Even the dead, who should have been hanged, but escaped their due punishment, could not rest in their graves until the corpse had suffered the proper legal penalty at the hands of the public executioner. Their restless ghosts wandered about as vampires or other malicious spooks until their crimes had been expiated by digging up their bodies and suspending them from the gallows. Culprits, who died on the rack or in prison, were brought to the scaffold as though they were still alive. In 1685, a were-wolf, supposed to be the incarnation of a deceased burgomaster of Ansbach, did much harm in the neighbourhood of that city, preying upon the herds and even devouring women and children. With great difficulty the ravenous beast was finally killed; its carcass was then clad in a tight suit of flesh-coloured cere-cloth, resembling in tint the human skin, and adorned with a chestnut brown wig and a long whitish beard; the snout of the beast was cut off and a mask of the burgomaster’s features substituted for it, and the counterfeit presentment thus produced was hanged by order of the court. The pelt of the strangely transmogrified wolf was stuffed and preserved in the margrave’s cabinet of curiosities as a memorial of the marvellous event and as ocular proof of the existence of were-wolves.
In Hungary and the Slavic countries of Eastern Europe the public execution of vampires was formerly of frequent occurrence, and the superstition, which gave rise to such proceedings, still prevails among the rural population of those semi-civilized lands. In 1337, a herdsman near the town of Cadan came forth from his grave every night, visiting the villages, terrifying the inhabitants, conversing affably with some and murdering others. Every person, with whom he associated, was doomed to die within eight days and to wander as a vampire after death. In order to keep him in his grave a stake was driven through his body, but he only laughed at this clumsy attempt to impale a ghost, saying: “You have really rendered me a great service by providing me with a staff, with which to ward off the dogs when I go out to walk.” At length it was decided to give him over to two public executioners to be burned. We are informed that when the fire began to take effect, “he drew up his feet, bellowed for a while like a bull and hee-hawed like an ass, until one of the executioners stabbed him in the side, so that the blood oozed out and the evil finally ceased.”