Benjamin Adamah
For centuries, countless people across Central Europe believed they were attacked while they slept. They awoke unable to move or breathe, convinced that something unseen was pressing upon their chest, while others reported being driven to orgasm by an invisible nocturnal visitor. Horses were found exhausted after being ridden through the night, cattle weakened, children wasted away, and communities attributed illness, paralysis, terrifying dreams, and loss of vitality to a vast array of nocturnal beings.Vampire & Nachtmar continues the historical journey begun in Before Nosferatu. Following the eighteenth-century investigations of Gerard van Swieten, the focus shifts from official vampire inquiries to nineteenth- and early twentieth-century folkloric evidence preserved across Central Europe. Carefully translated from German, Austrian, Polish, Czech, Hungarian, and other sources, these texts document an astonishing range of encounters with the Nachtmar (nightmare). Whether appearing as the Alp, Mahrt, Murawa, Drude, Hexe (witch), Incubus, Vampyr, or countless regional variants, it may manifest as the wandering double of a living person, a supernatural being, or a revenant (Nachzehrer, Doppelsauger) returned from the grave.Again and again, the boundaries between nightmare spirits, witches, wandering souls, revenants, and vampires dissolve, exposing a shared demonological tradition that persisted across languages, cultures, and centuries. Accompanied by scholarly editorial commentary, Vampire & Nachtmar reconstructs the forgotten demonological ecosystem from which the later European vampire-image emerged. Rather than tracing a single supernatural being, it reveals an interconnected world of nocturnal assault whose deeper structure has largely escaped modern scholarship.The vampire haunted the village. The Nachtmar haunted your bedroom...
