furiously or even endeavour to attack is incontinently accounted infect with the vampire taint.
It is supposed that the loogaroo will frequently molest animals of all kinds, and indeed in Trinidad and especially on the Spanish Main the horses suffer greatly from the attacks of large vampire bats. It is necessary that all the windows and ventilation holes of the stables and cattle pens should be firmly secured by wire netting to prevent the entrance of the bats, which are able greatly to harm any animal in whose flesh they manage to fasten their teeth.
It may seem that the superstition of the Quashee, although grosser and more ignorant, lacks some of the crueller and more abominable traits of the tradition in other countries. This is merely owing to the fact that it has largely been driven under ground by energetic and repressive measures. Père Labat in his Nouveaux voyages aux Isles d’ Amérique (1712) gives the story of a vampirish black sorceress who used to threaten to eat the hearts of those who offended her, and almost invariably they soon after began to waste away in great agony. When their bodies were opened it was seen that the heart and liver were drained dry as parchment. He further says: “Nearly all the negroes who leave their country, having attained the age of manhood, are sorcerers, or, at all events, are much tainted with magic, witchcraft and poison.” Even half a century ago an important ordinance was passed in all the West Indian colonies imposing heavy penalties on any person found guilty of dealing in Obeah. Writing as lately as 1893, Mr. H. J. Bell says of Hayti, one of the most beautiful of the West Indies, an island possessing an area almost equal to that of France: “Dreadful accounts reach us of thousands of negroes having gone back to a perfectly savage life in the woods, going about stark naked, and having replaced the Christian religion by Voodooism and fetish worship. Cases of cannibalism have even been reported, and nowhere in the West Indies has Obeah a more tenacious hold on high and low than in Hayti.”
By a comparison of the beliefs in these many lands, in ancient Assyria, in old Mexico, in China, India and Melanesia, although details differ, but yet not to any marked degree, it will be seen that the superstition and the tradition of the Vampire prevail to an extraordinary extent, and it is hard to believe that a phenomenon which has had so complete a hold over nations
