During the nineteenth century, pulmonary tuberculosis (‘consumption’) killed up to a quarter of the population in the northeastern United States. The heart-rending decline of victims, coughing up blood and already corpse-like before their almost certain deaths, readily suggested the image used in an elegy of 1838: “consumption’s vampire grasp.” Some people took that literally. Between 1784 and 1892, consumption-wracked families blamed the disease on the still-active internal organs of dead relatives and took appropriate action. About seventy exhumations are recorded in New England (at least nineteen of them in Rhode Island), thirteen in New York State, three (probably a serious under-estimate) in Pennsylvania, and one in Canada.
Why New England in particular? Historian Michael E. Bell invokes the convergence of “several different cultural groups, and in several variations,” including diverse northern European settlers. Even so, other eighteenth- and nineteenth-century communities were ravaged by tuberculosis, and influenced by quack-doctors, without developing a belief in vampires. Likewise, Americans could read lurid vampire stories disseminated by the European press, but so could a worldwide reading public that absorbed such entertainment without taking it seriously.
There must have been an exceptional convergence of factors, brought together and energized by medical tragedy. Bell’s more recent work emphasizes a distinctive ingredient: the New England tradition of Paracelsian remedies, using body-parts and human blood, from the time of the poet Edward Taylor (c. 1642–1729). One might add the stresses of a colonial society that had recently won a war of independence. More elusively, it seems possible to glimpse anxieties about young adult females that resonate with New England’s earlier witch-hunting tragedy.
***Tens of thousands of German speakers, mainly from the Rhenish Palatinate, settled in eastern Pennsylvania between the 1680s and 1760s. There they retained their language—a Palatinate dialect of German—and a distinct identity. A collection of their oral folk-culture, published in 1915, contains this revealing item: “If there are many deaths in a family in rapid succession, the grave of the first of those to die should be opened, to see whether the corpse has not drawn a part of its shroud into its mouth.”
The Rhineland was outside the European zone where the most alarming beliefs and practices flourished after 1500, and that its older culture of corpse-killing had faded. Accordingly, some motifs were not exported, notably the lip-smacking idea and the practice of beheading. It was more muted approaches to shroud-chewing that the colonists took with them, to be preserved in this enclosed community. A Pennsylvania newspaper in 1857 ran the story of Sophia Bauman, daughter of Peter Bauman of Ephrata, who had died of consumption some nine years earlier. Since then, every member of this large family had died, except one brother who feared the same fate: “The belief was seriously entertained and acted upon, that by some hocus pocus the winding sheet of the corpse had got into her mouth, and that by continual suction, (the modus operandi of which was only known to the spirits) she had actually drawn the other five members of the family after her; and that unless this winding sheet was speedily removed from the mouth of the corpse, she would in like manner cause the premature death of the whole connection.”
In this mild response, it seems likely that the shroud-chewer paradigm had been softened by the assimilation of different folklore motifs about shrouds and graveclothes, where it is the wrappings rather than the corpse itself that cause problems. The idea (also recorded in Pennsylvania in 1915) that if a corpse is buried in clothes belonging to a living person, the owner will wither and die, figures in what must be the latest of all the American ‘vampire’ exhumations, performed in 1949.
In one way or another, the New England vampires must go back to Central European traditions. It is hard to think of any other source, and it is indicative that, like the shroud-chewers of Saxony, they lay inert in their graves. The new environment was associated with other modifications: whereas the first to die was normally targeted as the culprit in German cases, it was the last to die in most New England cases. German sectarians from Pennsylvania, some with links to occultists, are known to have influenced Connecticut and Rhode Island’s rich mix of magico-religious beliefs during the eighteenth century, but New England also contained many direct immigrants from the Rhineland and neighboring regions.
After the 1760s, increasing numbers of healers, surgeons, and medicine-sellers, alongside other would-be experts and practitioners from England, Germany, and France, were also active there. These itinerant and often suspect entrepreneurs, who operated through taverns, coffee-houses, and newspaper advertisements, targeted precisely those backwoods and marginal communities in Connecticut and Rhode Island where vampire-exhuming would flourish over the next century. These ‘other’ New Englanders, writes Bell, “participated in various hybrid religions that were unofficial combinations of Christian beliefs and folk practices,” and “experimented with a worldview that tapped into alchemy, astrology, divination, seeing stones, dowsing, and other practices that Puritans viewed as diabolical.” Ideas about dangerous corpses—whether from Pennsylvania or direct from Germany—landed on this fertile ground and took root.
To complicate matters further, this was also an age of mass print media. German practitioners, if literate, could have read some of the central European exhumation reports. And on top of established Paracelsian ideas, sensational stories in the popular press could have enriched the mix. On January 21, 1765, the Connecticut Courant ran a front-page article titled “The surprising account of those spectres called vampyres,” recycling one of the standard narratives of Balkan vampire-killing. The Boston Evening Post replicated it on (significantly) April 1, 1765. An outraged correspondent protested on April 15 that such nonsense was “calculated to frighten old women and children, to amuse the ignorant and superstitious, and to promote deism and infidelity in the world.” If the April Fool was too subtle for this reader, less literate consumers could have taken it seriously. Did this light-hearted page-filler help to convince “ignorant and superstitious” New Englanders, devastated by consumption, that vampires were real? At any rate, some of them held that view by the mid-1780s.
During 1784–99, ten exhumations are recorded in New England. Circumstances were diverse. In 1784, one Moses Holmes of Hartford, Connecticut, complained that “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 consumption, where any of the same family has 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.” He adds that two bodies (children of Isaac Johnson) had recently been dug up at Willington; and that although the remains looked normal, “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 eart.”
This procedure resurfaces in the late 1790s, when several members of a family at Dummerston, Vermont, had died of consumption and another daughter was failing:
Among the superstitions of those days, we find it was said that a vine or root of some kind grew from coffin to coffin, of those of one family, who died of consumption, and were buried side by side; and when the growing vine had reached the coffin of the last one buried, another one of the family would die; the only way to destroy the influence or effect, was to break the vine; take up the body of the last one buried and burn the vitals, which would be an effectual remedy. Accordingly, the body of the last one buried was taken up and the vitals taken out and burned, and the daughter, it is affirmed, got well and lived many years.
Whether this motif of a grave-generated creeping plant was a folk-belief or an eccentric medical theory, it is otherwise unknown in vampire folklore. At all events, folk-belief is what it soon became. The narrative of a New England exhumation around 1840 observes that “there is a tradition among the Germans that if a descendant pluck from the corpse of the last victim of consumption this little vine, it will eradicate the disease from the family.”
Other cases look different again. In 1786, there is a frustratingly laconic reference at Charleston, New Hampshire, to the body of an Irish traveller being exhumed and boiled—a procedure unique in this book. In 1788, at Belchertown (Massachusetts), an educated and open-minded minister named Justus Forward, with three children dead of consumption and two more in imminent danger, “consulted many about opening the graves of some of the deceased, to see whether there were any signs of the dead preying on the living.” Having first exposed and rejected a fully decayed corpse, they exhumed his daughter who had died nearly six years earlier:
On opening the body, the lungs were not dissolved, but had blood in them, though not fresh, but clotted. The lungs did not appear as we would suppose they would in a body just dead, but far nearer a state of soundness than could be expected. The liver, I am told, was as sound as the lungs. We put the lungs and liver in a separate box, and buried it in the same grave, ten inches or a foot, above the coffin.
In contrast to this restrained treatment, in 1790 Josiah Hewitt (a Connecticut man who moved to Ballston, New York) exhumed his dead daughter, when two other children were sick with consumption, and burned her whole body. At Cumberland, Rhode Island, in 1796, Stephen Staples was enigmatically permitted to exhume his daughter Abigail “in order to Try an Experiment” on Livinia, Abigail’s living sister, and then rebury her. That leaves three cases involving young female subjects—to which we will return—in which the organs were extracted and burned.
While the European origins of the dangerous-dead beliefs are obvious, other influences were probably also at work. Most intriguing is the longstanding New England tradition of Paracelsian medicine, which could have laid the ground for beliefs in the power and danger of specific organs. That helps to explain why such a strong emphasis was now placed on the internal organs as the seat of a lethal vitality, and a consequent need to destroy them.
Even so, the web of beliefs retained older strands: these backwoods communities were as receptive to traditional magic as to modern medicine. If we dig deeper, we might find some more organic traditions and instincts at work.
The known exhumations show a marked imbalance in both age and gender: most of the subjects were in the age-group fourteen to thirty—especially fourteen to twenty-four—and of those nearly two-thirds were female. Objectively, there is a straightforward explanation. In New England during 1850–80, young women were heavily over-represented among victims of tuberculosis, which caused nearly half of all female deaths between the ages of fifteen and twenty-nine. It is possible, though, that this medical fact has cognitive implications. We have repeatedly noted the spiritually charged quality of this demographic group, which was now so eerily targeted by the dreaded consumption.
One earlier episode might offer some context. Notoriously, the Puritan communities of New England saw enthusiastic witchcraft prosecutions through the second half of the seventeenth century. Activity fluctuated between peaks and lulls during c. 1647–70, and then died off until the last and worst outburst, in Essex County (including Salem, Andover, and Danvers) in 1692. Reactions of horror and guilt to the Salem disaster fed an already emergent skepticism about witchcraft, and encouraged its eventual decriminalization. This tragic episode sprang from a combination of internal social stress, failures of leadership, and paranoia as the brittle, inflexible regime of the Puritan ‘saints’ felt increasingly threatened.
Were witch-hunting and vampire-hunting divergent responses—one severely orthodox, the other off-beat and eclectic—to the same deep layer in the New England psyche? The point of comparison is not with the accused in the witch-trials, but with one group among their accusers: the people who were supposedly bewitched. Their age and gender profile were similar: of forty-three people diagnosed as ‘afflicted’ in seventeenth-century Massachusetts Bay, more than three-quarters were females, and nearly half were females aged between sixteen and twenty-two. And here we are back in a familiar world: of young women engaging in extreme and transgressive behavior, claiming to have acquired second-sight and access to the occult through their supernatural afflictions. Later, one of the bewitched had a vision of her brother’s death at the moment when it happened, forty miles away. Such a woman fitted into society uneasily: she was a victim, but the experience had given her an uncanny new identity.
The vampire epidemic began nearly a century after Salem, and its heartlands in Rhode Island and Connecticut largely avoided the old centers of witchcraft persecution. There is one tenuous link: the Isaac Johnson who exhumed his children in 1784—the first known case in New England—was apparently related to Elizabeth Johnson, a young woman convicted of witchcraft in 1692. Did family stories of her supernatural power weigh on him? A more important question is whether the dead women who would later be exhumed and mutilated in New England were likened—possibly at some level of collective consciousness preserved in oral tradition—to the earlier afflicted. They were victims too, strangled in “consumption’s vampire grasp,” but they also spread an insidious, lethal poison from their undead internal organs.
The rather clinical accounts of exhumations rarely offer individualized perceptions of the dead. The few subjects who do emerge as active agents, however, were all young females. Two of them were resolute enough to pre-empt their posthumous fate. In 1797 a dying girl in the town of Harvard, Massachusetts (probably Anna Bowles) “extracted from friends a solemn promise that her heart should be consumed for the benefit of her sisters.” Another in about 1847, at Chesterfield, Massachusetts, “determined that her own ‘vitals’ should never become ghoulish creatures feeding upon the life blood of nearest kindred,” so ordered them to be cut out and burned before her burial. Apparently less altruistic was Rachel Burton (née Harris), “a fine, healthy, beautiful girl” who died at Manchester, Vermont, in 1790 after a year’s marriage. Her husband quickly remarried, but the new wife sickened with consumption. In 1793, therefore, Rachel was exhumed and her organs burned, as a “sacrifice to the Demon Vampire who it was believed was still sucking the blood of the then living wife.”
Another familiar stratum of terror breaks surface with Sarah Tillinghast of Exeter, Rhode Island. After she died in 1799, five of her sisters died in succession and her brother and mother sickened, Sarah having visited all the sickbeds in nightmare form. When her body was exhumed it “was found to be in a very remarkable condition. The eyes were open and fixed. The hair and nails had grown, and the heart and the arteries were filled with fresh red blood.” Unfortunately this narrative only occurs in a source from 1888, which could have been influenced by the vampire literature then current. Still, this exhumation really happened, and an authentic sleep-paralysis case (unique among documented American vampires if so) may underlie the embellished story.
In their different ways, these young women are ascribed emotional power and agency while conforming to recognizable vampire templates. There is a strange convergence here between embedded folk-belief and fictional Romantic overtones. An observer at the exhumation of a sixteen-year-old girl at Plymouth, Massachusetts, in 1807 would report to the newspapers in 1822:
Displacing the flat lid, they lifted the covering from her face and discovered what they had indeed anticipated, but dreaded to declare—Yes, I saw the visage of one who had been long the tenant of a silent grave, lit up with the brilliancy of youthful health. The cheek was full to dimpling, and a rich profusion of hair shaded her cold forehead, while some of its richest curls floated upon her unconscious breast. The large blue eye had scarcely lost its brilliancy, and the livid fullness of her lips seemed almost to say, “loose me and let me go.”
This eyewitness sounds thoroughly convinced by what he saw and even reworked his experience as an eerie little poem . But there must surely be some influence here from the beautiful, seductive female vampires evoked by Goethe and his literary successors. Did belief that mirrored fiction converge with fiction that mirrored belief?
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There would probably have been no vampires in New England without the groups of German-speaking immigrants, who transported stories of grave-bound dangerous corpses to ready listeners. Equally, the shroud-chewer would not have transmuted into a host for death-dealing bodily organs without the tradition of Paracelsian medicine, practiced in New England from the later seventeenth century. And, operating though it did in a “modern” society, the belief stirred up a more deeply-rooted fear: of young females cut off at the height of their uncanny power.
These ideas would not, however, have had traction in popular practice without the deadly scourge of tuberculosis. For parents and siblings, paralyzed and helpless in the face of multiple deaths, a procedure that was ritualized, comprehensible, and (within its own terms) scientific offered an escape-route. The New England vampire-killing episode counts as an epidemic, but it also illustrates once again how epidemics erupt out of endemic beliefs. In some ways the strangest of them all, it still followed the rules.
Excerpted from Killing the Dead: Vampire Epidemics from Ancient Mesopotamia to the New World by John Blair with permission of Princeton University Press.
