Supernatural the book of monsters, demons, spirits and ghouls

Shtriga

Folklore abounds with tales of creatures that were once human, but became otherwise due to some kind of magic or supernatural phenomenon. The wendigo is one, the loup-garou is another. And then there's the shtriga. You can go all the way back to the ancients and find records of something they called the strix, which they described as a kind of creature that as punishment for cannibalism became deformed-again like the wendigo-and turned into a kind of night-flyer perceived by the Romans as, in the words of Antoninus Liberalis, "a harbinger of war and civil strife to men." Hopefully by now you're getting the picture that people eating people is never a good move.

By the Middle Ages, the shtriga was described as a witch, but everything was described as a witch in the Middle Ages. Other descriptions of it link it with the Romanian strigoi, which is a kind of vampire. That's not quite accurate, either. Our take on it is that the shtriga is a revenant, a walking undead in a body that should have died a long time ago. It may not technically be dead, but it feeds on the spiritus vitae, draining the life force of its victims. That's what keeps it going. Usually it attacks children, working its way through all of the siblings in a family before moving on to the next.

The shtriga is one of the few monsters that it took us Winchesters two full hunts to bring down, because the first time we met it, we were little kids. That was in Fort Douglas, Wisconsin. While Dad was hunting it, the shtriga came after us-and we think he knew something was going to happen, because right when it started to get down to business, there he came busting through the door with guns blazing. He hit it, but didn't kill it, so that's why we ended up in Fitchburg, just down the road from Fort Douglas, seventeen years later.

We finished the job. The shtriga is vulnerable only when it's feeding, and then only to consecrated cold iron. We tracked it, waited until we knew which kid it was going after next, and then put it down.

You'd think there would have been something in Dad's journal about the shtriga, but there isn't, and we're guessing it's because Dad knew we'd run across it again, and he knew Dean would remember. No sense rubbing his face in it. Dean's always blamed himself for not drawing down on it then, but he was ten. There are some things ten-year-olds shouldn't have to do it. Facing down a thousand-year-old Albanian revenant is one of them.