Yankee Vampires

No, that's not the title of a Presidente Fidel Castro speech (at least as far as I know).  The vampire panic in New England lasted from around 1790 to 1895 and involved some very strange scenes in the graveyards.

All over the world, when livestock, crops or people suffered misfortune, disease or death, people have been wont to blame supernatural forces, often embodied in those they identified as witches, vampires or agents of the Devil.  To stop a vampire's predation, it had to be exhumed from the grave, and identified by a well-preserved corpse, have the internal organs -- especially the heart -- cut out and burned.  After Bram Stoker's Dracula came out in 1897 it was easy to imagine this happening in medieval Transylvania, but in  nineteenth-century New England?

Rhode Island farmer and orchardist Stukley Tillinghast began having nightmares in which his orchard was dying and his daughter Sarah was swept away by a cold wind.  Poor Sarah, 19 years old, took ill soon after and passed away.  Another daughter became ill and said that Sarah visited her every night.  She too then died, followed by four more children, who also claimed Sarah visited and touched them.  In a panic over this devastation, the farmer and others exhumed the bodies finding them all decomposed except for Sarah, who was, after six months, in good condition with her eyes staring and open.  They cut out and burned her heart, but the deaths continued with a son.  Then they ceased.

A hundred years later, in the same area of Essex, Rhode Island, the scenario played out again:  farmer George Brown lost his wife and two daughters to a wasting illness.  When son Edwin showed the same symptoms, George and neighbors exhumed those bodies to see if they were vampies preying on their own family, but only bones were found.  Except for daughter Mercy, who was well preserved (although she died in January and may have been above ground in a nearby stone crypt -- you can't dig graves in New England in the winter).  They, of course, cut her heart out and burned it.  Again, the last son did die anyway, and again, no one after that did.

Between these two events, around 1850 in Connecticut, Henry Ray's three sons wasted away and died one after the other.  The two elder were disinterred and burned, but Henry followed them in death in 1854.

There are too many similar stories, such as that of Rachel Harris who died in 1790.  Her widower subsequently married her stepsister who soon showed the same symptoms.  A mob of about 500 residents of Manchester, Vermont exhumed Rachel and burned her liver, heart and lungs.  When the second wife died anyway, they concluded that Rachel must have been a witch rather than a vampire.

But the culprit was not either one, but the bacillus which causes tuberculosis, called "consumption" previously because it consumed the body with weight loss and fever.  When the cause of the disease was identified in 1882, the vampire panic faded away.  Even today, with treatment finally available, it is still the leading infectious disease killer.

My grandmother would never drink milk.  When I asked her why, she said the "milk disease" had killed too many of her rural neighbor children when she was young, and it still scared her.  Milk infected with bovine tuberculosis was indeed often the source of TB before pasteurization became widespread during the first half of the twentieth century.  That is what finally quieted the vampires.

Mercy Brown, the "last New England vampire"