Nachzehrer

The Nachzehrer of northern German folklore is a corpse that consumes, and by consuming pulls the living after it. The name is nach (after) plus zehren (to waste away), not Nacht, night: the point is that the dead person keeps eating, gnawing his own shroud and flesh inside the closed grave, while his relatives sicken and die one by one. The belief is older than the word. In Luther's Tischreden, printed in 1566, a parson reports a buried woman eating herself in the grave while the whole village dies, and Luther calls it the Devil's fraud. In 1728 the Lutheran minister Michael Ranft gathered the countermeasures in his Latin book De masticatione mortuorum in tumulis: a stone and a coin put into the mouth so the corpse would bite on those instead; a linen collar tied over the mouth at Dresden; and, in a plague at Lviv in 1572, a woman dug up, found naked, and beheaded with a two-pronged spade. Ranft blamed the gnawed shroud on serpents and mice, then admitted that this explained nothing about the deaths. The word itself first turns up in the Altmark near Salzwedel in 1843; a child buried before 1651 with a stone forced between its jaws was excavated in Schleswig-Holstein in 2013.

The Nachzehrer is not a night creature. The name is built from nach (after) and zehren (to consume, to waste away), and it describes a mechanism rather than a monster: the dead person consumes, from inside the closed grave, and by consuming draws the survivors after him. The verb the sources actually use is nachziehen, to pull after oneself; the pale form of the same idea is nachsterben, dying after. Grimm's Deutsches Wörterbuch never gave the word an entry at all, although its N volume of 1889 lemmatises twenty-odd neighbours in the same alphabetical run, including nachzechlein and nachzemmeln. The word belongs to folklore collections, not to the standard dictionary. The belief is far older than the word. The earliest dated witness is Martin Luther. In the Tischreden collected by Johannes Aurifaber and printed in 1566, under the heading "Wunderbarliche Historie vom Teufel der die Leut betrug und würgte", a village parson writes to Georg Rörer at Wittenberg: a woman had died in his village and, now that she was buried, "fresse sie sich selbst im Grabe" — she was eating herself in the grave — and almost everyone in the village had died. Luther's answer was flat: "das ist des Teufels betriegerey und boßheit; wenn sie es nicht gleubeten, so schadete es jnen nicht" — it is the Devil's fraud and malice, and if they did not believe it, it would do them no harm. It was their superstition, he said, that kept killing them. The word for the corpse's noise came before the word for the corpse. In 1679 Philipp Rohr defended at Leipzig a Dissertatio historico-philosophica de masticatione mortuorum, on the chewing of the dead. In 1725 a young Saxon, Michael Ranft, took the same subject for his own Leipzig dissertation, defended on 27 September with Christian Gottfried Cleemann as respondent; in 1728 he expanded it into a book, De masticatione mortuorum in tumulis, liber singularis (Leipzig, Augustus Martinus). Its title page carries a German subtitle, "oder von dem Kauen und Schmatzen der Todten in Gräbern", which is why it is often taken for a German book; the text is Latin throughout. The true German version, the Tractat von dem Kauen und Schmatzen der Todten in Gräbern, came out at Leipzig in 1734, by which time Ranft signed himself deacon at Nebra. The 1728 book is where the countermeasures are gathered. In § LIX Ranft quotes Christian Friedrich Garmann: before the mouth of a corpse is closed, "lapidem et nummum ponunt in ore, ut si in sepulchro mordere incipiat, lapidem et nummum inveniat et morsis satietur" — they put a stone and a coin in the mouth, so that if he starts to bite in the grave he finds the stone and the coin and bites his fill on those. Ranft adds Georg Rollenhagen as a second witness that in his own day, in many places in Saxony, a coin and a pebble were put into the mouths of the dead. In § LVII he records a different fix: "Dresdae linteum seu collare solent firmiter affigere mortuis" — at Dresden they tie a linen cloth or collar tightly on the dead, for no other reason than to shut off the opportunity of chewing. When prevention failed, the grave was opened. In § LVI Ranft passes on, from the Paduan physician Ercole Sassonia's chapter on plica polonica, a case from 1572: plague was raging through all Poland; the body of a woman from the village of Rzeszów was buried in the Lviv suburb by the church of the Exaltation of the Cross; the plague began to bite in the neighbouring houses; those who had charge of the funeral suspected the woman had been a witch; the corpse was dug up and found naked, from which everyone concluded she had devoured her own clothes; they cut off her head with a bipalium, a two-pronged digging spade, and buried her again, and the plague stopped. Ranft is reporting, at two removes and 156 years later, a story he did not witness. The geography usually attached to the word is the eastern Lower Saxon corridor. Adalbert Kuhn printed the earliest use of it I have been able to date: tale 30 of his Märkische Sagen und Märchen (1843), collected orally around Diesdorf in the Altmark, near Salzwedel. Kuhn's informants blamed a run of family deaths on the first corpse not having been given his Zehrpfennig in the mouth, or on his name not being taken out of his shirt; they dug him up, found he had already eaten his clothes, and "weil es kein anderes Mittel gegen das Nachzehren giebt, als dem Todten das Genick abzustechen", the bravest man took a spade and did it — and they distinctly heard the Nachzehrer squeal like a piglet. Georg Schambach and Wilhelm Müller recorded the fainter Hanoverian version, anbraweln, in 1855; Paul Geiger's article in the Handwörterbuch des deutschen Aberglaubens (1934/35) rests its Brunswick material on Richard Andree's Braunschweiger Volkskunde, and its richest material — corpses that eat their shroud, then their own flesh, then come out and bleed their relatives — on West Prussian and Kashubian collections from the Bay of Danzig. But the belief is not confined to that corridor: Thomas Schürmann's Nachzehrerglauben in Mitteleuropa (1990) maps written attestations across Central Europe, thickest in the decades around 1600 and mostly in Protestant territories, and there are separate studies of it in the Eifel and the Trier country.

There is no Nachzehrer site to visit. This is a belief, and what can actually be inspected is documents and excavated graves, most of which are online and free. Ranft's 1728 Latin book, De masticatione mortuorum in tumulis, liber singularis, is digitised in full on archive.org (identifier bub_gb_Y5U5AAAAcAAJ), as is his 1725 Leipzig dissertation (bub_gb_TelaAAAAcAAJ). The countermeasures are in the last quarter of the 1728 volume, §§ LVI to LIX, around pages 97 to 101; the serpents and mice are at §§ XXXVIII to XLIII, pages 40 to 44. Do not confuse three separate works: Philipp Rohr's Dissertatio historico-philosophica de masticatione mortuorum (Leipzig, 1679), Ranft's Latin dissertation and book (1725, 1728), and Ranft's German Tractat von dem Kauen und Schmatzen der Todten in Gräbern (Leipzig, Teubner, 1734). Adalbert Kuhn's Märkische Sagen und Märchen (1843), tale 30, is also on archive.org, and Paul Geiger's Handwörterbuch article is in volume 6 of the scanned set, columns 812 to 823. The Jellenbek grave cannot be visited: the medieval St Catharinen church at Schwedeneck was pulled down around 1737 because it was unsafe, and the site was excavated by the University of Kiel in 2013. The excavation report, with photographs of the stone in the child's mouth, is a free PDF: the whole of Arkæologi i Slesvig / Archäologie in Schleswig 15 (2014) can be downloaded from the Kiel Institute für Ur- und Frühgeschichte website, and the article runs from page 55 to page 68. Of the comparable sites, the one that is genuinely open to the public is Lazzaretto Nuovo in the Venetian lagoon, where the woman with the brick in her mouth was excavated; the island is run by an association that offers guided visits on set days, and it is reached by public waterbus from Fondamente Nove. Check opening arrangements before travelling, as they are seasonal and not daily. Drawsko in Poland and Kamień Pomorski are archaeological findspots, not visitor attractions. The Lviv church of the Exaltation of the Cross named in Ranft's 1572 story is a sixteenth-century second-hand report, not a located grave, and nothing there is marked. If you want to see the material culture rather than the paper, the objects to look for in northern German and Polish museum displays are the ones the sources describe: the mouth coin or Totenobolus, the pebble, the linen chin band, and the sickle laid across the throat. They are ordinary objects, and that is precisely why they were used.