BLUATSAUGER

Lore

The Bluatsauger phenomenon occupies a special place in the European lore of vampiric revenants. The word Bluatsauger is preserved mainly in Bavarian dialects and literally means "blood-sucker"; standard German favors the spelling Blutsauger, while archival documents sometimes give Blut Aussauger. The dialect form reflects South-German phonetics, yet the legend itself carries Balkan roots: during the Habsburg era, tales of vampire hysteria recorded by army doctors and officials in Bosnia-Herzegovina drifted into Upper Bavaria, where they merged with local notions of the Nachtzutzler ("night sucker") and the Totbeisser ("dead-biter").

Folk belief laid out a list of conditions that could turn a corpse into a Bluatsauger. Foremost were religious or social deviations-unbaptized infants, sinners excommunicated by the Church, suicides, sorcerers-all viewed as potential bearers of a post-mortem curse.

The key feature of this revenant is the way it creates its own kind. Instead of the classic bite, a Bluatsauger performs the so-called grave ritual. He carries a handful of earth from his own coffin and forces the victim to swallow it, thereby forging a magical link between the person and the realm of the dead, guaranteeing the victim will rise as a vampire.

Visually, the Bluatsauger stands in sharp contrast to the nineteenth-century image of the aristocratic vampire. His most distinctive trait is the total absence of a skeleton: the body remains soft, turning into a boneless, almost amorphous mass able to squeeze through cracks in shutters or under a door. Skin is described as pale and waxy or marbled with a stagnant purplish hue. Legends also give him disproportionately large eyes, and his entire body is said to be thickly furred.