Ghoul, n. A demon addicted to the reprehensible habit of devouring the
dead. The existence of ghouls has been disputed by that class of
controversialists who are more concerned to deprive the world of
comforting beliefs than to give it anything good in their place. In 1640
Father Secchi saw one in a cemetery near Florence and frightened it
away with the sign of the cross. He describes it as gifted with many
heads and an uncommon allowance of limbs, and he saw it in more than one
place at a time. The good man was coming away from dinner at the time
and explains that if he had not been "heavy with eating" he would have
seized the demon at all hazards. Atholston relates that a ghoul was
caught by some sturdy peasants in a churchyard at Sudbury and ducked in a
horsepond. (He appears to think that so distinguished a criminal should
have been ducked in a tank of rosewater.) The water turned at once to
blood "and so contynues unto ys daye." The pond has since been bled with
a ditch. As late as the beginning of the fourteenth century a ghoul was
cornered in the crypt of the cathedral at Amiens and the whole
population surrounded the place. Twenty armed men with a priest at their
head, bearing a crucifix, entered and captured the ghoul, which,
thinking to escape by the stratagem, had transformed itself to the
semblance of a well known citizen, but was nevertheless hanged, drawn
and quartered in the midst of hideous popular orgies. The citizen whose
shape the demon had assumed was so affected by the sinister occurrence
that he never again showed himself in Amiens and his fate remains a
mystery.
From Ambrose Bierce's The Devil's Dictionary
Image from the Willow Cove Haunt.
