Everyone has heard of vampires, but few know about upiórs, strzygas, strzygońs, and wieszczys. Yet sources from Poland and the former Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth offer a wealth of fascinating material to discover Slavic beliefs in the living dead, which later became a universal myth known the world over. This book contains a small but representative selection of 80 texts spanning almost 500 years, ranging from scholarly works and religious treatises to official documents, ethnographic essays, and press reports on true events.

It is commonly believed that upiórs are bodies of the dead that have been in some way revived, so to speak. Without awaiting the general resurrection, they rise prematurely from their coffins and leave their graves to raid houses, strangling whomsoever they can, and, if unable to defeat someone, will wrestle with them, murder them, suck their blood, or climb onto altars, bleed on them, break candles, and commit numerous other indecencies and murders.

Jan Bohomolec, The Devil in His True Form, 1772.

On 18 March this year, at the parish cemetery in Bodzentyn, the head watchman noticed that the grave of a peasant woman, Szafrańcowa from Sieradowice, who had died suddenly on 22 February last year, had been dug up. The local mayor conducted an investigation and concluded that Szafrańcowa had apparently visited the house of her husband, Jan Szafraniec, after her death, terrorising him, their children, and even the neighbours. Wishing to rid himself of these unpleasant visitations, Szafraniec went to the cemetery and, assisted by gravedigger Walenty Czekaj, dug up the coffin, turned her corpse face downward inside it, and tied her hands. Despite these precautions, the visitations continued. Furious, Szafraniec went back to the cemetery, opened the coffin again, chopped off his late wife’s head, and buried it elsewhere. Both men who dug up the grave were put on trial.

Press report from 1869.

Łukasz Kozak is mediaevalist, technology and media expert. He has worked with the National Library of Poland, the University of Warsaw and other cultural and research institutes on the fields of innovation and new media. He is also the co-curator of the New Epiphanies early music festival and the author of numerous articles devoted to mediaeval and early modern culture.