Mare

Mares are spirits who ride people's chest in their sleep, causing sleep paralysis and nightmares. They are the quintessential and most powerful nightmare spirits. They can shapeshift into different animal forms, including frogs, cats, horses, hares, dogs, oxen or cows, mice, snakes,, owls, moths, mosquitos, bees, and wasps. Most have a unibrow. Some will carry goose feathers.

Mares (not related to a female horse, but rather, to nightmares) do ride horses, leaving the exhausted and sweating in the morning. They tangle their hair and leave horrible knots with branches being caught in them.

They have the power to cause nightmares, sleep paralysis, cold sweats, suffocation, anxiety, bone-breaking body spasms, bruising, spasmodic crying, trampling effects on bodies, or quickened heartrates. They can glamour themselves. They can also make themselves appear illusorily as grass, straw, white shadows, or leather bags. Very powerful mares will use their tongue to drain a little blood from their victims.

They can enter homes through unplugged holes or keyholes, but they will be trapped inside if the hole is plugged. Once it is unplugged again, they leave no matter what has happened between. They can also be trapped if you put green paint on their hands, which allows them to then be trapped in an oak (which dies).

If they are offered a cold bowl and buttered bread for breakfast after a night of torent, they will be sated and not return. If one boils water in a new jar with a new cork, the mare will take the cork and leave. They can be driven away by moving your big toe or lighting a fire or sleeping on one's bad side. Upside down slippers by the bed also ward them off. Verbal rhyming charms may also be employed before one sleeps to keep them away. If one senses a mare in their room at night, one can look out the window or turn their pillow to repel them. An upside down broom behind the door or a belt on the sheets might also work. Hanging a dead magpie over a stable will keep them out. Cutting off a string from a door knob, sticking an awl in a door, putting an axe across a threshold, hanging mirrors over mangers, dressing horses in red ribbons, covering horses in foul-smelling substances, drinking coffee before bed, taking the mare's hat, throwing a piece of noose at them, sleeping with a wedding belt or scythe, changing sleeping positions, putting feces on the front door, and leaving a hay bundle in one's bed and sleeping in another room are all things people do to stave them off, to varying degrees of success.

If a family has seven daughters, the first and last are especially susceptible to mares. If a pregnant woman passes between two other pregnant women, her child will be susceptible to mares.

In some regions, they go by different names, including but not limited to ajajainen, luupainajas, maras, zmoras, meres, maers, marras, mahrts, mårts, môrs, painajas, painajainen, mareritt, martröð, pressingers, alps (though they are distinct), marlíðendr or kveldriða, moras, nocnice (though they are distinct), hihimores, cauchemars, or many other names.

PRO ATH STR AWA WIL PRS STH ESS