sign that if investigation were made a body with all the marks of vampirism would be descovered lying there.
When the corpse is exhumed, even though death has taken place long before there will be no decay, no trace of corruption, or decomposition, but rather it will be found to be plump and of a clear complexion; the face often ruddy; the whole person composed as if in a profound sleep. Sometimes the eyes are closed; more frequently open, glazed, fixed, and glaring fiercely. The lips which will be markedly full and red are drawn back from the teeth which gleam long, sharp, as razors, and ivory white. Often the gaping mouth is stained and foul with great slab gouts of blood, which trickles down from the corners on to the lawn shroudings and linen cerements, the offal of the last night’s feast. In the case of an epidemic of vampirism it is recorded that whole graves have been discovered soaked and saturated with squelching blood, which the horrid inhabitant has gorged until he is replete and vomited forth in great quantities like some swollen leech discharges when thrown into the brine. In Greece it is thought that the corpse’s skin becomes exceedingly tough and distended so that the joints can hardly be bent; the human pelt has stretched like the vellum tegument of a drum, and when struck returns the same sound; whence the Greek vrykolakas has received the name τυμπανιαῖος (drum-like).[101] It was not infrequently seen that the dead person in his grave had devoured all about him, grinding them with his teeth, and (as it was supposed) uttering a low raucous noise like the grunting of a pig who roots among garbage. In his work, De Masticatione Mortuorum in tumulis, Leipzig, 1728, Michael Ranft treats at some length of this matter. H e says that it is very certain that some corpses have devoured their cerements and even gnaw their own flesh. It has been suggested that this is the original reason why the jaws of the dead were tightly bound with linen bands. Ranft instances the case of a Bohemian woman who when disinterred in 1355 had devoured the greater part of her shroud. In another instance during the sixteenth century both a man and a woman seemed to have torn out their intestines and were actually ravening upon their entrails. In Moravia a corpse was exhumed which had devoured the grave-clothes of a woman buried not far from his tomb.
