought the corpse back to life as a strzyga that preyed on the living. Stillborn or unbaptized infants could also become strzygi if proper precautions were neglected.
At night these creatures were said to take the form of an owl and attack travellers and anyone who wandered into the woods after midnight, sucking their blood and devouring their insides. Some traditions held the opposite: that strzygi did not harm people but foretold an imminent death, much like the Irish banshee.
Legacy
Andrzej Sapkowski features a strzyga in The Last Wish, the first book of the Witcher saga, where a girl born of an incestuous union is cursed into one. Władysław Reymont also mentions them in The Peasants, the novel for which he won the Nobel Prize.