Vampire. One word, so many images, from Bela Lugosi as Bram Stoker’s Count Dracula, dressed in tuxedo and cape with hair slicked back, pallid face, prominent canine teeth protruding, to Robert Pattinson as the young, dark, and handsome Edward Cullen of Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight. But another kind of vampire survived in remote areas of New England more than one hundred years before Stoker penned Dracula in 1897. This book relates my attempt to unravel the mystery of these little-known, so-called vampires. Beginning with a family story told to me by an old Yankee from rural Rhode Island, my search has led me to diverse strands of evidence, including eyewitness accounts, local legends, newspaper articles, local histories, town records, journal entries, unpublished correspondence, genealogies, cemeteries, and actual human remains.
These sources reveal the tragic stories of ordinary farmers confronted with an illness that medicine could neither explain nor cure. This mystifying, fatal disease was “consumption,” as pulmonary tuberculosis was then called. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, New England was in the grip of a terrible tuberculosis epidemic. By 1800, nearly one-quarter of all deaths in the northeastern United States were attributed to consumption, and it remained the leading cause of death throughout the nineteenth century.1
Not willing to simply watch as, one after another, their family members died, some New Englanders resorted to a folk remedy whose roots surely must rest in Europe. Called “vampirism” by outsiders (a term that may never have been used by those who engaged in this practice), this remedy required exhuming the bodies of deceased relatives and checking them for “unnatural” signs, such as “fresh” blood in the heart. The implicit belief was that one of the relatives was not completely dead and was maintaining some semblance of a life by draining the vital force from living relatives.
Vampire hunters of centuries past visited morgues and cemeteries in search of the undead. The morgues I search are old newspaper archives and long-forgotten local histories, where the stories of vampires whose bodies were exhumed and examined He waiting to be rediscovered. My task is to find them and bring them back to life. Since the first publication of Food for the Dead in 2001, the Internet has grown into a web of communication whose pervasive scope was unimaginable a mere decade ago. Access to the enormous amount of data now available online has allowed my research to expand more widely, deeply, and quickly than was possible when I was writing the first edition. My vampire trail has grown to include more than thirty new American exhumations, vampire incidents that I was not aware of in 2001. This new material extends the geographic distribution of vampiric activities well beyond New England, into the upper Midwest and, perhaps, the Deep South. The time frame has expanded as well, from 1784 to, almost unbelievably, the mid-twentieth century.
Before continuing on the vampire trail, I want to address some of the questions I’ve been asked about the book over the past ten years. At the top of the list:
Are (were) there really vampires?
In my prologue, when I suggest that readers should keep an open mind regarding the word vampire, I am not implying that reanimated corpses actually rise (or rose) from the dead to kill the living. I am warning readers that they are likely to encounter “vampires” who do not match their preconceptions. It should be clear, well before the final chapter, that I see the “vampires” who are the focus of this book as scapegoats. Everett Peck, who shares his family’s story of Mercy Brown in chapter 1, addressed the question plainly and concisely. Pointing to a newspaper article about him and his story, he said, “Now, what they do here, they change this around as if I believe in vampire [sic]. Now, that ain’t what I’m sayin’. I’m just revealin’ what they believed … see?” “Do I believe in vampire?” he asked rhetorically, then answered his own question: “No, I don’t believe in that. I’m not sure they did, but they had to come for an answer.… And some of them old people probably died with that in their mind, that they did the right thing.”
I use the term vampire when referring to the individuals who were exhumed, not because I believe that they were actually vampires, or even that they were labeled as vampires by their exhumers, but because it is a shorthand means for referencing them. I could have substituted a more accurate phrase, such as “corpses who were suspected of being the cause, directly or indirectly, of the illness and death of their kinfolk,” but that would soon become tedious to writer and reader alike, as would putting “so-called” in front of the term on every use. In most cases where I refer to a vampire, the context of use—the meaning of the term—is apparent. Where I think there may be some ambiguity, I have tried to clarify the immediate context.
When I write in the prologue about the dual nature of being a folklorist, I am invoking not only an approach to gathering data that is employed by most folklorists, usually termed “participant-observation,” but also the pleasure that many of us find in our work. Play alleviates toil and tedium for every type of worker. I’ve accepted that, for me, it’s impossible to be serious all of the time—even if I wanted to. But it is deeper than that. We folklorists have an enduring regard for the expressive culture we interpret. Many folklorists perform what they study. At any gathering of folklorists, you will hear great fiddle playing and wonderful stories, and if you are so inclined, you can learn a variety of traditional dances. Active engagement is what has drawn some into the profession; it provides an opportunity to understand from the inside by doing. Feeling the clay imparts a quality of knowledge, a wisdom that cannot be matched by watching someone throw a pot and asking questions about the process. I don’t want to paint all folklorists with the same broad brush—we are a diverse group of scholars. Nor do I wish to trivialize what we do, for, as folklorist William Wilson wrote, “Surely no other discipline is more concerned with linking us to the cultural heritage from the past than is folklore.… [A]nd no other discipline is so concerned … with discovering what it is to be human. It is this attempt to discover the basis of our common humanity, the imperatives of our human existence, that puts folklore study at the very center of humanistic study.”2
Through my own two aspects, whom I label Dr. Rational and Mike, I have attempted to give readers a sense of how difficult it can be to maintain the participant-observer dichotomy while engaged in fieldwork. Mike wants to suspend his disbelief and participate wholeheartedly; he wants to experience a “legend trip,” for example, from the insider’s point of view without the encumbrance of a scholarly lens. This eventually proves impossible. In chapters 6 and 7, especially, it is apparent that there are occasions when I cannot stay in the moment. Dr. Rational emerges. Impatient, he interrupts to ask more questions. Give me details! I want names, dates! He is audibly disapproving of what he perceives as silliness. It can be a humbling experience to hear yourself make regrettable mistakes as you play and replay an interview while transcribing. But these are the experiences that teach us how to do better. Listening—truly listening—is an exhausting test of self-control.
I’ve also been asked whether a university professor could really believe in giants, as I wrote in the prologue. Obviously I cannot speak for Wayland Hand, and I was wrong to ascribe beliefs to him. Yes, the classroom incident I describe did happen, and Professor Hand often talked about giants and other figures of folklore as if they actually roamed the earth. It was clear to me and his other students (we discussed this among ourselves) that Wayland Hand had the gift of empathy. He was able to take us with him when he transported himself to a different time and place. If it was merely a pedagogical device, it was utterly convincing and extraordinarily successful. Perhaps it was his way of suspending disbelief. The matter of belief (and disbelief), of course, is present explicitly and implicitly throughout this book.3
What is a folklorist’s process in investigating and interpreting the vampire phenomena I write about in the book?
As I have mentioned, folklorists are a varied group of scholars. Although folklorists share many basic concepts and methodologies, there are a variety of ways to interpret folklore. I want to know what the vampire beliefs, practices, and narratives mean or meant to the people involved. In chapter 3, I raise questions that occupy a significant portion of the book: If those involved did not use the term vampire, then on what grounds can outsiders justifiably use it? How widespread was this practice of “vampirism”? Where did the tradition come from? How did country folk learn about it? Why did it seem to threaten certain groups of people, such as newspaper editors and medical doctors? Taking a broader view, what are its underpinnings in folklore and history? How does it fit into larger systems of healing, belief, worldview, and religion?
The early stages of my investigation require historical research. When I find a narrative that has vampire elements—typically a description of, or reference to, an exhumation for the purpose of halting the spread of consumption—I ask: Did it actually occur? If I’m fortunate, the people in the narrative are named, and I can research genealogies, census records, town histories, historical archives, cemetery databases, and similar sources. If I can establish that these people actually existed, then I can conclude that the events described in the narrative could have occurred. Dates of birth and death are important, but I also want to know the people as individuals: What roles did they play in their communities? How were they linked to others in the community through kinship and social networks? I view folklore as a process of communicating among people interacting in close groups, so these social networks are central to disseminating and validating folk traditions, such as the vampire practice.
Local newspapers help fill in these contexts. I have occasionally found newspaper references to people who appear in a vampire narrative, but not often. When there isn’t much actual information in the narrative, such as names and dates, research is more difficult. Other trails to follow are available if the author of the narrative is named. He or she may have left notes, correspondence, or other similar materials that are accessible and might offer something concrete I can pursue. Talking to local people, including historians, genealogists, archivists, town clerks, and librarians, is an invaluable way to locate resources that establish the historical, social, and cultural contexts of the event. I make a point of asking about any relevant oral tradition. And on the rare occasions when I locate descendants of the people involved in a vampire narrative, I interview them to learn what might have been passed down orally or in writing or print. Locating the cemetery where the exhumation occurred and finding the gravestone of the person exhumed adds tangible testimony to the narrative. Gravestones sometimes lend insights not provided elsewhere. Besides places, dates, and names of parents or children, inscriptions may suggest how the deceased were regarded by those they left behind, as well as indicating their connections to the wider world. There are larger contexts to consider, too. In chapter 12, for example, I discuss New England communities that were beyond the Puritan influence, were more open to a magical worldview, and experimented with alternative approaches to organizing and comprehending their world. I also discuss the tension between “civilization” (or official culture) and “superstition” (or folk culture), which increased over the course of the nineteenth century.
My folkloristic interpretation begins with a cross-cultural, comparative analysis of the elements in the narratives. This kind of scholarship is mainly library- and archive-based. There are many published sources available for tracing the historic and geographic distribution of relevant folk beliefs—including the nature of disease, relations between the living and the dead, and the significance of blood—and folk practices, such as cutting out the heart and other organs, burning the organs or the entire corpse, ingesting the ashes, and decapitating the corpse. Locating such elements in their temporal and spatial distribution provides a sort of map that guides me in determining where vampire exhumation rituals were practiced, when they first appear in the record, and how long they persisted. These kinds of data, combined with information about social networks and other contexts, help me understand and interpret such issues as the dissemination and validation of the vampire practice and its associated narratives—to draw conclusions about the where, when, how, and why of these traditions.
In cases where a vampire narrative becomes part of local oral tradition, I investigate the legend process. I collect versions of the story through interviews as well as from print sources, especially newspaper articles (which appear particularly around Halloween, of course). Where possible, I look at the legend’s variants so that I can interpret how and why it changes over time and from one group or place to another. If the cemetery or, even better, grave of the suspected vampire is known, the legend frequently functions as an occasion for people (especially teens) to take “legend trips” (that is, visit the cemeteries, particularly at night).4 In chapters 5 and 6, I show how the case of Nellie Vaughn exemplifies how legends are formed and change as they become incorporated into the folklife of local communities. I use a combination of interview and research in chapter 7 to sharpen the contrasts between history and legend, and to suggest that the interaction among tradition, community, and personality is a key element in interpreting variation in the vampire narratives.
In chapter 7, I also discuss how folk vampires were transformed into literary vampires during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and how, through feedback loops, these literary vampires and their mass-media descendants now color our perceptions of the authentic vampires of our past. I explore literary uses of folk vampires in more depth in chapter 9, focusing on works by H. P. Lovecraft and Amy Lowell, which are based explicitly on New England’s vampire tradition, and Edgar Allan Poe, whose tales follow the more heavily trodden literary path of European vampire lore.
I devote chapter 13 to discussing how the vampire tradition has been interpreted in popular or mass media, where the Dracula stereotype is unrelenting. Time has dimmed the tragic elements of intractable illness and almost certain death. Vampire narratives now unfold in a framework of entertaining contacts with the supernatural realm. This trivializing contextualization is not limited to the popular media. A recent newsletter of an international tuberculosis organization included a well-written and accurate summary of New England’s vampire ritual and the Mercy Brown exhumation. The article, “Bacteria with Fangs,” appeared under the heading, “On the Lighter Side.”5 When I receive interview requests for media productions focused on vampires, I now suggest to producers that they read chapter 13 of this book. If they are still interested in talking to me after reading this chapter, then we can have a discussion.
Several overlapping scholarly contexts appear in Food for the Dead, notably in the disciplines of history and American studies (medicine and healing; belief systems in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century New England; oral history), anthropology (miraculous or “magical” experience; healing traditions; death and the dead; oral tradition), literature (the use of folk traditions by authors), and popular culture studies (modern legends; legend tripping; and folklore as a source for popular culture). Food for the Dead has been used as a textbook or as recommended reading in high school and college classes, mainly in departments of English, history, and anthropology. (Two of those courses I would love to sit in on are a history course at a British university entitled “Death and the Undead in Britain and Ireland, 1450–1750” and a microbiology and immunology seminar entitled “Infectious Disease: Fact and Fiction.”) The case of JB, which I discuss in chapter 8, illustrates how an interdisciplinary approach can solve even the most enigmatic of puzzles. Folklore studies, archaeology, forensic anthropology, and history come together to interpret what, at first glance, seems to be the bizarre exhumation and reburial of a middle-aged man in early nineteenth-century Connecticut.
I close the book by discussing what William Wilson termed “the basis of our common humanity, the imperatives of our human existence.” The vampire incidents of New England demonstrate that disease and death transcend time and place and that, despite the great accumulation of scientific knowledge since the nineteenth century, we still have our own “vampires”—our own mystifying, fatal diseases—to confront and defeat.
Now, let’s return to the vampire trail. The greatly enhanced research capabilities made possible by digitization and the Internet have allowed me to revisit some old trails that, ten years ago, were either dead ends or false traces. For example, in the 1990s, when I began researching Annie Dennett’s exhumation, I had no idea that I would still be following this trail more than a decade later. I first encountered the Dennett family through the diary of Reverend Enoch Hayes Place, a then-roving Freewill Baptist minister who visited Barnstead, New Hampshire, in 1810 (see chapter 12). After visiting Brother Dennett, ill with consumption, Reverend Place was asked by some of the townsmen to accompany them to the exhumation of Dennett’s daughter, who had died of consumption at age twenty-one, “more than two years earlier.” To see that Reverend Place’s description of the exhumation included the actual names of the people involved was gratifying. I thought this trail might not end prematurely as so many others had. But, alas, at that time, the available records were too meager to bring this family and community back to life.
Now, however, more accessible data have helped me to see beyond just the places, names, and dates of these exhumations. The details that emerge from these enriched resources allow me to put flesh on the bare bones of family trees and census entries. Understanding their upbringing, the obstacles they confronted as they moved into territory that they perceived to be an unknown and dangerous wilderness, and the families and social networks they created in building new communities makes their confrontations with the unstoppable consumption all the more heartbreaking. I now know that the young woman’s name was Annie Dennett, not “Janey Dennit,” as Reverend Place wrote. Her father, Moses Dennett, was born in 1758. Moses’s great-great-grandfather came to Portsmouth, New Hampshire, from England with his brother between 1660 and 1670. His great-grandfather was a blacksmith in Portsmouth for many years, accumulating considerable property for those days. At one time it was said that he was the richest man in Portsmouth.
Moses, a tailor by trade, moved to Barnstead from Portsmouth about 1769. His log house was deep in the woods on high ground facing northwest and stood on the spot still occupied by his descendants as late as 1908. For years after moving to Barnstead, Moses brought all of his provisions on horseback from Dover, a distance of about thirty miles, following a trail blazed through the forest. It was recorded that he usually left a small boy with his wife. One time the boy grew tired of the isolation and ran away to Dover, leaving Mrs. Dennett alone in her cabin for several days and nights, “to be entertained by the howling wolves and the bleak storms of winter.” The historical record indicates that Moses kept an excellent farm and served in Colonel Dike’s regiment for a short time in 1777, during the Revolution.
Moses and his wife, Betsey Nutter, had eight children. Their first was Polly, born in 1782, who lived for eighty years. Hannah, born two years later, lived to the age of seventy-five. The third daughter, Annie, was born in 1786 and died on March 27, 1807, three and a half years before her exhumation, described by Reverend Place. The fourth child and first son, Charles, was born in 1788 and lived at least long enough to be married. Then came Oliver, the fifth child and second son, born in 1790. He was brought up on his father’s farm, and also assisted him in his work as a tailor. He attended the district school and fought in the War of 1812. Oliver was said to be very popular among his townsmen, was for many years justice of the peace, and also served as a selectman. He died in his hometown on July 11, 1865. Olive, the sixth child, was born in 1793, married in 1812, and died at age eighty-six. The seventh child and third son, Mark, was born in 1795 and died at the relatively young age, for this family, of forty-seven. The last child, Elizabeth, outlived her first husband and married a second time. Sadly, their father, fifty-two-year-old Moses, died on December 28, 1810, not even three months after Reverend Place visited with him, prior to his daughter’s exhumation. I can imagine the anguished faces of those who, having fought in wars and endured “howling wolves and the bleak storms of winter,” while creating a society from scratch, stood helpless in the face of a relentless and mysterious killer. It must have been “a melancholy sight,” indeed, as Reverend Place described Annie’s exhumation. Like the Dennett family, many members of the families directly involved in vampire exhumations were prominent in their communities: successful bankers, lawyers, politicians, farmers, skilled tradesmen, and even physicians and clergymen.6
Two vampire incidents, first recorded by Moncure Daniel Conway in Demonology and Devil-Lore (1879), and both occurring just a few years before its publication, have been especially vexing for me. One was so lacking in the details needed for in-depth research that I was unable to write anything at all about it in the first edition of Food for the Dead. The other case, while supplying an apparently sufficient amount of information, never led me to a satisfying conclusion. I hope you are as pleased to read as I am to write that these shortcomings have now been addressed.
Conway wrote: “In 1874, according to the Providence Journal, in the village of Peacedale, Rhode Island, U.S., Mr. William Rose dug up the body of his own daughter, and burned her heart, under the belief that she was wasting away the lives of other members of his family.”7 In chapter 4, I describe the details of my frustrating search for the newspaper article referenced by Conway, and for the burial place of William Rose’s “vampire” daughter. I found neither because, as I learned from a genealogist and local historian employed at a university research library, Conway’s date and newspaper ascriptions were incorrect. Having access to extensive, digitized databases with powerful search capabilities, Bill Page, the librarian, was able to locate, in a matter of minutes, the article that I had spent countless numbing hours searching for on reels of foggy microfilm. Here, at last, was the newspaper account that I could never find because it first appeared in the Providence Herald—not in the Providence Journal—on September 5, 1872 (and not 1874, as reported by Conway):
The village of Peacedale was thrown into excitement on Thursday last, by the report that two graves had been dug up near Watson’s Corner, on the shore of the Saugatucket River. The circumstances are as follows: The family of Mr. William Rose, who reside at Saunderstown, near the South Ferry, are subject to the consumption, several members of the family having died of the disease, and one member of the family is now quite low with it. At the urgent request of the sick man, the father, assisted by Charles Harrington of North Kingston, repaired to the family burying-ground, which is located near Watson’s Corner, one mile north of Peacedale, and after building a fire, first dug up the grave of his son, who had been buried twelve years, for the purpose of taking out his heart and liver, which were to be placed in the fire and consumed, in order to carry out the old superstition that the consumptive dead draw nourishment from the living. But as the body was entirely reduced to ashes, except a few bones, it was shortly covered up, and the body of a daughter who had been dead seven years, was taken up out of the grave beside her brother. This body was found to be nearly wasted away, except the vital parts, the liver and heart, which were in a perfect state of preservation. The coffin also was nearly perfect, while the son’s coffin was nearly demolished. After the liver and heart had been taken out of the body, it was placed in the fire and consumed, the ashes only being put back in the grave. The fire was then put out, and the two men departed to their respective homes. Only a few spectators were there to witness the horrible scene. It seems that this is not the first time that graves have been dug up where consumption was prevalent in the family, and the vital parts burned, in order to save the living. A few years ago the same was done in the village of Mooresfield, and also in the town of North Kingstown, both of course without success.
The first thing we notice is that the article follows a familiar pattern by alluding to other exhumations without giving enough detail for any realistic follow-up. Still, these vague references, taken together, perform a useful function by suggesting that such exhumations were not as unusual as we might be inclined to believe.
Several potential leads in the Providence Herald newspaper article popped out at me. Having a relatively specific location for the cemetery (“near Watson’s Corner on the shore of the Saugatucket River”) gave me hope that I might actually find the cemetery this time. I also had a fairly restricted range of death years for the two children whose bodies were exhumed. The son, who had been buried for twelve years, must have died about 1860, and the daughter, dead seven years, died about 1865. I hoped that they would be in the same cemetery as their father, William Rose, who lived at least until September 1872. And I had a good idea where the family was residing—at Saunderstown near South Ferry, which is in southeastern North Kingstown near the South Kingstown line. Finally, I thought I might be able to track down Rose’s assistant, Charles Harrington. All in all, I was feeling very optimistic about the prospects for finally identifying the Rose family vampire and, perhaps, the cemetery, too.
Not long after I began tracking down William Rose and his family, I was contacted by a writer requesting an interview for a feature story for a local periodical. The interview morphed into more of an internship, as the reporter, Marybeth Reilly-McGreen, asked to assist me with my research. So, during the summer of 2008, Marybeth got her feet wet as a fledgling folklorist, and I was able take advantage of her research skills, not to mention her enthusiasm. The fact that she lived in South County, where the village of Peace Dale and the towns of North Kingstown and South Kingstown are located, was an additional asset, allowing her to conveniently do research in the local libraries, archives and town halls. Our email exchanges chronicle the mounting excitement we felt as we attempted to untangle the Rose family saga. The high point came as our research paths intersected.
“North Kingstown Library didn’t yield anything on the William Rose you’re looking for,” Marybeth wrote on June 4, 2008, “though I did find a William R. Rose of North Kingstown … who tried to sell his 12-year-old daughter … for the price of $100, according to the Rose Genealogy. If only he were your guy! What a story.”
“That William R. Rose could be the one,” I replied. I asked her to take a look at the genealogical notes I had made on the short list of William Roses who might match our criteria.
Marybeth sent me excerpts from the Rose Genealogy she had referenced, copied from a collection of papers, bound in a folder on file at the Peace Dale Library, entitled Rose Genealogy: 15 Generations in America 16__ to 1978. I had found the Rose Genealogy newsletters years before, when I was first conducting research for this book. Of course, I was focused on another Rose family, the one that seemed to match most closely the incident that was mistakenly assigned the year of 1874.
In the 1850 census, William R. Rose, age twenty-five, and Phebe A. Rose, age twenty, had a three-year-old son, John, in their household. In the 1860 census, the Roses had four children in the household: John R. Rose, age fifteen; Benjamin Carr Rose, age nine; Phebe A. Rose, age seven; and Maria Rose, age four. The vital records of Rhode Island show that William and Phebe were married in North Kingstown by Reverend Edwin Stillman on November 22, 1843. The Rhode Island Atlas for 1870 states that “W. R. Rose lives in the southern part of Saunderstown, North Kingstown near Watson’s and the South Ferry”—both in South Kingstown, South Ferry District, just where the newspaper article located his residence. The 1870 census shows that, in addition to William, who was listed as a stonemason, and Phebe, the household included their three-year-old son, Thomas, and Phebe’s seventy-five-year-old mother, Patience Carr. The Rhode Island Cemetery Database shows that Benjamin C. Rose, born 1851, died in 1926 and was buried in North Kingstown’s large Elm Grove Cemetery, where many of this branch of the Rose family are interred. At this point, Marybeth and I were able to eliminate both Benjamin (who lived too long) and Thomas (who was born too late) as the son who died about 1860 and was exhumed in 1872.
The Rose Genealogy contained a letter written in 1953 by Deda Belle Macdonald, the daughter of Phebe Rose Caswell and granddaughter of William and Phebe Rose. The following tantalizing piece of family history eliminates Phebe as the supposed vampire:
Phebe’s parents were no doubt poor, as people with large families were in those days. Phebe was a well developed and pretty miss at the tender age of twelve. About this time, 1865, the family lived in Saunderstown, R.I. Nearby, a James Gardiner, aged about 73, who was obviously much older than Phebe, needed a wife, as he had a large home to care for. It was an old time country house, with a huge chimney and cupboards etc. all around it. However, this man offered to pay the father, William Rose, $100 if Rose could get Phebe to marry him. Rose took the money and the daughter went to marry the old man, of whom she was afraid, and sent under protest. When it was time for the marriage to take place, Phebe could not be found. Of course the old man was “put out” and wanted the money back. Rose reluctantly returned the money. Phebe had hidden in the back of the old chimney. Was this white slavery? Later, under cover of darkness, she returned to her folks and lived a normal life.
The letter went on to describe Phebe’s subsequent marriage, at age fifteen, to James Caswell, a seafaring man, and the birth of their five children, including Deda Belle, the correspondent. The editor of the Rose Genealogy newsletter added the following cryptic comment: “There were some unpleasant notes about William Rose, but there seems no point in noting them here.” Maybe not, but I wish she had. I can’t help but wonder if the “unpleasant notes” concerned Rose’s exhumation of a son and daughter.
Deda’s letter, combined with the genealogical research I had been doing, convinced me that John and Maria were the likely candidates for William’s exhumed son and daughter. As for Charles Harrington, Rose’s “Igor” if you must, two candidates emerged from my research. One was born in 1831 and was living in Exeter at the time of the 1880 census. The other Charles Harrington, born in 1839, is buried in the Seth Harrington plot in South Kingstown. His residence in South Kingstown puts him in closer proximity to William Rose, and we have a possible occupational link between William Rose, a stonemason, and the Harrington family, as both Charles’s father and one of his brothers were stonemasons.
Marybeth and I visited local cemeteries that we thought might hold the Rose graves we were looking for. Since there are more than 3,000 documented cemeteries in Rhode Island, and early settlers often buried their kin on their own property, we had our work cut out for us. Trying to match the newspaper’s description of the cemetery with those listed in Rhode Island’s Cemetery Database was tedious and time-consuming. We came up with a short list of three cemeteries in the area of Mooresfield Road in South Kingstown, one of which, the Ebenezer Adams Lot, was on private property and could be accessed only with the owner’s permission. Naturally, this was the cemetery that held the most promise. In 1880, James N. Arnold had recorded that this lot contained the remains of seventeen members of the Rose and Adams families, but only seven of the stones were inscribed. None of the Rose stones, of course, were among the latter.
On a sunny day in June 2008, Marybeth and I arrived at the Adams Lot on the basis of an understanding with the owner that we would not reveal its exact location to the public. In recent years, vandalism has been all too prevalent in cemeteries, especially those that are purported to contain a vampire. Like so many of the state’s small burial plots, this one is undistinguished. As I gazed at the very well-constructed stone wall surrounding the cemetery, my eyes were drawn to the four gravestones within that were still upright and legible. Unfortunately, none bore the Rose name. I said to Marybeth, “Uninscribed headstones are the bane of my existence. They are the worst kind of dead end.” So, was the Rose cemetery doomed to be forever lost? A ray of hope shone through our gloom as further research showed that Ebenezer Adams was the grandfather of William R. Rose. Certainly, it would not have been unusual for William Rose and two of his children, John and Maria, to have been interred in his grandfather’s family plot. But for now, we have to be satisfied with the thought that we may have found the right cemetery.
Conway’s description of the other case reported in his 1879 book is lean, indeed: “Dr. Dyer, an eminent physician of Chicago, Illinois, told me (1875) that a case occurred in that city within his personal knowledge, where the body of a woman who had died of consumption was taken out of the grave and the lungs burned, under a belief that she was drawing after her into the grave some of her surviving relatives.”8 When I first encountered Conway’s book, I had no knowledge of the author’s own life or work. I was just excited to have followed the trail of two American vampire incidents back, if not to the source, then at least to a site close enough for the tracks to be still visible. But it finally dawned on me that my best hope for following Conway’s faint trail to Dr. Dyer lay in finding out how the paths of these two men might have intersected. At first glance, the story of Moncure Daniel Conway (1832–1907) seems paradoxical: born into an old and respected slave-holding Virginia family, he became an ardent voice for abolition; ordained a Methodist minister, he moved to Unitarianism, then through Emersonian Transcendentalism toward secular “freethought.” The apparent paradoxes disappear as one follows Conway’s consistent philosophical trajectory. As he elegantly expressed it: “In my ministry Theology was naturally replaced by Anthropology.”9
Tracking down Conway’s fleeting reference to Dr. Dyer led me to Charles Volney Dyer (1808–1878). He doubtless was well positioned to know something about vampires, having been born in 1808 in Vermont, a state that had quite a few vampire exhumations at the time. At age fifteen, Dyer attended the Castleton Academy, then Middlebury College, where he studied medicine and graduated in 1830 with honors. Dr. Joseph A. Gallup was president of the Castleton Medical Academy from the time of its inception in 1818 until 1825, a fact that would seem irrelevant unless one knew that one account of the vampire incident in Woodstock, Vermont, in 1830, named Gallup as one of the attending physicians in the case. He and other physicians in attendance “all advised the disinterment … all being clearly of the opinion that this was a case of assured vampirism” (see chapter 12). Dyer himself probably had firsthand experience with exhumations while a medical student. In those days, human cadavers used by medical students who were studying anatomy were hard to come by, and, therefore, the practice of grave robbing was not uncommon. An incident dubbed the “Churchill riots” found student spokesman Dyer confronting an angry mob who were demanding the return of the corpse of a recently interred young woman that had been stolen from the nearby town of Churchill and traced to students at the medical academy True to what was said to be his lifelong quirky sense of humor, Dyer later referred to the incident as a “grave matter.”10
After a brief stint practicing medicine in New Jersey, Dyer arrived in the growing frontier town of Chicago in 1835 and quickly became, as Conway characterized him, “an eminent physician.” Conway’s one-sentence description of the Chicago exhumation strongly implies that his encounter with Dyer in 1875 was a face-to-face meeting. I questioned how that could be possible, given that my research into Conway’s life showed that the staunch abolitionist had emigrated to London at the outbreak of the Civil War. Delving further into his biography, however, I found that he had returned to the United States for a lecture tour in 1875. In his autobiography, Conway writes, “In November [1875], when I was lecturing in Chicago, I was entertained at the house of Mr. and Mrs. Lewis.”11 A newspaper account from Texas describes Conway’s Chicago success: as he gave his “Demons and Devils” lecture to a packed opera house, “a sweet smile of satisfaction went rippling over a Chicago audience, and their eyes became suffused with tears of gratitude when Conway told them there wasn’t any such person as the Devil. The burden of life had been lifted from their souls.”12
So, we have both Conway and Dyer in Chicago in 1875. Now the question is, how or why would they have encountered one another? Perhaps the answer lies in the dedicated abolitionism of both men. I wondered if the Lewises also were abolitionists and served as the link between Conway and Dyer. Alas, I could not track down the Lewis couple.
Dyer was already an active abolitionist when Conway was an infant. It was an anti-establishment stance completely in character with his pedigree, as Dyer was a descendent of William and Mary Dyer. In 1638, when Anne Hutchinson was “cast out” of the Puritan church in Massachusetts, Mary Dyer stood up before the entire congregation and walked out with her. Both women found refuge in Rhode Island. While Mary’s husband remained in Rhode Island, Mary herself returned for a lengthy stay in England, her birthplace, where she converted to Quakerism. Unfortunately, she returned to Boston amidst a strong anti-Quaker persecution and was imprisoned. She was sentenced to the gallows three times but reprieved only twice.13 On his mother’s side, Dyer was related to Theophilus Harrington, a judge of the Supreme Court of Vermont from 1803 to 1810 who became legendary for his refusal to allow a fugitive slave to be returned to his New York owner. The attorney for the slave owner had presented what he believed was more than enough evidence to prove that the slave did, indeed, belong to the New Yorker. When Judge Harrington refused for a third time to grant title to the slave, even in the face of irrefutable bills of sale, the exasperated attorney asked just what he needed to resolve the case in his client’s favor. The judge replied, “I require a bill of sale from the Almighty!”14
I was not surprised to learn that Dyer was a founder of the Anti-Slavery Society of Illinois and an active “conductor” on the Underground Railroad. The murder of Elijah Lovejoy, the young editor of the abolitionist newspaper, St. Louis Observer, was a strong motivation for Dyer and the Anti-Slavery Society to begin a new political party and to start their own newspaper. One of Lovejoy’s fiery editorials eerily compared slavery to a vampire: “In every community where it exists, it presses like a night-mare on the body politic. Or, like the vampire, it slowly and imperceptibly sucks away the life-blood of society, leaving it faint and disheartened to stagger along the road to improvement.”15
Lovejoy’s use of biblical imagery in another editorial evokes the same supernatural terrorism represented by slavery: “At present, Slavery, like an incubus, is paralyzing our energies, and like a cloud of evil portent, darkening all our prospects.”16 Such analogies may have been common in the rhetoric of abolitionists, for Conway makes a similar case against the killer consumption when writing about the death of a young author: “but for the ghoul consumption he might have proved heir to the sceptre of [Thomas] Carlyle.”17
The gravestone of Simon Whipple Aldrich, who died in 1841 at the age of twenty-seven in North Smithfield, Rhode Island, contains a rather dramatic instance of the vampire metaphor. In the spring of 2002, following a lead provided by a local historian, a friend and I visited the unkempt older portion on the fringes of a well-maintained cemetery in northern Rhode Island. The historian had advised us that there was an old, broken tombstone with an epitaph that linked consumption and vampires. I had found no evidence that the label vampire was ever used by people in New England to refer to the exhumed bodies of their dead kin. So, I was naturally a bit skeptical. Poking around this jumbled plot of tumbled-down gravestones in numerous small family lots scattered in the woods seemed like a real shot in the dark. I’m still not sure how we did it, but Cyril and I finally found the stone. The inscription on the finely engraved slate reads as follows:
In Memory
of
Simon Whipple,
youngest son of
Col. Dexter Aldrich
& Margery his wife,
who died May 6,
1841,
aged 27 years.
Altho’ consumption’s vampire grasp
Had seized thy mortal frame,
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ing mind
The rest of the inscription (probably consisting of two more lines) was not visible. The stone was anchored in cement, undoubtedly because people had tried to remove it—which also may explain why the top of the stone was broken, as the historian had advised. Unfortunately, the cement covered the last lines. Is this reference to “consumption’s vampire grasp” merely metaphorical or symbolic, or does it suggest that Simon or his older sister who had predeceased him was exhumed in a desperate attempt to save his younger sister, who died three years after Simon? I couldn’t help but note the uncanny fact that all three had died at the age of twenty-seven.
The detective work of a fellow scholar and vampire researcher has led to the identification of the complete inscription, which was taken from a lengthy poem composed by Eliza Earle commemorating the death, in 1838, of Joseph Horace Kimball, a young, but celebrated, abolitionist. The unreadable lines etched on the gravestone can now be added with some confidence:
Altho’ Consumption’s vampire grasp
Had seized thy mortal frame,
Thy ardent and inspiring mind,
Untouched, remained the same.
The Aldrich family obviously was plagued by consumption, the metaphorical vampire. While doing some genealogical research on the family which was well known and successful in their community and beyond, I identified the following questions, in particular, for further exploration: Was this use of “consumption’s vampire grasp” only metaphorical, or were corpses actually exhumed? Was Simon, himself, or, indeed, the entire Aldrich family, strongly abolitionist? This trail continues.
Bill the research librarian continued to amaze me. He wrote that my book had prompted him to use his access to numerous databases of primary sources to look for other vampire incidents. “I have done a bit of researching in those sources,” he continued, “and there appears to be material you had not seen when you wrote your book.” What an understatement! Over the next several days, he sent references to a dozen new cases, as well as updates for several old ones. I was astonished—and grateful, of course.
One of the first new accounts that Bill sent was from a Hartford, Connecticut, newspaper of June 22, 1784:
WHEREAS of late years there has been advanced for a certainty, by a certain Quack Doctor, a foreigner, that a certain cure may be had for a consumption, where any of the same family had before that time died of the same disease: directing to have the bodies of such as had died to be dug up, and further said that out of the breast or vitals might be found a sprout or vine fresh and growing, which, together with the remains of the vitals, being consumed in the fire, would be an effectual cure to the same family:—and such direction so far gained credit, that in one instance, the experiment was thoroughly made in Willington, on the first day of June instant: two bodies were dug up which belonged to the family of Mr. Isaac Johnson of that place, they both died with the consumption, one had been buried one year and eleven months, the other one year, a third of the same family then sick—on full examination of the then small remains, by two Doctors then present, viz. Doctors Grant and West, not the least discovery could be made; and to prevent misrepresentation of the facts, I being an eye witness, that under the coffin was sundry small sprouts about one inch in length, then fresh, but most likely was the produce of sorrel seeds which fell under the coffin when put in the earth. And that the bodies of the dead may rest quiet in their graves without such interruption, I think the public ought to be aware of being led away by such an imposture
—Moses Holmes
One of the intriguing elements I noted in this letter is the search for vines growing in the coffin, a motif also found in two incidents in New Hampshire (see chapter 12)—including that of Annie Dennett, discussed above—one in Dummerston, Vermont (see chapter 10), and one from upstate New York, which I discovered after this book was first published. These incidents beg for further scrutiny to determine whether there are any factors that link these communities.
I hadn’t gotten too far with the Willington case when, in March 2008, the perfect opportunity for a field investigation presented itself. A New York—based television producer contacted me about a History Channel show called MonsterQuest. “I’m looking for real-life cases/investigations (unsolved or otherwise) in which a crime aroused suspicions of vampire-involvement that was substantiated (to some degree) by actual physical evidence,” he wrote. “Historical or recent cases will work (domestic or abroad) as long as some physical evidence (even the tiniest bit) exists to back the claims made.” So it was that the Connecticut state archaeologist, Nick Bellantoni, and I were to be reunited in front of the cameras (see chapter 8 for an account of our first joint venture and chapter 13 for our subsequent encounters with the mass media).
After a couple of months, the production team had worked up an itinerary and scheduled locations. Over the course of three days in mid-May and a follow-up day in June, we were to shoot on location at Willington, Connecticut—in the town hall, library, and old cemetery—and also in Rhode Island at the graves of Mercy Brown in Exeter (see chapters 1 and 2) and Simon Whipple Aldrich in North Smithfield.
Our search in Willington’s old cemetery for unmarked graves that could be those of Isaac Johnson’s family, using electromagnetic imaging, was less successful than our research at the town hall. Although I still haven’t located the graves of the Johnson family, I was able to document the family’s actual existence. According to town records, Isaac Johnson married Elizabeth Beal on July 15, 1756. They had eight children, and two of them match the details provided in Moses Holmes’s letter: Amos died on July 15, 1782 (at the age of twenty-one years and nine months), one year and eleven months before the exhumations; Elizabeth died on May 18, 1783 (at the age of eighteen years and eleven months), one year prior to the exhumations. According to the 1790 census, the Isaac Johnson household included two free white males aged sixteen and older, two white females, and seventeen “all other free persons.” Besides his immediate family, then, Isaac had seventeen other people in the household. No one else in the Willington census had even one such. I’m still wondering who they were and what they were doing there.
Buried in the historical records of Willington is an exclamatory footnote to the case of Isaac Johnson. The following incident was said to have occurred on December 23, 1799: “In the raising of heavy timbers of the new church, Mr. Johnson was killed outright and blood was on the underpinning for a third of a century. Deacon Holt was broken down to the space of three inches in his middle, so he said, and never enjoyed good health again, though he lived to ‘a good old age.’ ” Johnson’s blood being visible for a generation incorporates the motif known to folklorists as “the ineradicable bloodstain after bloody tragedy.” I have to wonder if this “bloody tragedy” was seen as divine retribution for what some in the community might have viewed as Johnson’s sacrilegious act fifteen years earlier. That it happened in the church would have made it seem, well, divinely appropriate.
In chapter 11, I question whether the vampire practice arrived in America from a single source or, alternatively, if it made its way multiple times, from several different cultural groups, and in several variations. The foreign quack doctor mentioned by Moses Holmes, combined with some other new evidence, favors the latter conclusion. These wandering practitioners functioned like honeybees in an orchard, cross-pollinating various medical traditions, not overwhelming the local folklore but keeping it open to outside remedies. I recently found some additional support for this conclusion in Frederic Denison’s Westerly and Its Witnesses (1878), a history of the town that occupies the southwestern corner of Rhode Island. In a chapter entitled “Swindles and Swindlers,” Denison explains: “Under this head we may appropriately mention the experiences and losses of the town from the arts of certain vagrant deceivers…. A remembrance of their operations should be a warning to the people against kindred pretenders in the future.” Denison’s caution echoes that of Moses Holmes. The vampire remedy for consumption may have arrived in the region—or America, for that matter—via the quacks, and perhaps had circulated with their help, but there’s no question that it was embraced by some members of the community and became an element in the local folklore.
The impetus for me to check Westerly and Its Witnesses came, yet once again, from a phone call of the sort that I relish above all others. In January 2009, a history graduate student at a local college asked if I knew about the exhumation of a black man named Bristoe Congdon. “No! Really?” I practically shouted through the phone. Robert said he had found the following reference under the heading of “Cremation” in Denison’s book:
Among the delusions and superstitions that, at different times, have tarnished the medical profession, one has strongly lingered, among the ignorant, even to the present generation. It consists in the whim that in some mysterious way the dead, or the diseases of the dead, may feed upon the living, coupled with the idea that diseases have their seat in the vitals of the body. Hence the bodies of persons, dying of a dreaded disease, have been opened, and the heart, lungs, liver, and other parts have been burned as a means of protection to the living.
The black man, Bristoe Congdon, and three of his children, died with the consumption. The body of one of the children was exhumed, and the vital parts were burned in obedience to the dicta of this shallow and disgusting superstition. Similar cases have occurred in more enlightened families.18
This was intriguing. Not just a new case, but the first in a family of color. Unfortunately, as Denison makes plain in his preface, the prospects for finding any further documentation of this exhumation seemed dim: “Obliged in some cases to depend upon the memories of the aged … it is highly probable that small errors of date and minute incidents have occurred in the statements.” And a paragraph later, the deal-breaker: “Instead of employing footnotes of reference, we have chosen to mention our principal authorities in the text of the work.” Since Denison mentions no “principal authorities” in his description of the Congdon exhumation, this coffin appeared to be nailed shut.
I made a cursory attempt to locate a Bristoe Congdon in the various genealogical databases, then saved the incident in the growing folder labeled New Cases. The dead ends seemed to be keeping pace with the new cases, a situation I’ve become accustomed to over the many years that I’ve been tracking these vampire incidents. Like a crime scene investigation, after a century or two, the evidence is more than merely cold, it is absolutely frigid. There are no literal fingerprints, no traces of DNA to point toward a solution. However, Robert Grandchamp, the history student, pulled me back, like a private eye, onto the Congdon case:
Several months back I called you about a “vampire” case in Westerly involving an African-American man and his children. I am writing to inquire if you found any additional material on the incident.… Unfortunately in this Westerly case, Denison does not give a specific date, and there is no mention of it in the Narragansett Weekly or Denison’s own papers at the Westerly Library.
Thanks for reminding me of Denison’s lack of useful contextual information, I thought, as I responded to Robert’s question:
Unfortunately, the reference in Denison is still a dead end. While he does provide a name, he does not offer a citation or give any clues regarding his source for the incident. The cemetery cited is characterized as “lost” in the Sterling index. I looked at some old maps and it seems possible that one might find the cemetery’s location. I haven’t tried that yet. Bristoe Congdon, while described as a “black man,” may have been a Native American. I think I did search for him without success. I didn’t leave a paper trail for that attempt (shame on me!)—so I might try again. If I find anything, I will let you know.
I did have to applaud Denison for his precise description of the cemetery. Even back in 1878, the place that he labeled “Indian Ground (9)” was in a sad state:
This lies on the cross road from the post-road to Dorrville, about one hundred rods west of the road, on the Wells farm, about southwest from the residence of Libbeus Sisson, Esq., in a meadow, and is uninclosed. The graves are few and unlettered. It is reported to contain the bodies of Indians. It also contains the remains of blacks. Here are the remains of Bristoe Congdon and his children.
I searched for this cemetery and for Bristoe Congdon in the Rhode Island Historical Cemeteries Transcription Project’s database (the Sterling Index, so called after John Sterling, who, beginning in 1990, mustered thousands of volunteers to transcribe and index the gravestones in Rhode Island’s more than three thousand known cemeteries). While the listing of identified Congdon graves runs to twelve pages, single-spaced, only a handful are buried in Westerly cemeteries. The entry for Bristoe Congdon has no dates of birth or death. The cemetery, designated as Westerly 511 in the database, is labeled, in the fashion of Denison, as “Indian Ground (9)” and is characterized as “lost.” Bristoe Congdon is the only person known by name to be buried in this cemetery.
I returned to the genealogy databases with a determination to be more patient, and it paid off. I had to plow through hundreds of records before I found a Bristow Congdon, residing in Westerly, listed in the 1840 Federal Census. The transcription has a parenthetical “Brister” after Bristow. Regretfully, in the 1840 census only the head of the household is named; all others are identified by race, gender, and a rather inclusive age range. There were seven “free colored persons” in the household, including one male aged ten to twenty-three, one male aged thirty-six to fifty-four (presumably Bristow), three females below the age of three, one female aged ten to twenty-three, and one female aged thirty-six to fifty-four (whom I guessed was Bristow’s wife).Two people in the household were employed in agriculture, probably Bristow and, perhaps, his wife or son. The census choices for racial identity are “free white persons,” “free colored persons,” and “slaves”—which is one reason I speculated that Bristow could have been either Native American or African American or, just as likely, some of each.
Taking the parenthetical “Brister” as a cue, I searched for Brister Congdon. It was hard for me to believe my eyes when he popped up in the 1820 Federal Census. There were five “free colored persons” in the household, including one male aged fourteen to twenty-five, one male twenty-six to forty-four (probably Brister), two females below the age of fourteen, and one female aged fourteen to twenty-five (his wife?). Combining the information from the 1820 and 1840 censuses, and doing the math (always a tricky proposition for me), yielded a date of birth for Bristoe between 1786 and 1794 and, for his presumed wife, between 1795 and 1804. At this point, I know that Bristoe Congdon was a real person, with a real family interred in a now “lost” cemetery in Westerly, Rhode Island. But I want to know so much more.
The process of unraveling the threads of these incidents is like a traditional story circle, where members of a community gather to share stories that many have heard before. No one person knows the entire story: this person contributes a bit here; that person adds a piece there. Sometimes people argue. Each gathering is unique, and no story is ever complete. Narrative is emergent during this collective process. As I listen to the assembled voices, I can almost convince myself that I am hearing “the story” in its entirety. But next month, next year, next decade, other voices will speak, and the story will continue to be shaped and reshaped. In the vampire narratives, I see a rich array of meanings, from the families who exhumed their relatives in desperation, and those who watched and disapproved, to current generations who might look back in disbelief, but who keep the narratives alive because they occupy that gray area between belief and disbelief. These stories are compelling because they push the edges of natural boundaries and continue to challenge the limits of our understanding.
Michael E. Bell
Pawtuxet Village
March 3, 2011
NOTES
1. For a discussion of this practice in relation to concepts of death, see Michael E. Bell, “Vampires and Death in New England, 1784 to 1892,” in “Becoming Dead: The Entangled Agencies of the Dearly Departed,” ed. Bilinda S. Straight, special issue, Anthropology and Humanism 31, no. 2 (2006): 124–40.
2. William A. Wilson, “The Deeper Necessity: Folklore and the Humanities,” Journal of American Folklore 101, no. 400 (1988): 157–58.
3. For a discussion of how folklorists view, and have viewed, belief, see Michael E. Bell and Simon J. Bronner, “Belief,” in Encyclopedia of American Folklife, ed. Simon D. Bronner (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2006), 83–86.
4. For a discussion of legend tripping that focuses on three of Rhode Island’s vampires, see Donald H. Holly, Jr., and Casey E. Cordy, “What’s in a Coin? Reading the Material Culture of Legend Tripping and Other Activities,” Journal of American Folklore 120, no. 477 (2007): 335–54.
5. Nickolette Patrick, “Bacteria with Fangs: The Story of the New England Vampires,” Northeastern Spotlight 4, no. 3 (Fall 2009): 6–7.
6. William Richard Cutter, Genealogical and Personal Memoirs Relating to the Families of Boston and Eastern Massachusetts, vol. 4 (New York: Lewis Historical Publishing Company, 1908), 2027–28.
7. Moncure Daniel Conway, Demonology and Devil-Lore (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1879), vol. 2, 52.
8. Conway, Demonology, vol. 2, 52.
9. Moncure Daniel Conway, Autobiography: Memoirs and Experiences of Moncure Daniel Conway (Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1904), vol. 2, 333.
10. Tom Campbell, Fighting Slavery in Chicago: Abolitionists, the Law of Slavery, and Lincoln (Chicago: Ampersand, Inc., 2009), 42–43.
11. Conway, Autobiography, vol. 2, 428.
12. Galveston Daily News, 25 November 1875, 4.
13. Cornelia J. Joy-Dyer, Some Records of the Dyer Family (New York, 1884), 12–31.
14. Campbell, Fighting Slavery, 27.
15. Campbell, Fighting Slavery, 18.
16. Campbell, Fighting Slavery, 18.
17. Conway, Autobiography, vol. 2, 167.
18. Frederic Denison, Westerly and Its Witnesses (Providence, RI: J. A. & R. A. Reid, 1878), 255.