The Drekavac: The Screaming Creature of Balkan Nights
Its name is its biography: drekavac , from the Serbian verb drečati — to scream, to screech — the Screamer, the Shrieker, one of the most persistent creatures of South Slavic folklore, known across Serbia, Bosnia, Montenegro, and into Croatia under a cloud of local names ( drekalo , krekavac , zdrekavac , and more). Ask the tradition what it looks like and the answers scatter: a gaunt long-legged thing like a starved dog or fawn; a bird-shaped horror; a child-thing with an enormous head on spindly limbs, or a creature woven of shadow with glowing eyes; some villages say it drags a thin body on disproportionate legs, others that it is small enough to sit on a grave. Ask what it sounds like, and the tradition speaks with one voice: a scream in the night that is like nothing living — like a child in mortal agony, like a beast being slaughtered, a cry so dreadful, so out of scale with the dark fields it crosses, that entire villages have barred their doors against a sound. For the dreka...