Michael Bell and the Vampires of New England

For over two decades, folklorist and scholar Michael E. Bell has researched into the macabre world of New England’s vampire tradition—far removed from the cloaked, nocturnal predators of pop culture—his reveals something far more unsettling: a past in which fear, disease, and desperation drove families to exhume, desecrate, and sometimes even ingest the bodies of their dead.

In Food for the Dead: On the Trail of New England’s Vampires (2001), Bell introduced readers to this unsettling tradition. Now, in Vampire's Grasp: The Hidden History of Consumption in New England (2024), he goes further, peeling back the layers of folklore and laying bare the cultural, medical, and emotional logic that shaped these rituals. Drawing from forgotten diaries, yellowed newspaper clippings, and obscure oral histories, Bell argues that these practices were not hysteria, but rather an attempt—albeit grim—to understand and combat an invisible killer.

That killer was tuberculosis—“consumption,” as it was known in the nineteenth century. Today we understand TB as a bacterial infection. But before germ theory, before Robert Koch’s 1882 discovery of the tuberculosis bacillus, the slow wasting away of multiple family members was a mystery—and mystery breeds myth.

“They didn’t call them vampires,” Bell explains. “They thought of it as a folk remedy… a form of healing. When someone died of consumption, and then others in the family began to fall ill, people believed the dead were drawing life from the living.”

That belief sparked chilling responses. In places like Rhode Island, Vermont, and rural Connecticut, communities dug up the dead, examining corpses for signs of “unnatural preservation”—most notably, liquid blood in the heart. If such signs were found, hearts were removed and burned, ashes fed to the sick, or bodies entirely cremated. The most haunting part? These "vampires" never left their coffins. They remained still and silent, harming their families from the grave.

A Different Breed of Vampire

Unlike the seductive, aristocratic creatures of Bram Stoker or Anne Rice, New England’s vampires were crude, decomposing, and familial. They were the child you lost last winter. The mother who succumbed in spring. The brother who coughed himself to death. These weren’t romantic monsters—they were loved ones, turned dangerous by the cruel arithmetic of disease and tradition.

“They killed their kin while still lying, apparently dead, inside their coffins,” Bell says. “How can you escape from something like that?”

It’s a question that strikes at the heart of why Bell’s work is so powerful. His books aren’t just academic explorations of the past—they’re deeply human investigations into how people once made sense of grief and loss.

The Strange Legacy of Consumption

Vampire’s Grasp is not merely a sequel to Food for the Dead, but a deeper dive into the pathology of belief and the sociocultural anatomy of fear. Bell draws compelling comparisons between the tuberculosis epidemics of the nineteenth century and our own era's encounter with COVID-19. He notes that in both cases, uncertainty, invisible contagion, and public panic led to deeply symbolic—even irrational—responses. The difference is that today, we have vaccines and antibiotics. In 1820, families had fire and folklore.

As Richard Sugg, author of The Real Vampires, writes: “If further proof were needed, Vampire's Grasp shows us time and again that history is so much stranger than fiction.”

Between History and Horror

The eerie power of Bell’s work lies in its refusal to mock or sensationalize the past. He takes folklore seriously—not just as superstition, but as a cultural operating system. These vampire rituals, gruesome as they may seem, were expressions of love, fear, and the desire to save one’s family.

Both Food for the Dead and Vampire’s Grasp challenge readers to reconsider the boundaries between myth and medicine, horror and hope. They ask not what we think we know about vampires, but why we needed them in the first place.

In the age of embalming, antibiotics, and epidemiology, it’s easy to see the past as primitive. But Bell reminds us: when faced with relentless death and no answers, even the most unthinkable acts can begin to make sense.

And perhaps—just perhaps—you’re alive today because someone long ago, desperate and terrified, burned a heart to ash and fed it to your ancestor.

Michael Bell’s Books:

• Food for the Dead: On the Trail of New England’s Vampires (2001)
  A groundbreaking work documenting the folklore and forgotten rituals of America’s real vampire tradition.
  
  
• Vampire’s Grasp: The Hidden History of Consumption in New England (2024)
  An essential companion volume that links vampire mythology to the very real devastation of tuberculosis, with new cases and timely comparisons to modern pandemics.
  
  

Further Reading:

• Richard Sugg, The Real Vampires (2023)
  
  
• John Blair, Killing the Dead: Vampires, Social Anxiety and Female Power (forthcoming)
  
  
• Simon Bacon (Ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of the Vampire
  
  

Follow Michael Bell's haunting trail through New England’s burial grounds and folklore archives, and you'll come away changed—not just by what you learn, but by what you feel.

You can listen to the interviews with Michael Bell here:

https://www.podpage.com/haunted-history-chronicles/microbes-with-fangs-death-disease-and-the-vampires-grasp-with-michael-bell/ 

https://www.podpage.com/haunted-history-chronicles/food-for-the-dead-on-the-trail-of-the-new-england-vampire-with-michael-bell/