Drekavac

Folklore treats the drekavac not as a single fixed species but as a class of restless dead or revenant phenomena. Sources commonly link its origin to improperly handled deaths: souls of sinful adults, of those who died in irregular circumstances, and especially unbaptised children. In some tales the soul of an unbaptised child rises from its grave and haunts the living until properly baptised; other accounts give origins as undead men, ghosts of soldiers or other disturbed dead.

Descriptions vary widely by locality. Reported forms include an undead man rising from a grave, an unbaptised child's spindly corpse with a large head, a humanoid canine walking on hind legs (Eastern Serbia), ghostly soldiers (Maglaj), vampire-like revenants (Kozarska Dubica), a long-necked long-legged creature with a cat-like head (Arilje), a one-legged humanoid with glowing eyes (Sredačka župa), and animal apparitions such as dappled foals, dogs, cats, or birds (Prijepolje, Lešak, Dragačevo). A localized Banovići report describes an ape-like form with long limbs and a dog-like elongated head. Common motifs across variants are night appearance, unsettling proportions (elongated neck/body, large head), and association with graves or dead children.

Core traditional attributes are vocal: loud, terrifying screeching at night and entreaty when in child form (begging for baptism). The drekavac functions as an omen—child-forms are said to predict human death while animal-forms predict cattle disease—and is believed to cause illness if its shadow falls on a person. It is said to avoid dogs and bright light. Modern role-playing and cryptid sources add mechanics such as fog transformation and disease‑carrier properties, but these are adaptations of folkloric motifs rather than claims from traditional sources.