“With regard to the growth of hair this is quite a natural condition.
“One might even compare these facts with the flowers, and in general with everything which depends upon the luxuriance of vegetation among the fauna and flora of nature.”
These objections thus stated may seem very weighty, but perhaps if they are impartially examined it may be found that the good Benedictine has been a little too dogmatic in his assertions. The phenomenon that the soil of the grave was almost invariably undisturbed by the exit of the Vampire, who further could make his entry through doors and windows without opening or breaking them may yet admit of an explanation which will go far to solve the difficulty Don Calmet and many others have regarded as insurmountable. In the first place it is hardly correct so sweepingly to assert that the ground is wholly undisturbed. Where careful investigation was made it was generally found that there were discovered four or five little holes or tunnels, not much larger indeed than a man’s finger which pierced through the earth to a very considerable depth. And here, perhaps in this one little detail, we may find the clue to the whole mystery. The wide spread growth of spiritualism has made even the ordinary public fairly familiar with the phenomena of a séance where materialization takes place, and where physical forms are solidly built up and disintegrated again within an exceedingly short space of time. This is done by some power or entity which awails itself of the body of the passive medium and utilizes the ectoplasm which it can draw thence. Professor Ostwald writes: “Certain human beings are capable of transforming their physiological store of energy (which, as we know, is almost exclusively present in the form of chemical energy), of transmitting it through space, and of transforming it at prescribed points back into one of the known forms of energy. It results from this, that the mediums themselves are usually much exhausted, i.e., that they use up their bodily energy. A transformation into psychic energy seems also to be possible.” The extreme exhaustion of a medium after such investigation and the production of forms of organic matter is a matter of common knowledge. Of one of the most famous mediums, Eusapia Paladino it is reported: “Eusapia during the sittings fell into a deep hysterical somnambulism, and was often in
