Toma was a 76-year-old resident of Mârotinu de Sus, a rural village in Dolj County in southwestern Romania. Toma died in late December 2003 and was buried around the beginning of January 2004. Within weeks of the burial, members of the extended family became convinced that the deceased had not remained peacefully in the grave but had returned as a strigoi, one of several Romanian folkloric forms associated with dangerous or restless dead. Contemporary reporting indicates that the family understood subsequent illness and weakness through this traditional framework rather than regarding the events merely as unexplained medical problems.

Romanian traditions concerning strigoi vary considerably by period and region. The term can encompass living or dead figures associated with harmful supernatural activity, while related traditions include revenants believed capable of returning from the grave to disturb, weaken, or draw vitality from relatives and neighbors. Particular customs for identifying and neutralizing suspected dangerous dead likewise vary locally. The Mârotinu de Sus case is important not because it establishes one uniform Romanian vampire tradition, but because participants themselves explicitly understood their actions within a surviving local tradition concerning the restless dead.

According to accounts later given by the family, several relatives became ill or unusually weak after Toma's burial. Mirela Marinescu, a relative by marriage, described a nocturnal experience in which Toma appeared in the room, after which severe weakness was experienced the following morning. Other family members reportedly became ill or described dreams involving the deceased. These experiences reinforced the family's belief that Toma was responsible for the illnesses.

The family did not interpret these experiences as symbolic dreams or coincidence. Within the cultural framework used by the participants, the reported visitations and declining health indicated that Toma had become a dangerous returning dead person. Later interviews suggest that knowledge of methods for dealing with suspected strigoi remained available within the community rather than having survived only in folklore books or tourist portrayals. Timothy Taylor, an archaeologist specializing in unusual mortuary practices, visited the village with anthropologist Kathryn Denning and interviewed participants several years after the incident. Their investigation documented that the family regarded the ritual as a practical response to a genuine threat rather than as a theatrical reenactment of an old custom.

Six men, led by a member of Toma's extended family, went to the cemetery and opened the grave. Contemporary UPI reporting quoted participant Gheorghe Marinescu as acknowledging that the group removed Toma's heart and pierced the body with wooden stakes. Marinescu asserted that the corpse reacted when stabbed, an interpretation belonging to the participants' account rather than an independently documented medical observation.

The heart was subsequently burned, and its ashes were mixed with water. Family members who had been experiencing illness consumed the mixture. Participants later stated that those people recovered following the ritual. The sequence is historically important because the actions were not merely remembered as an old custom: they were deliberately performed in twenty-first-century Romania by people who understood them as a necessary intervention against a dangerous returning dead person.

The reported improvement in health following the ritual does not establish a supernatural mechanism. Recovery could have involved ordinary medical improvement, expectation effects, psychosomatic processes, changing family stress, coincidence, or other factors that cannot now be reconstructed confidently. Conversely, the fact that conventional mechanisms are possible does not alter the documented fact that participants understood both the illnesses and their subsequent improvement through the strigoi tradition.

The exhumation did not remain a private family matter. Toma's daughter reported the disturbance of the grave to authorities, resulting in a police investigation and eventual legal proceedings concerning the desecration of the corpse. Contemporary international reporting brought the story well beyond Mârotinu de Sus, with the unusual survival of an anti-vampire ritual in modern Europe becoming the central focus of coverage. UPI reported the case on 2004-02-26, while later feature reporting returned to the village and interviewed those involved directly.

The international response frequently framed the event as a startling survival of medieval vampire belief. That characterization can obscure an important cultural distinction. The participants were not merely imitating the fictional vampire derived from Bram Stoker's Dracula, nor were they necessarily applying one standardized national ritual. The actions formed part of a living body of local beliefs surrounding dangerous dead, illness, family misfortune, and methods intended to sever harmful connections between the deceased and the living.

The Strigoi of Mârotinu de Sus is therefore particularly useful for documenting the difference between the existence of a supernatural tradition and the truth of its supernatural explanation. The death of Toma, the illnesses reported by relatives, the family's belief that the deceased had returned, the exhumation, removal and burning of the heart, consumption of ashes mixed with water, police intervention, and later interviews with participants all belong to the historical record. What cannot be established from those facts is that Toma objectively returned from the grave or caused the illnesses attributed to him.

Unlike the eighteenth-century Petar Blagojević Vampire Case and Medveđa Vampire Panic, the Mârotinu de Sus episode occurred within reach of modern journalism, policing, medicine, and ethnographic investigation. Its significance therefore lies not in demonstrating that traditional vampire beliefs survived unchanged from previous centuries, but in showing that beliefs concerning dangerous returning dead remained capable of shaping real behavior in a modern Romanian community. The case provides an unusually well-documented example of folklore functioning not merely as story, but as a framework through which contemporary participants interpreted illness, death, and recovery.