Vikram Vetal

Published on A vampire in Indian folktales is known as a vetala. It is unable to cross the river Vaitarni and go to the land of the ancestors. So it lives in the crematorium, inside a corpse, using its tongue to speak. If you can bottle a vetala, you can use it for sorcery and gain occult powers. But you must never speak to it before it is bottled, else it will slip out of the corpse and occupy another corpse. A sorcerer once asked King Vikramaditya of Ujjain to bring him a vetala. But the vetala was cunning, unwilling to be bottled. He would ..