Pitton de Tournefort, in his _Voyage into the Levant_, gives the following interesting account: “We were present at a very different scene and one very barbarous at Myconi. The man, whose story we are going to relate, was a peasant of Myconi, naturally ill-natured and quarrelsome; this is a circumstance to be taken notice of in such a case: he was murdered in the fields, nobody knew how or by whom. Two days after his being buried in a chapel in the town it was noised about that he was seen to walk about in the night with great haste, that he tumbled about other people’s goods, put out their lamps, gripped them behind, and played a dozen other monkey tricks. At first the story was received with laughter, but the thing was looked upon seriously when the better sort of people began to complain of it: the papás themselves gave credit to the fact, and no doubt had their reasons for so doing; masses were duly said; but for all this the peasant drove his old trade and heeded nothing they could do. After divers meetings of the chief people of the city, of priests and monks, it was gravely concluded that it was necessary in consequence of some musty ceremonial to wait till the ninth day after the interment should be expired. “On the tenth day they said one Mass in the chapel where the body was laid in order to drive out the demon which they imagined was got into it. After Mass they took up his body and got everything ready for blowing out his heart.... The corpse stunk so abominably that they were obliged to burn frankincense, but the smoke mixing with the exhalations from the carcase increased the stench; every person averred that the blood of the corpse was extremely red. The butcher swore that the body was still warm....” Pitton concludes the story by ridiculing the theory that this was the body of a vampire or _vroucolaca_. The practice of burning the body of a suspected or proved vampire does not appear to have found general favour in Greece, doubtless by reason of the fact that the Greeks possessed a religious horror of burning a body on which holy oil had been poured by the priest when performing the last rites upon the dying man. Leake, whose _Travels in Northern Greece_ were published in 1835, says in the fourth volume of that work: “It would be difficult now to meet with an example of the most barbarous of all these superstitions, the Vrukólaka. The name being Illyric, seems to acquit the Greeks of the invention, which was probably introduced into the country by the barbarians of Sclavonic race. Tournefort’s description is admitted to be correct. The Devil is supposed to enter the Vrukólaka, who, rising from his grave, torments first his nearest relatives and then others, causing their death or loss of health. The remedy is to dig up the body and if, after it has been exorcised by the priest, the demon still persists in annoying the living, to cut it into small pieces, or, if that be not sufficient, to burn it.”