Page:A book of folk-lore (1913).djvu/136

Rh was a blue scar about a finger’s length, with blood about it. At the opening of her coffin fresh blood ran out of her nostrils, and there was ‘balsamish’ blood in the breast and in the ventricle of the heart. The intestines were all healthy and sound.

After this visitation all the bodies that were in vampire condition were beheaded and then burnt.

A very general belief among the peasantry of England is—or was—that if a young man and a young woman are engaged and one of them dies before they are married, the tie still subsists, and can be only broken with difficulty. The dead one may claim the living. On this is founded Bürger’s ballad of Leonore.

I knew a handsome old woman, wife of a farmer of my neighbourhood in Devon, who had betrothed herself to a youth in the place, but he died before the wedding came off. After a sufficient time had elapsed she got engaged to the farmer, whom she eventually married. Directly after this the dead lover appeared to her at night and said: ‘Joanna, you cannot marry another than me, till you have returned my present, the red silk handkerchief. I’ll stop it till I have that back.’ She left her bed and took the kerchief