“They go into the house: there on the bench lie two sleepers—an old man and a lad. The stranger takes a pail, places it near the youth, and strikes him on the back; immediately the back opens, and forth flows rosy blood. The stranger fills the pail full and drinks it dry. Then he fills another pail with blood from the old man, slakes his brutal thirst, and says to the peasant: ‘It begins to grow light! Let us go back to my dwelling.’ “In a twinkling they find themselves at the graveyard. The vampire would have clasped the peasant in his arms, but luckily for him the cocks begin to crow, and the corpse disappears. The next morning, when folks come and look, the old man and the lad are dead.” According to the Servians and Bulgarians, unclean spirits enter into the corpses of malefactors and other evilly disposed persons, who then become vampires. In some places the jumping of a boy over the corpse is considered as fatal as that of a cat. There is a story told of a mother who lived in Saratof who cursed her son, and his body remained free from corruption after burial for a hundred years. When it was disinterred, his aged mother, who is said to have been still alive, pronounced his pardon, and, at that very moment, the corpse crumbled into dust. The Russians say that, when driving a stake into the body of a vampire, this must be done by one single blow, as a second blow will reanimate the corpse. One group of Russian stories relate to the sudden resuscitation shortly after death of wizards and witches at midnight possessed with the longing to eat the flesh of the watchers around the bier. The stories go that the body of the suspected witch was generally enclosed in a coffin which was secured with iron bands and carried to the church, and a watcher was appointed to read aloud from the Scriptures over the coffin right through each night until burial. It was also the duty of the watcher to draw on the floor a magic circle, within which he must stand and hold in his hand a hammer, the ancient weapon of the thunder-god. If the suspicion that the individual was a wizard or witch was a correct one, a mighty wind would arise one night about twelve o’clock, the iron bands of the coffin would give way with a terrible crash, the coffin-lid fall off, and the corpse leap forth and, uttering a terrible screech, rush at the watcher, who, if he had not taken the prescribed precautions, would fall a victim to the monster, and in the morning there would be nothing left of him but his bare bones. The following story of this character is contained in the records of the Kharkof government:—