Old Woman of Suljkovci

In the village of Suljkovci, on the Slavonian plain a few kilometers south of Pleternica, an old woman died in the autumn of 1873. The story belongs to her household, but Friedrich S. Krauss happened to know the family. His mother, Slavonian by birth, returned to her village often. On 27 December 1886 she sat with Mato Nikolčić of Pleternica, who had witnessed what the Suljkovci household lived through. He told her, and she told her son, who wrote it down twenty-two years later.

The 1873 Case

The old woman was buried in the autumn of 1873. On the second evening after the burial she came home and behaved badly. The Croatian word Nikolčić used was neprilika, a noun that covers everything from a nuisance to a calamity. She threw stones against the door, kicked dust around the room and raged so terrifyingly that the householder could no longer sleep alone with his wife and children. He had to invite eight to ten men to spend each night with him. The simple economic detail Nikolčić remembered, and that survived through Krauss’s mother into print, was the cost of lighting the rooms for that many guests every evening.

The men did no good. The revenant kept throwing stones, broke one man’s skull, badly wounded another’s hand, and the persecution lasted approximately ten nights before it stopped.

“Now there is nothing more to be heard of it,” Nikolčić finished. The house remained. The dead did not come back a second time. The unanswered question, the one Krauss did not ask and Nikolčić did not volunteer, was what had broken the cycle. It might have been seven masses said in time. It might have been simple exhaustion of whatever rage the dead woman carried out of her grave. The peasant who had lived through ten nights of stone-throwing did not seem to need a theological explanation.

The Second Case

Some years later, perhaps in the late 1880s, a second old woman of Suljkovci died and returned. The witness this time was Imro Koprivčević, the professional ghost-banner of Pleternica, whom Krauss interviewed in person. Koprivčević lived off his exorcism fees and had given up his earlier trade of mending peasant shoes. The case is in his own words.

She came back the day after her burial, while the sun was still bright in the sky. She began throwing stones at once, then climbed onto the loft and threw maize cobs and beans down through the floorboards into the room where her family sat. She had a son-in-law and a daughter. The neighbors persuaded the daughter to ask her mother what she was looking for. The daughter went up, trembling in every limb, and her mother threw stones at her without answering.

The son-in-law she left strictly alone.

One of the men present cursed God in obscene Slavonian terms. Jebem ti boga is the phrase Koprivčević repeated to Krauss without softening it. The dead woman tore a stone out of the wall and broke the curser’s skull with it. Blood ran from his head at once.

The kitchen door was bolted on the inside. The dead woman threw red-hot bricks through it into the room where the household sat.

Koprivčević arrived on the seventh night and began to zaklinjat, to pronounce the formal Croatian exorcism. The dead woman threw one more stone at the door. Then she did not return.

What the Two Cases Have in Common

Both Suljkovci dead are old women. Both come home within forty-eight hours of burial. Both throw stones, neither speaks, and neither targets a single relative or even a single house. They throw stones at whoever is in the room. Both injure men. Neither shows the conventional vampire signature, the puncture wound on the throat, the morning-after tiredness, the blood. The Suljkovci dead behave like an angry presence with arms strong enough to dislodge field-stones from a wall and aim them.

The Pleternica diocese already had a working theology of the restless dead by 1873. In Bjeleševci a man named Savo had returned a few years earlier as a tiger-shaped revenant who crawled out of the cemetery through a great hole and drove the village to flight. The Suljkovci pattern is gentler in shape, gentler being a relative term, with no tiger, no emigration, and only stones thrown at every man in the room.

Krauss’s collected restless-dead cases from this corner of Slavonia all share one feature. The dead person, the witness and the date are all named, with no folkloric haze. Even the obscene curse is preserved in the original.

Why the Son-in-Law

The single detail in the second case Krauss flagged as worth attention was the son-in-law. The dead woman’s daughter she pelted with stones the moment a question was asked. The son-in-law, the man who had married into her household, the man who would inherit, she left untouched.

A village in 1888 would have read this as resolved property and resolved succession. The dead woman had no quarrel with the man who would carry her name forward. Her quarrel was with her own daughter, with the man who cursed God in her presence, and with the locked kitchen door that tried to keep her out.

Krauss, who had a Vienna positivist’s distaste for sentimental folk-readings, did not propose a meaning. He recorded the case with the son-in-law detail intact and let it sit there.

Koprivčević and the Zaklinjat

The exorcist who finally stopped the second old woman was the same Imro Koprivčević who appears across half a dozen Pleternica revenant cases in Krauss’s chapter. He was a paid professional. Krauss notes, without disapproval, that he had supported his family for years on the Geisterbann-Geld alone.

His method was the zaklinjat, a formal verbal exorcism in Croatian that Krauss did not preserve in full. Other Pleternica cases in the same chapter show Koprivčević calling a spirit out of a house in the same way he might call a stray horse, by name and command. Stones, beans, hot bricks, cock-feathers, his presence ended every documented case after one or two appearances.

The Suljkovci stone-thrower threw a final stone at the door as he began to speak. Then she stopped.

A Second Witness, the Same Spring

The Suljkovci pages are part of a wider Pleternica cluster Krauss recorded between his Christmas 1886 visit and the autumn of 1888. Mato Nikolčić, Manda Šuperina, Margita Josipović and Imro Koprivčević all spoke through Krauss’s mother on dated visits to specific Pleternica houses. The two Suljkovci old women belong to the same testimonial network as the spinning-room transformations, the Bilač host-stealer, and the Trapari werewolf-woman.

This is what Krauss’s Slavische Volksforschungen offered Western Europe in 1908 that no other source did: not myth, not summary, not romantic reconstruction, but several hundred named informants describing what they had seen in their own villages within the previous twenty years. The Suljkovci stone-thrower of 1873 is a single bright fragment of that record.

Sources

Bibliography. The same list is held in the article’s frontmatter for the citation tools that read it programmatically.

• Friedrich S. Krauss, Slavische Volksforschungen (Wilhelm Heims, Leipzig, 1908), pp. 250-252
• Mato Nikolčić of Pleternica, oral testimony to Krauss’s mother, 27 December 1886 (the 1873 case)
• Imro Koprivčević of Pleternica, professional exorcist, oral testimony (the second case)