In the mountain villages of western Serbia, where pine forests meet alpine meadows and winter fogs roll through valleys like slow rivers, there exists a creature whose name alone carries the weight of centuries of fear. The Drekavac — literally “the screamer” — is one of South Slavic folklore’s most enduring and terrifying beings. Its origins lie in tragedy, its forms are many, and its cries still echo through modern Serbia, most notably in the small village of Tometino Polje, where ancient legend collided with unexplained livestock deaths.
I first encountered the Drekavac legend while working on translations of Serbian fairy tales in the Divčibare region. What began as academic research became something more unsettling when locals shared stories that weren’t confined to old books — stories of screams in the night, of sheep found dead at dawn, of a presence that refuses to stay buried in the past.
The Soul That Cannot Rest: Origins of the Drekavac
The Drekavac’s origins reflect the deepest anxieties of traditional Slavic society. According to folklore, these creatures arise from two primary sources: the souls of unbaptized children and the spirits of sinful men who cannot find peace in death.
The connection to unbaptized infants is particularly significant. In a time when infant mortality was high and baptism was considered essential for salvation, a child who died before receiving the sacrament occupied a terrible liminal space — neither fully human nor properly dead, neither saved nor damned. These souls, according to belief, could not rest. They rose from their small graves to wander the night, crying out in voices that were simultaneously pitiful and terrifying.
Some accounts describe these infant drekavci as seeking baptism even in death. They allegedly approach people passing cemeteries, pleading to be christened so their torment might end. The horror lies not in malevolence but in desperate, eternal need.
The other origin — sinful men who become drekavci — reflects broader Slavic beliefs about improper death and burial. Like the vampire (which the drekavac sometimes overlaps with in regional traditions), the creature represents what happens when the boundary between life and death is improperly crossed.
The Unbaptized Days: When the Veil Thins
The Drekavac is not a creature of all seasons. It emerges most powerfully during specific periods when the boundary between worlds grows thin.
The most dangerous time is the nekršteni dani — the “unbaptized days” or “unchristened days” — the twelve days of Christmas according to the Serbian Orthodox calendar. During this period, which roughly corresponds to late December through early January, demonic forces of all kinds were believed to gain unusual power. People stayed indoors after dark. Children were warned against wandering. The nights belonged to creatures like the Drekavac, the karakondžula (a demon that rides people through the night), and other spirits that emerged from the darkness.
Early spring marks another period of heightened activity, when the earth softens and graves seem less secure, when the boundary between the buried and the living grows permeable with the thaw.
A Creature of Many Forms
Unlike vampires or werewolves, which have relatively consistent descriptions across cultures, the Drekavac is remarkably shape-shifting in Serbian folklore. Its only constant feature is its horrifying scream — but what produces that scream varies dramatically by region.
In Eastern Serbia, the Drekavac appears as a humanoid canine creature that walks on its hind legs — a bipedal dog-like being that combines the familiar and the wrong into something deeply unsettling.
Near Arilje in southwestern Serbia, it takes the form of a long-necked, long-legged creature with a cat-like head — something that might stride through mists on impossibly thin limbs.
In Sredačka župa, Kosovo, the Drekavac manifests as a one-legged humanoid with glowing eyes — a hopping, lurching figure whose gaze brings misfortune.
Other descriptions include:
- A pale, elongated child with an oversized head
- A body “thin as a spindle” with limbs stretched wrong
- Something bird-like or corvine
- An undead man wrapped in a white shroud, emerging from graves
- A faintly glowing figure that drags a white cloak
This variability suggests that the Drekavac is less a single creature than a category — a name given to whatever screams in the night, whatever lurks at the edge of vision, whatever explanation communities needed for the sounds and losses that darkness brought.
What the Scream Foretells
The Drekavac’s cry is always an omen, but what it predicts depends on the form it takes.
When it appears as a child — that pale, desperate soul of the unbaptized — its scream foretells human death. Someone in the village will not survive the season. The cry is a warning and a sentence simultaneously.
When it takes animal form — the dog-like creature, the long-limbed thing — its presence predicts cattle disease. Livestock will sicken. Flocks will diminish. The pastoral economy that sustained mountain villages for centuries will suffer.
In either case, the message is the same: something has gone wrong in the order of things, and consequences are coming.
Contact with the Drekavac brings specific dangers. Its shadow falling across a person allegedly causes illness and death. Its touch is fatal. Even hearing its cry too clearly, too close, carries risk.
Protections Against the Screamer
Traditional wisdom offered several defenses against the Drekavac:
Dogs: The creature reportedly fears and avoids dogs. Keeping dogs nearby — particularly at night, particularly during the unbaptized days — offered protection. This may explain why shepherds with dogs lost fewer sheep to mysterious nighttime deaths.
Bright light: Like many creatures of darkness, the Drekavac cannot tolerate strong light. Fires, torches, and later lanterns served as wards.
Staying indoors: The simplest protection was avoidance. During the nekršteni dani, people simply didn’t venture out after dark unless absolutely necessary.
Proper burial and baptism: The ultimate prevention was ensuring that no soul had reason to become a drekavac in the first place — baptizing children quickly, burying the dead with proper rites, maintaining the rituals that kept the boundary between worlds secure.
The Tometino Polje Incident: 2003-2005
The Drekavac might have remained a creature of pure folklore — a story grandparents told, a remnant of older beliefs — had it not resurfaced in the early 2000s in a small village near the Divčibare ski resort.
Tometino Polje is a settlement in the mountains above Valjevo, western Serbia. It’s a place where traditional rural life persisted into the modern era, where shepherds still kept flocks and where the old stories never entirely faded.
Beginning in 2003, something began killing sheep.
Over the course of approximately two years, more than 200 animals were found dead. The manner of death disturbed villagers deeply: sheep were discovered with cut throats and drained blood. Not mauled and partially eaten, as wolf kills typically appear, but precisely wounded and exsanguinated.
One autumn evening, a young villager named Aleksandar Varagić witnessed the aftermath directly. Eleven sheep were killed or severely injured in a single night; those that survived the initial attack died within days despite care. Soon after, 23 acres of corn and wheat were ravaged, with signs pointing to wild boar — but the mix of natural and seemingly unnatural damage left the community shaken.
Samples were sent to Belgrade for testing. No definitive culprit was identified.
The village split in its explanations. Some blamed wolves, which had been returning to Serbian mountains. Others pointed to golden jackals, whose range was expanding. Feral dogs were another possibility — domestic animals gone wild can be more dangerous to livestock than their wild cousins.
But others reached for older explanations. The deaths fit the pattern of what a drekavac would do. The blood draining matched legends. And some villagers reported hearing screams in the night — not wolf howls, not jackal yips, but something else. Something that sounded almost human but wrong.
Not all agreed. Some pointed out that the killings happened during the day as well as night, while the Drekavac was supposed to be a nocturnal creature. The debate continued, but the deaths eventually stopped, and no definitive answer ever emerged.
A Pattern of Incidents
Tometino Polje was not an isolated case. Similar incidents dot modern Serbian history:
- 1992: Remains of a strange creature were reportedly found near Kruševac
- Late 1990s: Sightings and livestock panic occurred near Silver Lake (Srebrno jezero)
- 2008: More than 60 sheep and goats were killed near Sremska Mitrovica
- 2010: An unknown creature was shot in Poljanica near Vranje
- 2011: Eerie night cries were reported in Svojnov near Paraćin
Each incident followed a similar pattern: unexplained livestock deaths, unusual wounds, strange sounds, and communities divided between natural and supernatural explanations.
Natural Explanations: The Sounds of the Night
Wildlife biologists and skeptics offer compelling alternative explanations for Drekavac encounters.
Several animals can produce screams that sound almost human — or worse than human:
- Red fox vixens during mating season produce blood-curdling shrieks
- Golden jackals, whose range has expanded significantly in Serbia, have an eerie howl
- Roe deer in rut make barking screams
- Eagle owls and long-eared owls can produce sounds that echo strangely through mountain valleys
- Even donkeys braying at night can sound deeply unsettling to those unfamiliar with the sound
As for livestock deaths, wolves, feral dogs, and jackals are all present in rural Serbia. The “blood draining” often attributed to supernatural predators typically has mundane explanations: blood pools and coagulates internally after death, and scavengers accessing carcasses may create wounds that appear ritualistic but are simply feeding behavior.
Yet these explanations, however rational, don’t fully satisfy everyone who has spent a night in a Serbian mountain village and heard something scream in the darkness.
My Own Night in Tometino Polje
I spent a night in the Divčibare area while researching Serbian fairy tales. The experience left an impression I cannot fully rationalize.
Around midnight, a sound rose from the forest below the village — a cry that I initially dismissed as a donkey. But locals assured me there were no donkeys in the area. Fox? Possibly. Jackal? Perhaps. Owl? Maybe.
Or perhaps something older, something that has screamed through these mountains for centuries, something that carries the weight of unbaptized souls and ancient fears.
I cannot say what I heard. I can only say that afterward, I understood why the Drekavac legends persist. Some sounds carry more than noise. Some nights feel less safe than others. And some stories survive because they speak to something true — if not literally, then emotionally, psychologically, spiritually.
The Drekavac endures because death endures, because loss endures, because the darkness still comes every night and we still don’t fully control what moves through it.
The Legend Lives
The Drekavac appears in modern Serbian culture as well. Writer Branko Ćopić featured the creature in his short story “Brave Mita and the Drekavac from the Swamp,” where the mystery resolves as a misidentified great bittern — a bird whose booming call can indeed sound otherworldly. The story suggests that perhaps all drekavci have natural explanations.
Perhaps they do. Perhaps every scream has a throat, every death has a predator, every fear has a rational source.
But in the mountain villages of Serbia, where fog still rolls through valleys and old ways haven’t entirely faded, the Drekavac remains more than a story. It’s a warning: baptize your children, bury your dead properly, keep your dogs close, and when the unbaptized days come, stay inside after dark.
Because something still screams in the Serbian night. And whether it’s a fox, a jackal, an owl, or something else entirely — something born from tragedy and sustained by centuries of belief — the sound still carries power.
The Drekavac endures because we need it to. Every culture needs a name for what screams in the darkness.
