Foreign News: Ghoulish Notes

They are neither man nor woman—They are neither brute nor human, They are Ghouls!

—Poe.

¶ Rumanian frontier officials ghoulishly pried open the coffin of a Hungarian diplomat last week, as it was about to be shipped out of Rumania.

The corpse at which they peered was that of Herr Richard Eichorn, late Hungarian Consul at Klausenburg, Rumania. Hungarian news organs charged in a frenzy of indignation that Hungarian diplomatic seals on the coffin had been broken and the corpse “subjected to gross indignity.”

An international incident seemed to impend when the Rumanian ghouls incautiously admitted that they had pulled the corpse this way and that, in an effort to find contraband goods in the coffin. No more deadly insinuation could have been hurled against the honor of the Hungarian diplomatic corps.

¶ Alarming rumors that ghouls and vandals have stolen the ashes of Poet Dante Alighieri from his imposing tomb, in Ravenna, Italy, caused the local Podesta (Mayor) to issue orders, last week, for the tomb to be opened formally and searched with pomp and reverence.

¶ From Sweden, Jugoslavia and Poland came reports that bungling, amateur ghouls had been chased out of graveyards and some arrested, at Upsala, Zagreb and Warsaw. In the generic, Asiatic sense, a ghoul is one who not only opens a coffin or tomb but also eats the corpse. No such instance of pure ghoulishness came to light last week.