Excerpt two: “A corpse becomes a vampire if it has not been watched carefully enough, so that something jumps over it (most frequently a cat) or else if it had suffered a violent death: suicide by hanging, murder, drowning, etc. Not many years ago just such a vampire stirred up the whole village of Rajchilovci with his evil deeds: he set free the livestock from their pens and drove them toward the populace, suffocated young and old, scattered all sorts of household items, rode horses from the fields, etc. He became a vampire because he died an unnatural death: he fell from the roof of a hay loft, tumbled down a chute, and by evening was dead. The peasants knew that Velin (such was his name) would become a vampire, because, as soon as they dressed him (his corpse), he became excessively bloated, and during the course of the night became a full-blown drum. A vampire usually performs his evil tricks for 40 days and, if he is not destroyed, i.e. killed by some vampirdzhija or devoured by a wolf, he develops a skeleton and becomes even more frightening.”²⁵

Excerpt three: “An old peasant named Paja Tomic… died… on April 9th of this year. Shortly after his death his wife Cvija began to complain that her dead husband was coming to her during the night in the form of a spirit and was running about the house scaring all the members of the household. Some believed Cvija and others did not, but she continued to insist that her husband had become a vampire (se povampirio) and that he was visiting her every night. Thus it went for a whole month, when, so they say, the sons also noticed the vampire (vampir) in the house.”²⁶

Excerpt four: “In the Zemplín district (Eastern Slovakia) there has been preserved the folk belief that a dead person can return and cause harm to the living. Within this belief structure there occurs a typical vampire motif of sucking the blood of people and livestock, falling upon them, and suffocating them. A vampire (nelapši) can depopulate whole villages. He brings a plague upon the livestock and kills them all off. The vampire kills not only by sucking blood, but also with a single glance. He is able to annihilate everything that can be seen from a tower such as a church tower… If the body of the deceased has not become stiff, if it has two curls in its hair, if its face has not become pale, if its eyes are open, then it means that he has two hearts and consequently two souls.”²⁷

Excerpt five: “Among the Slavs of the Hannover Wendland who have been Germanized since the last [Editor: 18th] century, a vampire is called ‘Dubbelsüger’, Doppelsauger [Editor: Doublesuckler]… The Hannover Wend explains the origin of a vampire in the following manner. If a child is already weaned and is again placed on its mother’s breast, through this double weaning it takes on the attribute such that in the grave after its death with its undecayed lips it absorbs the fleshy part of its own breast and thereby removes the vital energy of its next of kin through sympathy.”²⁸

Excerpt six: “The Upper Sorbs have the following belief: If the body has a red face, it will draw to itself all its relatives, one after another. In addition, no piece of attire may be allowed to come near the mouth of the dead one, otherwise it will bite it and all the relatives will die.²⁹

 

 

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