destroy the evil infection are indeed exceptional, and it might be no easy task to find a parallel instance. However, the Baganda when passing by the spot where the body of a suicide has been burned always take good care to pelt it with sticks and clods of earth to prevent the ghost from catching them. Although these places in particular are dangerous to the last degree, there are other graves that may be haunted by phantoms, which as they have no bodies are not strictly vampires, but which certainly belong to the vampire family. Such are those remote places where persons who have been accused of black magic and who failed to satisfy the ritual ordeals have been burned to death, as also those spots where persons of evil and atrocious life have been cremated or interred.[18] The Maraves, a tribe of South Africa, who also burned witches alive, whenever they had occasion to pass the place of doom, pelted it with stones, and it is said that in some instances of spots considered particularly ill-omened a regular cairn or tumulus of loose stones has arisen.[19] In Madagascar too, certain solitary graves bear an exceedingly ill-repute, so that the chance traveller with averted face throws stones at them or large lumps of earth in order to prevent the ghost following in his tracks and seizing on him.[20] It must be remarked, and this is very important, that the sticks and stones, or heavy clods of earth with which a grave is pelted are not meant merely as a symbolical insult and expression of righteous indignation, but are actually missiles which will strike and hurt the being who haunts the spot of interment. So since the haunter can be struck and injured by these very material objects,—the heavier they are the better,—he must himself possess a certain concrete substantiality, and inasmuch as objects make an impression upon him he must exist under some kind of physical condition. Doubtless the exact idea is not very clearly defined in the minds of those who are so careful to pelt the grave, yet if stones will not merely ward off an attack from the haunter, but when in the course of time they become piled up into a small cairn they serve to keep the deceased in his place, that is to say in the grave, there must be some sort of material entity which can be so materially frustrated and obstructed. Here then we have the essential and complete vampire.
It is recorded by a traveller about the middle of the last
