Lidérc
Pronounced LEE-dairts — [ˈlideːrt͡s]
The Lover Hatched from a Black Hen's Egg
“Hatched from a black hen's egg, it comes by night as a fiery light or a lover who loves you to death.”
The lidérc is Hungary's most versatile demon — one name for three nightmares. It is the csodacsirke, the 'miracle chicken' hatched from a black hen's egg kept warm under a human armpit, which serves its keeper and ruins them; it is the ördögszerető, the devil-lover who comes by night wearing a dead sweetheart's face; and it is the flickering light over the marsh, sprinkling flame as it flies. In every form the bargain is the same: it gives, and then it takes more.
The creature is stitched into the Hungarian language itself — lidércnyomás, 'lidérc-pressure', is still the everyday word for nightmare, remembering the being that sat on sleepers' chests. Ethnographers documented it across the whole Hungarian world under a crowd of local names: iglic in the Csallóköz, piritusz in the south, mit-mitke in the east, ludvérc and lüdérc elsewhere — a national demon wearing county costumes.
The Legend
The miracle-chicken version is a compact tragedy about wanting things. Keep a black hen's egg warm under your arm — a manure heap will also serve — and the thing that hatches will attach itself to you and fetch whatever you desire, gold above all. But the keeping is the trap: as long as the lidérc lives its master can never be rid of it, the riches arrive with wasting sickness, and the creature's service shades into ownership. Ethnographers note it 'will acquire everything its master wishes' — and everything is exactly the problem.
As the ördögszerető, the satanic lover, the lidérc arrives as a light in the night sky that lands and takes human shape — very often the shape of a dead fiancé or lost lover. It enters through the keyhole or down the chimney, presses the breath out of its sleeping victim, and loves them into decline. The disguise has one flaw, and tradition is insistent about it: look down. However perfect the beloved face, the footprints it leaves are a horse's.
The Record
The lidérc is thoroughly documented in the Hungarian ethnographic canon. The Magyar Néprajzi Lexikon and Balassa and Ortutay's standard survey of folk belief both anatomise its forms: the hatched familiar, the incubus lover, the treasure-carrying fireball, and the tiny devil kept in a bottle, a box or a coat pocket that grants wealth and hints at a demonic pact. The regional record stretches from the Csallóköz to Transylvania and Moldavia, each district adjusting the name and the emphasis.
The catalogue of its behaviours reads like a casebook: it hoards and delivers gold; it sits on sleepers and rides them to exhaustion; it sprinkles flames as it flies; it brings sickness and misfortune to the households it enriches. Collectors also recorded the strict rules of its comings and goings — through keyholes and chimneys, as a point of light or a fiery streak across the dark, and always gone by the rooster's crow at dawn.
The Lore
Getting rid of a lidérc is a genre of its own. The classic remedy is the impossible task: command it to haul water in a sieve, or sand in a rope, and the endless errand breaks its hold on the household. Sterner traditions lock the creature into a tree hollow; cautious ones keep it away altogether with burnt incense and birch branches. The logic is consistent — the lidérc is a being of bargains and rules, and salvation lies in out-lawyering it.
Folklorists read the lidérc as a fusion creature, welding the European incubus, the witch's familiar and the will-o'-the-wisp into a single native demon — a compression of everything that visits people at night. The word lidércnyomás keeps it alive in every Hungarian dictionary, and the creature itself remains a fixture of Hungarian fantasy and folklore retellings, still hatching in the warm dark under somebody's arm.
Field Notes
- ✦ Can reportedly enter through the keyhole as a point of light.
- ✦ Said to be banished by setting it an impossible task, like carrying water in a sieve.
- ✦ Combines incubus, familiar, and will-o'-the-wisp traditions in one creature.
- ✦ The Hungarian word for nightmare, lidércnyomás, literally means 'lidérc-pressure'.
- ✦ As the devil-lover it wears a dead sweetheart's face — but leaves horse-like footprints.
Case File
- Classification
- Shapeshifting demon
- Category
- Shapeshifter
- Territory
- Rural Hungary
- First Sighted
- Hungarian folk tradition
- Habitat
- Households, hearths, and the night air
- Reported Size
- Variable; chick-sized to human form
- Also Known As
- Mit-mit kódis · Ördögszerető · Iglic · Ludvérc · Csodacsirke