Umbrarium

In Hungarian folk belief the lidérc is one name for several overlapping night visitors rather than a single creature with one body. The older household form is the miracle chicken, csodacsirke: hatched from the first egg of a black hen, kept warm under a person's arm or in manure until something featherless and clever comes out. It talks, fetches gold, and attaches itself as a lover of the opposite sex to the person who warmed it. Linda Dégh's collections and Tekla Dömötör's surveys of Hungarian folk belief record that the keeper grows rich while the spirit demands endless work, butter, and company, and that a person who grows wealthy too quickly may still be said to keep such a light.

A second strand is the ördögszerető, the devil-lover, who flies at night as a fiery light, a will-o'-the-wisp, or a bird of flame, then enters by chimney or keyhole in the shape of a dead spouse or longed-for stranger. Tellers say one footprint is a boot and the other a goose's or chicken's foot, or that the visitor leaves horse-marks. It sits on the sleeper; from this pressure comes the ordinary Hungarian word lidércnyomás, nightmare, literally lidérc-pressure. Adél Vehrer, summarising ethnographic work on incubi and household familiars, notes that the chicken-ghost and the marsh flame share this Hungarian combination of wealth, erotic attachment, and crushing night weight more densely than in many neighbouring traditions.

Getting rid of a lidérc is a matter of cunning, not of open war. The usual counsel is to set an impossible task: haul sand with a rope, carry water in a sieve, or fetch a millstone. Some tellings shut it in a tree hollow. Ashes scattered on the threshold may show the mixed footprints and keep it from crossing. Birch, incense, and garlic appear among household preventives. The spirit that is not kept busy may kill its master; the spirit that is loved too well may drain the same person to a thin death by summer's end.

Modern Hungarian still uses lidérc for a flickering marsh light, which can make the old being sound merely meteorological. The village stories are sterner. They speak to loneliness after a spouse has gone, to the shame of sudden riches, and to the night when breath will not come. The lidérc is not a generic incubus imported from Latin demonology, nor only a chicken joke. It is a Hungarian way of naming the bargain that looks like comfort and eats the house from the inside.