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Female house spirit who can be helpful or harmful. A good Kikimora helps with housework; an evil one causes nightmares and tangles threads. She is wife of the Domovoi in some traditions.
The Kikimora is a female household spirit of Slavic folklore, cousin to the male Domovoi. While the Domovoi guards the home and family, the Kikimora concerns herself with domestic work—particularly spinning and weaving. She can be either a blessing or a curse, depending on how she came to inhabit a home.
There are two distinct kinds of Kikimora. The "good" Kikimora is the spirit of a woman who died in the home or a benevolent ancestor. She helps with housework at night, finishing spinning left undone and watching over sleeping children. The "bad" Kikimora enters homes through curses or malicious magic, bringing chaos and misfortune.
The malevolent Kikimora is a creature of nightmare. She sits on the chests of sleeping people, causing suffocating dreams—what we might call sleep paralysis. She tangles threads, breaks dishes, and torments livestock. Children hear her scratching in the walls. Her presence indicates something is deeply wrong with the household.
The Kikimora is rarely seen clearly. Glimpses reveal a small, thin woman—sometimes ancient and wizened, sometimes appearing as a young girl with disheveled hair. She lives behind the stove or in the cellar. At night, she creeps out to spin by moonlight. The sound of her spinning wheel when no one is there is an omen—good if the spinning is steady, ill if it is erratic.
Banishing a malevolent Kikimora requires ritual purification. The home must be thoroughly cleaned, blessed with sacred herbs like wormwood and fern, and all spinning implements must be ritually broken or removed. If a Kikimora was placed by a curse—perhaps by a builder who hid a puppet in the walls—that object must be found and destroyed.
In The Witcher, the Kikimora appears as a massive insectoid monster dwelling in swamps—quite different from the traditional house spirit. This interpretation draws on the creature's more sinister aspects and the association of "kikimora" with ugly, frightening beings in some regional dialects. The game's Kikimora Queen is one of the most memorable monster encounters.
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