Then (and then only) be emboldened the hearts of my foes and opponents!
When the corpse in the ground opens of itself,
Then (and then only) be emboldened the hearts of my foes and opponents!
May your heart be softened when you behold me,
By grace of this prayer that I use, called Silam Bayn.
Abercromby, in his work on the Finns, says that the Ceremis imagine that the spirits that cause illness, especially fever and ague, are continually recruited on the death of old maids, murderers, and those that die a violent death. Whenever anyone becomes dangerously ill, the Lapps feel sure that one of his deceased relatives wants his company in the region of the dead, either from affection or to punish him for some trespass. The Truks of Altai have a similar belief. The soul after death willingly lingers for some time in the house and leaves it unwillingly, and often takes with it some other members of the family or some of the cattle.
Codrington, in his descriptive work on the Melanesians, says that there is a belief in Banks Islands in the existence of a power like that of vampires. A man or a woman would obtain this power out of a morbid desire for communion with some ghost, and in order to gain it would steal and eat a morsel of a corpse. The ghost of the dead man would then join in a close friendship with the person who had eaten, and would gratify him by afflicting anyone against whom his ghostly power might be directed. The man so afflicted would feel that something was influencing his life, and would come to dread some particular person among his neighbours, who was, therefore, suspected of being a talamur. This name was also given to one whose soul was supposed to go out and eat the soul or lingering life of a freshly dead corpse. There was a woman, some years ago, of whom the story is told that she made no secret of doing this, and that once on the death of a neighbour she gave notice that she should go in the night and eat the corpse. The friends of the deceased therefore kept watch in the house where the corpse lay, and at dead of night heard a scratching at the door, followed by a rustling noise close by the corpse. One of them threw a stone and seemed to hit the unknown thing; and in the morning the talamur was found with a bruise on her arm, which she confessed was caused by a stone thrown at her while she was eating the corpse.
Baron von Haxthausen, in his work on Transcaucasia, tells us that there once dwelt in a cavern in Armenia a vampire called Dakhanavar, who could not endure anyone to penetrate into the mountains of Ulmish Altotem or count their valleys. Everyone who attempted this had in the night his blood sucked by the monster from the soles of his feet until he died. The vampire was, however, at last outwitted by two cunning fellows. They began to count the valleys, and when night came on they lay down to sleep—taking care to place themselves with the feet of the one under the head of the other. In the night the monster came, felt as usual, and found a head; then he felt at the other end and found a head there also. “Well,” cried he, “I have gone through the whole 366 valleys of these mountains, and have sucked the blood of people without end, but never yet did I come across anyone with two heads and no feet!” So saying, he ran away and was never more seen in that country, but ever after the people knew that the mountain has 366 valleys.
Even America is not free from the belief in the vampire. In one of the issues of the Norwich (U.S.A.) Courier for 1854, there is the account of an incident that occurred at Jewett, a city in that vicinity. About eight years previously, Horace Ray of Griswold had died of consumption. Afterwards, two of his children—grown-up sons—died of the same disease, the last one dying about 1852. Not long before the date of the newspaper the same fatal disease had seized another son, whereupon it was determined to exhume the bodies of the two brothers and burn them, because the dead were supposed to feed upon the living; and so long as the dead body in the grave remained undecomposed, either wholly or in part, the surviving members of the family must continue to furnish substance on which the dead body could feed. Acting under the influence of this strange superstition, the family and friends of the deceased proceeded to the burial-ground on June 8th, 1854, dug up the bodies of the deceased brothers, and burned them on the spot.
Dr Dyer, an eminent physician of Chicago, also reported in 1875 a case occurring within his own personal knowledge, where the body of a woman who had died of consumption was taken from her grave and her lungs burned, under the belief that she was drawing after her into the grave some of her surviving relatives. In 1874, according to the Providence Journal, in the village of Placedale, Rhode Island, Mr William Rose dug up the body of his own daughter and burned her heart, under the belief that she was wasting away the lives of other members of the family.