A whole household of living people is turned into smoke and corked into bottles. In the German tale The Glass Coffin, gathered by the brothers Grimm between 1812 and 1857 and given here in an 1884 translation, a captive countess recounts how a magician sacked her castle by sorcery: her castle he shrank into a glass chest, her brother he made a stag, and her servants, "who were all turned into smoke", he "confined in glass bottles". They remain persons the whole time — merely persons in vapour, waiting. Rescue is a matter of uncorking. When the maiden at last opens the vessels, "the blue smoke rushed" out and "changed itself into living men", in whom she recognizes her own people restored. Smoke here is a state of arrest, a way of holding a soul without killing it; the deed that reverses it is as small as pulling a stopper.

A compilation of Chinese myth published in 1922 shows the other face of the same change — smoke not as prison but as flight. The sorceress Ta Chi, unmasked at last as a spirit in human form and seized to be beheaded by the victor's battle-axe, does not wait for the blow: "She transformed herself into smoke and" vanished, the served page reporting that she "disappeared" outright, leaving the executioner nothing to strike. What the German magician does to his victims, the Chinese demon does for herself; in one the smoke is a cage, in the other it is the only exit. Thompson filed both under the transformation of a person into smoke, one entry among his miscellaneous changes of a human into an object.

If a person can be smoke and still be themselves, is the smoke a punishment, a hiding-place, or only the soul briefly without its usual container?