Hopping Vampires (jiangshi)

[benedictjjones]

Hello all,

I was wondering if anyone could point me in the direction of any modern stories written regarding hopping vampire or even any old folklore tales that I could hunt out?

Working on a few stories using them but quite fancy seeing a bit more of what has come before apart from films etc.

As always, cheers in advance!

[The Lurker In The Shadows]

I know that Kim Newman had hopping vampires crop up at points in the Anno Dracula series, but I think these were influenced by the filmic versions of the creatures.

[benedictjjones]

cheers, mate - I've never read Anno Dracula.... might have to remedy that at some point.

Filmic is fine, I just wanted to find some mentioned in print!

[humgoo]

Jan 8, 2018 13:05:18 GMT benedictjjones said:

I was wondering if anyone could point me in the direction of any modern stories written regarding hopping vampire or even any old folklore tales that I could hunt out?

The problem is Jiangshi (or what we say Goeng See in Cantonese, "oe" pronounced as in German) are not really vampires. They appeared quite late in Chinese folklore, and are just corpses animated for the purpose of being led back to their home counties for proper burial. They don't harm people and don't drink anything, let alone blood. The blending of Goeng See with Western vampires originated from Hong Kong movies in the '80s, if I'm not mistaken. So we don't really have "old folklore tales" about "hopping vampires", as it'd be like looking for Romero-style zombies in old tales.

(I'm not sure if the thing in P'u Songling's "The Corpse At The Inn" can be called a Geong See, let alone a vampire, though some mischievous "translator" made it blood-drinking!)

Interestingly, M.R. James was familiar with the concept of Goeng See, as he was once asked to judge for a ghost story competition held by The Spectator, the winning entry being an account of Goeng See procession. You can read that on Gina Collia's excellent blog The Haunted Library (can also be found in the Ghosts and Scholars book). 

[dem bones]

Jun 4, 2021 5:26:47 GMT humgoo said:

(I'm not sure if the thing in P'u Songling's "The Corpse At The Inn" can be called a Geong See, let alone a vampire, though some mischievous "translator" made it blood-drinking!)

Had a correspondent once whose Dad was a professor of medieval literature or some such. Apparently, he and colleagues used to have a great laugh at all the 'vampire' nonsense reliant on Walter Map's De Nugis Curialium as historical "evidence." Seems Montague Summers may have taken certain liberties with the translation.