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Teresa Prieto The Witch of Jove and Spain’s First Vampire Case

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Teresa Prieto, known as the Witch of Jove, has captivated the imaginations of many through the centuries as the first recorded case of a vampire in Spain that reached the court. What was she? A witch? A vampire? Or was she one of many innocent women accused of something supernatural.

Long before the vampire became a figure of Gothic fiction, the fear of blood drinking witches already haunted the villages of medieval Spain. One of the earliest recorded cases emerged in the late fifteenth century in the coastal settlements around Gijón in Asturias. There, a woman named Teresa Prieto became the center of one of the strangest accusations in Spanish history. To her neighbors she was not simply a witch. She was believed to be a creature that slipped into homes at night and drank the blood of children.

Read More: Check out all ghostly stories and legends from Spain

The case of Teresa Prieto, later known as “the Witch of Jove” or “the Vampire of Xove,” sits at the crossroads between folklore and historical reality. It reveals how medieval fears of night demons, witchcraft, and vampirism could merge into a single terrifying accusation.

Gijón City: It is the largest city and municipality by population in the autonomous community of Asturias. This is also where the first recorded vampire court case in Spain happened.

Night Visitor of the Village

In the late 1400s the area of Jove, today called Xove, was not the modern district of Gijón known today. It consisted of small scattered villages connected by narrow paths and surrounded by forests and fields. Oral traditions and superstition shaped daily life. Local healers lived on the margins of society, gathering herbs from the woods to make remedies and potions.

The Asturian Guaxa: The Guaxa is said to be an old and thin woman-like entity, ugly and covered in warts. She is said to have a single sharp tooth she stalks her prey with. She sneaks into people’s homes in the middle of the night and feeds on them with her one sharp tooth. Children are preferred, but also young women and handsome men are in danger. She doesn’t kill them at once, nor does she transform her victims to one of her own. She slowly kills them, draining their life, bit by bit. In Asturia, people can say “It looks like the Guaxa has swallowed you,” when people have lost a lot of weight, as the Guaxa slowly over time drained people’s lives. Although this is a very Asturian legend, the case of Teresa Prieto was called a Strix or Estrige.

Within this environment strange rumors began to circulate.

Parents claimed that something entered their homes during the night. The intruder moved silently while families slept and approached the beds of children. When morning came, some children were found dead. According to the stories told by villagers, the bodies bore two small marks on the neck, signs that their blood had been sucked during the night.

Fear quickly turned toward a human suspect. The villagers accused Teresa Prieto.

The Shadow of the Strix

The accusations against Prieto did not arise in isolation. At the end of the fifteenth century European folklore still carried strong beliefs in striges or strigias, monstrous female beings said to prey on infants. These creatures were described as winged women with the claws and beaks of birds of prey who drank the blood of children to use in magical brews.

Such beliefs had deep roots in classical mythology and medieval superstition. The Roman strix and the Greek lamia were both imagined as female night predators who attacked infants. In medieval Europe these creatures slowly merged with the idea of witches. A woman accused of sorcery could easily be accused of vampiric acts as well.

The Strix: The strix (plural striges or strixes), in the mythology of classical antiquity, was a bird of ill omen, the product of metamorphosis, that fed on human flesh and blood. It also referred to witches and related malevolent folkloric beings. The strix is described as a large-headed bird with transfixed eyes, rapacious beak, greyish white wings. In Romanian, strigăt means “scream” and strigoaică is the name of the Romanian feminine vampire while strigoi is the Romanian male vampire. Albanian folklore tells of the shtriga, and Slavic of the strzyga/stryha.

In the isolated communities of Asturias, the old legends were still alive. When children died unexpectedly, the ancient explanation returned. A blood drinking witch must be responsible.

Accusation and Trial

Around 1480, Teresa Prieto was formally denounced by her neighbors. She was accused of being a striga, a night witch who entered homes and drained the blood of children. The case reached the attention of the Spanish Inquisition, which opened proceedings against her.

The accusations described her as a woman who wandered through villages at night and entered houses secretly, harming Christians and sucking blood from children. In essence, the first documented case of vampirism in Spain, although the lore behind the blood sucking entity looked a little bit different than the modern version. 

She was turned in to Juan de Acebal, at the time a prosecutor and litigant who would lead the first Asturian case in the renewed Tribunal of the Inquisition, which had just been re-established in the kingdom of Castile, precisely on All Souls’ Day in 1478.

Prieto was arrested and subjected to interrogation and torture. She was bound hand and foot, twisting and turning on her back, and she was forced to drink liters of water continuously for at least an hour. Despite the ordeal she maintained her innocence and never confessed to the crimes attributed to her.

Torture: Water cure was among the forms of torture used by the Spanish Inquisition. Before pouring the water, torturers often inserted an iron prong (known as the bostezo) into a victim’s mouth to keep it open, as well as a strip of linen (known as the toca) on which the victim would choke and suffocate while swallowing the water.

The tribunal or the Bachelor Brecianos, eventually condemned her to death by hanging. There, it was ordered that she be taken “on horseback, riding a donkey, her hands and feet bound with an esparto rope around her neck,” publicly and shamefully before the townspeople, to the stone gallows where the witch or sorceress of Gijón would be hanged and her flesh burned to ashes.

Yet the case did not end in the way many witch trials did.

Escape From the Gallows

Before the sentence was carried out, Teresa Prieto appealed the verdict. As she stated in her protest, when she was arrested she was not informed of the charges or anything else; she had not been told who had denounced her; the accuser turned out to be the only witness and, aside from contradicting himself, was a personal enemy of hers, which should legally disqualify his testimony; furthermore, she had not been provided with the required legal representation, and the lieutenant corregidor had acted against her unjustly and contrary to the laws of the kingdom. She also emphasized that she had been subjected to torture without cause or reason and was summoned repeatedly without any new evidence or proof appearing. To conclude her plea, she stressed that by appearing before the court she demonstrated her good faith and should be able to atone for any possible crime.

The Court Case Files: (PARES, Portal de Archivos Españoles)

The appeal succeeded. Instead of execution she was imprisoned while the case continued. Her conduct during the proceedings appears to have influenced the authorities, and eventually the sentence was overturned.

In November of 1500 she was released from prison and allowed to return to Asturias as a free woman. Neither party was ordered to pay costs, but Teresa requested a written copy of the sentence and the return of the property and assets that had been confiscated from her.

In the end the supposed vampire of Jove was never proven to be anything more than a victim of fear and rumor.

The Birth of a Spanish Vampire Legend

Even though Teresa Prieto survived the trial, her reputation never disappeared. Folklore continued to describe her as a vampire witch who crept into houses at night to feed on children. Later historians and folklorists such as Julio Caro Baroja and Juan Uría Ríu recorded the story as one of the earliest examples of vampiric belief in Spain.

The witch of Jove belongs to a darker chapter of European folklore. She stands at the boundary between legend and historical record. A woman once accused of slipping through the night to drink the blood of children. A case where ancient fears of witches, demons, and vampires converged in the life of a single unfortunate person.

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References:

Mito y realidad de Teresa Prieto, la bruja de Jove

Un zumbido mortal. Theresa Prieto, la vampira de Jove | El Comercio: Diario de Asturias

https://citaclio.blogspot.com/2022/11/teresa-prieto-la-asturiana-condenada.html

Strix (mythology) – Wikipedia