When I was a little boy, my mother used to tell me stories about Der Mampf.

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He was sort of a local boogeyman in the town I grew up in. A spooky story for parents to tell their kids. Nothing more, nothing less.

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The one she most often told was about a little boy named Stefan, who was a very loud and lively child. Stefan liked to play from the moment the sun rose until long after it set and though his mother and father would often tell him that he needed to go to bed, Stefan would not. When they tried to tuck him in, he would wait until they had left before creeping out of his bed and playing with his toys once again until the noise he made caused his parents to come and put him back to bed.

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One time, Stefan had asked his mother why she insisted he be asleep by dark and she had told him that if he remained awake and continued to play, then he risked drawing the attention of Der Mampf.

‘Der Mampf is a terrible creature.’ She’d said to him. ‘He lives in the forest, and comes out at night looking for something to eat. He has no eyes, so he listens for loud sounds and follows them back to their source.’

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‘Why do they call him Der Mampf?’ Stefan had asked, ‘That sounds like such a silly name!’

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‘They call him Def Mampf because he is the man with ten thousand teeth. When he bites into your flesh and begins to chew, the agony never stops. As your body slides down his gullet piece by piece, those teeth crush and mush you into a pulp. He starts with your feet, then he bites off your legs. He’ll swallow your arms, and tear you in half. Then before he eats up the rest of you, he takes out your teeth and adds them to his own mouth.’

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Well, little Stefan still thought the whole story sounded silly so he didn’t pay it any mind. He decided that his mother was simply trying to scare him and he didn’t want to change his ways. So the next night, he behaved the same as he always did. When he was put to bed, he got up and played with his toys. He did the same the night after that, and the night after that, and the night after that.

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Then one night, when Stefans mother heard a commotion in his room, she went to put him to bed once again, only to find no trace of her son. Only an open window, a pool of blood on the ground, and the distant sound of chewing.

‘Mampf. Mampf. Mampf.’

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That story used to scare the crap out of me when I was little. I’d always go to bed, wrap myself in my sheets and never make a sound after being sent to bed, terrified that if I was somehow too loud, Der Mampf would crawl through my bedroom window and eat me alive.

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I used to think it was a story a lot of people told to their children, but in reality, I rarely hear any mention of it outside my hometown. There are a few neighboring towns who are familiar with the story of course, but that’s really it. Mention it anywhere else and people won’t know what you’re talking about.

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I can’t help but envy them a little.

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Most people in my hometown don’t actually believe in Der Mampf. But every now and then, you’ll run into someone who will swear up and down they’ve seen it for themselves.

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There was a police officer in my town by the name of Hans Blümel. I actually remember Blümel from when I was a little boy, he seemed a good enough man and I don’t think there was anyone in town who ever actively disliked him. I recall that when he was injured in the line of duty, people went out of their way to support him and his family, cooking them meals and offering to help however they could. They went out of their way to help him… The only thing they wouldn’t do was talk about how he got injured.

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Most people simply said that he’d been injured during a fight with a thief he’d caught trying to enter somebody's house. Another officer had found him during the altercation and chased off the assailant, although by then they’d already gouged out poor Blümel’s eyes.

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As for what happened to the unknown assailant, whose house they’d been trying to break into or any other details… Those were just never really addressed. In fact, I’ve asked around and nobody remembers if they ever caught the person who injured poor Officer Blümel… And Blümel himself never said much about the whole affair until recently.

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After his wife passed away, Blümel started hitting the bottle a lot harder than he had before and when he was drunk, he started to talk. People mostly dismissed the things he said as the drunken ramblings of an aging former police officer who probably wasn’t all there in the head anymore. But when I ran into him a few weeks ago, I held on to his every word.

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The way Blümel tells it, he’d been called to a farm on the edge of town regarding some sort of disturbance. The owners had thought that there was some sort of animal in the barn and Blümel had gone to investigate. He’d sent his partner to watch the other entrance while he went inside to try and scare whatever it was out into the open.

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Now, he never told me exactly what it was that he saw inside… In fact, he outright refused to describe it. The only thing he told me about it was that:

“It took my eyes.”

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Blümels screams had drawn his partner to his aid, and he told me that he remembered hearing gunshots, and feeling the creature run away. After that, he had blacked out. I had pushed Blümel a little, hoping that he might tell me more about just what it was he’d seen that night… After all, chances are it was the last thing he ever saw. He’d only laughed at me, and spoken two words:

“Der Mampf.”

I got nothing else out of him.

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I would’ve spoken to his partner, who at the time had been a man named Friedrich Decker, but Decker is long dead. He passed away about two months after he saved Blümels life, during some sort of hunting accident. The only thing I was able to learn about that accident was that he’d been mauled by some kind of wild animal, a fact I do find a little suspicious, but hardly conclusive.

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I suspect that some people in town think I might be a little mad, for looking into this sort of thing. After all, Der Mampf is just a bedtime story. Something that parents tell their children at night… And the strange deaths that sometimes occur around town, the mauling of Officer Blümel, the unsolved disappearance of Stefan Scharf in 1931… They’re all just coincidences. Horrible things happened, yes. But not proof of anything unnatural!

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Officer Blümel was attacked by a wild boar who got into a barn. Officer Decker was probably killed by a different boar. They’re certainly common enough in the region. Stefan Scharf was likely just a runaway who got turned into a local folk tale and my parents died during a home invasion.

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Yes… A home invasion…

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That was the official explanation. Murdered by an unknown assailant during a burglary.

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But I know the truth.

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Just like Officer Blümel. I saw him with my own eyes, only unlike him, I managed to get away.

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My mother and father were very much in love and it wasn’t uncommon for them to leave me at home for a night out. When I was young, they’d usually leave me with a relative for the night, but as I grew older they saw no issue with leaving me at home to care for myself.

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I was around 15 the night they died. They’d been out on one of their date nights and had come home lively and a little drunk. I’d gone to bed at my usual time, since I had school the next morning but they’d stayed up to talk and laugh like a couple in their twenties… I didn’t think they were being that loud. But, I suppose they were loud enough.

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I remember a few moments of silence, followed by the sound of my mother screaming and the sound of shattering glass.

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I’d sat bolt upright in bed, listening to my parents scream in terror. I could hear the crash of furniture being thrown around, followed by the most agonized screech I’d ever heard… Likely from my father… That scream seemed to cut off suddenly, and in its aftermath, all I could hear was the horrified sobbing of my mother, followed by her own screams and pleas for mercy before she too fell silent.

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I’d stood silently in my bedroom, heart pounding like a drum as I listened to the silence… And started to hear the sound.

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‘Mampf. Mampf. Mampf.’

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That was the sound my mother used in her story. The sound of chewing. Translated into English, it would more or less be the same as: ‘Munch. Munch. Munch.’

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The actual sound isn’t something I think I can properly describe… It was a wet, heavy chewing accompanied by the snapping and crunching of bone and the squish of crushed meat… At the time, it made me sick to my stomach and the memory of it still causes my guts to churn.

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I’d opened my door and stepped out into the hall before creeping to the banister to look downstairs. I only caught a glimpse of it from the side and only just for a moment… A leathery thing that was shaped like a man, but bore no other resemblance to one. Its limbs were long and spindly, sort of like a frogs. The skin was like tanned dry leather. The palms of its hands were covered in broken jagged teeth. I could see a mouth full of countless little teeth, running all the way down its massive gullet…

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And I could see my mother, her legs torn from her body and disappearing down the maw of the thing that stood over her. Her eyes were still open and fresh blood dribbled from her open, now toothless mouth. I saw her chest violently rising and falling as she bled out and in her final moments, she looked at me, her eyes wide with a terror I cannot even begin to describe.

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One day, I may forget the beast. But I will never forget the look in my mother's eyes as she lay ripped apart, waiting to be devoured. The sight of her was too much for me…

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I watched the creature grab her by the torso, hooking the teeth embedded into its hands into her flesh, and drag her toward it. I saw it begin to stuff her down its throat, and I heard the sound of her flesh squishing as it chewed her with a horrible, undulating motion. I could see its neck pulsating as it crushed her and I could hear her garbled, miserable cry of pain as it ate her alive. I couldn’t watch any more… All I could do was turn and run, and as I did I saw the creature's head tilt slightly in my direction.

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Tears streaming down my cheeks, I ran back to my bedroom and slammed the door behind me, blocking it with a chair and praying to whatever God might listen that it wouldn’t find me.

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It did no good.

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I could hear footsteps on the stairs, and I could hear the sound of heavy breathing in the hall. I could feel its presence nearby. Somehow, in a way I don’t know that I can describe, I could feel it… Like a weight on the edge of my subconscious. I knew it was coming for me. I could hear its low, heavy breathing and I could hear the sickening squish of my mother's flesh as it chewed on her. I could hear bones cracking, and the weak whimpers she made as it consumed her…

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I knew it was coming closer to my door, and so I did the only thing I could. I opened my window and climbed out. No sooner had I done so, did I hear the sound of my bedroom door flying open. In the moment before I dropped down to the ground below, looked back to see a shadow in the hall. I didn’t look back again.

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That night, I woke up a neighbor by pounding on their back door until they answered. They called the police for me, who found only blood. Nothing else.

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We buried empty caskets, and they concluded that my parents had been killed during a home invasion. I was sent to live with my grandfather and that was that.

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I don’t talk about what I saw very often. Most people in my town don’t believe in Der Mampf and long ago, when I tried to tell them the truth, they dismissed it, writing me off as nothing more than a poor, traumatized boy who’d just lost everything. But I remember all too clearly what I saw that night and I know now that I am not the only one who has seen it.

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I will keep digging. Hopefully, if I dig deep enough I might be able to find out what it truly is, where it came from, and maybe even how to kill it.

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One way or another, I will force this bedtime story to its happy ending.