CHAPTER VI
VAMPIRISM IN HUNGARY, BAVARIA, AND SILESIA
The Hungarians believe that those who have been passive vampires in life become active vampires after death; that those whose blood has been sucked in life by vampires become themselves vampires after death. In many districts the belief also prevails that the only way to prevent this calamity happening is for the threatened victim to eat some earth from the grave of the attacking vampire, and to smear his own body with blood from the body of that vampire.
That the belief in vampirism is still current in Hungary was evidenced recently. The Daily Telegraph of February 15th, 1912, contained the following paragraph: “A Buda-Pesth telegram to the Messaggero reports a terrible instance of superstition. A boy of fourteen died some days ago in a small village. A farmer, in whose employment the boy had been, thought that the ghost of the latter appeared to him every night. In order to put a stop to these supposed visitations, the farmer, accompanied by some friends, went to the cemetery one night, stuffed three pieces of garlic and three stones in the mouth, and thrust a stake through the corpse, fixing it to the ground. This was to deliver themselves from the evil spirit, as the credulous farmer and his friends stated when they were arrested.”
In 1732, in a village in Hungary, in the space of three months, seventeen persons of different ages died of vampirism, some without being ill, and others after languishing two or three days. It is reported that a girl named Stanoska, daughter of the Heyduk Jotiutso, who went to bed in perfect health, awoke in the middle of the night trembling violently and uttering terrible shrieks, declaring that the son of the Heyduk Millo, who had been dead nine weeks, had nearly strangled her in her sleep. She fell into a languid state and died at the end of three days. Young Millo was exhumed and found to be a vampire.
Calmet, in his work The Phantom World, relates the following: “About fifteen years ago a soldier who was billeted at the house of a Haidamaque peasant, on the frontiers of Hungary, as he was one day sitting at table near his host, the master of the house, saw a person he did not know come in and sit down to table also with them. The master of the house was strangely frightened at this, as were the rest of the company. The soldier knew not what to think of it, being ignorant of the matter in question. But the master of the house being dead the very next day, the soldier inquired what it meant. They told him it was the body of the father of the host, who had been dead and buried for ten years, who had thus come to sit down next to him, and had announced and caused his death.
“The soldier informed the regiment of it in the first place, and the regiment gave notice of it to the general officers, who commissioned the Count de Cabreras, captain of the regiment of Alandetti infantry, to make information concerning this circumstance. Having gone to the place with some other officers, a surgeon and an auditor, they heard the depositions of all the people belonging to the house, who decided unanimously that the ghost was the father of the master of the house, and that all the soldier had said and reported was the exact truth, which was confirmed by all the inhabitants of the village.
“In consequence of this the corpse of the spectre was exhumed and found to be like that of a man who had just expired, and his blood like that of a living man. The Count de Cabreras had his head cut off and caused him to be laid again in the tomb. He also took information concerning other similar ghosts: among others, of a man dead more than thirty years who had come back three times to his house at meal-time. The first time he had sucked the blood from the neck of his own brother, the second time from one of his sons, and the third time from one of the servants in the house; and all three died of it instantly and on the spot. Upon this deposition the commissary had this man taken out of his grave, and finding that, like the first, his blood was in a fluidic state like that of a living person, he ordered them to run a large nail into his temple and then to lay him again in the grave.