Sylvia Tory lived alone in a small cabin deep in the Ministerial Woods. The former slave was a “sibyl or fortune-teller or prophetess or spirit-medium or witch, just as one’s fancy might call her,” according to “Shepherd Tom” Hazard. The irony of an African-American fortune-teller living on lands granted in 1668 “to preach God’s word to the inhabitants,” was less than apparent in South Kingstown, Rhode Island, as Shepherd Tom and his two young companions paid a visit to Sylvia to have their fortunes told on a Sunday afternoon in 1820. With her head back and eyes shut, Sylvia spent an hour telling the fortunes of Hazard and Charles Barker—“more in truth than fiction,” as far as Hazard could discern. “But when she came to Adam Babcock (then in robust health),” Hazard wrote, Sylvia’s fluent predictions ceased abruptly:
… not a word could he get from the old shriveled, gray-headed crone save, “Don’t you by no means go east,” which Sylvia repeated as often as Adam pressed her to say more, for some half a dozen times, without a word’s addition or subtraction, “Don’t you by no means go east!” which made Adam mad, but still he offered to pay her his quarter, the same as we did, which she persistently refused to accept, and on my asking the contrary old critter after Adam had gone outdoors, why she would not tell him his fortune, the old witch shook her head oracularly and said that “that young fellow has no fortune to tell;” and sure enough, when Adam’s indentures had expired, a week later, he went straight to New Bedford, some thirty miles due east of Sylvia’s hovel, where he sickened in a few days and died a fortnight later.
Thomas Robinson Hazard (1797–1886) was a Quaker, Yale dropout, shepherd, woolen-mill owner, abolitionist, and story-teller. He also communicated with spirits through dreams and seances. And he was a member of one of the oldest, wealthiest, and most eccentric families in South County (“a self-willed race of independent thinkers,” he termed them), no mean feat in a place where independence and idiosyncrasy were, if not a way of life, then at least defining characteristics. The numerous isolated boulders left by receding glaciers in southern Rhode Island are called “eccentrics” by geologists, and the behavior of its inhabitants often matches the landscape.
A few days before interviewing Everett Peck, I drove down to South Kingstown to do some fieldwork and to interview a man whose father had known Sylvia Tory and many of the Hazards. Oliver Stedman’s firsthand knowledge of South County was praised as unsurpassed. As a lifelong resident of Peace Dale, ninety-year-old Stedman had witnessed the village’s rise to textile manufacturing prominence (reaching its peak of 1500 workers during World War II), its subsequent decline, and its settling in as a quiet, residential community adjacent to the more urbanized Wakefield. Under the leadership of the Hazard family, the village had grown from a cluster of small water-powered mills in the eighteenth century to South Kingstown’s foremost manufacturing center, producing fine woolens, including the highly regarded Peace Dale shawl. The Hazards were responsible for many of the fine architectural treasures of the village, named for Rowland Hazard’s wife, Mary Peace. Shepherd Tom was one of their nine children. Another son, Joseph Peace Hazard, also became a “spiritualist” and, in 1884, built “Druidsdream” (his family’s seaside compound that, according to his diary, he had constructed after a Druid appeared to him in a dream, instructing him to build a stone house on that site). About the same time, he built the “Witches Altar” (a tomb and monument surrounded by eight granite pillars in a cemetery in the Narragansett Pier area).
Though I hadn’t yet interviewed Everett Peck, I already had a sketchy impression of the Mercy Brown story. But vampires were not foremost on my mind in the Fall of 1981. While I was hoping that Stedman might fill in the partial picture of the vampire incident that I had read about, I anticipated that our interview would cover a fascinating range of topics, from local characters and places, to mysteries and murders. Since I was just embarking on a two-year project to document the folklife of South County, I was casting a wide net. The project focused on the three cultural groups—Yankees, Native Americans, and African-Americans—whose interactions had shaped the traditions of South County (comprising eight of Rhode Island’s thirty-nine towns and cities: Exeter, North Kingstown, South Kingstown, Narragansett, Richmond, Charlestown, Hopkinton, and Westerly). I was accompanied by James Clements, my intern on leave from his job as archivist at the Rhode Island Black Heritage Society.
On the way to Peace Dale, we drove past the Austin Homestead Farm, located between Breakheart Hill and Nooseneck Hill Road in Exeter. Records show that about a hundred years earlier, John Austin had 13,000 boulders taken from the fields and added to the existing walls! Looking at these walls, I couldn’t help but contemplate Robert Frost’s poetic observation, in “Mending Wall,” that “good fences make good neighbors.” I always interpreted this as an allusion to the character of New Englanders: independent, isolated, even aloof. But an equally convincing reading transposes Frost’s neighbors and fences. Historically, in New England, good neighbors made good fences. Dry walls were not only repositories for rocks removed from planting fields, they also served as property boundaries and animal enclosures. Able-bodied men were mustered to repair fences held in common, and fines were imposed on those who neglected their private fences. Early settlers placed high value on good fences.
We stopped at the home of Russell Spears, on Kings Factory Road in Charlestown. Spears is a Narragansett Indian stone mason in his midsixties. As he labored on a fieldstone facade on the front of his house, we asked questions and photographed him working. Spears comes from a long line of masons; he learned the craft as an apprentice to his uncles Paul, Tom, and Frank Babcock, who, in turn, had learned from their father, Charles. And Charles’s father also had been a stonemason. How far back, who knows? The historical record shows that white colonists had paid Native Americans to build stone walls as early as 1653. One who had learned the mason’s trade was “Stonewall” John, one of the unfortunate Narragansetts massacred by Connecticut militia in North Kingstown on July 3, 1676, at Queen’s Fort—a Native American village John helped build for old Queen Matatunk. More than two-hundred years later, Joseph Peace Hazard employed another well-known Narragansett stonemason, John Noka (or “No Cake”), to lay out and construct the stone foundations for his visionary “Druidsdream” and “Witches Altar.”
The Stedman interview began with a lively mix of history and legend, incorporating African-American and Native American, as well as Yankee, folklife. A little more than half an hour into the interview, there was a pause while I changed the audiotape. It seemed an opportune moment to broach the subject of Mercy Brown. I hoped to elicit the story without being too conspicuous. Stedman’s demeanor and dress (he was wearing a tie and jacket while we interviewed him in his own parlor!), suggested that he might balk at a direct inquiry. I didn’t want to prejudice his delivery by labeling it a “vampire” story. Although I wasn’t quite successful at avoiding the term altogether, with some patience—and the timely intervention of my intern, James—I was able to draw out a reluctant and halting narration of the event.
Fumbling for words, I asked, “What about the … I’m trying to think of what it was called … it happened in Exeter … I guess, the … vampire story?”
“Ah, haaa! I don’t want to talk about that one. That’s too gruesome. That’s too gruesome altogether. You go up and see, uh, Everett Peck on that one.”
“Everett Peck? Where is he?”
“He’s up in Exeter. It actually did happen. It actually did happen.” Stedman laughed nervously. “Yup, they did. They dug ’em up … yeah. And that wasn’t too long ago!”
“When was it?” I asked, hoping that my ignorance would persuade Stedman to continue.
“Well, I think that was the latter part of the, uh, long about eighteen hundred and eighty-five or ninety. It wasn’t what I would consider way back in the Revolution days.”
“You were a young boy then.” I was marveling at the fact that I was sitting face-to-face with a man who was alive when Mercy’s body was exhumed, and whose father had firsthand stories about Sylvia Tory, the fortune-teller who was born into slavery in the eighteenth century and lived to the age of one-hundred and four!
“Yes. I think what happened, you see, those people back up in Exeter then—you didn’t get around same as we do now. It wasn’t too much populated up there, so they got away with that all right. But, yeah, they really believed that.”
“I guess it was a matter of fear, huh?” This was my feeble attempt to overcome his obvious reluctance to continue.
“Yeah.”
“Being afraid?”
“And they …” Stedman sighed. “Yeah, that’s quite a story. What’s his name, this Peck, knows right where it happened and everything.” He emitted a short burst of nervous laughter. I was thinking that he wouldn’t go on, especially when he repeated Peck’s authority on the topic.
“He can tell you the whole story, but I say it’s just too gruesome.” Stedman paused, as if thinking about what happened. “I can’t, I can’t imagine a thing like that, can you?” His voice began rising in both pitch and volume. “I can’t, I can’t imagine!”
His urge to tell was bumping up against his sense of decorum. Stedman loved to share his knowledge of the past. He had recently published a four-volume collection of columns he wrote for the local newspaper, A Stroll Through Memory Lane. It consisted mostly of his own recollections of South County and South Kingstown. He wanted to tell the story. Yet, at the same time, he was worried about propriety. Here was a man who graduated from Yale, served four years as a naval officer, then spent fifteen years as a town councilman, state representative, and state senator.
With perfect timing, James jumped in to push Stedman over the brink. “I never heard the story.”
“Oh, you never heard, you never heard it? It’s been written up.” Turning to me, he asked, “You’ve heard it, you’ve heard the story, haven’t you?”
As I nodded yes, Stedman said, “Yeah. Yup!” I wasn’t sure if he was confirming his suspicions that I knew the story or reaffirming that it actually happened—or both.
Again, James stepped into the breach. “Does that have something to do with witch haven or something like that?” Perhaps James was referring to Hazard’s “Witches Altar.”
“No.” Stedman sighed again, but this time his tone was one of resignation. I think we all realized right then that he was going to tell the story.
“These, this family, they had, un, several deaths in the family.”
There was a matter-of-fact expression in his voice, as if he was now just a conduit for the tale, with no emotional stake in it, as though he didn’t want us to think that he was, in any way, connected to what he was about to relate.
“One right after the other, it seems so. They thought there was …” Stedman paused between each phrase, “something … about it … some … vampire.” The word did not come easily, his discomfort obvious. He chuckled nervously, “they called.…” More pausing and stammering. “I, I, … but then they, they did … after three or four of them had died … in the cemetery …” Now his words were coming out uncoupled, fragmented verbal images of a picture I supposed he was seeing in his mind. “And they, one night they got together, and they went over and they dug them up.…”
There was a moment of silence. When Stedman continued, his voice was solemn and matter-of-fact. “And they found, in one—this most recent one that had died—they [the following phrases were delivered one at a time, accentuated by their singularity] found … blood … in her heart. And they went and cut the heart out, and burned it, there. Well. Then they figured the whole thing was all over. It was all right. They’d, they’d fixed it. There’d be no more vampire.”
Stedman returned to his regular speaking voice. “That’s just a sketchy idea of it. That’s about what the story was. You know. You read it.” Both the volume and pitch of his voice rose sharply. “It’s been printed. And it actually happened! No doubt!”
I asked about details, the procedures employed, hoping he would continue.
“I don’t know how it was done, but, by God, I can’t imagine anybody doing it, can you?” His voice rose again, strong, almost a laugh. “Ha, ha, haaa! Dear, I can’t imagine anybody doing it, but, by any rights, it was done, I guess. Yeah. That’s one, that’s, that’s quite a well-known story around, around South County, yeah. Yep.”
After my interviews with Stedman and Peck, I made a list of questions. If those involved did not use the term “vampire,” then on what grounds could outsiders justifiably use it? How widespread was this practice? Was it confined just to some quirky corner of Rhode Island? Did it actually extend throughout New England, and perhaps to other American regions? Where did the tradition come from? How did Rhode Island country folk learn about it? What are its underpinnings in folklore and history? How does it fit into larger systems of healing, belief, worldview, and religion? Why did this act seem to threaten certain groups of people, such as newspaper editorial writers? I realized that this pursuit of vampires would not be simple and direct. It would entail more than simply locating old documents and newspaper articles. Reconciling this “gruesome” practice with the prosaic life of Yankee farmers proved more of a struggle than I had imagined. Even the Providence Journal articles of 1892 raised more questions than they answered. The Journal introduced the vampire issue by rebuking their “local correspondent” for not correcting his informants’ mistaken omission of the term:
All mention of “the vampire” is omitted from this account of the exhuming, but this signifies nothing. The correspondent simply failed to get to the bottom of the superstition. The files of the Journal when reference is made in them to the practice of the tradition in Rhode Island, without exception speak of the search of the graves in such cases as attempts to discover the vampire. The last illustration of the practice was six or seven years ago in the same county, and it was then so described. Previous accounts of the digging up of the bodies for the same purpose are also inspired by the vampire theory. Otherwise the analogy between this case and those which occurred in Europe in the 18th century is perfect, except in the terrible suggestion that the patient must take the ashes of the vampire internally to be cured. These ideas are not, so far as can be learned, based upon any form of the European tradition. The books and authorities of Europe do not connect the theory with consumption, nor, in its logical turn upon that application, with the victim’s eating the vampire. This presentation of the theory must be of American or Rhode Island origin, and most likely it can be claimed as the exclusive possession of Rhode Island country people. It is horrible to contemplate, and the local correspondent can hardly be blamed for attributing it to the Indians. It seems very odd that South County people alone should ever had re-gendered and accepted such fancies.
The article corrected the correspondent’s oversight by quoting the Century Dictionary’s definition of “vampire,” citing Calmet’s dissertation on the vampires of Hungary, and then offering an extended description of vampirism. The excerpt above suggests the practice was not uncommon in Rhode Island—was, perhaps, the “exclusive possession of Rhode Island country people.” Yet, elsewhere the article claims that it was found in other parts of New England:
How the tradition got to Rhode Island and planted itself firmly here, cannot be said. It was in existence in Connecticut and Maine 50 and 100 years ago, and as far back in some cases as the beginning of the 18th century. The idea seems never to have been accepted in the northern part of the State, but every five or ten years it has cropped out in Coventry, West Greenwich, Exeter, Hopkinton, Richmond and the neighboring towns.
It was apparent that I would have to cobble together this story bit by bit. I thought of how Russell Spears, without mortar, built a coherent wall, functional yet beautiful, from a jumbled pile of fieldstones. How, without obvious effort, he eyeballed the rubble pile and selected the stone that fit with little or no trimming. I was told that, if chosen and arranged properly, the stones in the completed wall would sing to the builder. And I recalled another line from Frost’s “Mending Wall”: “We have to use a spell to make them balance.” My search for answers began with the narrative equivalent of Spears’ pile of stones: Stith Thompson’s six-volume Motif-Index of Folk Literature (1932-1936).
Motifs are the smallest fixed narrative elements that, when pieced together, create folktales, legends, ballads, myths, and other types of folk stories. In his pioneering work, Thompson used a decimal scheme to classify these recurring units, progressing from the mythological and supernatural toward the realistic and humorous. The letter E lists all motifs concerned with the dead. E250 incorporates bloodthirsty revenants (that is, those who return from the dead). E251 is vampire, a “corpse which comes from the grave at night and sucks blood.” Included under this motif are numerous cross-references, showing that vampires appear in stories from Germany, England, Lithuania, Greece, the Slavic countries, Assyria, India, Indonesia, the West Indies, and Native cultures from both North and South America.
Two of Thompson’s numerous cross-references caught my immediate attention since they related to New England. Although George Lyman Kittredge, in Witchcraft in Old and New England, did not mention Mercy Brown (or any other similar case in New England), he illustrated the diversified nature of vampire folklore and suggested some possible links between British and American traditions. It would take a few years—and the extraordinary archaeological discovery of an exhumed corpse along the Connecticut-Rhode Island border (which I describe in Chapter 8)—for me to appreciate the full significance of the following story:
William Laudun, a brave English knight, came to Gilbert Foliot, then Bishop of Hereford (as he was from 1149 to 1162), and asked counsel: “A Welsh wizard (maleficus) recently died in my town. Four nights later he came back, and he keeps coming every night, calling by name certain of his former neighbors, who instantly fall sick and die within three days, so that but few of them are left.” The bishop suggested that the evil angel of this dead villain had perhaps reanimated his body, and advised the knight to have it dug up and beheaded, and then buried again after the grave had been sprinkled copiously with holy water. All this proved of no avail, and at length the name of Sir William himself was called. Seizing his sword, he pursued the demonic corpse to the churchyard, and, just as it was sinking into the grave, cleft its head to the neck. There was no further trouble. We have here, to all intents and purposes, a case of vampirism, and it is noteworthy that the vampire was a wizard in this life. Other instances of vampirism in the twelfth century are recorded by William of Newburgh.
I made a note to follow up the William of Newburgh reference and continued on to Kittredge’s next indexed entry under “vampire,” which was a discussion of the various creatures who get blamed when a cow stops giving milk. I knew that witches were commonly accused, and the inclusion of goblins, fairies, and imps was not startling. Such are the vagaries of folk tradition. But vampires? Kittredge’s provocative: link between milk and blood seemed to foreshadow recent oral-erotic, Freudian interpretations of the vampire:
The German vampire who so impressed the imagination of Henry More, varied his ghoulish pranks by draining the cows dry. Witches may take away the milk of a nursing mother; they may even suck her breasts till the blood come—just as they can make cows give bloody milk. Sometimes, too, they suck the blood of infants. Such were the striges of antiquity, who were hags or demons in bird form.
Kittredge’s connecting of striges, lamiae, witches, and other blood-sucking demons pointed me toward a resolution to my questions about the vampire figure in folklore and history.
Thompson’s other reference was eye-catching, indeed. In “The Animistic Vampire in New England” (American Anthropologist, 1896) George Stetson counted at least ten instances of vampirism in South County alone! Stetson wrote:
In New England the vampire superstition is unknown by its proper name. It is believed that consumption is not a physical but a spiritual disease, obsession, or visitation; that as long as the body of a dead consumptive relative has blood in its heart it is proof that an occult influence steals from it for death and is at work draining the blood of the living into the heart of the dead and causing his rapid decline.
Stetson links Old and New World patterns, observing that in Turkey, Hungary, and Russia, “the vampire does not stop his unwelcome visits at a single member of a family, but extends his visits to the last member, which is the Rhode Island belief.” I also saw a connection between Kittredge’s “evil angel” that “perhaps reanimated” the Welshman’s body and Stetson’s observation that New Englanders regarded consumption as a spiritual visitation rather than physical disease. Stetson cites rural Rhode Island as a hotbed of the belief:
By some mysterious survival, occult transmission, or remarkable atavism, this region, including within its radius the towns of Exeter, Foster, Kingstown, East Greenwich, and others, with their scattered hamlets and more pretentious villages, is distinguished by the prevalence of this remarkable superstition.
My excitement over finding evidence of the tradition’s prevalence was tempered by Stetson’s tactful use of blanks instead of family and place names. How would I fill in the blanks?:
The first visit in this farming community of native-born New Englanders was made to _____ a small seashore village possessing a summer hotel and a few cottages of summer residents not far from Newport—that Mecca of wealth, fashion, and nineteenth-century culture. The _____ family is among its well-to-do and most intelligent inhabitants. One member of this family had some years since lost children by consumption, and by common report claimed to have saved those surviving by exhumation and cremation of the dead.
In the same village resides Mr. _____, an intelligent man, by trade a mason, who is living witness of the superstition and of the efficacy of the treatment of the dead which it prescribes. He informed me that he had lost two brothers by consumption. Upon the attack of the second brother his father was advised by Mr. _____, the head of the family before mentioned, to take up the first body and burn its heart, but the brother attacked objected to the sacrilege and in consequence subsequently died. When he was attacked by the disease in his turn, _____’s advice prevailed, and the body of the brother last dead was accordingly exhumed, and, “living” blood being found in the heart and in circulation, it was cremated, and the sufferer began immediately to mend and stood before me a hale, hearty, and vigorous man of fifty years. When questioned as to his understanding of the miraculous influence, he could suggest nothing and did not recognize the superstition even by name. He remembered that the doctors did not believe in its efficacy, but he and many others did. His father saw the brother’s body and the arterial blood. The attitude of several other persons in regard to the practice was agnostic, either from fear of public opinion or other reasons, and their replies to my inquiries were in the same temper of mind as that of the blind man in the Gospel of Saint John (9:25), who did not dare to express his belief, but “answered and said, Whether he be a sinner or no, I know not; one thing I know, that whereas I was blind, now I see.”
At _____, a small isolated village of scattered houses in a farming population, distant fifteen or twenty miles from Newport and eight or ten from Stuart’s birthplace [Gilbert Stuart, whose portrait of George Washington appears on the one-dollar bill, was born in North Kingstown], there have been made within fifty years a half dozen or more exhumations. The most recent was made within two years, in the family of _____. The mother and four children had already succumbed to consumption, and the other child most recently deceased (within six months) was, in obedience to the superstition, exhumed and the heart burned. Dr. _____, who made the autopsy, stated that he found the body in the usual condition after an interment of that length of time. I learned that others of the family have since died, and one is now very low with the dreaded disease. The doctor remarked that he had consented to the autopsy only after the pressing solicitation of the surviving children, who were patients of his, the father at first objecting, but finally, under continued pressure, yielding. Dr. _____declares the superstition to be prevalent in all the isolated districts of southern Rhode Island, and that many instances of its survival can be found in the large centers of population. In the village now being considered known exhumations have been made in five families, in the village previously named in three families, and in two adjoining villages in two families.
The latter case, with some discrepancies, seems to fit the Brown family. Chestnut Hill is about eight miles from Gilbert Stuart’s birthplace (now a museum) on Snuff Mill Road, in North Kingstown. The mother and two (not four) children had succumbed to consumption, and the body of Mercy, the “child most recently deceased” was exhumed and “the heart burned.” The Dr. _____, “who made the autopsy” and found the body to be “in the usual condition” certainly could be Metcalf. Perhaps Stetson is referring to Eddie when he writes that he learned of the death of “others in the family.” And the remark that the father at first objected and only later, under pressure, reluctantly assented to the procedure agrees with newspaper accounts.
Stetson left few footprints. Any published sources he might have used went unacknowledged. He seems to have gleaned his information about South County’s “remarkable superstition” from interviews with people in the community, probably sometime around 1895. Stetson’s article concurs with the Providence Journal article of March 21, 1892, in suggesting that the vampire tradition was not rare in the region, and that the locals “did not recognize the superstition even by name,” nor did the doctors believe in its efficacy.
In the Fall of 1982, almost exactly one year after I interviewed Oliver Stedman and Everett Peck, I discovered the Arnold Collection in a neighborhood branch of the Providence Public Library. This fascinating and unindexed hodgepodge of old newspaper clippings and typed sheets was housed in numerous three-ring binders. A bookplate inside the first of the numbered binders read:
In memory of James Newell Arnold
born Aug. 3, 1844—died Sept. 18, 1927
A searcher of records
A careful historian
A lover of the past
Whose life was given to perpetuating its lesson
The binders have labels such as “Anecdotes of South County, RI,” “Town Notes,” “Poems” (which include broadsides and ballads), and “Tombstone Records.”
A yellowed newspaper clipping pasted into Scrapbook 7 grabbed my attention. The unattributed text was headlined, “The Vampire Tradition,” with the date “December 23” just beneath. (The clipping’s juxtaposition to other clippings describing events whose dates I could determine suggests that the article was probably published in a Rhode Island newspaper, though not the Providence Journal, in 1890 or 1891.) The anonymous author buoyed my spirits, providing yet further testimony that the practice of the vampire tradition in rural Rhode Island, as well as Rhode Islanders’ knowledge of it, was much more widespread than official records would indicate. But that apparent fact also contained the seeds of looming frustration. As the author insinuated, the vampire trail consisted mostly of “stories told by old people” or written “allusions” and condensed “newspaper sketches.” I could expect sanctioned records, such as “regular histories” and official documents, to be free of references to this tradition.
The author noted that, in every case he knew of, “the tradition has been that a deceased consumptive in a family has been possessed of a vampire that has fed on the living of such a household.” He asserted that, “until a score of years ago,” this “ghastly belief … was so firmly held in western Rhode Island that occasionally the dead was disinterred and the heart and associated parts of the cadaver removed, to be burned as the dwelling place and shape of the vampire.” Because “nobody cared to spread the view that such an evil power had appeared in his family,” then “the least noise made about the performance … the better.” Besides, since “the burials were in family or remote country plots, the formalities necessary to secure disinterment were nil.” The author argued that “the unaccountable, mystifying and weird vampire tradition” had as much claim as “the records of a scientifically historical past” to be included in any history of the state, since both had something to say about “the essential intellectual and spiritual fibre of the people of Rhode Island.” To a growing list of “speculations as to the origin of the tradition,” he added two more: “the French Huguenot settlers who lived at Frenchtown, below East Greenwich, in the early part of the eighteenth century” and the “very singular people [who] settled Rhode Island, and … brought out of Old England some of the oldest of its dark traditions.” The author briefly described the last reported case, which he said occurred in 1888 or 1889, but did not provide the details that would have allowed me to undertake further investigation.
I checked the “regular histories” of Rhode Island as a matter of course and found, as predicted, no vampire references. The newspaper columnist James Earl Clauson kept me on the trail with two faint tracks. Most of his 1937 article entitled “Vampirism in Rhode Island” is a retelling of the Brown family incident. What a shame that he gave no clues to his sources. He wrote of Edwin Brown: “A photograph we’ve seen shows him a big, husky young man” What wouldn’t I have given to see a likeness of Eddie Brown! Apparently Clauson was unaware of the 1892 Journal article, since he records that the hearts of all three exhumed bodies were burned. He does not know the date of the incident, writing that “the peculiar rite we have described occurred not longer ago than 1890.” Clauson also makes reference to a case from Jewett City, Connecticut, and provides the following provocative tidbit: “The late Sidney S. Rider, historian and antiquarian, tells of a similar case in these plantations about the time of the outbreak of the Revolution. Unfortunately for record purposes he fails to locate it with any exactness.”
Enter Alphonsus Joseph-Mary Augustus Montague Summers. A fascinating character, Montague Summers (1880–1948), after ordination as a deacon in 1908, left the Church of England to become a Roman Catholic curate. But it was his research and writing on a broad range of supernatural topics, including witchcraft, werewolves and vampires-combined with a curious blending of denunciation and belief in such matters—that earned him an enduring reputation. His thesis was that religious and governmental institutions were covering up actual cases of vampirism. In The Vampire in Europe (1929), his second book on the subject, Summers mentions two more new (to me, at any rate) cases and gives some particulars for the Jewett City case.
During the year 1854 the Norwich [Connecticut] Courier (U.S.A.) reported some remarkable happenings which had taken place at Jewett, a neighbouring town. In 1846–7 a citizen of Griswold, Horace Ray, had died of consumption. Unfortunately two of his children, young men, developed the same disease and followed him to his grave, the younger and last of these passing away about 1852. It was found that yet a third son was a victim to the same fatal disease, whereupon it was resolved to exhume the bodies of the two brothers and cremate them because the dead were supposed to feed upon the living; and so long as the dead bodies in the grave remained entire the surviving members of the family must continue to furnish vital substance upon which these could feed. Wholly convinced that this was the case, the family and friends of the deceased on 8th June, 1854, proceeded to the burial ground, exhumed the bodies of the deceased brothers and having erected a great pyre, burned them there on the spot.
Summers offers a brief account of yet another incident in Rhode Island, then extends the range of vampirism in America to Chicago:
The Providence Journal in 1874 recorded that in the village of Placedale, Rhode Island, a well-known inhabitant, Mr. William Rose, himself dug up the body of his own daughter and burned her heart, acting under the belief that she was exhausting the vitality of the remaining members of the family. In the following year Dr. Dyer, one of the leading physicians of Chicago, reported a case which came under his own observation. The body of a woman who had died of consumption, was taken from the grave and burned, under the belief that she was attracting after her into the grave her surviving relatives.
There is no Placedale in Rhode Island, so I wondered if the reference might be to Peace Dale, located in the heart of South County.
A year on the vampire trail had uncovered the following: there were perhaps ten cases in Rhode Island alone, centered in South County, including the families of Brown (1892) and Rose (1874); the practice extended to nearby Connecticut (Jewett City is just across the state line from Exeter) with the Ray family (1854), and maybe well beyond to Maine and even Chicago; the time frame ranged from perhaps the early part of the eighteenth century up to 1892; the procedures employed varied from burning the heart (and sometimes “associated parts”) to the entire corpse. Even though the amount of actual documentation was still meager, the results of my search were satisfying and the prospects encouraging.