Bestiary · Slavic · Disease demon
Plague Maiden
Also known as: Plague Maidens, plague woman, Morovaya Dzeva
The plague in the form of a woman, who walks through a village waving a red kerchief through windows and doors and so spreads death.
In Lithuania and Belarus any great epidemic was imagined as the Plague Maiden. She comes into a village, goes round the houses, puts her hand through a window or a door and waves a red kerchief, and everyone in the house dies. In most Slavic and Lithuanian lands the pestilence is a woman who has herself carried from village to village on a man's shoulders; one peasant saw her as a huge woman in white, with dishevelled hair, fleeing from a pack of dogs. The Bulgarians call her chuma-samodiva, linking her with the cloud maidens. People ploughed a furrow round the village at night to keep her out. Afanasyev sees in her a storm-cloud maiden whose arrows are the lightning.