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DEAD PERSONS IN HUNGARY WHO SUCK THE BLOOD OF THE LIVING.

About fifteen years ago, a soldier who was billeted at the house of a
Haidamagne peasant, on the frontiers of Hungary, as he was one day
sitting at table near his host, the master of the house saw a person
he did not know come in and sit down to table also with them. The
master of the house was strangely frightened at this, as were the rest
of the company. The soldier knew not what to think of it, being
ignorant of the matter in question. But the master of the house being
dead the very next day, the soldier inquired what it meant. They told
him that it was the body of the father of his host, who had been dead
and buried for ten years, which had thus come to sit down next to him,
and had announced and caused his death.

The soldier informed the regiment of it in the first place, and the
regiment gave notice of it to the general officers, who commissioned
the Count de Cabreras, captain of the regiment of Alandetti infantry,
to make information concerning this circumstance. Having gone to the
place, with some other officers, a surgeon and an auditor, they heard
the depositions of all the people belonging to the house, who attested
unanimously that the ghost was the father of the master of the house,
and that all the soldier had said and reported was the exact truth,
which was confirmed by all the inhabitants of the village.

In consequence of this, the corpse of this spectre was exhumed, and
found to be like that of a man who has just expired, and his blood
like that of a living man. The Count de Cabreras had his head cut off,
and caused him to be laid again in his tomb. He also took information
concerning other similar ghosts, amongst others, of a man dead more
than thirty years, who had come back three times to his house at meal
time. The first time he had sucked the blood from the neck of his own
brother, the second time from one of his sons, and the third from one
of the servants in the house; and all three died of it instantly and
on the spot. Upon this deposition the commissary had this man taken
out of his grave, and finding that, like the first, his blood was in a
fluid state, like that of a living person, he ordered them to run a
large nail into his temple, and then to lay him again in the grave.

He caused a third to be burnt, who had been buried more than sixteen
years, and had sucked the blood and caused the death of two of his
sons. The commi