VAMPIRES

GARLIC tied in bundles over a house door will keep out a vampire, and stuffed in the mouth of a corpse will keep the vampire (if there were suspicions that the deceased might be one) quiet in his grave (Gifford). These are Balkan superstitions, and there were Roumanian beliefs that vampires left their graves on St Andrew’s Eve, and walked about the houses in which they used to live. So before nightfall every woman took some garlic and anointed the door locks and window casements with it (Miles). In Hungarian folklore, a vampire’s grave could be recognised by two holes on the tombstone. Stop these holes with garlic and you could make sure the vampire would stay there.

The correct wood to be driven through a vampire’s heart is ASH, though hawthorn and rowan are also mentioned. In the Balkans, it was a BLACKTHORN stake that impaled a vampire (Kemp).