Mullo (Muli: female, Mulo: male) is an
undead
The undead are beings in mythology, legend, or fiction that are deceased but behave as if alive. Most commonly the term refers to corporeal forms of formerly-alive humans, such as mummies, vampires, and zombies, who have been reanimated by ...
,
revenant
In folklore, a revenant is an animated corpse that is believed to have been revived from death to haunt the living. The word ''revenant'' is derived from the Old French word, ''revenant'', the "returning" (see also the related French verb ''reve ...
, or
vampire
A vampire is a mythical creature that subsists by feeding on the Vitalism, vital essence (generally in the form of blood) of the living. In European folklore, vampires are undead, undead creatures that often visited loved ones and caused mi ...
of
Roma
Roma or ROMA may refer to:
Places Australia
* Roma, Queensland, a town
** Roma Airport
** Roma Courthouse
** Electoral district of Roma, defunct
** Town of Roma, defunct town, now part of the Maranoa Regional Council
* Roma Street, Brisbane, a ...
folklore. 'Mullo' means 'one who is dead'.
A mullo is created when a person dies suddenly of some unnatural cause or the person did not have proper funeral rites. A mullo is described as having white clothes, hair that reaches to their feet, and one physical oddity (a trait which varies from geographic region to region). A mullo's existence is in seeking out people it did not like in life and harassing that person.
Mullo are believed to return and do malicious things
and/or attack by strangling and suck the blood of a person (usually a relative who had caused their death, or hadn't properly observed the burial ceremonies, or who kept the deceased's possessions instead of destroying them as was proper).
To get rid of a vampire people would hire a
Dhampir
In Balkans folklore, dhampirs (sometimes spelled ''dhampyres'', ''dhamphirs'', or ''dhampyrs'') are creatures that are the result of a union between a vampire and a mortal human. This union was usually between male vampires and female mortal hum ...
(the son of a vampire and his widow)
to detect the vampire. To ward off vampires, Romani people drove steel or iron needles into a corpse's heart and placed bits of steel in the mouth, over the eyes, ears and between the fingers at the time of burial. They also placed hawthorn in the corpse's sock or drove a hawthorn stake through the legs. Further measures included driving stakes into the grave, pouring boiling water over it, decapitating the corpse, or burning it.
References
Romani legendary creatures
Vampires
Revenants
{{Romani-stub