In 1576, a gravedigger on a plague island in the Venetian lagoon reopened a mass grave. One of the corpses — a woman — was bloated, red-lipped, and her burial shroud was torn to shreds around her open mouth. It looked like she had been eating. He grabbed a brick and shoved it between her jaws.

In 2006, archaeologists found her. The brick was still there.

The Nachzehrer is the forgotten vampire of German folklore — and it is nothing like the one you know. No cape, no fangs, no castle. This undead lies in its coffin and chews. First its shroud, then its own flesh. And through an invisible, magical connection, everyone it was close to in life begins to waste away. You don't see it coming. You just get tired. Pale. And then you die.

In this episode, we trace the Nachzehrer from the plague pits of medieval Germany to the academic vampire debates at the University of Leipzig. We uncover the Kashubian Vjesci — a near-identical creature from Poland's Baltic coast — and the eerie "Empty Night" ritual designed to catch the undead before burial. We examine the forensic science that explains everything the gravediggers saw: the bloating, the red lips, the torn shroud, the sounds from underground. And we visit the Venice find — a 16th-century woman with a brick in her mouth, whose face was reconstructed by scientists in 2024, more than 400 years after she was declared a monster.

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