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What this episode is about
No cape, no fangs, no castle: the Nachzehrer lies in his grave and eats, and with every bite someone above ground dies. In this episode I introduce one of the creepiest undead figures of German folklore, one that hardly anyone knows today.
What is a Nachzehrer?
The name combines nach (“after”) and zehren (“to consume” or “to waste away”). After death, the Nachzehrer feeds on the living without leaving the grave, by chewing on his shroud or his own body. His victims grow tired and pale, and die. The belief goes back at least to the late Middle Ages.
How you become a Nachzehrer
Not through a bite. People at risk were those who died by suicide, the first person to die in an epidemic, in Bavaria children born with a caul, and the dead whose name had not been removed from their burial clothes.
Signs in the grave, and protection
When people opened a suspicious grave, they looked for an open left eye, a soft body, a chewed shroud. They put stones, earth or coins in the mouth, buried the body face down or cut off the head. In Kashubian tradition, the Nachzehrer can turn into a pig, and his shadow alone is said to kill.
The Kashubian relatives
Among the Kashubians in Pomerania there was the vjesci, who was born with a caul, and the wupji, who came into the world with teeth. Before the burial, people kept the Pustô Noc, the “Empty Night,” a wake with prayer and singing.
The academic debate
The Nachzehrer gave scholars something to argue about. Philipp Rohr published his dissertation on the chewing of the dead in Leipzig in 1679, and Michael Ranft followed in 1728 with De masticatione mortuorum in tumulis, just as the case of Peter Plogojowitz set off the vampire debate in Europe.
The find in Venice
In 2006, a team led by Matteo Borrini found a woman with a brick between her jaws in a plague grave from 1576 on the island of Lazzaretto Nuovo. Borrini saw it as a rite against a revenant; other researchers are more cautious. In 2024 her face was reconstructed: the face of a completely ordinary woman.
The explanation
What the gravediggers saw was decomposition: gases, leaking fluids, a torn shroud, lips pulled back. To people who knew nothing about microbiology, it looked like a dead man who had been eating.
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between a Nachzehrer and a vampire?
A vampire leaves the grave and hunts. The Nachzehrer stays in the grave and kills from a distance by chewing.
Who was the “Vampire of Venice”?
A woman from a 1576 plague grave on the island of Lazzaretto Nuovo who had been buried with a brick placed in her mouth.
More in the lexicon: Nachzehrer.
About this episode
In 1576, a gravedigger on a plague island in the Venetian lagoon reopened a mass grave. One of the corpses — a woman — was bloated, red-lipped, and her burial shroud was torn to shreds around her open mouth. It looked like she had been eating. He grabbed a brick and shoved it between her jaws.
In 2006, archaeologists found her. The brick was still there.
The Nachzehrer is the forgotten vampire of German folklore — and it is nothing like the one you know. No cape, no fangs, no castle. This undead lies in its coffin and chews. First its shroud, then its own flesh. And through an invisible, magical connection, everyone it was close to in life begins to waste away. You don’t see it coming. You just get tired. Pale. And then you die.
In this episode, we trace the Nachzehrer from the plague pits of medieval Germany to the academic vampire debates at the University of Leipzig. We uncover the Kashubian Vjesci — a near-identical creature from Poland’s Baltic coast — and the eerie “Empty Night” ritual designed to catch the undead before burial. We examine the forensic science that explains everything the gravediggers saw: the bloating, the red lips, the torn shroud, the sounds from underground. And we visit the Venice find — a 16th-century woman with a brick in her mouth, whose face was reconstructed by scientists in 2024, more than 400 years after she was declared a monster.
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