Nachzehrer

Also Known As: also called Neuntöter and Doppelsauger; a form of Wiedergänger; known as a shroud-eater among the Kashubians of northern Poland
Region/Culture: Northern Germany, Bavaria, and Silesia, with a close parallel among the Kashubian Slavs of northern Poland; early modern German folklore
Mythos: Germanic, Slavic
Primary Type/Nature: Undead/Cursed Beings
Mythical Attributes: A revenant that lies in its grave devouring its own burial shroud and then its own flesh, wasting the life out of its living kin as it feeds.
Role in Mythos: It explained why whole households sickened and died in the wake of a single death, and why grieving families sometimes reopened a grave to silence the corpse inside it.
Relation to Humans: The Nachzehrer preys almost entirely on its own relatives and near neighbors, draining their strength from underground without ever needing to rise. Ordinary people guarded against it by what they placed in the coffin and, when the deaths kept coming, by digging the body up and stopping its mouth for good.

The sound came up through the soil at night, a wet and steady smacking, as though someone beneath the churchyard were eating in the dark. Villagers across the German north knew the noise and dreaded it, because it meant a body had gone wrong. Below the frost line a corpse had started to feed on its own linen, and while it fed, the living who had buried it would begin to waste away.

The name says the whole of it. Nach means after, and zehren means to consume or to prey upon, so the Nachzehrer is the after-devourer, the dead thing that keeps eating once eating should be finished. The belief runs strongest through the folklore of northern Germany, Silesia, and Bavaria, and the same word names a nearly identical creature among the Kashubian Slavs of the Baltic coast. Unlike the traveling bloodsucker of the later stage and screen, this one is a homebody. It rarely leaves the grave at all. Its work is done lying down.

What it does first is eat its shroud. A body newly turned Nachzehrer takes the burial cloth into its mouth and chews, and when the linen is gone it starts on its own hands and flesh. The horror is not in the grave but in the house above it, because every mouthful the corpse swallows is taken from a relative still breathing. As the dead thing consumes itself, a widow grows thin at her spinning, a child sickens without fever, a brother weakens and cannot say why. The more of itself the Nachzehrer devours, the more of its family drains away with it. A single funeral could become a season of funerals, one coffin carried out after another, the parish sexton digging in the same corner of the yard again and again.

People had firm ideas about who came back this way. The first to die in an epidemic was suspect, and so were the drowned, the suicides, and those carried off by sudden accident before their time. A child born with a caul was watched. Above all there was the matter of the name. If a corpse was buried in clothing marked with its own name, or if a coin or scrap bearing the name went into the coffin, the dead were thought to gnaw at that first and, having a name to eat, never stop. Grief and carelessness could damn a body as surely as a bad death.

Against all this the living had their defenses, and they were practical and grim. A clod of earth or a stone was wedged under the dead chin to hold the jaw shut. A coin was set in the mouth to give the teeth something that was not linen. The shroud was tied down or knotted out of reach, and any garment bearing the name was stripped away before burial. When these failed and the family kept dying, there was nothing for it but to open the grave. What waited there confirmed everything: a body that should have rotted but had not, cheeks flushed, lips reddened, the left thumb gripped in the right hand, and the shroud pulled halfway into the working mouth. To end it they packed the mouth with earth, or drove a spike through it to pin the tongue, or struck the head from the shoulders and laid it at the feet. Some among the Kashubians told of the thing slipping out of its plot in the shape of a pig and trotting home to bleed on its kin, but even then the cure was the same. Find the body. Stop it.

The corpse had not moved. Decay had moved it. By the late seventeenth century educated men were saying as much, and saying it in print. In 1679 the Leipzig scholar Philipp Rohr set down a treatise on the chewing of the dead in their graves, and in 1728 the Lutheran pastor Michael Ranft answered him with a longer one, arguing that the devil had nothing to do with the smacking underground. Ranft, a rationalist ahead of his time, still granted the phenomenon a strange half-life, proposing that a kind of vegetative soul lingered in the flesh for a while after death. Later scholarship supplied the plainer answer that folklore had been reading a natural process as an appetite. The gases of putrefaction bloat the body until it looks well fed, flush the skin, and force the jaw and lips to shift, pressing them against the shroud so that the cloth is drawn inward and marked as if by teeth. The soft, uncorrupted look that terrified the exhumers was simply a body decaying on its own schedule rather than theirs.

Its power was real enough to those who believed. The Nachzehrer could kill an entire family without leaving its coffin, reaching them through sympathy and blood alone, and its curse spread outward from the first grave like a contagion looking for the next. But its strength was also its cage. It was bound to its own body and its own plot of ground, helpless once the mouth was stopped and the shroud put beyond reach, undone completely when the head came off or the corpse was destroyed. A creature that feeds on itself has, in the end, only itself to lose.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a Nachzehrer?

A Nachzehrer is a revenant from German folklore, a corpse that lies in its grave devouring its own burial shroud and flesh while draining the life from its living relatives. Its name means “after-devourer,” and the belief was strongest in northern Germany, Silesia, and Bavaria, with a parallel version among the Kashubian Slavs of northern Poland. Unlike a roaming vampire, it does its harm mostly without leaving the grave.

How does a Nachzehrer kill people?

A Nachzehrer harms its own family by a kind of sympathetic feeding: as it consumes its shroud and body underground, its living relatives weaken and waste away, sickening without an obvious cause. The more of itself the corpse devours, the more strength is drained from its kin. This belief was used to explain why several members of one household would die in quick succession after a single burial.

How do you stop or kill a Nachzehrer?

The classic defenses were aimed at the mouth: wedging a stone or clod of earth under the chin, placing a coin in the mouth, or tying down the shroud so the corpse could not chew. Removing any clothing marked with the dead person’s name was also thought to prevent it. If a family kept dying, the grave was opened and the corpse silenced permanently by packing its mouth, driving a spike through it, or decapitating it.

Why do people believe corpses chew in their graves?

Bodies were exhumed and found looking fresh, flushed, and bloated, with the burial shroud drawn into the mouth, which pre-scientific communities read as evidence of a feeding corpse. Later writers, especially the folklorist Paul Barber, explained this as normal decomposition: gases of putrefaction bloat the body, redden the skin, and move the jaw and lips against the cloth. The eighteenth-century pastor Michael Ranft had already argued the devil was not involved.

Is the Nachzehrer the same as a vampire?

The Nachzehrer overlaps with the vampire but is not identical. Both are undead corpses blamed for the deaths of the living, and in the grave they can look the same, but the Nachzehrer typically stays buried and feeds by wasting its family from a distance rather than rising to drink blood. Some Kashubian accounts do describe it leaving the grave in the form of a pig, bringing it closer to the classic vampire.