Baba Yaga
One version of the crone in popular Slavic folklore is Baba Yaga, sometimes malevolent, sometimes beneficent, but always dangerous. Many cultures have the Baba Yaga legends, such as the Russian, Bulgarians, Slovene, Slovak, Bosnian, Croatian, Ukrainian, Macedonian and Serbian, –and that is to name only a few. Naturally if you travel the world, stopping in every country to ask about here, –well, if you’re polite and interested about it, –you’ll most likely get a response. She’s portrayed as a witch, a wild old woman, spirit of the untamed and wild forest, and leader of other forest spirits.
In the most well distributed and popular Russian folklore on Baba Yaga, she lives deep within the woods. She flies through the air in a mortar (bowl used for mixing/crushing herbs into powder, obviously not the explosive) using the pestles as a steering device, while sweeping away her tracks with an old birch broom. She lives in a cabin, perched atop a pair of chicken’s legs, that might appear to be trees to a traveler, –once the unwitting traveler is inside, the legs bring the house to Baba Yaga, or move elsewhere, so that whomever is inside will be hopelessly lost. The cabin is surrounded by poles on which sit skeletons, sometimes with on pole empty; a reserved spot for the hero’s skull to sit. The hole for the key in the cabin’s front door, is a mouth fill with sharp teeth. In other stories, the door won’t even appear until the hero has spoken the phrase, “Turn your back to the forest, your front to me.”
Sometimes the story is told with the a connection to three horses and riders; the red, the black, and the white. In this version, Baba Yaga’s home is tended to by invisible servants as well. If a hero should speak to Baba Yaga, and inquire about the riders, she will tell him or her, that the red rider represents the sun, the black rider, the night, and the white rider is the day. However, if someone asks about her servants, she kills them instead.