754 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



CURIOSITIES OF SUPERSTITION. 



By FELIX L. OSWALD, M. D. 



III. 



SOME international superstitions have a symbolic significance. The 

 vampire-fable, for instance, typifies the insufficiency of human life, 

 the sleep-disturbing consciousness of its unattained purposes. Like the 

 visits of the White Lady, the rambles of the posthumous night-walker 

 have generally a definite object, the gratification of revenge or desire, 

 or of some special crotchet, like that of the Turkish horse-ghoul (men- 

 tioned by the traveler Kohl), who amused himself by galloping the 

 race-horses of his former master. Mental aberrations can become epi- 

 demic, and the vampire-delusion seems to be as contagious as the 

 witchcraft-insanity. In Transylvania the " climate of opinion " ap- 

 pears to affect even foreigners. In 1859 an Austrian notary of Klau- 

 senburg recorded the testimony of forty-eight deponents of various 

 nationalities, who attested the >ost-mortem appearance of one Fedor 

 Radotzek, a brevet captain of the Grenz- Corps, or Military-Frontier 

 Guards. About two years after the funeral of the brevet captain, the 

 neighbors attended a birthday-party at the house of his widow, and 

 toward evening some of them were standing in the open porch, talking 

 to one of his sons, when they saw the old man himself come round the 

 corner and enter the garden-gate. A few minutes after the garden 

 was crowded with a mass-meeting of citizens, in a pardonable state of 

 excitement, for the twilight was still clear enough to remove all doubts 

 about the identity of the visitor. He had taken a seat on the garden- 

 bench, making himself at home, as if nothing had happened ; but, on 

 being taken to task for the eccentricity of his conduct, he had the good 

 sense to re-die on the spot, and met his fate like a well-behaved corpse, 

 when a couple of priests took him in charge and hustled him off the 

 premises. 



Vampirism prevails all over Russia, Persia, Greece, Bohemia, and 

 Poland, but especially in the Danubian Principalities, where the wealthy 

 families of the last century often buried their dead in sheet-iron-lined 

 coffins of the heaviest oak-plank, while the poor would sometimes fet- 

 ter or even hamstring their deceased relatives, to prevent them from 

 abusing their feet for posthumous excursions. It is one of the few 

 dogmas which the Moslem share with their Christian neighbors. There 

 is a variety of maladies, chlorosis and hectic fever, for instance, which 

 the Turkish beldames unhesitatingly ascribe to the activity of a ghoul ; 

 and after the massacre of Chios the Capitan Pasha ordered the bodies 

 to be burned, " lest they should leave their graves." For a similar rea- 

 son, perhaps, the judges of the Holy Inquisition roasted their victims ; 

 they believed, with Aristotle, that " fire disembodies the principle of 



