Note 26 — Chapter LXXIII

Cp. the Vampire stories in Ralston’s Russian Folk-Tales, especially that of the soldier and the Vampire, p. 314. It seems to me that these stories of Vetálas disprove the assertion of Herz quoted by Ralston, (p. 318) that among races which burn their dead, little is known of regular corpse-spectres, and of Ralston, that vampirism has made those lands peculiarly its own which have been tenanted or greatly influenced by Slavonians. Vetálas seem to be as troublesome in China as in Russia, see Giles’s Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio, Vol. II, p. 195. In Bernhard Schmidt’s Griechische Märchen, p. 139, there is an interesting story of a Vampire, who begins by swallowing fowls, goats and sheep, and threatens to swallow men, but his career is promptly arrested by a man born on a Saturday. A great number of Vampire stories will be found in the notes to Southey’s Thalaba the Destroyer, Book VIII, 10. See also his poem of Roprecht the Robber, Part III. For the lamps fed with human oil see Addendum to Fasciculus IV, and Brand’s Popular Antiquities, Vol. I, p. 312, Waldau’s Böhmische Märchen, p. 360, and Kuhn’s Westfälische Märchen, p. 146.