Laura Wright 
Long before Dracula became the model for the modern vampire, families in rural America were opening graves.
They were not searching for capes, fangs or immortal aristocrats.
They were searching for something much closer to home.
A daughter.
A brother.
A wife.
Someone who had recently died of consumption, the disease now known as tuberculosis.
When another member of the household began wasting away from the same illness, some New England families reached a terrifying conclusion.
The dead relative was not entirely dead.
Something inside the grave was consuming the life of the living.
And the only way to save the family was to dig up the body and stop it.
These events were not merely folklore. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, documented exhumations occurred across rural New England, particularly in Rhode Island, Connecticut, Vermont and surrounding areas. Hearts were removed and burned. Bodies were repositioned or destroyed. In some cases, the ashes of burned organs were given to sick relatives as medicine.
America had its own vampire panic.
It simply looked very different from the one Hollywood eventually gave us.
The Disease That Looked Like a Vampire
To understand these incidents, it is necessary to understand tuberculosis.
Consumption was devastating in nineteenth-century America.
A victim could decline slowly over months or even years.
They became pale.
They lost weight.
They weakened.
They coughed blood.
Their bodies seemed almost literally to be consumed from within.
Worse, the disease frequently moved through families.
One person died.
Then another became sick.
Then another.
Today, we understand that tuberculosis is an infectious disease caused by bacteria.
The people experiencing these outbreaks did not.
Germ theory had not yet provided rural families with an explanation they could readily use. What they could see was that someone had died, and afterward the surviving members of the family appeared to have their lives gradually drained away.
The conclusion was supernatural.
The dead were feeding upon the living.
They Didn’t Always Call Them Vampires
There is an important distinction between the New England tradition and the European vampire familiar from literature.
The people involved did not necessarily use the word vampire themselves.
Nor did they imagine the deceased climbing from the grave every night and physically biting relatives on the neck.
The belief was more ambiguous.
Somehow, as long as something remained alive or unnaturally preserved within the corpse, the dead person could continue drawing vitality from surviving family members.
The solution was therefore to examine the body.
If suspicious evidence was found, whatever remained active within the corpse had to be destroyed.
That usually meant the heart.
Opening the Grave
Exhumation practices varied considerably.
In some communities, the heart was removed and burned.
Elsewhere, other organs were burned as well.
Sometimes the entire body was burned.
Occasionally bones were rearranged or the corpse was decapitated.
These weren’t acts committed because families hated the deceased.
Quite the opposite.
Often the people digging into the grave were handling the remains of someone they had loved.
They were trying to save someone else they loved.
That makes the New England vampire panic considerably sadder than the sensational version.
These weren’t mobs hunting monsters.
They were frightened families facing a disease they couldn’t understand.
And sometimes the only treatment they believed remained was buried in the cemetery.
The Jewett City Vampires
One of the cases mentioned in the original article occurred in Jewett City, Connecticut, now part of Griswold.
The Ray family had been devastated by consumption.
Lemuel Ray died.
His father Henry died.
Another son, Elisha, died.
Then another member of the family became ill.
In 1854, the family took extraordinary action.
The bodies of Lemuel and Elisha were exhumed and burned because the dead were believed to be feeding upon surviving members of the family. Contemporary newspaper coverage survives documenting the incident.
This was not a legend reconstructed a century afterward.
People were writing about it when it happened.
The Vampire Grave at Griswold
More than a century later, physical evidence emerged suggesting that the tradition around Griswold was older still.
During the 1990s, an abandoned family cemetery was discovered in a gravel pit.
Most of the burials appeared normal.
One did not.
The man was approximately fifty years old when he died. Brass tacks on his coffin formed the initials J.B.
Several years after burial, someone had reopened his grave.
His ribs had been disturbed.
His skull had been removed and placed upon his chest with his femurs arranged beneath it.
The arrangement resembled a skull and crossbones.
Analysis of the remains found evidence consistent with tuberculosis. Archaeologists eventually connected the unusual treatment of the body with New England’s vampire tradition.
We don’t have to rely entirely upon folklore here.
Someone really opened that grave.
Someone really rearranged that man’s bones.
And whoever did it apparently had a reason.
The Rhode Island Vampires
Rhode Island became particularly associated with these beliefs.
One case from 1874 involved a man named William Rose.
According to an account published in the Providence Journal, Rose exhumed his daughter’s body because he believed she was somehow exhausting the vitality of surviving family members.
Her heart was burned.
The original version of this article identified the location as “Placedale,” Rhode Island. Folklorist Michael Bell, who extensively researched New England vampire traditions, noted that there is no Rhode Island community by that name and suggested that the original reference may have meant Peace Dale.
That tiny uncertainty is worth preserving.
Old newspaper reports aren’t always perfect.
The event can be documented without pretending every detail surrounding it is equally certain.
The Chicago Case
The original article also mentioned a case reported by Dr. Dyer of Chicago.
That story is particularly interesting because it suggests the belief wasn’t completely confined to rural New England.
According to the historical account, relatives of a woman who had died from consumption exhumed her because they believed she was drawing her surviving family members after her into death.
The corpse was burned.
Folklorist Michael Bell found the Chicago report while tracing the geographical spread of American vampire practices.
Whether this represented the same folk tradition migrating westward or an independent expression of similar beliefs is harder to establish.
But the fear was recognizable.
Someone had died.
Others were dying.
And the family believed the first death was somehow causing the others.
Mercy Brown
No American vampire case became more famous than that of Mercy Lena Brown of Exeter, Rhode Island.
Her family had been devastated by tuberculosis.
Mercy’s mother died.
Her sister died.
Her brother Edwin became ill.
Then Mercy herself contracted the disease and died in January 1892.
She was only nineteen.
Two months later, neighbors persuaded Mercy’s father, George Brown, to allow the bodies of his deceased relatives to be examined.
George apparently did not share their belief that the dead were responsible.
But he allowed the exhumations.
The older bodies had decomposed normally.
Mercy’s had not.
The Body That Hadn’t Decayed
There was a perfectly natural reason.
Mercy had died during a New England winter and had been temporarily placed in an above-ground tomb because the frozen ground made burial difficult.
Her body had essentially been refrigerated.
To the people opening the tomb, however, her condition looked like evidence.
Mercy was unusually well preserved.
Blood was reportedly still present within her heart.
For people searching specifically for evidence that one member of the family remained unnaturally alive, they had found it.
Mercy’s heart and liver were removed.
They were burned upon a nearby rock.
The ashes were mixed with water and given to her sick brother Edwin to drink.
The treatment failed.
Edwin Brown died approximately two months later.
This Happened in 1892
Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of Mercy Brown’s story is the date.
1892.
This was not colonial America.
Electric lighting existed.
Telephones existed.
Railroads crossed the country.
Scientists had already identified the bacterium responsible for tuberculosis a decade earlier.
And in Rhode Island, people were still opening graves to prevent the dead from consuming the living.
The incident attracted newspaper attention far beyond the local community. Mercy subsequently became the most famous of the New England “vampires.”
Frederick Ransom
Nor was the practice limited entirely to isolated or poorly educated families.
Frederick Ransom was a Dartmouth College student from South Woodstock, Vermont.
He died of tuberculosis in 1817 at only twenty years old.
His father feared that Frederick might continue bringing the disease upon surviving family members.
His body was exhumed.
His heart was removed.
It was burned in a blacksmith’s forge.
The ritual did not save the family.
Frederick’s surviving brother later recorded that their mother, sister and two additional brothers died afterward.
The case is particularly valuable because it complicates the easy explanation that vampire beliefs belonged exclusively to the uneducated.
Fear does not always respect education.
Especially when medicine has no cure to offer.
What Did They Find in the Graves?
The dead can behave in ways that are deeply unsettling if decomposition isn’t understood.
Bodies bloat.
Skin changes.
Fluids emerge from the mouth and nose.
Internal organs decompose at different rates.
Hair and fingernails can appear to have continued growing as surrounding tissue retracts.
Depending upon temperature, soil and burial conditions, decomposition can occur much more slowly than expected.
To someone already convinced that a corpse might remain active after death, these perfectly natural processes could look like evidence.
Blood around the mouth?
The dead had been feeding.
An unexpectedly preserved heart?
The vampire remained alive.
A corpse that hadn’t decomposed?
Something was terribly wrong.
The evidence seemed to confirm the belief because the people examining the body didn’t possess the medical knowledge necessary to interpret what they were seeing.
But Calling Them Ignorant Is Too Easy
Modern accounts sometimes treat these people as ridiculous.
That is unfair.
They were observing something real.
A disease was moving through families.
One person was dying after another.
Consumption really did seem to drain people slowly of their lives.
The mistake was not in recognizing a pattern.
It was in explaining what caused it.
And when conventional medicine repeatedly failed to save their relatives, folk practices offered one final possibility.
Imagine watching three of your children die from the same mysterious wasting disease.
Then a fourth begins coughing.
Someone tells you there is one thing left to try.
It requires opening one of the graves.
How certain would you need to be that it couldn’t work?
That is the world in which the New England vampire panic existed.
The Vampire Was Real
There is a strange irony behind these stories.
Something invisible really was moving from person to person.
Something entered households.
It passed between family members.
It slowly consumed their bodies.
And it killed them.
The people of nineteenth-century New England were wrong about what it was.
The threat wasn’t climbing from the cemetery at night.
It was Mycobacterium tuberculosis.
But they could not see bacteria.
They could see graves.
So the graves became the place where they searched for an answer.
America’s Forgotten Vampires
American vampire folklore never developed quite the same way as its European counterpart.
There were no Transylvanian castles.
No aristocratic counts.
No beautiful immortal strangers arriving after sunset.
The American vampire was often considerably more intimate.
It was your sister.
Your daughter.
Your husband.
Someone you had buried only months before.
And the horror wasn’t that the dead person hated you.
The dead might not even consciously know what they were doing.
They simply could not stop taking the living with them.
Perhaps that is why these stories remain so disturbing.
The monster was someone the family loved.
Destroying the vampire meant disturbing the body of someone they had already mourned.
And if they refused?
Another family member might die.
When the Graves Were Closed Again
Eventually medicine provided better explanations for tuberculosis.
The vampire exhumations disappeared.
The graves remained.
For generations, many of these incidents survived primarily as obscure pieces of local history.
Then historians, folklorists and archaeologists began rediscovering them.
Old newspapers described bodies being burned.
Family accounts remembered hearts destroyed in blacksmith forges.
Archaeologists uncovered a skeleton whose bones had been deliberately rearranged after burial.
The vampire panic had left evidence behind.
That does not mean vampires were real in the supernatural sense.
But the belief was real enough to make grieving families walk into cemeteries, reopen graves and burn the hearts of their own dead.
And perhaps there is something appropriately unsettling about the explanation.
The people searching those graves believed an invisible killer was moving through their homes.
They were absolutely right about that.
They simply gave it the wrong name.
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