Beware the Raven Mocker

by M.P. Pellicer | Stranger Than Fiction Stories
The vampire feeds on blood, the Raven Mocker (Kâ'lanû Ahkyeli'sk) feeds on life. The Cherokee feared these witches greatly. 

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Raven Mockers subsist by stealing life force from the sick and dying

The raven mocker can appear as a withered old man or woman, and they are known to stalk the sick and dying. Their arrival is heralded by strong winds and the cry of a raven. More than one raven mocker could appear at a home, where someone lays close to death. Only the presence of someone who knows how to repel them from the bedside, where they would torment the person unto death, is a guarantee the person’s life is not stolen.

The raven mocker eats the person's heart in order to consume their life, unbeknownst to the family present, since they are invisible. As they consume the flesh, they add any remaining years of life the person has to their own. Only the presence of a medicine man that can recognize them will keep them at bay. They are afraid to be seen, because if this happens once detected in their true shape, they will die within seven days.

The cry of a raven announces that a raven mocker is nearby, and someone will be dying soon. The witches can only steal life force before death, because once buried they cannot steal the heart from a corpse. Among witches, the raven mockers are the most feared.

In retribution and jealousy, when a raven mocker dies, other witches dig up the body to desecrate it.

The author Manly Wade Wellman, included this mythic creature in his novel The Old Gods Waken:

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Amongst those anisgina things, I should offer that the Raven Mockers can be put down for near about the worst of all. They were given that name because they can fly if they want to, and when they fly, they make a noise like a raven. Reuben Manco imitated it for me, kraa-kraa, a pure down ugly noise. They make it their chief business to help a man to die, you might could say. If somebody gets down flat on his back, bad sick or wounded, the Raven Mockers fly in and crowd all round and over him like a bunch of, well, like ravens. Most times they make themselves right hard to see by air real man or woman except maybe a wise old Cherokee medicine man. And the medicine man has got to pray his strongest prayers and work his best and fastest and sensiblest with all the magic he knows, so as to keep those Raven Mockers off from one they're out to kill.

Their heads were round and dark, with a knobby look all over them, and the heads and those wrappings were the same sooty-looking color that, in the sunlight, might could have been a deep dirty brown. They'd come on out and spread this-a-way and that to surround us, and they stood and looked on us with eyes like coals of fire that had died down to a scummy pink.

It had a monkeyish look to it, only not just monkey, either. Monkeys are funny, and this wasn't funny. I mean, the skull was squashed low and shallow above and its jaw was wide and shallow below. Its mouth hung loose and ugly and went all the way across, and its two pink-shining eyes hung deep back in it, in hollows like pits under two big bony brows like jackknife handles. But not funny like a monkey, or either with that sad monkey look. It was pure poison mean. And, I reckoned, hungry.

That stuff was a kind of skin. It grew downward from the wrists and elbows of the long arms, it was fast to the two sides of the squatty body, all the way down to the ankles of the short, chunky legs. It was like the spread of an umbrella, or of the wings of a bat. Only it had no ribs to it, just the wide-pulled stretch of it you could see the moonlight through.