214 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



deceased, appeared in her house and beat and otherwise tormented 

 her child. The priest seems to have accepted the truth of her state- 

 ment, since he ordered the corpse to be disinterred, decapitated, re- 

 buried at a cross-road, and covered with poppies. In 1851, during the 

 prevalence of cholera in Ukraine, in the governmental province of 

 Kiev, the peasants of Possady attributed the epidemic to a deceased 

 sacristan and his wife, who were supposed to roam about at night 

 as vampires and kill people by sucking their blood. In order to 

 stay the ravages of the scourge the corpses of this couple were ex- 

 humed, their heads cut off and burned, and ashen stakes driven 

 through their backs into the ground. In 1892 a peasant woman in 

 the Russian province of Kovno hanged herself in a wood near the 

 village of Somenishki. The priest refused her Christian burial be- 

 cause she had committed suicide, and was therefore given over to the 

 devil. In order that she might rest quietly in her grave and not be 

 changed into a vampire, her sons severed her head from her body and 

 laid it at her feet. In thus refusing to perform religious funeral 

 rites the priest obeyed the canons of the church and also the laws of 

 the Russian Empire. Until quite recently a corner of unconsecrated 

 ground next to the wall of the Russian cemetery was reserved as a 

 sort of carrion pit for the corpses of self-murderers, and it is ex- 

 pressly prescribed in the Svod Sakonov * that they " shall be dragged 

 to such place of infamy by the knacker, and there covered with 

 earth." This treatment of a felo-de-se by the ecclesiastical and civil 

 authorities directly fosters popular superstition by tending to con- 

 firm the notion that there is something uncanny, eldritch, demoniacal, 

 and preternaturally malignant inherent in his mortal remains, a no- 

 tion still further strengthened by a most unjust paragraph (1472) 

 in the Russian code, which declares the last will and testament of a 

 suicide to have no legal validity. Drought, too, as well as pestilence, 

 is ascribed to the evil agency of vampires, which " milk the clouds," 

 and hinder the falling of the dew. In 1887 the South Russian prov- 

 ince of Cherson began to suffer from drought soon after a peasant 

 had hanged himself in the village of Ivanovka, the inhabitants of 

 which, assuming a causative connection between the aridity and the 

 self-homicide, poured water on the grave while uttering the follow- 

 ing words: " I sprinkle, I pour; may God send a shower, bring on a 

 little rainfall, and relieve us from misery! " As this invocation 

 failed to produce the desired effect, the body was taken up and in- 

 humed again in a gorge outside of the village. In some districts the 

 corpse is disinterred, beaten on the head, and drenched with water 

 poured through a sieve; in others it is burned. 



* General Code, vol. xiii, edition of 1892, cited by Lowenstimm. 



