Montgomery’s cow was enchanted so no butter could be made from her milk the following lines occur:
It happened for a month or two
Aye when they churn’d they got nae butter.
Rown-tree tied in the cow’s tail,
And vervain glean’d about the ditches;
These freets and charms did not prevail,
They could not banish the auld witches.
Gay in his Fables, XXIII, “The Old Woman and her Cats” mentions the horse-shoe as a protection against witches:
Straws laid across, my pace retard;
The horse-shoe’s nad’d (each threshold’s guard);
The stunted broom the wenches hide,
For fear that I should up and ride.
They stick with pins my bleeding seat,
And bid me show my secret teat.
In Polynesia we pretty generally find the tü, who under some aspects is a kind of vampire-demon and Dr. R. H. Codrington in his The Melanesians: Studies in their Anthropology and Folk Lore, says, “There is a belief in the Banks Islands in the existence of a power like that of Vampires. A man or a woman would obtain this power out of a morbid desire for communion with some ghost, and in order to gain it would steal and eat a morsel. The ghost then of the dead man would join in a close friendship with the person who had eaten, and would gratify him by afflicting any one against whom his ghostly power might be directed. The man so afflicted would feel that something was influencing his life, and would come to dread some particular person among his neighbours, who was, therefore, suspected of being a talamaur. This latter when seized and tried in the smoke of strong-smelling leaves would call out the name of the dead man whose ghost was his familiar, often the names of more than one, and lastly the name of the man who was afflicted. The same name talamaur was given to one whose soul was supposed to leave the grave and absorb the lingering vitality of a freshly dead person. There was a woman, some years ago, of whom the story is told that she made no secret of doing this, and that once on the death of a neighbour she gave notice that she would go in the night and eat the vitality. The friends of the deceased therefore kept watch in the house
