Nachzehrer

The Nachzehrer ("night waster" or "after-devourer") is a vampiric revenant from German folklore, with Slavic-influenced variants across the Baltic and Central European countryside, described as a corpse that continues gnawing on its own burial shroud or limbs while draining the life force of surviving family members from within the grave. Unlike the seductive vampires of later fiction, the Nachzehrer was feared as a bloated, restless corpse blamed for a wave of deaths following an epidemic or a suspicious first death in a household. The belief was documented at length in 1728 by Lutheran pastor Michael Ranft in his treatise De Masticatione Mortuorum in Tumulis ("On the Chewing of the Dead in Their Tombs"), which recorded cases of villagers exhuming suspected Nachzehrer, placing coins or stones in the corpse's mouth, or decapitating and reburying it face-down to stop the chewing believed to kill relatives one by one. The belief likely grew from a misunderstanding of natural decomposition, where gases cause a corpse's mouth to open and shroud fabric to shift, alongside the very real spread of contagious disease within families, which folklore explained through a supernatural culprit rather than germs.