Mormo

Greek mothers had a reliable method for enforcing bedtime: Mormo. She was a phantom, a bogeywoman, a thing that came for children who misbehaved. The details shifted by region and family — she bit, she drank blood, she carried children away in a sack — but the core message was consistent: obey your parents or Mormo would visit.

The name itself may have been onomatopoeic — "mormo" suggesting something growling or snarling in the dark. It became a common noun: mormo meant "bugbear" or "fright" in everyday Greek. To call someone a mormo was to call them a horror.

Some traditions gave her a backstory. She was a woman from Corinth who ate her own children and was cursed to haunt the living world, hunting other people's offspring. This placed her in the same category as Lamia — bereaved mothers transformed into child-predators, their grief warped into something monstrous.

Aristophanes used mormo as a casual reference, expecting his audience to recognise the name without explanation. Theocritus did the same. She was folklore so universal in the Greek world that she needed no introduction — everyone had been threatened with Mormo at some point in childhood.

The tradition of female night-demons who targeted children persisted through the Roman period (as the strix), into Byzantine culture, and from there into modern Greek folklore, where the mormo survives under various regional names. The nursery threat that frightened Athenian toddlers in 400 BC is still frightening Greek children today.