A local shoemaker tragically takes his own life for unknown reasons and his family scrambles to hide his cause of death to avoid the disgrace that would surely be brought upon them by the Church. Dark rumours begin to spread out among the townsfolk of Breslau, Germany - despite the family's best efforts, people know what happened to the shoemaker - and as if this wasn't bad enough, the violent spirit of the dead man now seems to be holding the entire town in a grip of icy fear.
Darkness Gathering[]
The unnamed shoemaker around which this nightmarish tale centres was a well-to-do man by all accounts. His wife had just given birth, and one would've expected this to be one of the happiest times of the man's life. However - this was clearly not the case - as he was apparently driven to slit his own throat on September 20th of 1591, sending ripples of shock and horror through his family.
Suicide was considered to be a most vile sin in the religious culture of medieval Germany, and so his wife and her sisters suddenly found themselves caught in a mad frenzy to hide the circumstances of the man's death. They resorted to telling people that he had died of a stroke, and would refuse all visitors. Under the cover of silence, they swiftly made arrangements for a funeral and hired a local old woman to wash the man's body and cover up the wound to his throat. After placing the body in its coffin, the distraught family finally felt ready to allow a priest to view the body. The unnamed elderly woman had apparently done such a good job at covering up the offending wound that the priest didn't register anything as being out of the ordinary. Just three days after his death, the unfortunate shoemaker was buried after a lavish, rich man's funeral.
However - it was all just a futile race against time. Seemingly from the moment that the blade had crossed the man's throat, the rumour mill had started its grim and relentless turning. Whispers of the suicide had already started to spread through the city like a virus. Originally, people wouldn't believe it out of respect for the deceased - but eventually these rumours grew so thick and suffocating that the city council felt they had no choice but to make inquiries. Under this mounting pressure, the family decided to lie further - saying that the man had instead fallen over and cut himself on a sharp rock - and that an awl had been found in his clothing, presumably providing the basis for what they claimed were unfounded rumours of suicide.
The rumours just wouldn't stop despite all this - and the city council were still hanging over the heads of the stricken family like the Sword of Damocles. Those in the know begged the shoemaker's widow not to let the man's body be exhumed, on the grounds that it would surely be moved to unhallowed ground or perhaps even declared to have been a witch.
Striking Midnight[]
A depiction of a Nachzehrer, a folkloric German vampire.
Awful noises, hideous nightmares and sexual assault under the ebony cloak of darkness. These were just some of the vast array of torments that a figure bearing an uncanny resemblance to the deceased shoemaker was now unleashing on the inhabitants of Breslau. As the harassments on them mounted due to the sudden appearance of the spectral likeness of the deceased shoemaker, the family went to the court and declared that their deceased relative was being abused after his death, and that they wanted to take the matter to the Kaiser. Seemingly nothing came of this, however.
The ghost started off sporadically manifesting, seemingly nonplussed by if it showed itself during the nighttime or the day. Eventually its wrath would spread to almost everyone in the city - becoming responsible for a massive epidemic of what we would now call sleep paralysis through harassing each and every one of them once the sun had dipped below the horizon. A local folkloric account claims that it seemed to mostly target those who had returned from a hard day's work and wanted to get some sleep. It would suffocate them in their beds - squeezing them so hard that people could 'see the marks left by its fingers'.
People became so terrified that some of them no longer felt safe in their own homes. Large groups of people would stay with each-other, too frightened to sleep in their beds and instead dispersing themselves among the other rooms in an attempt to appeal to safety in numbers. There were burning lights all around these houses so that darkness could never creep onto the premises - but the attacks still somehow continued all the same. Sometimes everyone in a room would see the foul spirit, but more often only a few would see it - of whom it would only attack a further few. This terror would continue unabated for eight months.
Presumably at their wit's end - the city council at last decided that the body of the shoemaker should be disinterred. This was carried out on April 18th, 1592. As they opened the accursed coffin - the locals were horrified (but perhaps not surprised) to find that the corpse had apparently been untouched by decay. It had bloated 'like a drum', but the limbs and features of the man were all still intact. His limbs seemed unaffected by rigor mortis, and although the skin on his feet had 'peeled away' (I hope you weren't eating while reading this), a second skin had somehow grown over his feet - being 'much purer and stronger' than his original epidermis. It was expected that witches would've had some sort of strange mark somewhere on their bodies - and the shoemaker was no different. There was a mole 'like a rose' on his big toe. The bright red wound on his neck gaped open, and had apparently not changed from what it had looked like on the day he died. His body didn't seem to smell of decay - but instead the cloth with which it had been wrapped gave off a truly foul odour.
For days after this exhumation, the corpse was guarded around the clock. It was aired during the day and kept in a house at night. Strangely enough, the only thing this did was confirm that it must've been the man's spirit attacking people as opposed to his physical reanimated corpse - as the attacks continued as if nothing had changed. Next, the townsfolk decided that the best thing to do would be to bury the shoemaker underneath a nearby gallows - a traditional folkloric way to dispatch of a vampire. This, however, also did nothing - and seemed instead to incite the entity to increase the intensity of its attacks.
Daybreak[]
Finally, the pressure had mounted on the shoemaker's widow to such a degree that she broke down and at last admitted that her beloved husband had committed suicide - stating that the city council could do whatever they pleased with him in a show of utter defeat. Montague Summers (born April 10th, 1880) noted that the body was then dug up once more on the 7th of May, and that it was observed to have 'grown more sensibly fleshy' since its last interment.
The council, now acting under the certainty that they had a vampire on their hands, decapitated the body and removed his arms and legs. They cut open his back and removed his heart - which was found to be just as fresh-looking as that of a 'calf new kill'd'. The dismembered body and all its many separated parts were placed on a wooden pyre and burnt into ashes, which were then swept up and placed into a sack before being poured into the nearby river to prevent any other witches from using the remains for malevolent means. The ghost of the shoemaker would never be seen again.
However, the vampire plague of Breslau was not quite over yet. A maid who had worked for the shoemaker had died sometime after her master - and she also returned as a vampiric spirit. Her ghost appeared to a fellow maid one night, laying atop her and pressing down on her so heavily that her eyes bulged. This spirit would also appear to others, assuming numerous forms such as that of a cat, hen or goat. Eventually people grew tired of being bedeviled to such an extent - and the maid's body was also dug up and burnt. There are also some references to the shoemaker's wife also dying shortly after her husband, and of her reappearing as yet another vampire. Her body was also almost immediately disinterred and promptly cremated.
Conclusion[]
And so there we have it. A tragic suicide followed by mass hysteria? Or a suicide followed by the appearance of a malevolent vampiric spirit? There are several incidents mentioned in the records of this hysterical period which are worthy of consideration. It is not even remotely normal for an entire city to be plagued by sleep paralysis at the same time, and I have never heard of this hypnagogic disorder behaving like an epidemic before. The reports of the apparition making itself known to large groups of people at the same time could also be used to justify the proposition that perhaps these experiences weren't entirely hallucinatory. Interestingly enough, vampires in folklore wouldn't necessarily spread their curse through biting - but would instead simply need to kill humans for those humans to rise again as fellow vampires. Vampires normally go after their loved ones, and so - if that aspect of the lore and this story are to be considered possibly based on fact - then it is amusing to consider that perhaps the shoemaker and his maid were having an affair...
Source[]
'The Encyclopedia of Vampires, Werewolves and Other Monsters' by Rosemary Ellen Guiley