The whole village having crowded to the spot to behold the miracle, instantly recognised a Vampire in this healthful corpse. Thousands of anecdotes were instantly cited of children lost in the neighbourhood; who, though previously supposed to have fallen into the river, or been destroyed by wolves, had evidently satisfied the dreadful appetites of the dead schoolmaster! In order to keep him, for the future, quiet and harmless in his grave, the villagers drove a stake through the body, after having cut off his head and burnt it on the spot.
Had they persevered in their search, they would doubtless have found reason to fear, from the evidence of the adjoining graves, that their own fathers and mothers were also Vampires. Many soils, particularly those impregnated with nitre, have the property of preserving bodies by converting them to a substance resembling spermaceti. Similar discoveries have been made in several church-yards in England; but luckily without provoking suspicions so preposterous.
In the course of a few years, thanks to the progress of national education, the best authenticated ghost-story going will scarcely find an auditor. Half of the magic rites and mystic wonders of the olden time have found able expositors in our own, in the retort and the crucible. We no longer exorcise a ghost:—we decompose it,—like any other gas.
The orgies of intemperance used to be a fertile source of apparitions; as in the case of the female spectre which rebuked the infidelity of Lord Lyttleton—and the appearance of Lord Lyttleton himself to his friend Miles Peter Andrews; two bon vivants, who were most likely indebted for their nocturnal visions to an extra bottle of claret, and a broiled bone.
A clergyman, who had been struggling hard and sacrificing his nights’ rest for a series of months to a new translation of the Prophecies, took it into his head one night, that three children had entered his room and were seated at his writing table. As there was nothing alarming in such a visitation, he continued to write on; and on retiring to bed, at daybreak, left his young visitors apparently occupying their place. When he woke in the morning, they had of course disappeared.
The illusion was, however, so strong, and recurred so often, that his studies were seriously interrupted; till at last he took the only wise step ever taken by an inveterate ghost-seer:—he consulted an eminent physician.
“You have been overworking yourself,” was the judicious reply, “and unless you have recourse to air and exercise, your nervous system will become seriously impaired. Such cases are by no means rare among men of studious habits. In some instances, the spectrum is created by a disorder of the optic nerve. In yours, I am pretty nearly sure that it arises from derangement of the stomach. A good dose of calomel, my dear Sir, will lay all your ghosts in the Red Sea!”
An ignominious conclusion of a romance, which in some respects resembles the story of the Lutheran clergyman related in Wraxall’s Memoirs! who, on taking possession of his cure, was awoke early next morning by the spectre of a pastor in his gown and band, praying beside the desk at the foot of his bed, and holding a ghastly child by either hand, whom he recognised—by a likeness suspended in the parish church—as his predecessor in the living. This occurred in summer time; but at the beginning of winter, when the stove in his chamber came to be lighted, as it never used to be in the time of the former pastor, an unpleasant smell issuing from the chimney caused a search to be instituted; when lo! the bones of two young children were found among the ashes in the stove. The incumbent, who had already circulated the report of his ghost story, had of course the comfort of finding child-murder attributed to his predecessor.
The instance of Eugene Aram and ‘Dan Clarke’s bones’ affords strong proof that those who hide can find; and in the ease in question, there appears some doubt whether the spectre were the delinquent.
The subject of ghosts, however, must not be treated with less reverence than its due. Samuel and the Witch of Endor, and the declaration of the Evangelist that, during the Passion of our Saviour “the dead were raised up, and seen by many in the City of Jerusalem,” remind us that spectral visitations are consistent with the records of Holy Writ. But in this case, as in that of demoniacal possession, the Christian era has produced a revolution in the pschycological phenomena of nature; the power of the evil one over the human race being modified so that the dead are no longer raised up; while the angels of the Lord no longer manifest themselves to the eyes of mankind, nor do His fallen angels take possession of the living soul.