I brought a clipping from a Shanghai Chinese newspaper describing a rather peculiar case of vampirism to the USSR in 1947, but three years later, at the next sharp turn in my life, it got lost somewhere; therefore, instead of an exact reproduction, I will retell its content in my own words, adding to the picture of Shanghai 1940s a few touches, without which the reader would not understand something.
A failed romance in the hotel of the dead
• At two o'clock in the morning, there was still silence on Frelupt Street. The mash of cars, rickshaws, trolleybuses, buses, trams dissipated. The ringing and din of a thousand-headed street stream subsided. The gates and sidewalks were cleared of shouting street vendors; no pestering, aching, ulcerated, foul-smelling beggars … Yellow Babylon fell asleep: the rich slept in luxurious bedrooms to the distant hum of a hairdryer; the homeless slept in the alleys, spreading newspapers on the pavement … Silence. There is no one on the street …
A night patrol appeared - two policemen. One of them is Chinese, the other is a Russian émigré who was forced by unemployment to join the police service of the French Concession. They want to sleep - they yawn and exchange short remarks from time to time. And here - in front of them not far off the figure of a lonely girl looms.
- Prostitute! - both decide in one voice. - What a decent girl at such a late hour …
Without saying a word, both quicken their steps and catch up with her. The Chinese girl does not look like a prostitute. Elegantly dressed, beautiful and meets both with cold eyes.
- Aren't you afraid to be alone so late on the street?
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- No.
- If you will allow, will any of us be happy to take you home?
She looks at both for a moment.
“Well, if that's what you want,” she points her finger at the Chinese policeman, “then you …
The Russian is a little disappointed: it was not he who was lucky, but his partner.
- Well, to hell with them! They're their own … - and reaches into his pocket for a cigarette.
His partner tried not to waste time in vain - the companion is extremely attractive, and he was young … He bombarded her with questions and talked about himself, but, unfortunately, did not have time to say half of what he wanted, as the companion said that they had already approached to her house and they have to part. The policeman decided to use one last chance:
- Maybe you will agree to go to the cinema with me tomorrow?
- Well, it is possible, - she smiled, - call me on the phone 37-83-93, my name is Li-hsiang-fu.
Here the guy, in accordance with the bourgeois traditions of Shanghai, should have given the girl his business card with his full name, title (if there was one) and address. Well, what kind of business card is there when there is not enough money anyway, and the address is a barracks!
He got out of the situation, quickly tore a piece of paper from his notebook and wrote it all on it, and handed it to the girl. She took the sheet, and on this they said goodbye.
In a dry statement of the reporter's note, further events developed as follows.
A Chinese policeman, after a little rest after duty, bought two tickets to the cinema and called the phone number given by the girl to make an appointment. He was told that no Li-hsiang-fu lives here, and they hung up. In order not to lose the chance for happiness, which, perhaps, was very close (and tickets are a pity), he found out the address by the phone number and went there himself. The house where he said goodbye to the girl at night turned out to be a funeral home.
We'll interrupt the story here for a moment to give the reader an idea of what a 1940s Shanghai funeral home was.
China is in flames of civil and World War II. The wealthy from the provinces, along with their capitals, moved to Shanghai. The city of seven million is full of rich and poor alike. The frenzied speculation of some and a desperate struggle for the survival of the war-torn Chinese refugees who rushed into the city hoping to earn at least something.
On the streets, according to newspaper reports, an average of 60 corpses are picked up every day. The city authorities are taking them away somewhere, they say - to a common grave. But the rich die too. And the custom requires that everyone be buried in their homeland, near their home, where the graves of their ancestors are … But there is now a war … And there is no communication with that place … What to do with the deceased - temporarily, until there is an opportunity to transport him to his homeland?
Private funeral homes come to the rescue. These are enterprises with huge capital and a large staff of employees. They occupy completely multi-storey buildings. For a large fee, of course, the deceased is assigned a separate room there. He is shaved, trimmed, manicured, embalmed, tinted, and dressed in appropriate attire is placed in an expensive coffin with a glass viewing window so that relatives can approach him with fresh flowers, sit beside him, gazing at his dear features … This is the hotel of the dead.
And here in front of such a funeral home was our Chinese policeman, whose heart longed for love …
He entered the office of the enterprise and began persistently seeking a meeting with Li-hsiang-fu. They replied that they did not know such a person and tried to send him out as soon as possible. Then he suspected a crime: after all, he himself brought the young lady here, and she was well dressed - she was wearing jewelry … Only how could she be killed and robbed here!..
He went to his superiors and reported everything. The authorities sent a detective to the funeral home with our young policeman. The detective began to question the bureau employees, and then one of them remembered that a few weeks or months ago they had brought a dead woman, a young girl named Li-hsiang-fu. They took the registration book and found out the room number from it, after which everyone went there. The coffin was opened, and the young policeman recognized her as his nighttime companion … In her hand was a piece of paper torn from his notebook …
Responsibility for the veracity of the above story lies with the editorial staff of the newspaper.
• • •
But a thoughtful reader might have the following thought: “Well, a vampire (astral shell) seeps through the grave mound, passes through the boards of the coffin, and so on - this can still be understood somehow (described below), because he himself is made of thin matter - a soul, in a word. But how a piece of paper, a leaf from a notebook, rough matter, was able to pass through the walls of the coffin - it is not clear!
In the arsenal of psychotechnics of the owners of ancient secret knowledge (which is hidden not because the owners "clamp" it only for their own personal use, but because it was given to the masses to be instantly used for evil and harm) there is a way of disintegration of matter, that is a certain object can be turned into a scattered cloud of atoms, which by the tension of thought-will is directed anywhere for the operator. Such a cloud easily passes through walls and other obstacles; as soon as the operator stops volitional tension, the cloud of atoms itself takes on the previous form of the object.
This explains the materialization of objects at spiritualistic seances, since some entities of the other world possess, to a large extent, the ability to disintegrate. There is a known case when in a tightly closed room where a session of spiritualism was held, freshly picked flowers and twigs from trees with raindrops on them suddenly appeared.
• I was a priest in a large village 50 km from Kiev. In this village there is a distillery, where a man worked as an accountant, with whom I had never had any business: he was an unbeliever, and I was a priest. What do we have in common? They spoke of him as a cold, heartless person … This accountant died (he died suddenly), and they buried him, of course, without me, according to the civil ceremony.
Some time passed, in the summer it was, I came home at six, and my wife told me.
- Go to the hall, the accountant is waiting for you there - she has been waiting for a long time.
I was surprised - what could she want from me? I go into the hall and say hello.
- Why did you come? - I ask.
- Help, father! - He speaks. - My husband, who died, began to come to me at night.
And she began to tell that just a few days after the funeral, her husband appeared at night in the courtyard of the house where she lives. The first nights I walked only around the yard, in silence. Other nights I approached the dog sitting on the chain. Then he began to go into the house and yesterday told her that he would soon take her with him to the cemetery …
He says this, is worried; it was evident that she was scared and did not know what to do … And I also remembered, people said, with her husband, her life was not sweet …
- Well, - I say, - what I can - I will do. Although a bit late, grabbed what was needed and went to the cemetery. He performed a funeral service over the grave; and there is such a part in it - it is called the sealing of the grave. I strongly hoped for this sealing of the grave … Then we went to the widow's apartment. There I consecrated the water and sprinkled all the windows, doors and thresholds, and strongly punished the widow that if something happened that he still came, not open it to him, no matter how he knocked there.
Subsequently, the widow told me that on the first night after my departure, the deceased still came, walked around the yard, but could not get into the house on his own. He knocked for a long time, in the end, he left and since then has not come again.
• • •
What helped in this case and what did not? The ceremony of the funeral service and the sealing of the grave, although the priest “strongly hoped in him,” clearly did not help, because the vampire came out. Consecrated water helped. Why and how? These questions can be answered by a case that was described in one of the issues of the magazine "Occultism and Yoga".
In Tallinn, in one of the rooms of an old house, residents were disturbed by a ghost: it sometimes came out of one wall, passed through the room and disappeared into another. To get rid of him, a Theosophist was invited. He sat silently in the restless room, and after that the ghost was no longer seen. When the Theosophist was asked what was the secret of his sitting in the room, he replied that at that time he mentally built an impenetrable glass dome covering the entire room.
So in the first case, the priest: sprinkling water on doors and windows, he, as you can see, mentally imagined an indestructible barrier for a being, whose body is made of the same subtle matter as thought.
Since the story of the priest echoes the case of vampirism, which the student of the construction school V. told me about her aunt, I also bring it up in order to give an explanation for both stories.
• It was in the Semipalatinsk region, Zharminsky district, village st. Zharma Turksib. Time - 1938-1939. Don't tell San to her aunt's surnames. Her husband was a switchman and was run over by a train. During his lifetime he was a good husband and loved his wife. After he was buried, he immediately began to appear in the yard and in the barn where his wife milked the cow. During his lifetime, he eagerly engaged in economic affairs and after his death retained an interest in them. He entered into long conversations with his wife, and the woman ceased to be afraid of him. Sometimes they talked in the morning during milking. The sounds of conversation were heard by strangers, and they asked the widow:
- Who are you talking to there?
But if outsiders during such conversations entered the barn where the conversation was taking place, they saw only one widow of the deceased, and he himself was invisible to outsiders. This went on for some time, and the otherworldly guest did not show himself as anything vampiric. But suddenly he began to demand that his wife send tobacco to the cemetery, and at the same time an indispensable condition was that this tobacco should be brought by his own son, who was not yet five years old. The wife did not agree, suspecting that something was wrong, and invited the deceased to go into the house himself and take tobacco. But the deceased insisted that the son bring it. The wife in her heart decided not to let the child in.
Her surprise was great when her son the next day announced that he had seen dad and that dad needed tobacco and he himself would take the tobacco to the cemetery … The widow strictly forbade him to do this. But the next day she happened to be absent somewhere. So that her son would not try to run to the cemetery in her absence, she locked him in a room, closing all doors and windows. When I came home, the boy was not in the room: he found a way to escape …
The search began for the little fugitive, which led nowhere. Three days later, the boy, pale and barely alive, returned home himself and soon died. To get rid of further visits to the vampire, the aunt moved to live in Magnitogorsk, where he did not follow her. In Magnitogorsk, my aunt remarried.
• • •
Vampirism is a fact of real life. That which is called the soul or consciousness, clothed in the astral body of a person invisible to ordinary vision, at the moment of death leaves the physical body (but is not destroyed itself). Complete death occurs at the moment of complete separation of the soul from its physical body. Until such a separation has taken place, there is always the possibility of the return of the soul to the body, even if it bears all the outward signs of death and the doctor recognizes it as dead. It is on this return that the so-called miraculous resurrections of the dead are based. Sometimes the soul is separated slowly, and relatives rush to the burial. By the time the grave mound had already grown over the coffin, the soul, perhaps, had only half separated …
In such cases, seized with horror, the soul forcibly enters again into the shell, from which it has just got rid of, and then one of two things happens: the first - either the unfortunate revived victim begins to beat in convulsions of death throes from suffocation, or, the second - if it was rude a material person who knew only animal aspirations and pursued only purely selfish goals, he becomes a vampire and begins a difficult two-bodied life of half-death.
To slow down the decomposition of the physical body, the astral form seeps through the grave ground, wanders nearby and sucks the vital energy of living beings, which it transfers to the physical body remaining in the grave through a magnetic thread, which is thus able to persist for a very long time. There are other kinds of vampires. The topic of vampirism is so extensive that its presentation in brief explanations is almost impossible. The best way to get rid of vampirism is cremation.
A. Haydock