Slavic folklore features a female home spirit named Kikimora, who can be either helpful or evil depending on the owner’s actions. A woman, sometimes with a chicken’s beak or duckbill, is described as a spirit in her stories, and she is either helpful or harmful, depending on the version you read.
Even if a kikimora has a dog’s snout or another animal feature, she will always appear female, whether an elderly lady, a young girl or a maid. These ghosts were blamed for domestic disturbances and were said to have acted out because the householders had failed to maintain the place clean or brought negative energy into the home via their actions. The Kikimora, married to the male family spirit recognized as a domovoi, is generally reasonable. Still, the Kikimora from the everglades, sometimes affiliated with the entity Leshy, is evil and is linked to demonic activity as well as the Slavic witch Baba Yaga because she abducts children and unwitting adults who wander into the wild and also enters homes thru the keyhole to make trouble.
If the Kikimora like how the house is kept, they will pitch inside and help out, causing problems only when humans are too lazy to do things correctly. Women were encouraged to be conscientious housekeepers because of the notion that the best way to get rid of a kikimora was to make the house so clean that she became bored and left. Similarly, youngsters were taught that a commotion attracts Kikimora at night and that they should be calm and go to sleep when told, or the Kikimora would steal their air, give them awful dreams, or take them away. The figure emerged sometime before the 8th to 13th century when Christianity supplanted paganism in the Slavic lands. The Kikimora remained a reality in Slavic families long after Christianity’s acceptance and spread, which devalued as well as dismissed many Slavic paranormal entities because the belief helped keep order and discipline as well as explained an otherwise unexplainable, such as night terrors, lost belongings, the lives lost of women and children, and unusual noises or occurrences.
The Russian name kuku’mopa, which is up for question, may have inspired the English word Kikimora—possibly derived from the Finnish term for “scarecrow” or even the Slavic more again for dead, as suggested by author Rosa Angela. Others have proposed an association with words that mean Devil, death, crookedness, nightmares, tears, or wailing. Among the Kikimora’s many nocturnal activities was the belief that it caused sleep paralysis, a condition in which an individual is awake but immobile; the Kikimora was assumed to be seated on the chest of the victim throughout this time, trying to prevent them from even weeping out and brutalizing them with feelings of dying.
The god of the sky, fire, hearth, or smithing of pre-Christian Slavic religion, Svarog, may have inspired the Kikimora. In this story, Svarog makes heaven a perfect place for all the lovely beings around him, but some get discontented with their ideal home and start demanding change. The ghosts hatch a plot to topple Svarog, but the god-king is aware of their scheme long before it is implemented. He seizes the plotters and hurls them from on high, where they will remain until he says otherwise. They float from the sky and get stuck in people’s fireplace chimneys. After realizing their error, they make a pact to watch over the homeowners by maintaining a steady fire, protecting the family from harm, and keeping the home’s positive energy flowing.
Many aspects of the ancient Slavic religion were lost as Christianity replaced or suppressed them. Since neither the Kikimora nor this story has any verifiable historical roots in Slavic culture, any suggested link is purely speculative. While the Kikimora is known for its unpredictability when insulted, the home spirits in this tale are not. Thus, there may be no link. However, the Kikimora is nearly always linked with the hearth and is supposed to live beneath the stove. Therefore, it is probable that the idea of the peculiarly Slavic household ghost arose or was inspired by this narrative.
However, according to folklore, their beginnings are not related to the fireplace but rather the terrible loss of a baby or small child, a woman, or a woman lured by a demon. There isn’t just one story about how they came to be; instead, several different things are credited with giving them existence. Death before baptism was also supposed to transform an infant into a kikimora, as with stillborn children and miscarriages. Like matriarchs who grew accustomed to watching over the household and refused to depart upon death, the spirit of a woman who died by suicide was supposed to become a kikimora. Children whose parents had cursed them were also considered prime candidates. The Devil would focus on the child and work his influence until his soul faded into the Kikimora.
Girls were especially vulnerable because the spirit was thought to be female, but it appears that young boys were also affected. It was believed that young women of marrying age were particularly vulnerable to the sinister magic of handsome young men who were demons who seduced people with expensive gifts or, more commonly, left items along trails the woman would indeed walk, so if she brought each home, she granted the devil permission to roam the house. The demon left after impregnating the woman, and the gifts burned to ashes; the baby would be born with malformed, pointy ears and grow up to be a kikimora. After a kikimora infant is switched with a mortal infant, its parents nurture the child as theirs until they begin to exhibit strange behaviour that betrays the child’s actual nature as a kikimora. Aveela gives the example of parents who decide against teaching their child how to read early in his age category out of fear that he will be labelled a kikimora by his peers.
The Kikimora is typically shown as a shrivelled, wrinkled older woman in a headscarf, but she can take on several appearances. She can be a chicken-beaked woman or any other domestic animal, a lovely young woman, a recently deceased relative, or a goat-like figure with luminous eyes and horns. In other accounts, she plays a role in the genesis of witchcraft in the form of the Kikimora.
Some people associate the Kikimora with the notorious witch Baba Yaga, who is said to have hunted for infants to eat by flying through the sky on a mortar powered by a pestle. A kikimora was a child predator with supernatural abilities similar to Baba Yaga’s. This element of the Kikimora seems to only apply to one of the two types of Kikimora, and it seems at variance with her position as a benign guardian and assistant in the home. Like most supernatural beings, the Kikimora’s role was to promote upholding cultural norms. Things were believed that a kikimora would move into a house if the wife did not keep it clean, the husband was harsh and sluggish, and the children were not adequately disciplined. Once inside, as was previously mentioned, the only way to dispose of them was to treat them with dignity, as if they belonged there, and leave them tokens of appreciation and food.
The spirits also explained sad events, such as losing a child, a young woman, an expecting mother, or a healthy matriarch. The evil Kikimora of a swamp was blamed for these occurrences because they could just as readily steal a child from loving parents as they could from parents who cursed their child. They were also blamed for everyday frustrations like misplacing everyday items.