Was the troubled spirit of the old man causing the unseasonable rain from his grave?
A story from the Iacobeni Commune, Suceava County, Bukovina during the Austrian Rule (1775-1917). Many thanks to The Bukovina Society of the Americas (https://bukovinasociety.org/) for their rich newsletters. We have embellished this story which was included in the Newsletter Volume 9, Number 3 from September 1999 under the section titled “The Zipster Settlement of Jakoeni”. 1
The Story
In a village there lived an old man whom the peasants believed could control the weather. He died and was buried.
When the hay-cutting season arrived there was no sunshine and unseasonable rain had been falling for weeks. The harvest was endangered. Most years that season was sunny, dry and perfect for cutting and stacking hay. Some peasants thought that this spell of weather couldn’t just be bad luck.
Romanian folklore made some men in the village suspicious that the old rainmaker was causing the rain from his grave. If that was true, they knew just what to do to thwart it.
Secretly under the cover of night and as the rain fell, four men crept into the cemetery with shovels. Arriving unseen at the grave of the rainmaker they began to dig through the wet soil. They shovelled away the earth until they found the body of the old man. They opened the old man’s toothless mouth, put a clove of garlic in it and then replaced him lying face down in his grave and reburied him. The men returned to their homes and hoped that having performed the ritual would be enough to stop the rain.
As if by magic the rain stopped that morning and there were clear skies for almost three full weeks. The harvest of the hay was able to be completed!
With this proof of their success, the perpetrators must have decided that it was safe to tell the story about what they had done. Word of their deed spread and it was eventually heard by the local Austrian police. The four men were arrested and they were reprimanded by the court for desecration of a grave.
The Folklore
Based on Romanian folklore, burying a body face down with garlic in its mouth was a ritualistic precaution taken to prevent the deceased from returning as a strigoi (a troubled spirit or vampire).2
In Romanian superstition, garlic (Romanian: usturoi) is considered an all-purpose magical item that wards off evil. Placing garlic in the mouth of a body was believed to block the spirit from being able to inhabit the body and reanimate it or to stop the spirit from leaving the body to harm the living.
It was believed that a reanimated corpse facing downward would dig into the earth rather than upward toward the surface. The more it dug, the deeper it would go, effectively trapping itself. It was a way to confuse the undead, ensuring they could not physically locate the path back to the world of the living.
References
- Newsletter (Vol. 9, No. 3 – Sptember 1999) -The Zipster Settlement of Jakoeni, The Bukovina Society of the Americas, https://bukovinasociety.org/newsletters/Buko-NL-1999-3-Sep.html, Viewed Jan 1, 2026 ↩︎
- Strigoi, Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strigoi, Viewed Jan 1, 2026 ↩︎
