Vetala

A corpse-possessing spirit of the Sanskrit and Hindu folk record. The figure was given the form of a corpse hung from a tree at the cremation ground, animated rather than spectral, capable of speech, prophecy, and the answering of riddles in exchange for transport. The *Vetalapanchavimshati* (the Twenty-Five Tales of the Vetala), preserved in the eleventh-century Kashmiri compilation *Kathasaritsagara* and translated by Sir Richard F. Burton (1893), records the contest between King Vikramaditya and the *vetala* who would not stay on the king's shoulder. Crooke's *Popular Religion and Folk-lore of Northern India* (1896) documents the figure as the spirit of the unburned dead, hostile to settlements and addressed by ritual specialists at the cremation ground.

The vetala is not classed with the preta or the bhuta in the older record. The figure was held to occupy the corpse it possessed without becoming the corpse, and to abandon it when the contest was concluded or the ritual completed. The cremation ground at which the figure was traditionally encountered was held to be the proper place of address, never the household.