VAMPIRES. Sol 



pages to a reasoned debate upon the case. He touches on 

 the mysteries of life and death ; he sets forth the extreme 

 difficulty of accounting for the phenomena of a corpse rising 

 from the tomb without disturbing the earth; of returning 

 thereto without disturbing the earth ; of the utter unmean- 

 ingness of a ghoul such as this taking pleasure in the moles- 

 tation, even murder, of its once dearest friends. Lastly, he 

 asks how it can be that a dead body, out of which the soul, 

 the life, hath fled, can yet retain a second life ? All this he 

 asks, and more; he throws doubt on the case, but nowhere 

 expressly denies the existence of vampires. I think he tries 

 to make it seem, inferentially, that vampiredom is wholly 

 an illusion, a fiction of the Greek Church ; but he almost 

 cuts the ground from under him, by presenting certain re- 

 cords of living dead people, which come very nearly up to 

 the mark of vampiredom. He quotes the German authors 

 Raufft and Rehrius, concerning whom mention has already 

 been made, seemingly disposed to believe much they have 

 related concerning the gluttony, the swinish munching, prac- 

 tised by certain evil-disposed corpses. 



' Raufft takes it for a certain conclusion,' writes Cardan, 

 6 that certain corpses have been known to devour the grave- 

 clothes and other things within their reach, nay, even their 

 own flesh.' He remarks, that in certain parts of Germany, 

 in order to prevent this horrible habit of underground feast- 

 ing, grave-diggers are accustomed to put a good hard packing 

 of earth under a suspected corpse's chin : that, moreover, to 

 make security doubly sure, some grave-diggers place in the 

 mouths of suspected corpses a little bit of silver, or else a 

 stone, taking the farther precaution to tie a handkerchief 

 tight about the throat. 



Certain of the milder and least mysterious tales concern- 

 ing dead-alive people admit of a sort of half-explanation, 

 by adopting the hypothesis of trance ; as, for example, the 

 following cases narrated by Calmet : 



