?

Then it is well known that fright will bring on certain kinds of
fits--in women hysteric fits, in the youth of either sex epileptic fits;
and certainly no ghastlier terror can there be than the accredited
apprehension of vampyrism. And it deserves remark, that impressions upon
the mind are known to be capable of shaping particular kinds of fits,
and especially of exciting and determining the features of sensorial
illusions, that seem adjuvants in vampyrism.

We are able to creep yet a step nearer to the mark. There is great
reason to believe that some human beings have had the power of throwing
themselves into the state of seeming death, _voluntarily_. In Gooch's
surgical works, there is an account of a Colonel Townsend, who asserted
this of himself, and challenged Gooch to witness the performance. And
you may read in the narrative of Gooch, how he and two or three other
competent witnesses saw Colonel Townsend dispose himself to favour the
invasion of this fit, and how he gradually fell into a state apparently
devoid of animation. A very few years ago there was a story in the
papers of a native in India, who undertook for a reward to do the same
feat, and to allow himself to be buried for a stipulated period. A
gentleman, certainly not of a credulous turn in general, told me he was
in India at the time with his regiment; and, though not on the spot,
that he knew the parties who brought the conjuror to work; and that he
believed they positively buried him, and, at the end of the time agreed
upon, disinterred him, and found him alive. But be _this_ story true or
false, the case of Colonel Townsend remains to show the thing asserted
to have been possible--and this remark may be safely added: Whatever
change of the kind the will can bring about, can be twice as readily
wrought by fear or a disturbed imagination.

You are, I hope, or fear rather, by this time satiated with the
marvellous and with the subject. What!--yet another question? Ay. How
came this superstition to arise?

The answer is ready. In those days the belief in ghosts was absolute,
and a vampyr was a sort of ghost. When an ignorant person, that is, when
any one in those days became the subject of a sensorial illusion
representing a human being, to a certainty he identified the creation of
his fancy as somebody he had seen or heard of; then he would tell his
acquaintances that the ghost of such a person haunted him. If the fright
brought on a fit, or s