Of all the many and dark superstitions that prevail in the West Indies none is more deeply rooted than the belief in the existence of vampires, and as this tradition was brought from Guinea and the Congo and maintained for more than two centuries by the hundreds of thousands of African slaves who were so constantly being imported from this native continent it may not impertinently be considered here. In Grenada, particularly, the vampire is known as a “Loogaroo,” a corruption of loupgarou, and the attributes generally assigned to the loogaroo as well as the current stories told of these ghastly beings not infrequently recall the pages of De Lanere, clearly showing that the demonology of the French colonists of the seventeenth century was soon welded with negro witchcraft and voodoo. The West Indian natives, and above all the black, Quashee as he is called, hold that loogaroos are human beings, especially old women, who have made a pact with the devil, by which the fiend bestows upon them certain magic powers on condition that every night they provide him with a quantity of rich warm blood. And so every night the loogaroos make their way to the occult silk-cotton-tree (bombax ceiba, often known as the Devil’s tree or Jumbie[58] tree), and there, having divested themselves of their skins, which are carefully folded up and concealed, in the form of a ball of sulphurous fire they speed abroad upon their horrid businesses. Even to-day visitors to Grenada have been called out of the house late at night by the servants to see the loogaroos, and their attention is directed to any solitary light which happens to flash through the darkness, perhaps the distant lantern of some watchman who is guarding a cocoa piece. Until dawn the loogaroos are at work, and any Quashee who feels tired and languid upon awaking will swear that the vampire has sucked his blood. Doors and shutters are no barrier to the monster who can slip through the tiniest chink, but if only rice and sand are scattered before a cabin the loogarroo must perforce stay until he has numbered every grain, and so morning will assuredly surprise him ere the tale is told.
Mr. H. J. Bell recounts the following anecdote which is sufficiently striking as reproducing in actual belief of to-day more than one of the old witch traditions. A native gardener pointed out to Mr. Bell a hideous beldame walking along the highway. This hag, who wore a bandage over one eye, was
