I enjoy getting phone calls from colleagues who say things like, “I’ve found something that I think might interest you.” Robert Mathiesen, a Brown University professor, delivered just this message following a lecture I gave, in 1999, on the New England vampire tradition. During my presentation, I showed a map of New England with red dots marking each vampire incident. Robert said that a student in his course on magic and witchcraft had created a map showing the religious affiliations of New England colonies in the seventeenth century. All of the red dots on my map fell into areas designated as “tolerant,” “separatist” or “unspecified” on his student’s map. There were no red dots in the Puritan heartland. Robert recommended some works that discussed a magic worldview very different from the Puritan belief system that most of us associate with early New England.
So, when he called with something interesting, I was anticipating adding another red dot to my map. I wasn’t quite correct; I needed two additional dots. Robert showed me some photocopied pages from a two-volume journal that had just been published. Incredibly, the very first entry described the author’s participation in a vampire exhumation. On September 3, 1810, Enoch Hayes Place, a twenty-four-year-old Freewill Baptist Minister, set out for Vermont from southeastern New Hampshire to preach the word of the Lord. With his wife and young daughter (sick and “looking pale as death”) in tears, and his grandmother pleading for him to stay, as Place wrote in the first entry of a journal that he would keep for fifty-five years, “I then turned my back upon them all, with tears in my eyes and went out of the house, took my horse and went on.” Place had begun preaching three years earlier, a mere month after being converted, having been caught up in the sweeping religious revival known as the Second Great Awakening. A farmer, teacher, and strong advocate for education and the antislavery and temperance movements, Place remained, for most of his life, a minister in and around Strafford, New Hampshire.
Less than two days into his journey to spread the gospel, Place witnessed a “melincolly sight … as I never Saw before”:
Sep 4th — … I went this afternoon, to parson Geores meeting, which was at a Br Denitts; who was Sick with the Consumption. When I preached from these words Prov. 1–33, “But whoso harkeneth unto me Shal dwell safely, and Shall be quiet from the fear of evil.” We had a good Season, Br George was well engaged, & the people there Bless God for the work he has done in that place—I then went on to Br Wilsons; where they were asembling for meeting. I preached from these words “The best of the Land is yet before.” I had a deep Sense of the misteres of the Gospel, after meeting the people joined & Sung Some, beautiful hymns; which Comforted me much. I was then requested by Esqr Hodgdon, & others to attend the takeing up the remains of Janey D. Denitt, who had been dead, over two years, (she died with the Comsumption AE 21). She was the daughter of the beforementioned Sick brother—The people had a desire to see if any thing had grown upon her Stomach—Accordingly I attended, this morning Wednesday Sep 5th a little after the breake of day with Br George, and a number of the neighbors. They opened the grave and it was a Solemn Sight indeed. A young Brother by the name of Adams examined the mouldy Specticle, but found nothing as they Supposed they Should—Suffis to Say it was a melincolly sight to many I can Say of a truth I Saw Such a Sight, this morning, as I never Saw before. There was but a little left except bones and part of the Vitals. Which Served to Show to all what we are tending to. After the grave was filed up again, I went with Sister Wilson to visit Br Denitt and prayed with him where we had a good season to our souls Bless God for it.
It may seem almost incomprehensible that Janey Denitt’s exhumation was carried out by townspeople with the assistance of Parson Georges and in the presence of Elder Place—not to mention that, after the event, Place went to visit and pray with Janey’s father. The lesson that Place drew from this “melincolly sight” has to do with the frailty of the human condition on earth. In place of the pious condemnation of the exhumation that we might expect from conservative pillars of religion, we encounter charity and compassion. He was at one with his flock.
The very same day, Place heard an account of a similar occurrence some years before in Loudon, a few miles to the west:
I then took breakfast with Br Willson’s family; and then went on to Br Shepherds in Gilmantown. Here I Stoped for a while and rested my Self, then took dinner, prayed took my leave of the family and went on to Loudon. I Called at one Br Cates, and found them will engaged being a distant relation to the Barrington Cates. They requested a meeting. I concluded to Stop. There was quite an asembly at meeting. I preached from these words. Luke 2–29, 30, 31, 32. Now lettest thou thy Servant depart In pease according to thy word &c. (There being a number of old people present) we had a good Season. The Lord being with us of a truth. There was some weighty exortations, delivered after Sermon, there being quite a reformation in that place. The people there told me of an instant, in their neighbourhood simielar to this one. I mentioned in barnstead of a Woman that had ben dead eleven years. Who was taken up by the Shakers, they found the Bones and eleven Sprouts that had grown out of the bones, principally from the Stomach bone, one from thence grew out through the top of the Scull a number of others Stood up on the bone, all of them resembling potatoe tops when grown in the Seller, the persons that broke off those things Soon died. it was all to no purpose to the Sick relation.
Reverend Place’s actual participation in the exhumation ceremony puzzled me. I had been able to reconcile the participation of the secular society—family, neighbors, community leaders, and even medical doctors (though the extent and nature of their participation still has not been resolved). Even granting that the supernatural worldview was a great deal more pervasive and influential than is often acknowledged or discussed, I was not prepared to explain a religious accommodation of practices that suggested a belief system quite apart from that of conventional Protestantism. When I learned of Rev. Place and his journals, I had already begun to sketch in the general historical background of New England’s religious and secular belief systems, intending to create a background against which to view the vampire practice and the reactions to it by outsiders. Now, I needed to look again, and more deeply than before.
The existence of the supernatural realm, including a varied host of harmful spirits, was accepted by all segments of early New England. Illness was viewed as a result of supernatural or irrational causes, ranging from witchcraft to the predestinarian notion that “God causes sickness.” God and witchcraft were not mutually exclusive. American colonists carried on an unbroken tradition of witchcraft from sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, but they created their own variations. Puritan theology encompassed relations, not only between God and His saints, but between devils, witches, and sinners, as well. In Puritan New England, if the official and folk supernatural realms did not coalesce, they at least ran in parallel streams. According to folklorist Richard Dorson, the Puritans
did not swallow wholesale the old wives’ tales and notions freely circulating among the folk, with which they were fully acquainted, but rather endeavored earnestly to screen out “superstitions” and “fabulous” elements from genuine evidences of sorcery and diabolism. The New England Puritan fathers took a median position on witchcraft lore, rejecting at one extreme the skeptics who denied the actuality of witches, and at the other the gullible who thought witches could transform themselves into beasts and birds.
The official Puritan stance also frowned on employing folk remedies that mustered supernatural forces. Dorson wrote that Puritan leader, Increase Mather,
castigated those well-meaning persons who attempted folk remedies against witchcraft such as destroying wax images pricked with needles, or drawing blood from suspected witches, or bottling the urine of witches, or nailing horseshoes over the door, for having “fellowship with that hellish covenant” between the Devil and his witches. These widely practiced folk charms he dismissed as superstition, but at the same time he recognized the malevolent force of the dark covenants…. The art of “unbewitching persons” could only be learned from magicians and devils themselves, insisted Increase, and to practice this art in effect served the Devil’s ends and worked for his salvation.
Although many of the miraculous providences—events through which God revealed himself, particularly his plans and judgments, by direct intervention in the affairs of humankind—concerned the appearance of ghosts and revenants, their role was strictly orchestrated within the confines of Puritan orthodoxy.
The Puritans in effect appropriated the currently circulating legends and folklore and pressed them into the service of their worldview. When the dead return in the remarkable providences, they do so to reveal a murder or other heinous sin. As Giles Corey, of Salem, Massachusetts, lay dying from the heavy stones placed upon his chest because he would not enter a plea to the charge of witchcraft, an apparition appeared to Ann Putnam. It was the ghost of the village idiot, who communicated to Ann that he, himself, had been pressed to death by Corey years before. The Devil had covenanted with Corey, promising that he should not be hanged for his crime. But “God’s greater power ensured that Corey met a just retribution, by dying in the same manner as his victim.”
Disease epidemics were part of the continuing struggle between God and Satan. The witchcraft outbreak in Salem Village, in 1692, followed a hard winter and an epidemic of smallpox, both of which served as proof that “a group of witches has allied themselves with Satan to destroy the Church of God and set up the kingdom of the Devil.” There is, in this case, a linking of a contagious disease to supernatural agency, which is, of course, the foundation of the vampire practice in New England. But despite this common foundation, understanding how the vampire practice took hold in parts of New England (however it might have arrived there) requires looking to outlying areas where vampire accounts appear in the record and where very different worldviews held sway.
Rhode Island, in particular, was far removed from the Puritan influence, even though virtually surrounded by Puritans. In his Jonny-Cake Papers, Shepherd Tom Hazard described the state as “being filled with a host of sectarians and free thinkers, individualists one and all.” Shepherd Tom, who “was bred in the strictest school of the Quakers’ doctrine,” wrote that he and his neighbors were fond of repeating “three articles of faith”: “First, that ye love one another and your neighbor as yourselves. Second, that ye hate the Puritans of Massachusetts with a perfect hatred. Third, that ye hold the Presbyterians of Connecticut in like contempt.” This other New England, radiating from the outlying towns in Rhode Island and eastern Connecticut, occupied the margins both philosophically and geographically. It extended up the Connecticut River Valley into Vermont and New Hampshire, and stretched into southern Maine. Its people were not especially religious in an orthodox sense, although many could be considered spiritual. During the colonial period, about 85 percent of New England’s white population did not belong to any church, and, by the close of the eighteenth century, that figure had risen to 90 percent. Most of these “unchurched” New Englanders participated in various hybrid religions that have been classified as “folk,” in the sense that they were unofficial combinations of Christian beliefs and various folk practices, many of them of a kind often referred to disparagingly as “superstitions.”
These New Englanders experimented with a magical worldview that tapped into alchemy, astrology, divination, seeing stones, dowsing, and other practices that would have been viewed as part of the occult and, therefore, off limits to Puritans. The Puritans would have considered the vampire procedures to be diabolical practices that served the interests of Satan. But other Protestants could have reconciled such acts in the same way that they could, with equal ease and no apparent contradiction, consult and treasure almanacs and dowsers as well as bibles and preachers. This was the heartland of the Quakers and Shakers and the source of later religious sects, such as the Mormons and the Oneida Community (whose founders both were from Vermont), that developed in central New York’s “Burned-over District,” so named because of its successive waves of unorthodox religious and spiritual movements based on idiosyncratic interpretations of Protestantism and imbued with an appealing supernaturalism. Joseph Smith, a treasure hunter by trade, found the golden tablets that became the basis for the Mormon religion by the use of seeing stones or, as they are commonly called, crystal balls.
“This mix of magic and religion influenced the untrained preachers who were commonplace after the Revolution.” According to a scholar of American revivalism, “Dreams had meaning [for them], and the activities of beasts were oracles to the knowing. Birth, love, and death were assisted or held back by incantations. When a boy raised in this way became a preacher, it was not hard to reconcile his folk inheritance and his Christianity.” Reverend Enoch Hayes Place’s participation in the exhumation of Janey Denitt does not seem so mysterious in view of the eclectic belief system of his time and place.
This magical worldview cut across class, religious, ethnic, and linguistic boundaries. Along with the home remedies and supernatural lore that had been handed down in their own families and communities, people encountered the traditions of other groups. Shepherd Tom, a wealthy, landed Quaker from one of South County, Rhode Island’s oldest families, made regular visits to a small hovel in the woods to have his fortune told by Sylvia Tory, a former slave. His brother, Joseph Peace Hazard, was a student of mysticism and spiritualism, a transcendentalist who went to seances and responded to dreams. He had “Druidsdream” and “Witches Altar” constructed as result of his supernatural experiences (see Chapter 3).
The prevailing, general interest in supernatural topics is recorded in old newspaper advertisements that promote itinerant lecturers, many originally from Germany and Eastern Europe, making the circuit from New Jersey and Pennsylvania into New England. For example, from 1760 to 1773, a German fortune-teller advertised his services in Rhode Island’s English-language newspapers. Although this worldview has not received much attention, it appears to have touched many, if not most, Americans prior to the early 1800s. It is difficult to assess just how widespread the magical worldview was, as D. Michael Quinn observed in his examination of the New England roots of early Mormonism:
Without statistical sampling and opinion polls, it is impossible to know the actual extent of occult beliefs and magic practices among Americans during any time period. Anti-occult rhetoric and media attention could simply be the paranoia of the vast majority against a perceived threat by a numerically insignificant minority. On the other hand, anti-occult rhetoric by early American opinion-makers (clergy, legislators, jurists, newspaper editors, book authors) may have been the embattled effort of an elite minority to convert a vastly larger populace that was sympathetic to the occult. I accept the latter view of the situation. At any rate, literary sources and material culture show that occult beliefs and folk magic had widespread manifestations among educated and religious Americans from colonial times to the eve of the twentieth century.
As the eighteenth century unfolded, however, distinctions among magic, religion, and science became increasingly important to the elite, even though it still meant little to ordinary people, for whom the borders separating medicine and magic, and religion and the occult, were not sharply defined. By the time Mercy Brown’s heart was cut from her body and burned, in 1892, a significant rift between the official and folk worlds had developed, at least from the viewpoint of the “civilization establishment” that included scientists, scholars, businessmen, clergy, politicians, and practitioners of the by-then dominant biomedical paradigm. Where official and academic culture began to divide the world into a variety of specialties, with their attendant specialists, the all-inclusive nature of folk culture persisted.
The lesson of the Mercy Brown event, according to the Providence Journal (and other newspapers of the day), was that “there are considerable elements of rural population in this part of the country upon which the forces of education and civilization have made scarcely any impression.” The Journal’s editors, referring to “Deserted Exeter,” found “the amount of ignorance and superstition to be found in some corners of New England … more than surprising.” Viewed from the pedestal of civilized man, the exhumation of Mercy Brown was yet another skirmish in the war between modern, scientific thinking and the primitive, unreflective superstitions inherited from a savage past. While the Journal waved the popular banners of “progress” and “civilization” before its readers, the American Anthropologist, through George Stetson’s article of 1896 (“The Animistic Vampire in New England”), launched a scholarly attack on the lowly culture of Rhode Island’s South County. Stetson commented that “it is a common belief in primitive races of low culture that disease is caused by the revengeful spirits of man or other animals” and suggested that rural Rhode Islanders harbored survivals from a lower level of cultural evolution as evidenced by this
extraordinary instance of a barbaric outcropping … coexisting with a high general culture…. The region referred to [South County], where agriculture is in a depressed condition and abandoned farms are numerous, is the tramping-ground of the book agent, the chromo peddler, the patent-medicine man and the home of the erotic and neurotic modern novel…. Farm-houses deserted and ruinous are frequent, and once productive lands, neglected and overgrown with scrubby oak, speak forcefully and mournfully of the migration of the youthful farmers from country to town. In short, the region furnishes an object-lesson in the decline of wealth consequent upon the prevalence of a too common heresy in the district that land will take care of itself, or that it can be robbed from generation to generation without injury, and suggests the almost criminal neglect of the conservators of public education to give instruction to our farming youth in a more scientific and more practical agriculture. It has been well said by a banker of well known name in an agricultural district in the midlands of England that “the depression of agriculture is a depression of brains.” Naturally, in such isolated conditions the superstitions of a much lower culture have maintained their place and are likely to keep it and perpetuate it, despite the church, the public school, and the weekly newspaper.
In a footnote, Stetson provided statistics to corroborate his claim that South County, particularly Exeter, was in decline: “The town of Exeter, before mentioned, incorporated in 1742–’43, had but 17 persons to the square mile in 1890, and in 1893 had 63 abandoned farms, or one fifth of the whole number within its limits.”
(I think that if there had been a Food and Drug Administration at the time, it might have required that a warning be posted prior to the performance of each vampire ritual: “Surgeon General’s Warning: Vampire rituals may not prove effective against consumption, especially in advanced cases. Side effects may include public ridicule.”)
Stetson, of course, was not alone in his assessment, nor was he totally misrepresenting the condition of rural New England. In her monograph entitled “The New England Vampire Belief: Image of the Decline,” Faye Ringel Hazel writes:
The persistence of this vampire belief coincides with the gradual decay of rural New England, as farms were abandoned for more easily cultivated land to the west. Beginning as early as the 1830s, and continuing to this day, the New England countryside has reverted to woodlands. In the nineteenth century, this process seemed to drain rural New England of its most enterprising young citizens, leaving the old and unfit behind. The results were appalling to contemporary observers. In 1869, the Nation asserted that “Puritan stock is diminishing…. even that such of it as remains is no longer what it should be” (411). Indeed, the editors note, “we are forever felicitating ourselves that the West is being peopled in great measure by the hardy citizens of Maine, but we are continually forgetting what sort of an effect this is likely to have upon Maine” (411).
Indeed, Hazel’s citations from The Atlantic Monthly suggest that Stetson’s blunt depiction of South County was almost mild in comparison with the picture of rural New England offered by other commentators:
In the notorious articles concerning “A New England Hill Town” which appeared in The Atlantic Monthly in 1899, the inbred inhabitants of the decayed hill towns of western Massachusetts are described in terms that recall similar Social Darwinist studies of the Appalachians and the Ozarks. The articles picture New England towns inhabited by dwarfs, giants, and idiots, all mutated from the ancient stock by what Rollin Hartt calls “natural selection the other end to—the survival of the unfittest” (572)…. In such a climate of opinion, the audiences of scholarly journals or of scandal-sheet newspapers such as The World were ready to believe anything about the folk of backwoods New England. Any superstition or survival of ancient beliefs might linger in those benighted areas left behind by the westward march of American civilization.
Certainly, the editors of the Providence Journal, as well as George Stetson, would have agreed with the opening sentence of Hazel’s monograph: “Of all the images of New England’s decay and decline, none provides a more striking objective correlative than that of the vampire.”
Amy Lowell used precisely this image in her vampire poem, “A Dracula of the Hills,” which unfolds in a rural New England that she viewed as a decaying, superstitious backwater, drained of its original hardy stock by the Civil War and movement away to the cities and out west (see Chapter 9). In 1917, she wrote in a letter:
My bringing-up was very cosmopolitan, and my fore-bears for several generations have been much travelled people, and the decaying New England which [Robert] Frost presents and which, if you remember I also present in ‘The Overgrown Pasture,’ has been no part of my immediate surroundings. Therefore it is no grief to me to have it disappear.
She expressed the same sentiment a few years later, contrasting her attitude towards rural New Englanders with that of Robert Frost:
… he [Frost] is much more sympathetic to them than I am, and makes excuses for their idiosyncrasies. I pity them, and, in some ways, admire them, but, as far as time goes, I am a complete alien; not until I grew up did I know anything of the native Yankee…. But you remember that my cousin, Mr. James Russell Lowell, was one of the authorities on Yankee character of his day, and all I can think is that subconsciously I inherited a sort of general family acquaintance with the country people.
Robert Frost may have felt more kinship with the viewpoint that came from within the town of Exeter. Not surprisingly, it was exactly opposite of that proffered by outsiders. Local sources saw strength where others saw weakness. Following the death of Mercy’s brother, Edwin, in May of 1892, the Wickford Standard (which covered the towns of North Kingstown and Exeter) published a lengthy commentary entitled “A Rhode Island Country Town.” While there are no explicit references to the Brown family and the exhumations (a kind of discretion familiar in many of the documents pertaining to New England’s vampire tradition), the article makes the best sense when viewed in the context of the notoriety this event generated when news of it was rapidly disseminated to the general public. The article begins with a description of Exeter that caused me to wonder if this is the same community that George Stetson and the Providence Journal were writing about:
There is a quiet rural town in South County where the sun rises earlier and where its golden beams linger later than in most other places in Southern Rhode Island [Exeter’s east-west stretch is the longest of any South County town]. It is widely known for its picturesque and romantic scenery, for its lofty terraced hills rising in rugged splendor one above another some of them reaching upward nearly six hundred feet above the level of the sea.
Unlike the outsiders, who saw a threat to civilization in the isolated rural areas, the Wickford commentary found the country to be a safe haven from the evil influences of urban life:
If people are deprived of some of the conveniences of modern life, they are amply compensated by exemption from many of the temptations which undermine manhood and womanhood in more populous communities. No travelling theatrical troupe or circus company ever stops over night within its borders to poison the minds of the young or generate a feverish discontent with the conditions of honest labor and the routine of farm life. The citizens as a rule are honest, industrious, amicably-inclined and though living remote from their neighbors they are generous and social in their relations with each other.
The editorial emphasized the role of the community in times of illness, alluding to the advice given to George Brown by his neighbors:
Perhaps in no phase of the life of these kind-hearted country people is their genuine goodness of heart more apparent than in cases of sickness and death, when their neighborly hands will linger long and lovingly in their efforts to perform in the most perfect manner the highest service which human power can render.
Finally, the commentary criticized journalists who denigrated the customs and exaggerated the beliefs of Exeter country folk:
In conclusion it may not be amiss to say that this same town has been the subject of frequent newspaper articles during the past two or three years from the pens of young, ambitious city journalists….
So it would seem that these writers started out to find something sensational and unreal, and being somewhat unaccustomed to the conditions of country life have allowed their imaginations to picture a ghoul in every deserted fireplace, to parade the afflictions and misfortunes of those in distress before the public as something strange and wonderful. They have come to regard every man, the cut of whose clothes showed independence in dress, as a deluded believer in some superstitious impossibility. The people of this town may be fairly said to possess all the virtues and fewer of the vices than many communities, and it is equally true that the average education, general intelligence and freedom from superstition will compare favorably with any other town in the State, although it bears the name of “Deserted Exeter”.
Other South County newspapers voiced similar opinions. Like the Wickford Standard, these local articles generally interpreted the Mercy Brown event as a demonstration of the positive values, such as compassion, concern, and mutual assistance, that characterize closeknit rural communities. A month after the event, the Pawtuxet Valley Gleaner, in its “Exeter Hill and Vicinity” column, ran the following commentary:
We think that some one in “Deserted Exeter,” who can afford it, should contribute an old shoe from which a medal can be made and suitably inscribed (never mind the expense we say) and then with appropriate ceremony have the said medal presented to the very (?) gentlemanly reporter whose graphic and herculean efforts recently appeared in the Providence Journal. “’Nuff said”.
These local newspapers were reinforcing a sense of group solidarity in the face of an outside threat. Outsiders used the same event to show that civilization had not yet triumphed everywhere and was being menaced by remnants of primitive thought and ignorance. Newspapers such as the Providence Journal were both censuring and asserting superiority over their rural neighbors. Whether or not the Journal’s editorial stance was fair, the newspaper was undoubtedly correct in asserting: “It is probable that the theory was never practiced in this State under a better light of publicity, discussion and criticism.”
The vituperative tone evident on both sides of this issue suggested that something deeper than a folk ritual was dividing these communities. The division between industrial Providence and agricultural South County was long-standing, rooted in economic and political concerns. But in the verbal battle over the exhumations, newer dichotomies also came into play as the beliefs and attitudes of evolutionists and modernists confronted those of romantics and antimodernists. This vampire war was part of a much wider struggle that pitted civilization against superstition.
The large debt amassed during the Revolutionary War became a source of strained relations between farmers and urbanized commercial interests in Rhode Island. The brunt of the war’s financial burden was borne by farmers, since revenue from real-estate taxes had to offset revenues lost due to the disruption of trade and the British occupation of commercial port towns. In the ensuing struggle, farmers argued successfully for the issuance of paper money, thus allowing them to pay their debts to reluctant creditors with highly inflated currency. As Rhode Island was becoming the first urban, industrialized state in the Union, the state legislature was still dominated by rural interests, which steadfastly maintained a tax structure and voting requirements that ensured the continued disenfranchisement of the burgeoning cities in the north. This disparity led to an armed confrontation in 1842, the “Dorr War,” which created greater representation for the northern industrial towns. The momentum continued to swing in the direction of cities during the nineteenth century, and farming communities lost their dominance. Well before 1892, the groundwork had been laid for the vampire war.
Another reason this event received widespread scrutiny is because it occurred at the end of the nineteenth century, a time that had experienced great changes in science and technology that were generally assigned positive labels such as “progress” and “advances in civilization.” A vampire exhumation seemed very much out of place in 1892; it was an anomaly or, in the vocabulary of the era’s anthropologists, a survival from a lower stage of cultural evolution. The exhumations carried out in the previous century received little, if any, attention from contemporaries. Perhaps there was an element of polite discretion involved but, in addition, practices that had not seemed extraordinary at the end of the eighteenth century were viewed by some as bizarre and threatening a century later.
With that issue in mind, I reviewed the vampire record, looking for commentary that would reveal attitudes about the practice. While the case of Captain Burton, in Manchester, Vermont, is the earliest on record, having occurred in 1793, it wasn’t actually set down until many years later. It is likely that Judge John Pettibone collected the story from an eyewitness sometime between 1857 and 1872. When Pettibone used the following phrases to characterize the event, the nineteenth-century push toward civilization was well underway, so Pettibone, even though he was living in the same town, was, by then, judging a significantly different culture: “strange infatuation … strange delusion … altar in the sacrifice to the Demon Vampire who it was believed was still sucking the blood.” While the Horace Ray case in Jewett City, Connecticut, was reported in the newspaper just two weeks after it happened in May, 1854, by that time, the author’s disapproving tone was not out of place: “A strange and almost incredible tale of superstition…. The scene, as described to us, must have been revolting in the extreme; and the idea that it could have grown out of a belief such as we have referred to, tasks human credulity. We seem to have been transported back to the darkest age of unreasoning ignorance and blind superstition, instead of living in the 19th century, and in a State calling itself enlightened and [C]hristian.” The same can be said for the “horrible vampire story” from Ontario, the “repulsive superstition” that “shocked” its collector in 1893.
The vampire report that has the earliest commentary attached to it was provided to me by one of those “I-think-I-have-something-of-interest” phone calls, this one from William Simmons in the fall of 1986. He had just completed a book on Native American history and folklore (Spirit of the New England Tribes), for which I provided some tales that I had collected in South County. We had discussed my interest in the vampire tradition, so, as he searched through old newspapers looking for Native American tales, he was on the lookout for any article that seemed relevant to my research. He presented me with two articles from the Old Colony Memorial and Plymouth County [Massachusetts] Advertiser. The first article appeared in the inaugural issue of the newspaper, May 4, 1822, under the headline “Superstitions of New England.” The heading notes that it was taken from the Philadelphia Union:
In that almost insulated part of the State of Massachusetts, called Old Colony or Plymouth County, and particularly in a small village adjoining the shire town, there may be found the relicks of many old customs and superstitions which would be amusing, at least to the antiquary. Among others of less serious cast, there was, fifteen years ago, one which, on account of its peculiarity and its consequence, I beg leave to mention.
It is well known to those who are acquainted with that section of our country, that nearly one half of its inhabitants die of a consumption, occasioned by the chilly humidity of their atmosphere, and the long prevalence of easterly winds. The inhabitants of the village (or town as it is there called) to which I allude were peculiarly exposed to this scourge; and I have seen, at one time, one of every fifty of its inhabitants gliding down to the grave with all the certainty which characterises this insiduous [sic] foe of the human family.
There was, fifteen years ago, and is perhaps at this time, an opinion prevalent among the inhabitants of this town, that the body of a person who died of a consumption, was by some supernatural means, nourished in the grave of some one living member of the family; and that during the life of this person, the body remained [retained?], in the grave, all the fullness and freshness of life and health.
This belief was strengthened by the circumstance, that whole families frequently fell a prey to this terrible disease.
Of one large family in this town consisting of fourteen children, and their venerable parents, the mother & the youngest son only remained—the rest within a year of each other had died of the consumption.
Within two months from the death of the thirteenth child, an amiable girl of about 16 years of age, the bloom, which characterised the whole of this family, was seen to fade from the cheek of the last support of the heartsmitten mother, and his broad flat chest was occasionally convulsed by that powerful deep cough which attends the consumption in our Atlantick States.
At this time as if to snatch one of this family from an early grave, it was resolved by a few of the inhabitants of the village to test the truth of this tradition which I have mentioned, and, which the circumstances of this afflicted family seemed to confirm. I should have added that it was believed that if the body thus supernaturally nourished in the grave, should be raised and turned over in the coffin, its depredation upon the survivor would necessarily cease. The consent of the mother being obtained, it was agreed that four persons, attended by the surviving and complaining brother should, at sunrise the next day dig up the remains of the last buried sister. At the appointed hour they attended in the burying yard, and having with much exertion removed the earth, they raised the coffin upon the ground; then, displacing the flat lid, they lifted the covering from her face, and discovered what they had indeed anticipated, but dreaded to declare.—Yes, I saw the visage of one who had been long the tenant of a silent grave, lit up with the brilliancy of youthful health. The cheek was full to dimpling, and a rich profusion of hair shaded her cold forehead, and while some of its richest curls floated upon her unconscious breast. The large blue eye had scarcely lost its brilliancy, and the livid fullness of her lips seemed almost to say, “loose me and let me go.”
In two weeks the brother, shocked with the spectacle he had witnessed, sunk under his disease. The mother survived scarcely a year, and the long range of sixteen graves, is pointed out to the stranger as an evidence of the truth of the belief of the inhabitants.
The following lines were written on a recollection of the above shocking scene:
I saw her, the grave sheet was round her,
Months had passed since they laid her in clay;
Yet the damps of the tomb could not wound her,
The worms had not seized on their prey.
O, fair was her cheek, as I knew it.
When the rose all its colours there brought;
And that eye,—did a tear then bedew it?
gleame’d like the herald of thought.
She bloom’d, though the shroud was around her,
locks o’er her cold bosom wave,
As if the stern monarch had crown’d her,
The fair speechless queen of the grave.
But what lends the grave such a lusture?
O’er her cheeks what such beauty had shed?
His life blood, who bent there, had nurs’d her,
The living was food for the dead!
It seems that the event occurred about 1807 and that the author (who apparently wrote both the article and the poem) was an eyewitness. A lengthy reply to this account was published in the next issue of the weekly newspaper. The letter, under the signature of “A Physician,” took issue with some of the assertions about consumption that appeared in the first article, and the writer left little doubt that he believed his community had been unfairly singled out for ridicule:
Sir—… The writer indulges his imagination in ranting about the superstitious customs which specially prevail in the Old Colony, or Plymouth County, and this he fantastically locates in an insulated part of the State of Massachusetts. His first assertion is too extravagant to require refutation. If true it would imply a phenomenon which has never occurred in any part of the habitable world, “that nearly one half of the people die of consumption.” Nor will it be credited, that one of fifty of the inhabitants fall a prey to this inexorable disease. It is impossible to conceive the motive by which the writer could be actuated in advancing a position so glaringly preposterous….
[T]he average proportion of consumptive cases is about one to every five and a half deaths. This estimate applies to New England and the intermediate States, extending to the Carolinas. Instances, it must be conceded, too frequently occur of whole families having a constitutional predisposition to consumption, by which parents are bereft of children in the early periods of life. But the writer in the Philadelphia Union, cites one instance of a family in this vicinity consisting of sixteen persons, all of whom were victims of consumption. The number specified, as well as his fanciful ideas relative to the superstitious belief in the salutary effects to be derived from touching the entombed corpse, bear evident marks of great exaggeration. During a residence of nearly forty years in the district referred to, and favoured with opportunities of correct observation respecting this subject, the writer of this reply, has not been made acquainted, with but one solitary instance of raising the body of the dead for the benefit of the living: and this was done purely in compliance with the caprice of a surviving sister, reduced to the last stage of hectic debility and despair. Although the family and connections entertained not the smallest hope of beneficial consequences, they could not in duty and tenderness refuse to indulge a feeble minded and debilitated young woman in a mean, on which she had confided her last fallacious hope. Inferences must be extremely incorrect when drawn from solitary instances, and it may with truth be affirmed, that the inhabitants of Plymouth County are equally intelligent, and not more remarkably addicted to superstition, than the generality of our race.
The insider’s view evident in this letter is consistent with that which appeared some seventy years later in Exeter, with assertions that people in the community are just as intelligent and no more superstitious than people elsewhere. The physician takes the author to task for “indulging his imagination” in regard to the practice, and suggests that the incident described is greatly exaggerated. Yet he does admit to knowing of an exhumation that was carried out in the town. And his description calls to mind, once again, the decision made by Exeter’s George Brown. Although the family did not believe the ritual would be efficacious, they complied out of a sense of duty and compassion. This rift between civilization and superstition—the vampire war—seems to have begun many years before Mercy Brown’s corpse came to the attention of the Providence Journal.
The Plymouth account raises some other issues that, of course, I cannot ignore, even if they have no direct bearing on the vampire war. I was at first perplexed by the location of a vampire incident in Plymouth, the early gateway to New England and home of the Pilgrims. I checked again the map that Robert Mathiesen had shown me and discovered that Plymouth lies squarely within the southeastern section of Massachusetts that had a strong Separatist religious affiliation throughout the seventeenth century. It was not part of the Puritan tradition that stretched north from Cohasset (about midway between Boston and Plymouth) to Ipswich along the Atlantic Coast and to the southwest as far as Greenwich, Connecticut. Also excluded from the Puritan sphere were tolerant Rhode Island and the unspecified southern portion of adjacent Connecticut, in addition to northern New England, which became the states of Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine. This territory, ringing the Puritan lands, takes in precisely those areas where a supernatural worldview was permitted to coexist, and even mingle, with Protestant sects and, not coincidentally, where the vampire tradition has been documented.
The remedy in the Plymouth case—simply turning the corpse over from face up to face down—is the only example of this procedure I’ve found in New England, adding yet another variant practice to the mix. (The stipulation that the rite be carried out at sunrise is a new addition, too.) Prone burials have an established precedence in folklore; they have been documented in Europe (among ancient Celtic peoples and others), Aboriginal America, India, and Africa. Burying a corpse face down (or prone) has been interpreted as a way to insure that it rests in peace and also prevents it from transforming into a vampire. Perhaps prone burial inhibits the vampire from finding its way to the surface because, according to some folk sources, the vampire will bite its way further down into the earth (folk vampires, unlike their literary and pop-culture counterparts, are not noted for being cunning or intelligent). An alternate folk explanation is that prone burial protects those attending the burial from the vampire’s fatal gaze. In Romania and Macedonia, one of the signs that a corpse is a vampire is that, upon exhumation, it is found with its face turned downwards. The explanation offered in the following folktale from Transylvania is that the vampire’s soul cannot return to its body if it has been turned into the prone position:
An old man with some soldiers was driving a cart in Transilvania, trying to find where he could get some hay. Night came on during their journey, so they stopped at a lonely house in a plain. The woman of the house received them, put maize porridge and milk on the table for them, and then went away. The soldiers ate the maize porridge, and after their meal looked for the old woman to thank her, but were unable to find her. Climbing up to the attic to see if she was there, they found seven bodies lying down, one of which was the woman’s. They were frightened and fled, and, as they looked back, they saw seven little lights descending on the house. These were the souls of the vampires. Had the soldiers turned the bodies with their faces downwards, the souls would never have been able to enter the bodies again.
Ralph Merrifield, in his interpretation of ritual and magic through archaeological evidence, discovered a large number of prone burials in Britain dating from the late Roman and early Anglo-Saxon eras. He concluded that they revealed a “rite of separation … intended to ensure that the dead did not return,” for it presumably indicated “to the soul the direction which it should travel.” Paul Barber connects face-down burials to the well-known and widespread custom of reversing direction to ward off evil, a practice that folklorists call “widdershins.” Of course, we all are familiar with the phrase that someone has “turned over in his grave” when something that would have been disagreeable to him occurs. According to Barber, the original notion that the corpse is preparing to return from the dead (perhaps to remedy the transgression) has been lost. And let’s not forget that, according to Everett Peck’s family story, Mercy Brown was found, upon excavation, to have “turned over in the grave.”
The vampire war echoed a grander struggle. The apparent progress achieved by the late nineteenth century spawned two opposing views. One maintained that American culture, having just completed its “manifest destiny” of taming a New World from coast-to-coast, was on the verge of attaining the highest stage of civilization. The other was an antimodernist reaction by “American intellectuals” who saw a “vulgarizing and deinvigorating tendency” accompanying “progress.” They turned to the past, to “an older sense of community and tradition” to “understand their growing sense of alienation and loss.”
While the newer notion of cultural evolution had its share of followers, the romantic idea of the “noble savage” continued, in various transformations, to hold the public imagination: the idea that the closer one is to nature, the land, and the direct labor involved in fulfilling one’s various needs, the richer one is in a spiritual sense. By the late nineteenth century, the “latent hostility between town and country became more overt” and republican pastoralism became a more militant populism. Farmers were losing their independence as “railroad entrepreneurs and commodity traders” gained increasing control over their economic life. “The ideal of an independent American folk” (as epitomized by the farmer) that had “energized political discourse throughout the 19th century” was in jeopardy, if not indeed already dead. Writing about the influence of folklore on mass culture, Jackson Lears provides an idealized romantic vision of these vanishing folk:
Once upon a time, there was a place called traditional society. People lived on farms or in villages, at one with nature and each other. For these preindustrial folk, there was no separation between the home and the world, between labor and the rest of life. They worked hard but their lives were unhurried, governed by the rhythms of the seasons rather than the ticking of the clock, endowed with larger purpose by a supernatural framework of meaning. They passed the time, rather than saving or spending it, in easy sociability with people like themselves. Together they constituted a static, homogeneous social group, rooted in the soil and in face-to-face relationships. But the urban-industrial transformation brought an end to this organic community. Religious beliefs eroded, social bonds stretched, class antagonisms formed and sharpened. People escaped the drudgery of the farm only to find themselves huddling in fetid, anonymous streets, scurrying to routine jobs in factories and offices. Through the brown fog of a winter dawn, they glimpsed the rise of modern society.
This same kind of romanticism actually helped stimulate the collection of what were conceived to be the “disappearing traditions” of various folk groups, including European peasants and native and black Americans. The impetus was to document for posterity, if not actually preserve, the relics from more primitive, backward ways of life. Some social reformers, though, used the existence of these “backwater” communities as evidence of the need to press for eliminating superstitions and other “survivals” deemed detrimental to the advancement of civilization in an enlightened age. Their task as they saw it was to educate those who still suffered under the delusions brought about by the faulty reasoning of previous ages—the “bastard science” of magic, as Sir James Frazer termed it.
Viewed from the pedestal of “civilization,” the Brown family exhumations were yet another skirmish in the war between modern, scientific thinking and the primitive, unreflective superstitions inherited from a savage past. But, the romantic “noble savage” would not go away. The two sides of this dichotomy placed very different values on folk traditions, such as the ritual performed in Exeter’s Chestnut Hill cemetery.