The Strix was an ominous bird of ill omen — a screech-owl or vampiric night-bird that fed on the blood and flesh of the young, swooping into nurseries by night to prey on infants in their cradles. It is one of the most ancient ancestors of the vampire and the witch, and its name echoes through European languages of the supernatural to this day.
The Bird of Ill Omen
The Strix (plural striges) was a nocturnal bird associated with the night, with death, and with dark magic. To the Greeks and especially the Romans, its cry was a terrible omen, and its very appearance foretold disaster. It was no ordinary owl: it was a creature of dread, a feathered horror that haunted the dark hours.
The Devourer of Infants
The Strix's most chilling habit was its appetite for the young. The Roman poet Ovid describes striges as greedy night-birds with grey feathers, hooked beaks, and grasping talons, that flew by night into houses where infants lay unguarded, and tore at the babies' flesh and drank their blood, leaving the children pale and dying. Parents hung protective charms (branches of whitethorn, offerings to the goddess Carna) at the windows to ward the striges away. The Strix was the embodiment of every parent's deepest night-terror: the unseen thing that comes for the child in the dark.
The Witch-Bird
Over time, the Strix blurred into something even more sinister: the belief that certain old women — witches — could transform themselves into these blood-drinking night-birds, or were striges in disguise. The line between the monstrous bird and the human witch dissolved, and the Strix became one of the key ancestors of both the European witch and the vampire. Indeed, its name lies at the very root of the word for “witch” or “vampire” in many languages — the Romanian strigoi, the Italian strega, the Albanian shtriga all descend from the Latin strix.
The Root of the Vampire
The Strix endures, mostly unrecognised, as one of the oldest and most influential supernatural creatures in the Western tradition. Every blood-drinking witch, every night-flying vampire, every horror that preys on the innocent in the dark, traces part of its lineage back to this ancient screech-owl of ill omen — the bird whose name still hides inside the words we use for the creatures of the night.
It came by night for the children in their cradles — and its name lives on, hidden, inside our every word for witch and vampire.