Food for the Dead: On the Trail of New England’s Vampires

Preface to the Wesleyan paperback edition

PREFACE TO TH EWESLEYAN PAPERBACK EDITION 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 ofStephanie Meyer's Twilight. But another kind ofvampire survived in remote areas ofNew England more than one hundred years before Stoker penned Dracula in 1897. This book relates my attempt to unravel the mystery of these litde-known, so-called vampires. Beginning with a family story told to me by an oldYankee 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including eyewitness accounts, local legends, newspaper articles, local histories, town records, journal entries, unpublished correspondence, genealogies , cemeteries, and actual human remains.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 IX Food for the Dead 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 ofthe 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 lie waiting to be rediscovered. My task is to find them and bring them back to life. Since the first publication of Foodfor 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 midtwentieth century. Before continuing on the vampire trail, I want to address some ofthe questions I've been asked about the book over the past ten years. At the top ofthe 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 ofthis book as scapegoats. Everett Peck, who shares x Preface 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! 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...