e was nothing in all that but what
was very simple and very natural, these persons not being dead, and
acting naturally upon other bodies. 4. Others have asserted[582] that
it was the work of the devil himself; amongst these, some have
advanced the opinion that there were certain benign demons, differing
from those who are malevolent and hostile to mankind, to which (benign
demons) they have attributed playful and harmless operations, in
contradistinction to those bad demons who inspire the minds of men
with crime and sin, ill use them, kill them, and occasion them an
infinity of evils. But what greater evils can one have to fear from
veritable demons and the most malignant spirits, than those which the
ghouls of Hungary cause the persons whose blood they suck, and thus
cause to die? 5. Others will have it that it is not the dead who eat
their own flesh or clothes, but serpents, rats, moles, ferrets, or
other voracious animals, or even what the peasants call
_striges_,[583] which are birds that devour animals and men, and suck
their blood. Some have said that these instances are principally
remarked in women, and, above all, in a time of pestilence; but there
are instances of ghouls of both sexes, and principally of men;
although those who die of plague, poison, hydrophobia, drunkenness,
and any epidemical malady, are more apt to return, apparently because
their blood coagulates with more difficulty; and sometimes some are
buried who are not quite dead, on account of the danger there is in
leaving them long without sepulture, from fear of the infection they
would cause.

It is added that these vampires are known only to certain countries,
as Hungary, Moravia, and Silesia, where those maladies are more
common, and where the people, being badly fed, are subject to certain
disorders caused or occasioned by the climate and the food, and
augmented by prejudice, fancy, and fright, capable of producing or of
increasing the most dangerous maladies, as daily experience proves too
well. As to what some have asserted that the dead have been heard to
eat and chew like pigs in their graves, it is manifestly fabulous, and
such an idea can have its foundation only in ridiculous prepossessions
of the mind.

Footnotes:

[582] Rudiga, Physio. Dur. lib. i. c. 4. Theophrast. Paracels. Georg.
Agricola, de Anim. Subterran. p. 76.

[583] Ovid, lib. vi. Vide Debrio, Disquisit. Magic. lib. i. p. 6, and
lib. iii. p. 355.

CHAPTER