A nachzehrer

A mythical creature from the North German medieval folklore, often associated with vampires.

Unlike vampires, a nachzehrer, as they say in the legends, does not drink the blood of living people, and eat their own dead body, by which the distance is infecting people with a fatal disease (particularly plague) and drains their life force.

The more they eat, the weaker becomes their family members dying one after another from disease and exhaustion. To identify it can be turned to large fingers and open the left eye.

They may be died an unusual death (e.g., suicide or accident) or the first cases of a large group of people who died from some illness (usually the plague), and they supposedly could become drowned or children who died at birth.

Translated by «Yandex.Translator»