Alp

The sound arrives before the weight. Something is working at the wall, a dry scraping like a mouse or a cat picking its way along a beam, and then it stops, and the room is quiet, and the quiet is worse. The pressure begins at the feet. It moves up over the stomach and settles on the chest, and it keeps getting heavier, and by the time the sleeper understands what is happening there is no breath left to shout with. In the Teupitz district they said that if you thought you knew who she was, you had to call her by name straight away, before the weight reached your throat. After that it was too late, because the Alp takes the voice first.

The word itself is the oldest thing about it. *Alp* is the German form of the word that comes into English as elf, and the early glossaries treat it as a being of the woods and fields, equated with the fauns of classical mythology, eerie and spiteful, described in the Althochdeutsches Wörterbuch as a spirit who as the nightmare plays his tricks on women. That etymology survives in ordinary speech. A German nightmare is an *Alptraum*, an elf-dream, and the older word for the attack itself is *Alpdruck*, elf-pressure. Every German-speaker who has ever complained about a bad night has named this creature without meaning to.

It answers to a great many other names. The nineteenth-century collectors found *Mahr*, *Mahrt* and *Mårt* across the north, *Trud* and *Drude* in the south, *Murraue* around Wendisch-Buchholz, *wåridèrske* in East Friesland and Saterland, and on the island of Baltrum a pair of names split by sex, *wålrüder* for the male and *rittmeije* for the female. Kuhn and Schwartz, gathering all this in 1848, noted that the same word could be masculine or feminine depending on who was using it. The being underneath does not change. Only the mouth does.

Asking what it looks like is the wrong question, and the sources answer it sideways. The Grimms, printing “Der Alp” in the first volume of the *Deutsche Sagen* in 1816, describe something that can be heard entering but not seen, and they record the belief, credited to the seventeenth-century compiler Prätorius, that a person whose eyebrows grow together in a single line is an Alp; the spirit leaves such a person from between the brows in the form of a small white butterfly and crosses the room to the sleeper’s breast. Elsewhere it is a cat. Bernhard Baader’s Baden collection has one squeezing through a hole in a workshop wall on the stroke of midnight. In a Pomeranian version it is a straw that a man grabs out of the air and holds while it fights him. What is consistent is not a body but a shape of behaviour: it is small, it is quiet, and it can get through anything.

Nobody is born an Alp on purpose. It happens. In the villages around Braunsdorf they said an Alp could be a man or a woman, but only someone born on a Sunday, and that person would go through their whole life without knowing what they did at night. At Moorhausmoor the rule was arithmetical: seven boys in one family, or seven girls, and one of them is a nightmare. In Pomerania, J. D. H. Temme recorded something colder. A märt there was usually a girl with a bad foot, and in the village of Bork near Stargard there was a smith with a lame daughter, and that same season an unusual number of people complained of being ridden at night. Nobody in the story does anything about it. The account simply places the girl and the epidemic side by side and leaves them there.

The best-known tale of the Alp is a capture that turns into a marriage. In Baader’s version a cabinetmaker in Bühl slept in his own workshop and was crushed night after night, so he talked it over with a friend and then lay awake in the dark until midnight, when a cat came through a hole in the wall. He stopped up the hole, caught the cat and nailed one of its paws to the floor, and went to sleep. In the morning there was a naked woman on his workshop floor with one hand pinned. He liked the look of her, and he married her, and she bore him three children. Years later, standing in the workshop with her, he opened the plug and said, look, that is where you came in. She was a cat again before he finished the sentence, and out through the hole, and she never came back. The same story is told at Swinemünde with a piece of straw and a farmhand, and in Denmark with a knothole in a ceiling, and in every telling the marriage ends at the exact moment the husband explains it to his wife.

Its powers are all versions of the same power. It gets in. Locked doors and shuttered windows are irrelevant; it comes through the keyhole, the knothole, the gap where the latch strap runs through the door, the smallest crack in the plaster. Once inside it presses, and the pressure is heavy enough to kill young geese in a pig pen and rabbits in a hutch. It rides horses through the night and leaves them wet and finished by morning, and it works its way into their manes, sucking the hair and braiding it into the matted knots that country people called mare-braids. If a chair is left unmoved at bedtime it will ride that instead. It will unpin a baby’s nappy and put the dirty one back on unless the nurse crosses herself over the cloth and folds a corner open. It sours the ordinary machinery of a house.

Its weaknesses are just as domestic, and they nearly all turn on one rule: an Alp can only leave the way it came in. Stop the hole while it is inside and it belongs to you, and the legends have it complaining bitterly, saying it has little children at home who will die without it. Short of that, the record is a catalogue of small defences. Turn your shoes at the bedside so the toes point away. Put an old pair of scissors, or anything of steel, into the bed straw. Cross your arms and your legs before you sleep. Fold your thumb inside your fist while it presses and it must give ground. A hackle laid on the chest works, although an Alp will sometimes flip the iron comb over and drive the teeth in. Around Paderborn people said a charm before lying down, forbidding the nightmare to trouble them until it had swum every water that flows on earth and counted every star in the firmament. And then there is the strangest defence of all, which is politeness. Say to the thing on your chest, Trud, come tomorrow and I will lend you something, or come tomorrow and drink with me, and it leaves at once. In Zwickau the invitation was coffee. In the morning a neighbour turns up at the door wanting to borrow something, and their eyebrows meet in the middle.

One detail that circulates widely in English is not in any of this. Modern vampire encyclopedias give the Alp a magic hat, a *Tarnkappe*, worn in every shape it takes and the source of all its power, along with a taste for blood from the nipple and a vulnerability to a lemon pushed into its mouth. The nineteenth-century German collectors describe none of that. The Tarnkappe belongs to Alberich, the treasure-guarding dwarf of the *Nibelungenlied*, and it was lent to the Alp somewhere in the twentieth century by writers cataloguing vampires for a general readership. The hat is a borrowed prop. What the older record gives instead is stranger and much older: a fourteenth-century night-blessing, the Münchener Nachtsegen, which orders the elf and the little elf, the elf’s sister and father, the elf’s mother, the *trute* and the mare out through the gate and up over the roof-ridge, and finishes by addressing the thing directly. Elf with your crooked nose, it says, I forbid you to blow on people. Owen Davies, writing in *Folklore* in 2003, set that whole tradition alongside the clinical literature on sleep paralysis and showed how neatly the two describe the same twenty seconds. The charm and the sleep laboratory disagree about almost everything except the weight on the chest.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is an Alp in German folklore?

An Alp is a night spirit of German folklore that sits on a sleeping person’s chest, growing heavier until they cannot move or speak. The word is the German form of “elf”, and it survives in the modern German words *Alptraum* (nightmare, literally elf-dream) and *Alpdruck* (elf-pressure). Nineteenth-century collectors recorded it across the German-speaking world under regional names including Mahr, Mahrt, Mårt, Trud and Murraue.

What does an Alp do to people?

It enters a locked room through a keyhole, knothole or crack, then settles on a sleeper and presses until they are breathless and unable to move. Beyond the bedroom it rides horses to exhaustion and tangles their manes into knots, crushes small penned animals such as geese and rabbits, and plays domestic tricks like re-soiling a baby’s nappy. Its victims are ordinary people asleep in their own beds.

How do you get rid of an Alp?

The standard remedies are household ones: plug the keyhole, turn your shoes so the toes face away from the bed, put scissors or another piece of steel in the bed straw, cross your arms and legs, or fold your thumb into your fist while it presses. Calling the Alp by name forces it to retreat, since many traditions hold that it is a living neighbour who does not know what they do at night. The oddest remedy is an invitation: tell it to come back tomorrow to borrow something or drink coffee, and it leaves immediately and turns up at your door in human shape the next morning.

Does the Alp really wear a magic hat?

No source in the German folklore record gives the Alp a hat. The magic cap or *Tarnkappe* attributed to it in modern English vampire encyclopedias belongs to Alberich, the dwarf who guards the treasure in the *Nibelungenlied*, and was attached to the Alp only in the twentieth century. The older German accounts describe the Alp as invisible or as a borrowed shape, most often a cat or a small white butterfly.

How is the Alp related to the Mara and the Drude?

They are regional names for one experience rather than three separate species. The Mara is the northern and Scandinavian form that gave English the word “nightmare”, the Drude is the southern German and Bavarian form, and the Alp is the High German one. Collectors such as Kuhn and Schwartz recorded the names shifting from village to village while the behaviour stayed identical.

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