8. The body of the wife of one Hadnuck, buried seven weeks before; and that of her infant eight weeks old, buried only twenty-one days. They were both in a state of decomposition, though buried in the same ground and closely adjoining the others.
9. A servant, by name Rhade, twenty-three years of age; he had died after an illness of three months’ duration, and the body had been buried five weeks. It was in a state of decomposition.
10. The body of the heyduk Stanco, sixty years of age, who had died six weeks previously. There was much blood and other fluid in the chest and abdomen, and the body was in a vampire condition.
11. Millac, a heyduk, twenty-five years old. The body had been in the earth six weeks. It was also in the vampire condition.
12. Stanjoika, the wife of a heyduk, twenty years old; had died after an illness of three days, and had been buried eighteen. The countenance was florid. There was blood in the chest and in the heart. The viscera were perfectly sound, the skin remarkably flush.
The vampire tradition in its original loathsomeness, however, is to be found only in the Bulgarian provinces, whither the knowledge of the superstition was first imported from Dalmatia and Albania. In the former country the vampire is known by the name of wukodlak.
St Clair and Brophy, in their work on Bulgaria, state that in Bulgaria the vampire is no longer a dead body possessed by a demon, but a soul in revolt against the inevitable principle of corporeal death. He is detected by a hole in the tombstone which is placed over his grave, which hole is filled up by the medicine man with dirt mixed with poisonous herbs.
Vampirism is claimed to be hereditary as well as epidemic and endemic, and vampires are also stated to be capable of exercising considerable physical force. Stories are told of men who have had their jaws broken, as well as their limbs, as the result of their struggles with vampires.
About 1863 there was a local epidemic of vampirism in one of the villages of Bulgaria, when the place became so infested by them that the inhabitants were forced to assemble together in two or three houses, burn candles at night, and watch by turns in order to avoid the assaults made by the Obours, who lit up the streets with their sparkles. Some of the most enterprising of these threw their shadows on the walls of the rooms where the peasants were assembled through fear, while others howled and shrieked and swore outside the door, entered the abandoned houses, spat blood on the floors, turned everything topsy-turvy, and smeared everything, even the pictures of the saints, with cow-dung, until an old lady, suspected of witchcraft, discovered and laid the troublesome spirit, and afterwards the village was free.