Sometimes, he had to flee, barely alive at night.
It crawled on all fours, and all naked it was;
it interfered and moaned; it thrashed and lifted the bed
until he’d crawled out of the room.
When he’d lay patiently, with sacred objects under its arm…
the widow would poke him, saying:
‘Go, you fool, to the pigsty at least; the dead man won’t put up with you’.
This jealous ‘dead man’ is eventually chased away thanks to the advice of a pilgrim beggar (which suggests that he might, in fact, have been the warm widow’s very much alive lover). A different way of dealing with the strzygoń-husband was described by Stefania Ulanowska in her ethnographic series Z Górskiego Zacisza (From a Mountain Retreat, 1886), published in the daily Czas (Time). The story begins in a fairly typical way: the deceased husband comes at night and works on the farm. The couple nonchalantly flaunt their posthumous relationship; the woman ‘no longer hid it and had two children with him during this time; the children grew up perfectly well; today, the older boy already herds cows and the girl watches over the geese’, but eventually she grew tired of her relationship with the deceased, and, in order to end it, she struck a blow to the most sensitive part of his dead heart:
In the evening, at the time when the strzygoń would usually arrive, the woman unbraided her hair – since married women in the highlands do not have their plaits cut as they do in the Kraków region – and began to comb her hair. The man came in and asked her what she was doing. And she said that she wanted to braid her hair in the evening because she was going to wed such and such a farmhand the following morning. The strzygoń roared in a terrible voice that made the windowpanes rattle; he angrily stormed out of the cottage and never appeared again.