The Aufhocker: The Night Rider Who Grows Heavier at Every Step
In the middle of the old German city of Hildesheim, on a busy shopping street, stands one of the strangest public monuments in Europe. It portrays a boy hurrying along with a sack of stolen apples — and, landing on his back at the moment of the sculpture, claws dug into his shoulders, a wiry, grinning goblin. The townsfolk have called the creature the Huckup — Low German for "jump-up" — for centuries, and the verse carved beneath addresses every thief in the dialect of their grandmothers: the stolen goods weigh light in the hand, it warns, but the Huckup rides heavy. The statue is beloved, photographed, patted by children — and it is the domesticated, municipal face of one of the oldest and most widespread terrors of the German-speaking night: the Aufhocker , "the one who crouches on" — the being that waits beside the dark road for the solitary walker, springs silently onto his back — and then does the one thing that makes it unlike every other monster in Europe. ...