What is a nachzehrer?
The nachzehrer does not leave his grave. That is what sets him apart from the vampire of later literature. He lies in the coffin, chewing on his shroud or on his own flesh, and as long as he keeps doing it, the people who were close to him die. The name says as much: nachzehren means roughly “to consume after,” and he devours the surviving family from a distance.
The belief is recorded in northern Germany, Silesia, Bavaria and parts of Poland. Among the Kashubians, the wake included the “Empty Night,” when prayers and singing were meant to stop the dead person from becoming a nachzehrer.
How he was recognized and what people did
Suspicion fell on anyone who died with their mouth or eyes open, anyone born with a caul, or anyone whose corpse did not stiffen after death. If more deaths in the family followed shortly after a burial, people sometimes opened the grave. They placed a stone, a coin or soil in the dead person’s mouth so that he could no longer chew. In serious cases, they cut off the head.
Origins and sources
The belief is closely linked to the great epidemics. When one person after another died in the same house, people needed an explanation, and the first to die was the obvious candidate. As early as the 17th and 18th centuries, scholars at the University of Leipzig debated the “chewing of the dead in their graves”: Philipp Rohr published a dissertation on it in 1679, and Michael Ranft his treatise De masticatione mortuorum in tumulis in 1728.
A striking archaeological find comes from the Venetian Lagoon: in a mass grave from a plague period lay a woman whose mouth had been forced open with a brick. Matteo Borrini and colleagues examined the find forensically.
What scholars say
What the gravediggers saw was very likely normal decomposition. Gases bloat the body, fluid leaks from the mouth and nose, and the shroud over the face is the first thing to decay and tear. To someone who did not know what happens to a body in the grave, it looked like a dead person who had been eating. In 1990, Thomas Schürmann published a comprehensive study of the nachzehrer belief in Central Europe.
Episode on this topic
Further reading
- Philipp Rohr: Dissertatio historico-philosophica de masticatione mortuorum, Leipzig 1679.
- Michael Ranft: De masticatione mortuorum in tumulis, Leipzig 1728.
- Thomas Schürmann: Der Nachzehrerglauben in Mitteleuropa, Marburg 1990.
- Matteo Borrini et al.: “Forensic approach to an archaeological casework of ‘vampire’ skeletal remains in Venice,” Journal of Forensic Sciences.
- Angelika Franz, Daniel Nösler: Geköpft und gepfählt. Archäologen auf der Jagd nach den Untoten, 2016.