Lux Esoterica (Nifiluz)

Poland's native vampire is built on a theory of the soul, and the theory is the terror. The strzyga (masculine strzygoń )—her name descends, through the Balkans and old Rome, from the strix , the shrieking night-owl of classical witch-lore that fed on the flesh of the young—is, in the Polish tellings, a person born with two souls : a doubling the villages diagnosed at birth or after by its signs— two hearts , a double row of teeth (the second row often discovered only at death), the early teeth, the caul, the unusual and unsettling infancies. Such a child, baptized once, had one soul christened and one left pagan ; and when the person died—often young, for the double-natured were held marked for early graves—only the christened soul departed. The second soul stayed in the body —and rose with it: the strzyga is the corpse animated by its own unbaptized remainder, and its career follows the appetite of its owl-ancestress: it leaves the grave at night—sometimes as a ruffled, huge-e...