Folk imaginations concerning the human figure of death mostly focus on
the image of a skeleton with a scythe or a female figure with a scythe. Apart
from them, what is present in some regions is the image of death as an alien
woman who appears in the village from nowhere and who is able to disappear
suddenly – her visit is always associated with somebody’s death. In the folklore,
there are also tales about meeting the death, quoted as authentic events taking
place in particular villages.
In Christianity, both in Catholicism and Orthodoxy, no beliefs exist that
death has a shape of an ordinary woman who comes from orbis exterior. This
places the analyzed belief in the earlier pre-Christian layer. In the light of the
materials of the Polish Ethnographic Atlas, this folklore belief functioned in
culturally backward regions of Poland
