The Little Russians hold that, if the vampire’s hands have grown numb from remaining long crossed in the grave, he makes use of his teeth, which are like steel. When he has gnawed his way with these through all obstacles, he first destroys the babies he finds in a house, and afterwards the older inmates. If fine salt be scattered on the floor of a room, the vampire’s footsteps may be traced to his grave, in which he will be found resting with rosy cheek and gory mouth.
The Kashoubes say that when a vieszcy, as they call a vampire, wakes from his sleep within the grave he begins to gnaw his hands and feet, and as he gnaws, first his relatives, and then his neighbours, sicken and die. When he has finished his own store of flesh, he rises at midnight and destroys cattle or climbs a belfry and sounds the bell. All who hear the ill-omened tones will soon die. Generally he sucks the blood of sleepers.
Ralston, in his Songs of the Russian People, says that it is in the Ukraine and in White Russia—so far as the Russian Empire is concerned—that traditions are most rife about this ghastly creation of morbid fancy, and that the Little Russians attribute the birth of a vampire to an unholy union between a witch and a werwolf or a devil.
He relates the following as a specimen of the vampire stories prevalent in the country:—
“A peasant was driving past a graveyard after it had grown dark. After him came running a stranger, dressed in a red shirt and a new jacket, who said: ‘Stop! Take me as your companion.’
“‘Pray take a seat.’
“They enter a village, drive up to this and that house. Though the gates are wide open, yet the stranger says, ‘Shut tight!’ for on those gates crosses have been branded. They drive on to the very last house: the gates are barred, and from them hangs a padlock weighing a score of pounds; but there is no cross there, and the gates open of their own accord.
“They go into the house: there on the bench lie two sleepers—an old man and a lad. The stranger takes a pail, places it near the youth, and strikes him on the back; immediately the back opens, and forth flows rosy blood. The stranger fills the pail full and drinks it dry. Then he fills another pail with blood from the old man, slakes his brutal thirst, and says to the peasant: ‘It begins to grow light! Let us go back to my dwelling.’
“In a twinkling they find themselves at the graveyard. The vampire would have clasped the peasant in his arms, but luckily for him the cocks begin to crow, and the corpse disappears. The next morning, when folks come and look, the old man and the lad are dead.”
According to the Servians and Bulgarians, unclean spirits enter into the corpses of malefactors and other evilly disposed persons, who then become vampires. In some places the jumping of a boy over the corpse is considered as fatal as that of a cat.