Mora

The mora is Europe's nightmare given a body — the Slavic member of the family that includes the German mahr and the Polish zmora, its very name the common word for the crushing night visitation. The compendia describe a vampiric being, typically female, that causes nightmares and steals vital energy from sleepers; a mora that falls in love with her victim drinks his blood as well. Male moras are known by a physiognomy — bushy black eyebrows meeting over the nose — and one major strand of the folklore makes the mora not a demon at all but a living person, man or woman, whose soul leaves the body in sleep, takes any of countless forms, and travels to press, suffocate, and feed on a chosen sleeper.

The tradition survived migration intact enough to be collected on a second continent: among Kashubian settlers in Canada the mora is the wandering soul of a sleeping girl who was never properly baptized, and it still suffocates its prey. The counter-lore is domestic and precise. A victim who wakes catches the creature in mid-escape, when it transforms into an apple, a ball of wool, or a mass of hair before vanishing; prevention is cheaper — unused keyholes stopped with wax, and shoes pointed away from the bed at night.

One caution about names attaches to the entry. The compendia's variation lists sweep the Russian kikimora in with the mora, but that figure is a house spirit of a different character, and the census keeps it apart; the names kept here — mahr, mara, zmora, morava, murawa — are the genuine regional declensions of the night-crusher itself. The word behind them all is the same one English preserves fossilized inside nightmare, which is the neatest possible measure of how wide the being's distribution once was: wherever the language went, the crusher had already been.

The paragraphs below are extrapolated; no source supports them.

The mora reads as intimacy inverted. It enters bedrooms, knows its victim, returns nightly, and in the living-sleeper version is someone's own neighbor or lover unaware of what their soul does in the dark — predation with the texture of a relationship. The temperament that fits is obsessive, secretive, and needy: it does not want to kill so much as to keep, pressing the same chest night after night. Read from the lore's shape, and marked as speculation.