lieutenant-general of
the town of Herez, on the frontier of Spain. These instances might be
multiplied to infinity, of persons buried alive, and of others who
have recovered as they were being carried to the grave, and others who
have been taken out of it by fortuitous circumstances. Upon this
subject you may consult the new work of Messrs. Vinslow and Bruyer,
and those authors who have expressly treated on this subject.[574]
These gentlemen, the doctors, derive from thence a very wise and very
judicious conclusion, which is, that people should never be buried
without the absolute certainty of their being dead, above all in times
of pestilence, and in certain maladies in which those who are
suffering under them lose on a sudden both sense and motion.

Footnotes:

[570] Le Clerc, Hist. de la Medecine.

[571] Corneille le Bruyn, tom. i. p. 579.

[572] Cronstand, Philos. veter. restit.

[573] Gaspard Reies, Campus Elysias jucund.

[574] Page 167, des additions de M. Bruhier.

CHAPTER XLIV.

CAN THESE INSTANCES BE APPLIED TO THE HUNGARIAN GHOSTS?

Some advantage of these instances and these arguments may be derived
in favor of vampirism, by saying that the ghosts of Hungary, Moravia,
and Poland are not really dead, that they continue to live in their
graves, although without motion and without respiration; the blood
which is found in them being fine and red, the flexibility of their
limbs, the cries which they utter when their heart is pierced or their
head being cut off, all prove that they still exist.

That is not the principal difficulty which arrests my judgment; it is
to know how they come out of their graves without any appearance of
the earth having been removed, and how they have replaced it as it
was; how they appear dressed in their clothes, go and come, and eat.
If it is so, why do they return to their graves? why do they not
remain amongst the living? why do they suck the blood of their
relations? Why do they haunt and fatigue persons who ought to be dear
to them, and who have done nothing to offend them? If all that is only
imagination on the part of those who are molested, whence comes it
that these vampires are found in their graves in an uncorrupted state,
full of blood, supple, and pliable; that their feet are found to be in
a muddy condition the day after they have run about and frightened the
neighbors, and that nothing similar is remarked in the other corpses
interred at the same