Moroi

Accounts vary by locality. In Romanian folkloric taxonomy the moroi belongs to a family of revenant and witchlike beings including strigoi, pricolici and bosorcoi. Some traditions describe moroi as spirits of the dead that return from graves; other strands identify them with infants who died before baptism or as the offspring of supernatural unions. The collector Wlislocki recorded a version in which a woman impregnated by a nosferat would bear an extremely ugly, hairy child that would quickly become a moroi. Etymological commentary (Romanian Academy; Éva Pócs) links the word to Old Slavonic mora, a term for a nightmare‑causing spirit, which situates the moroi in a broader Indo‑European set of nocturnal, oppressive beings rather than a single fixed origin.

Descriptions are inconsistent across sources, reflecting local variation. One attested motif (Wlislocki) depicts the moroi as an ugly, thickly haired infantlike body born from a supernatural impregnation; other accounts simply treat moroi as phantomlike or revenant figures without a single canonical form. The feminine form moroaică and plural moroaice are recorded, and grammatical formation with the -oi suffix groups it morphologically with other augmented/pejorative revenant terms such as strigoi and bosorcoi.

Sources attribute nocturnal emergences and energetic predation to moroi: in some versions they are "phantoms of a dead person which leave the grave to draw energy from the living," linking them to vampiric or ghostly feeding on the living. Genealogical explanations (offspring of two strigoi or of a nosferat) frame moroi as inheritors of malefic tendencies. They are also associated with unbaptized infants whose unsettled deaths place them at the birth/death liminal zone. In Hungarian regional usage morák/norák function as a bogeyman — a socialized threat invoked to frighten children — indicating a cultural behavioral role as much as an account of supernatural power.