Microbes with Fangs: Death, Disease, and the Vampire’s Grasp with Michael Bell

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Because history, folklore, and the paranormal are never truly silent, some doors, once opened, can never be closed.

Welcome to Haunted History chronicles where the past lingers just beneath the surface.

Imagine walking through a quiet New England cemetery, the headstones worn with time, bearing the names of those who fell victim to an unseen terror.

A terror that spread through families, through towns, leaving fear, desperation, and, some believed, vampires in its wake.

But these weren't the fanged creatures of Bram Stoker's imagination.

No capes, no castles.

Just a silent, creeping killer that haunted the living and fed on the dying.

The people of New England saw their loved ones wasting away, and with no scientific answers, they turned to folklore, to ritual, and to the desperate hope that digging up the dead could somehow save the living.

Today we unravel the truth behind New England's vampire panic, its roots in disease, in fear, and in the tragic misunderstanding of tuberculosis, known then as consumption.

And who better to guide us through this eerie history than folklorist and vampire scholar Doctor Michael Bell?

With decades of research and his groundbreaking book Food for the Dead, Doctor Bell has traced the chilling accounts of exhumed corpses, heart burning rituals, and communities gripped by a deadly superstition.

So were they really vampires in New England?

Or was the tree monster something far smaller and far deadlier than anyone could have imagined?

Stay tuned as we dig deep into Michael's more recent book, The Vampires.

Grasp the hidden history of consumption in New England right here on Haunted History Chronicles.

Hi, Michael, thank you so much for joining me on another podcast.

You're welcome.

It's my pleasure, Michelle.

It's been a while since we last spoke.

Would would you like to just start by reintroducing yourself to the to the listeners of the podcast?

Sure.

Well, my name's Michael Bell.

I'm a folklorist.

I got my PhD in folklore from Indiana University quite a while ago, and I spent most of my career as a state folklore for Rhode Island, the smallest state in the Union, but a very diverse state.

So it was.

It was interesting work, and I've published A2 books and a number of articles on the vampire tradition in New England or in the northeast of of the United States.

And the last time we spoke, we we're speaking about your first book, Food for the Dead.

You've subsequently gone on to write Vampires Grasp the The hidden History of consumption in New England.

Do you want to just start by maybe explaining how?

What new discoveries or insights does it bring?

Well, in Fruit to Fruit for the Dead, I, I wrote about my 20 years up to that point of, of research into this topic.

Foods of the Dead was published in first in 2001 and then ten years later an updated edition was published.

So I had 20 so-called vampire cases at that time for that book, but I was really certain that I'd only found the tip of a much larger iceberg.

And I, I, I was, I was correct.

Now because I have, we have online databases, I was able to document an additional six years, 65 cases of vampire events in New England.

So in Vampire's Grass, which was published last year, I discuss about 80 to 85 of these vampire cases.

And the evidence shows that in New England during the late 1700s and throughout the 1800's, the ritual to stop consumption, or vampires, if you will, was actually known, accepted, even endorsed, and sometimes actually performed by the community at large, by town authorities, by doctors, and even by clergymen.

So it's to me that's it's an amazing, an amazing story that keeps getting larger and larger.

So what was it, then, that first drew you to to the study of New England's vampire traditions?

Well, as I said, I was.

I started the as in the folklore for the state of Rhode Island in in 1980.

So about a year later, in the fall of 1981, I was doing some field work in southern Rhode Island documenting local traditions.

And I had a an intern working with me.

And she said, you know, we're going to set up an interview with this guy named Everett Peck, who lives down in Exeter, He said, she said he's a farmer.

He knows, he knows everything about local history, but one thing we need to be sure to ask him about, and that is the vampire and his family.

So I did a kind of a, a double take, as you might imagine, because I, I heard vampire stories, of course, folklore fiction, even some historical ones from Europe, but I didn't know that we actually had vampires in America.

So we went down to Exeter and recorded him, believe it or not, he lid lived at the end of a a little dirt Rd. called Sodom Trail, which on the way down there did give me a little a little bit of a fright.

It's like I'm going down Sodom Trail and in the woods and I'm going to talk about this guy about vampires and his family.

So that's that got me started.

He told me about Mercy Brown, which turns out to be probably the last well documented case of vampires in in in New England.

And it started me on this on this trail which I'm still following.

So what were some of the the biggest challenges then in researching and writing this latest book?

Well, there were many challenges.

I often think of my research into this project as it's kind of, you know, the impossible task that that some people in folk tales are given.

They come down and say, well, here's something you have to do, but you know, it seems impossible.

And that's what it looked like to me when I started finding all these cases.

It was kind of like a jigsaw puzzle, a lot of pieces, but I didn't have a box to hold the pieces, and I didn't have a picture that was going to tell me what the completed puzzle would look like.

So the pieces were scattered around.

Many of them will never be found, but I felt I was allowed to fill in some of the blank spaces if I did so kind of judiciously and carefully using the surrounded pieces as clues.

So that was the first challenge, which is I guess you would say it's almost like forensics.

I've taken all the clues for this, these one, this one case or that case, I found all I can find.

And then I put the put all the clues together and try to come out with the best narrative that that explains all these different pieces.

And another challenge was actually how to organize what I'd found.

You know, I have 808085 cases.

How am I going to organize this material?

So I started first thinking about doing a chronologically, starting with the earliest case, which is 1784, and going through the latest case, which is about 1892.

It didn't really satisfy me.

It didn't seem to show much, and so I started looking at it in terms of locality, arranging all of these cases by where they happened and what That wasn't very satisfying either.

So looking back on how I did structure the book, it now seems so obvious.

Since the knowledge of these rituals is based predominantly on stories describing these events, I look closely at the stories themselves.

Was trying to figure out if there were any significant patterns in the stories in the terminology of a folklorist.

I started looking at the data as storytelling events.

The questions to ask were pretty clear once I started doing that.

Who was the storyteller?

Who was the audience?

What relationships existed between Teller and the audience?

In what context were these stories told?

And these questions LED quite naturally to me asking what did the stories mean?

That is, you know, how were they used?

What were their functions?

So in Vampire's Grasp, the narrative moves forward on the basis of storytelling context, beginning with eyewitnesses, which includes both participants and people who were there on the scene just observing and proceeding, proceeding through family storytellers like Everett Peck Donen, Exeter newspaper writers, editors and publishers, compilers of local histories, medical and scientific professionals, and then ending up with community based and fictional authors.

So the book, the narrative art flows in the book from personal stories through more impersonal accounts and ending with with fictional narratives.

So do you want to describe maybe then how people in the 18th through to the 19th century in New England understood and and experienced the consumption epidemic?

Yeah.

Well, if you look at the mortality statistics, it's really a a very grim picture showing consumptions impact in the Northeast, which began really in earnest during the late 1700s and continued throughout the the next century.

According to some sources, about 25% of all deaths during this time were attributed to consumption.

I mean, that's that's a huge number, 25%.

And the statistics, yes, they are cruel, but they're only numbers in until they're connected to real people living in actual communities, which is one reason I did spend a lot of time reading local histories during the research for this book.

I wanted to bring the tragedy of of consumption down to eye level.

I wanted to see how it actually impacted real people.

While the author of the history of the town of Spencer, MA wrote in 1860, and I'm I'm quoting him.

Consumption, the great destroyer of human life, formerly made havoc among our people, sometimes sweeping away whole families.

Out of eight children of Captain Wilbur Watson, seven fell victim to consumption.

Mr. Simeon Wood lost six out of eight children by the same disease.

Nathaniel Williams having six or seven children, all but one died of consumption.

A sad breach was often made in other families, and sometimes all or both parents, or one or both parents were cut down.

End of quote and from another history.

In 1844, History of the city of Lynn in Massachusetts, historian Alonzo Lewis was disturbed by Consumption's grip on that city, and he wrote quote from some cause.

However, there are a great number of deaths by consumption.

Formerly a death of this disease was a rare occurrence, and then the individual was ill for many years, and the subjects were usually aged persons.

In 1727, when a young man died of consumption at the age of 19, it was noticed as a remarkable circumstance, but now young people frequently die of that disease after an illness of a few months.

In some years since 1824, more than half the deaths have been occasioned by that insidious malady.

There is something improper and unnatural in this close quote.

As late as 18, 80, consumption was still the leading cause of death in the city of Lynn, so Alonzo Lewis, the historian writes writes in that piece.

There is something improper and unnatural about this, and I think we can also add unpredictable, because the fear created by consumption was heightened by its baffling decimation of some families while leaving others untouched.

Historical records show that the invisible tuberculosis microbe was an impartial destroyer, too.

The families of clergymen, selectmen and bankers were as devastated as those of farmers and laborers.

And if there was any selection going on, it wasn't according to class, social standing or income.

It was young people, especially females, who took the brunt of this disease.

I might add that folklorists have noted that folk beliefs of the kind that we often call superstitions come into play when people understand that they're at great risk, but they have limited control over the outcome.

So the day-to-day existence of 19th century New Englanders is facing consumption.

To me it must have seemed like a life or death lottery and they didn't know, you know, how things were being selected.

What was the mode of selection?

They didn't understand that either.

And I think there was one particular word that came through in that, which I think really for me helps to exemplify the brutal nature of this.

And it it's this sense of cutting, cutting down life, you know, cutting huge portions in some cases of the family members down in their prime.

And, you know, that sense of loss must have been absolutely profound.

And like you said, just that complete wonder and mystery around it.

What was the cause?

How they could do anything at all about it.

Just completely baffling when you don't have the medical answers in the way that we in the way that we do today.

Right.

Well, I think the people who were diagnosed with consumption, you know, prior to the 20th century had every reason to be uncertain and fearful because they had really little hope of being cured.

Throughout most of this period, the medical community was unable to provide any treatment that actually worked because they didn't know that the disease was caused by a germ.

I think you have to remember at this time, physicians were actually bleeding patients to cure them, which certainly didn't help.

So that anytime the establishment medical community can't stop people from getting sick and dying, then people look somewhere else.

And that's very understandable.

And folklore always offered answers.

Practitioners of folk medicine confront a health crisis in basically the same way that other medical workers do or should do.

They intervene, they take action, they do something.

And just doing something gives the afflicted people a sense of control over situations that seem to be insoluble.

They have no solution.

Even if what they're doing doesn't actually cure the sick and stop the dying, they may feel that they've done everything possible, that they've exhausted all the available resources.

So how then did the the fear of consumption evolve into a belief in vampirism?

Well, I think I think we might start answering that question by looking at some of the parallels between the symptoms of consumption and the traditional evidence of vampire attacks.

Victims of consumption suffer most at night.

They wake up coughing and in pain.

Sometimes they describe a heavy feeling, as though someone or something has been sitting on their chest as the disease progresses.

And this is pulmonary tuberculosis we're talking about, by the way.

So it's it's consuming the lungs.

That's why it's called consumption.

As consumption progresses, ulcers and cavities develop in the lungs, and people begin to cough up blood in increasing amounts as the disease goes on.

So imagine you have a family member who's suffering with this disease and you go into the room in the morning to check on them.

And you find blood at the corners of their mouth, and the bedclothes are stained with blood.

And then they fade into death, and other people in the family begin to show the same symptoms.

And I think it's fair to say that both consumptives and vampires are the living dead, because people with consumption are, in a very little literal way, walking corpses.

They're pale.

They're wasted just waiting to take their final breath.

And the vampire provided, I think, a tangible image for the unseen evil that was slowly draining away these lives, this invisible evil.

This vampire was, as we know now, a microscopic germ, a bank, a bacterium with fangs, as one nurse called them.

So when family members began to waste away, some of them actually wondered if it was possible that the that the dead could be praying on the living.

So when this question was entertained by a family, it was it was often resolved by having a consultation that brought together the head of the family and other kin, mostly male kin, and sometimes other leaders in the in the community outside of the family.

So do you want to maybe walk us through that, that next step in terms of then that process of confronting the suspected vampire?

You know what rituals were then performed.

Well, when a family asked the question, thought I'd just posed that they did sometimes, you know, is it possible for the dead to be praying on the living?

And then they had a, a family consultation or the head of the family just decided that, OK, we're going to perform this book medical ritual, which involved, and I know this is going to sound gross to some people, but exhuming and mutilating and sometimes partially consuming the corpses of, of dead relatives.

So once this ritual was decided on, there were basic 4 sequences of behaviors.

I call them acts, ACTS, acts because rituals are like plays in a very real sense.

They're dramatic compositions.

They have a cast of characters or performers, and they have a script to follow.

So the script of the consumption ritual begins with the inaugural act, and that's where the ritual ritual practitioners confront the corpse or corpses who had died of consumption.

Well, exhumation is almost always the inaugural act, but sometimes the course may be examined prior to burial.

So during the next act, which is the diagnostic act, practitioners determine whether a corpse is or is not a threat to a living.

Usually they're looking for signs that the corpse is not completely dead or is is unusual looking.

Mainly they were looking for liquid blood, which they interpreted as as fresh blood in the heart or other vital organs.

Sometimes they were looking for a vine that was growing from the corpse out of the coffin.

So the third act after the diagnostic act would be the transformational act.

And that's that's the act that eliminates or at least neutralizes the threat.

So once the corpse has been the right corpse, the vampire, if you will, has been discovered, then they want to neutralize it.

And the most common transformational act is burning the heart or other vital organs.

In some cases, such as one in Jewett City, CT, the entire corpse was burned.

And in Plymouth, MA in 18 O 7, the corpse was simply turned face down and reburied, which is I guess the, the neatest and simplest thing to do.

Presumably the, the evil spirit that was in the corpse couldn't find its way out if it was face down.

And there's a lot of variation in, in some of these practices.

And that's to me is a hallmark of folklore.

Once you have variations in the transformational acts, for example, then I think we are in the realm of folk practices.

And finally, the fourth act is the healing act, which is performed to restore the well-being of all those in the family who are afflicted.

To complete the cure, I'll.

Family members may be instructed to inhale or be fumigated by the smoke from the burning corpse, as in Foster, RI and in 1827, or to ingest the ashes from the incinerated vital organs, as in Exeter, RI in 1892.

So just kind of going back to that first initial stage then that you that you referenced in terms of the exclamation process, were those public events?

Were they?

Were they commonly held in the public arena?

Well, normally the ex exhumations were conducted by family members and maybe a few attendants, neighbors or other, you know, people who were concerned in in the the community, but they were not public events.

But that doesn't mean that people outside the family didn't attend.

Sometimes family would invite people who thought who could assist them in some aspects of the ritual.

As you can imagine, it would be difficult, I'd say, for a head of a family to actually exhume a corpse of a family member and and perform some of these acts.

So sometimes someone would be recruited to do that.

And often that person with a was a physician or at least a person that that with a physician in those times.

It's not like a medical doctor today.

And when physicians were there and, and they were there just over 15% of the time, which to me is sort of amazing, their roles varied.

Sometimes they were active, they performed autopsies or interpreted the state of the corpse in relation to signs of vampirism.

And other times the physicians were just passive observers simply to look at the proceedings, perhaps out of curiosity.

The most extraordinary public enactment of the consumption ritual that I've shown took place in Lenox Township in Pennsylvania.

In 1871, a man named William Torchy paid for a newspaper notice that was published twice, actually, in the Montrose Democrat.

It was published on April 12th and April 26th and 1871.

The notice was headed bodies to be exhumed.

I'll read you the notice because it's extraordinary quote.

The subscriber being the only survivor of a large family of brothers and sisters, all of whom have died of that dread disease consumption, and whose children are following them by the same disease, has consented that the bodies of some of the first who died may be exhumed to satisfy the belief entertained that it will arrest the further progress of the disease which is destroying the remaining survivors.

The exhumation will take place on Saturday, April 29th, at 10:00 AM, at the burying ground on David Whitney's land in Lenox Township, this county.

This notice is given that all interested parties may be present.

End Quote.

Now, William Perget was 65 years old when this notice was published, and this event took place in northeastern Pennsylvania.

But here's an interesting thing.

The federal census of 1850 shows that William and his brother Jonathan were born in, probably no surprise, Rhode Island.

So sometime between 1817 and 1819, the family relocated from Rhode Island to Pennsylvania.

Now, if this public invitation published in the newspaper weren't enough drama, let me share another article that was published in the same newspaper about two weeks after the exhumation.

I won't read the entire text of the article, but here's the important part Quote.

When Mr. Torget presented us the notice for publication, he emphatically stated that he had no faith in it Whatever, and then he had for many years been the only opposer in the matter among the friends that, and has persistently refused until even quite an unpleasant feeling had arisen, and then he now merely consented to gratify their wishes.

These facts are corroborated by other parties and although Mr. Turge's name has been made prominent in this manner, we think it do him that these facts should be made made known in quote.

So obviously when he decided to do this, there was a lot of blowback or feedback, negative feedback in the community.

And to make this event even more interesting, one interested party did attend the ritual and he sent his detailed description to the same newspaper.

I won't read the description, it's pretty long, but it's really a very incredible narrative.

This interested party who was there and wrote the the story, he estimated that about 100 people attended the exhumation.

And even more amazing to me at least, this guy's account stimulated another reader of the newspaper to submit a description of yet another exhumation that he had witnessed years before in another town.

So these kinds of narrative chains where one story stimulates or provoked to another, they're not common, but obviously when they do occur, I and I find them, I, I'm certainly very happy about it.

And I think it, it helps to highlight, though, just how much a part of the community something like this could be.

The fact that it could make the, the newspapers in the way that you just helped to illustrate there that it was the, you know, the topic of conversation.

The fact that you have other members from the, the community taking part, maybe for their expertise, for their skill, You know, it, it suggests that it suggests the importance of it as part of the ritual in, in helping to process and deal with with this disease.

But at the same time, it also suggests, I think, the era of credibility that that brings, that they really did believe in this.

Oh, sure, but it's not like everybody believed in it.

Newspapers especially well came down hard on on these exclamations in terms of of their interpretive framework.

And newspaper newspapers were the major had been the major source for finding these.

I've I've got, I've got to say, I've got manuscripts and archives.

I've got diary entries, personal correspondence, oral accounts, scholarly journals or books, popular periodicals.

Not newspapers, local histories and medical journals.

But newspapers by far are the largest source.

And sometimes an account will appear, let's say in a in a local history, and then it'll be ticked up by a newspaper.

So these events sometimes occur in more than one one source.

So did the the rituals themselves actually help curb the spread of tuberculosis in any way?

Well, I can't imagine that performing these rituals actually could stop the spread of tuberculosis.

My interpretation is the, the rituals were therapeutic, but in a psychological or sociological, perhaps both psychological and sociological sense, they brought closure to a suffering family.

And I think the rituals also helped to heal the larger community by bringing them together to confront a common enemy or a threat.

And I think just the act of performing a ritual can be beneficial for those involved that that in itself can be a healing process.

So to the question, how effective was this ritual in, in curing consumption?

Well, I I ran some charts to answer that question, a little spreadsheet.

So I'll give you some statistics.

In almost 46% of the documented cases, the outcome of the ritual is either unknown or cannot be determined based on the information provided.

So let's that's nearly half don't know how it worked.

Nearly 35% of the time, the ritual was deemed unsuccessful as the disease continued its fatal course.

In about 7% of the cases, the ritual was either not performed or remained incomplete.

I I think in most of these cases the signs that would indicate A troublesome corpse or a suspicious grave were not there.

And just slightly more than 8% of the rituals were deemed successful, in that the ailing person recovered.

And a little more than 4% of the time the rituals were considered mixed.

So maybe one more family member died that's in that seemed to take care of the problem and others recovered or continued in good health.

And I should also point out here that during this time rate, 1700s throughout 1800's, the failure rates of any attempt to cure consumption were essentially the same for any medical system, whether it was folk or quacks or establishment.

So which in reality it was basically the same as doing nothing at all.

So in a sense, people had nothing to lose by performing a ritual.

And you know, I think it comes back to what you were saying earlier, this, this at least gave the, the the family experiencing this, that sense of being able to take control.

As you know, they were trying and exhausting every Ave. that they could physically, tangibly do, which like you said, must have had some at least of that effect of making them feel and giving them that.

That feeling that they are doing everything that there is, that hope that they've tried everything, that they've exhausted everything that they can possibly do.

Yes, yes, I think, I think especially for the head of a family to have that, to have that feeling of closure, because if he didn't, if people pressured him to do it, like Mr. Torshay in Pennsylvania, and he didn't believe it and didn't want to do it and he didn't do it, how would he feel if that disease just kept going on and on?

So he agreed to do it.

And I think that's, that's the situation that heads of families especially were in during that time.

I, I, I don't want to feel like I haven't done every possible thing I can do to stop this and to help my family.

And if I don't do it, will I feel guilty?

Probably.

So did the people in New England then actually use the word vampire to describe these these exhumed corpses?

Or is that just a later interpretation then?

OK, well, the people who participated in the consumption ritual did not use the word vampire when they talked about these events.

And even in the stories of outsiders, people outside the community or the family, the word vampire was rarely used.

And once again, I I ran some statistics in only 12 of the 85 collected texts is the word vampire used.

And that's just 7%.

The word first appeared in New England consumption stories in 1842.

That's 58 years after the first so far that I've documented in the region, which was in 1784.

So it took a 58 years for someone to even use that word to recognize what was going on and and to label as vampires or vampirism.

And eight of the 12 outsider areas in which the word vampire does appear, eight of the 12 were recorded in 1885 or later.

So I think you could say that the vampire as a word arrived late in New England and pretty much stayed in the shadows.

And I think if if insiders had blamed consumption on a corpse that was, that physically left the grave, perhaps to suck blood and kill the living, don't you think they would have given this thing a name or a label that they didn't?

So what they didn't say actually tells me a lot.

I think there's no evidence that the people who performed the rituals imagined or visualized the deadly link between living and dead, is some sort of discreet or tangible thing.

Now, it's true, insiders did wonder if the dead were praying on the living.

But, and I think this is the important thing, they didn't offer theories about how or why that could happen.

And only a handful of outsiders even attempted to describe that nature, this destructive link between the living and the dead, and the few outsiders who dared struggled in that attempt to describe it.

But one thing was clear in the outsider interpretations.

Whatever was praying on the living lacked materiality.

It was a spiritual power, not a corporeal being, not a thing that you could see or touch.

And I don't believe that the small number of outsiders who labeled the New England rituals as vampires, vampirism were incorrect.

They were placing these events into contexts that were familiar to to them both from literature and history.

But I think using the the vampire label also has an empirical basis grounded in historical connections between Europe and New England.

The author of An Incident from Chesterfield, MA, which took place about 1850 provides a good summary of this vague concept, The link between the living and the dead, and I'll quote her.

The story said that when one member of the family died of with consumption, his or her vitals, meaning the term.

By that term, the lungs, heart and liver became animated after burial and came back to earth in invisible form to prey upon the vitals of others in the family until they in turn wasted away with the same disease.

Of course, now we know that this sympathetic connection so-called was a germ, and I still can't help visualizing tuberculosis bacteria sprouting fangs.

Both vampires and germs are lethal and invisible.

That's a parallel that helps explain why I think in in general, folk monsters of various kinds were frequently blamed for mysterious diseases and strange deaths.

Yeah, it's giving the face a thing to something that they can't quantify isn't.

It.

True, it's making it seem less scary in some regards because you are you at least have something attached to it as opposed to the great void that is the unknown otherwise.

Right.

But to me that that's what makes these New England vampires actually more frightening than most of our literary vampires, because the the folk vampires in New England were invisible, couldn't be seen.

It could hardly be felt.

So you know, once you can, once you can put AI think like you said, once you can visualize something, put a put a face on it if you will, then it becomes less frightening because it's something you can, you can deal with.

If you, if you can't see it, if you can't experience it, an interviewer's senses, then how do you deal with it?

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Now let's step back into the shadows for more haunted history chronicles.

So why then do you think so many of these so-called New England vampires were were female?

I mean you mentioned that earlier.

While, you know, European vampire legends were often male figures.

Yeah.

Well, that's that's a good question.

And it's a question that was posed to me by someone who's actually publishing a book.

It will be out in November.

And he's he's from Britain.

I look at it first is explainable by social role that people have.

Well, think about the social relationships, sexual division of Labor at that time in 1800s, let's say, females were the ones who stayed in the house for the most part and did the household chores in the morning.

The males usually would go out to work, whether they went into the fields or whether they went to the blacksmith shop or to the bank or wherever.

They left the house and it didn't come back till later in the day.

So who's in the house with sick people, taking care of sick people, contagious sick people.

Maybe they didn't know people were contagious, but that's the that's the reality.

And so I think it's understandable from that the point of social relationships, why more females would contract the disease and die from it, and therefore more females would be identified as vampires, the gender of exhumed corpses.

I did.

I did a spreadsheet on that too.

Let's see, 44% of the assumed corpses identified as vampires were were female, 29% were male and 27% it's it's unknown.

We don't know the gender of of the so-called vampire.

Now John Blair, the man I alluded to, professor Emeritus of History and Archaeology at Oxford University, is completing a book now on worldwide vampire traditions and he sees another explanation for the female centered vampires scapegoat traditions and he links it back to the witch trials in the late 17th century, New England, late 1600s.

And I think he makes a good case.

His book is going to be out in November and it may be of interest to people.

The title is Killing the Dead Vampires, Social anxiety and Female Power.

It's going to be published by Princeton University Press.

Now I helped him with a chapter he did on New England and then I'm not sure if this is significant then I'll end this little piece by saying that one of the vampire families that the family of Isaac Johnson in Willington, Connecticut which took place in 1784 had ancestors who were tied, tried and convicted of witchcraft in Andover, MA which is Essex County in 1692.

I don't know if there's any any link there.

I'm sure he was aware of his third cousins witch trials.

So just kind of following on from that, you know, something else that I think is quite an interesting question to pose pose to you and get your thoughts on.

You know, given that, you know, early New Englanders were mostly from Great Britain, which really doesn't have a great wealth of of vampire folklore in comparison to to Europe, say for example, How is it then that they come to adopt this belief?

You know, that is the good question if one of the first questions people always ask about it.

And my my hypothesis is that the consumption cures labeled vampires and by outsiders were first introduced to New Englanders by traveling healers, likely from different places and, and, and and also introduced at different times by these traveling healers who roots were in Europe where the vampire, you know, mainland Europe.

I say continental Europe, where the vampire tradition was known and, and probably practiced like the foreign quack Doctor Who appeared in Willington, CT in 1784.

I was talking about Isaac Johnson and his family's relation to the witch trials earlier.

Well, this foreign quack Dr. convinced Isaac Johnson to exhume the bodies of two of his children to stop consumption in the family.

So I think that this foreign quack Dr. he very well may have come over here during the American Revolution with the British troops, the mercenaries that the, that were part of the British Army that came here.

Many of them were, they were called Hessians.

Many of them were Germans, but a lot of them were other other nationalities from Europe.

And a lot of them stayed here.

Some were captured and remained here.

Others just decided to stay here.

And so we have documented these, I guess you would call them immigrant quacks, moving around through the Northeast and selling killers for various things.

But they weren't.

I wouldn't say they were on a cultural exchange mission.

They were engaged in a commercial enterprise.

They were selling a short list of like step by So what I see in in the vampire tradition in New England is in Europe is like a dichotomy with the detailed and explicit belief system of Europe on one side, in the reduced, simplified New England version on the other.

Concerned with results, not theories, Pragmatic Yankees asked questions like what do we have to do to stop these deaths?

To them, it became simply a folk medical practice.

And so the vampire as a word or a concept or even a context, I think was understandably absent in their stories.

Earlier you kind of mentioned a particular name that I think for many they they will recall and and maybe know a little about, which is the Mercy Brown account of vampirism, probably one of the most famous American vampire cases.

Do you want to just tell us about her case and why it stands out?

Sure.

Well, yeah, I mean, you said probably the most well known American vampire.

I I she may be one of the most well known worldwide vampires because her story continues to to circulate in every medium from spoken, written, printed forms to film, video and the World Wide Web.

And she's if you, you know, if you search on the Internet Mercy Brown vampire you, you, you could come up with hundreds of thousands, if not a million hits.

So her story has been expanded and twisted into probably every imaginable undead shape, even though the facts of her were unfortunate plight are pretty well fixed.

Incredible sources which I can summarize.

Now here's the historical facts is it is as I've been able to find them.

On March 17th, 1892, three corpses, the wife and two daughters of George T Brown were disinterred and examined in the Chestnut Hills Cemetery in Exeter, RI.

The wife, Mary Eliza, had died of consumption on December 8th, 1883.

On June 6th, 1884, Brown's eldest daughter, Mary Olive succumbed at the age of 20.

Within a few years, Brown's only son Edwin began to show the signs of consumption, so Edwin travelled to Colorado Springs with his wife Fortance, who was known as 40, hoping that a change in environment would affect the cure.

But by this time Brown's 19 year old daughter Mercy Lena, who was known as Lena in the family, had contracted consumption.

She died on January 19th, 1892 and her corpse was not buried but was placed in an above ground stone crypt in the cemetery waiting to be buried at in the ground.

After the spring thaw, as Edwin continued to to decline, he and Horty returned from Colorado to Rhode Island to be with family and friends.

So hoping to save Edwin and spare the rest of the family.

George Brown yielded to pressure from kinsmen and neighbors just liking Mr. Torji in Pennsylvania, and he consented to the consumption ritual, even though he said he did not believe in the old time theory, as he called it.

The medical examiner for the towns of Exeter and North Kingstown.

In it an adjoining town in southern Rhode Island, his name was Doctor Harold Metcalf.

He reluctantly agreed to oversee the proceedings, even though he thought that the whole thing was nonsense.

George Brown and Edwin Brown, the son, the father and the son were noticeably absent at the cemetery.

Well, when the body of Missus Brown was exhumed, some of the flesh appeared to be mummified, but there was no blood in her heart.

In the corpse of Mary Olive, the older daughter had been reduced to a skeleton with only a thick growth of hair remaining.

But Mercy's corpse, which had been in the above ground tomb for 2 winter months, seemed fresh, so her heart and liver were removed.

The heart showed clotted blood, but the liver, though deemed well preserved, revealed no blood despite but despite Dr. Metcalf's assurance that the condition of Mercy's corpse was unremarkable, attendance at the scene kindled fire and burned her heart and livred ashes as a cure.

Edwin was supposed to drink the ashes in water, but no one could, or no one would say if he actually did.

But sadly, the hope for a cure didn't work for Edwin because he died on May 2nd, a few weeks shy of his 25th birthday.

And three of the remaining Brown children daughters also died of consumption within a few years.

Hattie Mae Brown was the only sibling to survive the family's consumption epidemic and she lived to pretty ripe old age of 79.

And their father George also lived long, dying at the age of 80 in 1922 at Hattie's home.

So those are basically the the facts of Mercy Bau's story.

Why is it then that you know you think her story has become so synonymous when it comes to vampire folklore and vampire stories?

What is it about this particular case that really sparked interest around the world?

Well, for one thing, it happened so late, you know, and the whole vampire thing in, in this country at least 1892.

I mean that's ten years after the tuberculosis bacterium was, it was discovered and announced in 1882.

So it's a very late case.

And also because it's, I think because it's very late, it's also well documented.

When I went to to interview Everett Peck in 1981, my first introduction to the American vampire, he told me this story and he got it from older relatives who were alive at the time.

So you'll, you also have this oral tradition going back only 2-3 generations to Mercy Brown.

So in that sense, it seems more fresh.

There's, there's a lot more information.

You've got family stories, you've got newspaper stories.

And then you had legends growing up around Mercy Brown, which is it's certainly a common kind of thing.

And, and I think the the legends are reinforced by the legend tripping, that is people going out to the cemetery at night and telling the story and, you know, the delight of fright, They're scaring themselves.

And I don't think Everett Peck did anyone any favors by hanging out at the cemetery on Halloween.

He didn't want people vandalizing Mercy Brownstone and I can understand it, but he would hide in the woods and then he would try to scare them by making noises.

And so I, I stayed in touch with Everett until unfortunately, he died last year.

And I would say that I'd say Everett, you know, you're just, you're not helping the, you're not helping stop these legends.

You're actually contributing to them by doing these silly noises and stuff.

And people are going to be there at her grave and just, Oh my gosh, look, there's something going on here and it's spooky.

And then they'll go home and they'll tell the stories and then other kids go out there.

So that's, I think that's one reason she's become so well known.

And it's also the the story now that that most mass media wants to look at because there's so many interesting aspects to the story and so much, so much detail that they can bring out in the story.

So she's become kind of like the iconic American vampire.

So just thinking about for you personally then and all the research that you've done, you know, when you think of all the cases that you've examined, what are the strangest or the most bizarre for you personally that you've come across?

It's going to be interesting when I tell you this one because it's a it's a story of Jess Roll Smith and Jethro.

Jethro Smith was a was AUS citizen.

He was a, a veteran of the Revolutionary War, but this took place in in Canada.

So this this is probably not going to help our relations, which are pretty strange right now anyway.

So Jethro Smith, here's some background.

The southern portion portion of the Canadian province of Quebec, known as the Eastern Townships, borders New England.

It's it's an English speaking part of of Quebec and Canada.

And in 1791 it was described as an almost unbroken wilderness.

So to encourage settlement, the Crown offered land grants to those who were willing to undertake, you know, the very arduous task of turning forests and Swans into farm students and towns.

And most of these Hardy folks that came to that part of Quebec were new from New England states.

In the backs back woodsman Jethro Smith was one of those pioneering adventurers who crossed the border into Canada, settling in the newly formed community of Stanbridge E.

His plight was recorded nearly 100 years later in a history column in the Waterloo Advertiser from that community.

No, I'm, I'll read, I'll read you the story because the ritual is just, it's very much unlike any 5 encounter infected.

While it's unique, here's, here's the story.

Lot 5 was settled in 1798 by Jethro Smith of Waterbury, Vermont.

Smith was known among the early settlers as an experienced hunter and a trapper, whose spring guns and steel traps, skillfully set at night, wrought havoc among the bears and wolves, which at that time infested the country.

Smith is said to have been a superstitious person, who firmly believed in the powers of witchcraft and necromancy, and that the souls of men after death possessed unlimited influence over the living.

A strange sort of spiritualism not easily defined.

The following story, which I have from our aged friend EJ Briggs, of this place, may serve to illustrate to a certain extent the blighting influence of witchcraft which swept over New England states 250 years ago, at which time to have disputed the power of disembodied spirits would have brought ruin to the unbeliever, believer, and the unwary, A belief that still existed.

At the period of which I am writing.

Three of Smith's sons had lately died of consumption.

The fourth and last son was stricken with the disease, and was living at the point of death.

While watching at the bedside of his afflicted son, Smith claimed that he had been accosted by a spirit from the unknown world, who urged him to exhume the remains of his third son, who had lately died and burned that portion of the body from whence the fell disease originated.

I guess that means lungs.

By which means.

The wrath of the devil's dark Angel would be appeased and the health of his dying sun restored.

Smith called on George Briggs, who at that time was living nearby, and entreated him to be present at the burning.

Briggs, fully aware that his neighbor was laboring under a terrible hallucination, strove hard to put him alight.

But nothing could be done.

That evening, at early twilight, a log heap, standing not far from Smith's residence, was discovered to be on fire.

Briggs hurried away to the place with a harrowing sense, and then he saw the scene.

The afflicted man, bowed down with sorrow and long watching, was walking slowly around the burning heap, calling aloud to the Angel of death to make good his promise and restore to health again his dying son.

On the following morning Smith's fourth and last son died, leaving the disappointed and helpless man a physical wreck for life.

End Quote.

And just following on from that and, and thinking in particular about vampires grasp, do you have any particular favorite stories that you researched that made, you know, made their way into the book?

Well, one of them I talked about, I think the the last time I was talking to you back in 2023, that was the the story of Congregational Minister Justice Ford from Belchertown.

So instead of reiterating that story, I think I'll share another one with you.

It's also from another minister, not a Congregational minister, but a Baptist minister was named with Enoch Hayes Place.

He was born in Rochester, NH in 1786 and at the age of 24, newly converted to the Freewheel Baptist faith.

He set out from for Vermont from his home in southeastern New Hampshire to try to introduce God to as many people as possible.

So on that same day, which was September the 3rd, 1810, he began the Daily Journal that he would keep for the rest of his life for the next 55 years.

And during this evangelical mission place made a point of visiting the afflicted.

So he encountered many, many injuries and illnesses and his his list that he has in his diary is pretty harrowing.

It shows what miseries people at that time had to contend with.

There were burns, drownings, being kicked by a horse, dropsy, cancer, rheumatism, colic fever, did typhus, spotted fever, and of course consumption.

And placed noted in his diary that often he didn't know the cause of the deaths that he encountered.

He wrote that a person would become quite ill and then die.

But in his diary also emphasizes over and over his belief that God was protecting him so that he could accomplish his own mission, his mission to convert as many people as possible.

Well, one of Reverend Place's first stops after starting his mission was Barnstead, New Hampshire.

And there he was asked to visit this local resident named Moses Dennett, who was dying of consumption.

Later that same day, which was September the 4th, 1810, he was requested to quote, attend the taking up remains of Moses's daughter.

So I'll read you his little diary entry about that.

I was then requested by Esquire, Hodgestone and others to attend the taking up of the remains of Janie D Dennett who had been dead over 2 years.

She died with a consumption age 21.

She was the daughter of the before mentioned sick brother, That's Moses.

The people had a desire to see if anything had grown upon her stomach.

Accordingly I attended this morning, Wednesday, September 5th, a little after the break of day, with Brother George and a number of the neighbors.

They opened the grave, and it was a solemn sight indeed.

A young brother by the name of Adams examined the mouldy spectacle, but could find nothing as they supposed they should.

Suffice to say it was a melancholy sight to many.

I can say of the truth.

I saw such a sight this morning as I never saw before.

There was but little left except bones and part of the vitals which served to show to all to all what we are tending to.

After the grave was sold up again, I went with Sister Wilson to visit Brother Dennett and prayed with him where we had a good season To our souls.

God bless for it.

End Quote.

Unfortunately, Moses Dennett died on December 28th 1810 at the age of 52, which was less than three months after the ex exhumation.

So even though the attendants failed to discover the suspicious growth, probably a vine or a sprout which is sometimes looked for in these cases, I think the exhumation might have been judged at least partially successful because the next death in the family was 184333 or 33 years after the death of Moses.

I think maybe I should point out too that Reverend Place was not judging the exhumation or the people involved.

He does in his diary.

He doesn't question why Fanny or Jane was exhumed.

He he doesn't interpret it as a horrible superstition or exert exert the exhumers to repent.

True to the tone of his general and general tone of his diary, he's down to earth and he's accepting life's mysteries.

He wrote that the site of the corpse was melancholy, but still it manifested God's plan for everyone, which is the dissolution of the earthly vessel that houses the immortal soul.

And just kind of moving on, you had a a particular case that you became involved in in in 1990, didn't you, in Connecticut.

Do you want to just explain to the listeners about how you became involved in that case and and what it revealed?

Yeah, well.

In the early spring of 1990, I got a phone call, and the voice at the other end of the phone said this one bury was really weird.

It looks like this guy was buried long enough to decompose, and then he was dug up and some of his parts were rearranged and then he was buried again.

Well, the voice belonged to the Connecticut State Archaeologist Nick Bellantoni, and he said over the phone that he'd been aware made aware of my research in the New England's vampires and was hoping that I might be able to shed some light on these peculiar findings Dave was going to tell me about.

He described how a few weeks earlier three boys were having fun sliding down the slope of a recently excavated section of a gravel pit in town of Griswold.

And as the boys descended, 2 human skulls seem to pop out of the ground and accompany them to the bottom of the pit.

So they did the right thing.

They reported their fine to the local police who at first wondered if this might be a murder case because one victim of the serial killer, Michael Ross had previously been an unearthed in Griswold.

But closer examine examination revealed that the remains were quite old.

So that's why it why they contacted the state archaeologist.

Well, Bell and Tony's research revealed that the skulls were from an unmarked family cemetery that had been in use from the mid 1700s to around 1830, after which time it was abandoned and then eventually disappeared from sight.

But when I visited the excavation, Nick and his team of archaeologists were just completing the process of unearthing 29 the 29 human remains that they found in the cemetery.

These remains were bubble wrapped and stored waiting for re burial in another active cemetery in in Griswold.

All but one, that is.

And that was burial #4 the weird one that Nick had mentioned on the phone.

His remains had been sent to the Museum of Health and Science for analysis by a forensic anthropologist, Paul Sledzic.

The complete skeleton of this man, The best preserved of the cemetery, by the way, had been buried in a crypt with stone slabs winding the sides and the tops of the coffin.

I mean, it looked like they really did not want this guy leaving the grave.

And on the lid of the hexagonal wooden coffin, arranged in brass tacks was spelled out JB 55, presumably the initials and the age of death of this individual.

Now, at this point, I'm I'm going to summarize what Nick Bell and Tony found, but I want to say that you really shouldn't read Dick's own account of finding this grade because it it's like a thrilling mystery.

You can find it in an article that he and I co-authored in 2023 in the Middleton of of the Archaeological Society of Connecticut.

The article's called Fear of the Undead, an archaeological and folkloristic interpretation of the New England vampire tradition.

So anyway, the open grave revealed that JB's skull and thigh bones as femurs had been rearranged into a kind of skull and crossbone pattern on top of his ribs in the vertebrae, which had also been rearranged.

Later analysis by the forensic anthropologist Sludsick showed that JB's ribs contain lesions or scars that indicated he had a chronic pulmonary infection, likely tuberculosis.

And in any of that, it would have been probably interpreted as consumption by the people at that time.

Two of the graves along the embankment next to JB's grave were an IB 45 and an NB 13, also spelled out in brass tacks who might have been J BS wife or other female relative and child.

So Nick, Paul and I arrived at the following scenario as a last resort to spare the lives of the family and stop consumption from spreading into the community.

J BS body was exhumed so that his vital organs, or perhaps his entire corpse could be burned.

But when his body was unearthed, it was found perhaps too decomposed to remove and burn.

So the exhumers resorted to an alternate solution.

They removed the skull and his long bones and rearranged them, which is really a well known faux practice designed to keep the dead from leaving the grave.

Well, interestingly, initial DNA analysis of JB's remains revealed a generalized European Lynnite, and now newer technology has identified A matching surname.

Barber in further research located an obituary in the Norwich CT Courier from 1826 for a 12 year old boy named Nathan Barber, son of John Barber who died in Griswold on July 27th, 1826.

So the grave near J BS coffin containing the notation in B13 packed on the lid might very well be that of Nathan Barber who died during his 13th year.

And also there's a map from the county of an 1844 map that shows the site for a House of J Barber near the Walton Cemetery.

So a lot of intriguing evidence.

And I think as new evidence comes to light, I'm sure this extraordinary story will continue to evolve.

But for now, significantly, this is the only actual physical evidence for the existence of of New England's vampire tradition.

The rest the rest of the evidence.

Basically narrative stories.

But I think it helps to kind of highlight something that you said right at the very beginning of our conversation, which is that, you know, your research just proved to, to, to make the point that the more you looked, the more you found.

And you know that you, you think you find maybe all that you can find.

And then suddenly you find a whole, a whole lot of, of further examples.

And it, it does beg the question, you know, what else is still out there in terms of archival material, newspaper material, evidence such as as was found in Connecticut here with, with this particular case, in terms of just how, how, how much this kind of happened in terms of the way of dealing with tuberculosis.

How much more evidence might there be out there that as of yet still hasn't been discovered?

Well, I'm sure there's, there's more.

And, and I, I, I say, as more and more databases come online and they're searchable, then we'll find more and more of these cases.

You know, the number of cases blossomed along with the blossoming of, of electronic databases that were searchable through Boolean algebra.

So I could go to a newspaper, go to a newspaper archive electronically and I might put in consumption, exhumation, heart, something like that superstition.

And I put that in and I may get like 35105 thousand hits.

And so I just have to go through, you know, 11 paper at a time, one article at a time.

It's time consuming, but you know, for someone who's addicted to research, it's like it's like going to a gambling concedo casino saying no, I know I'm not going to win most of the time, but when I do, it could be big and.

And you know, just coming back to to your book, you obviously mention in the book the the COVID-19 pandemic.

You know, how do you see parallels between the 19th century tuberculosis crisis and obviously today's maybe public health challenges that we face?

Well, I, I think during the tuberculosis epidemic in New England, people ask the same questions we now ask when we're faced with public, you know, puzzling epidemics like COVID.

You know, what's going to happen to us?

Will, will we be safe?

What should we do?

What can we do?

These questions come from uncertainty and fear, regardless of, of time or place or even the kind of epidemic that we're facing.

And if these concerns aren't adequately addressed by medical and government or other officially sanctioned authoritative cultural organizations, if the answers provided don't lend lead to, you know, acceptable resolutions, primarily not dying, then people look elsewhere.

And as I said before, folklore.

Folklore and folk medicine offers answers.

So during the COVID crisis, folklore naturally turn to looking at the developing folklore about COVID.

And of course, we there have now there have been books and articles written about the folklore that came out of the of the COVID pandemic.

You know how to cure it.

And folk medicine wasn't the only alternative strand of medicine to step into the void for COVID quacks were also out there selling their snake oil instead of snake oil.

There was one company was selling immunity oil as a cure for COVID and COVID treatment with Ivor.

Ivormectin, an anti parasitic drug was also widely circulated but also debunked.

So I don't know.

The more things change, the more they remain the same.

Yeah, yeah, not a lot, not a lot has changed, has it?

In terms of of, I think what it reveals just about us as human beings in a moment of crisis, doesn't it?

And I don't know if you want to elaborate on that in terms of what you think the vampire panic really just does reveal about human nature and our response to these unexplained crises.

Sure.

Well, as I like to say, looking back from the president, I don't present.

I don't think we should break our arms patting ourselves on the back over how smart we are today.

We have more knowledge, sure, but we're not more intelligent than our ancestors were 200 years ago.

So when we're faced with health issues and diseases that currently have no solution, we conjure one up or let someone else conjure one up for us, as they did with tuberculosis and we still do with or did with COVID.

Old, old, old remedies and solutions come back.

We still let quacks sell us quick fixes.

And desperate people who take desperate measures aren't necessarily fools.

We know that.

I think it's important to understand that belief itself isn't really necessary in order to take action.

As I mentioned before, sometimes just doing something can be enough.

So yeah, I think ultimately the vampire practice, the consumption ritual, rest on a universal instinct that's always been with us, and that's the will to survive.

And just kind of having that moment to reflect on the history of tuberculosis, you know, if people had had that understanding of germ theory at the time, how do you think history would have played out differently?

Well, I think many, many lives would have been spared.

It's it's the germ theory had been known at that time.

I mean, the medical establish establishment at that time had to work in a in a fog of mystery, really not knowing that consumption was caused by a germ.

And I think that situation pitted competing theories against each other.

So looking back, it seems that these internal squabbles among medical practitioners probably actually thwarted progress toward what should have been the common goal to find a cause and then a cure for the consumption epidemic.

Even after 1882, when Edward Koch announced his discovery of the tuberculosis bacterium, it took a long time to find a cure.

In fact, it wasn't until the 1940s that streptomycin was found to be an effective antibacterial drug.

But just knowing that the disease was contagious allowed the establishment of measures that did did reduce its spread.

Particularly sanitary majors in the isolation of patients.

I think I would like to cite an important book that addresses these questions about modern day legends and fears that remind mind one of the New England vampire panic.

Yeah.

John D Lee in 2014 published a book called An Epidemic of Rumors.

How stories shape our perceptions of disease.

So this book was published during the SARS epidemic, before COVID.

But his general thesis I think holds for all epidemics, and I'll quote him here.

Concerning novel diseases, people use certain sets of narratives to discuss presence of illness, to mediate their shares of it, to come to terms with it, and otherwise incorporates corporate its presence into their daily routine.

Past experiences with disease Past experience with disease does influence future perception of newer diseases.

Some of these narratives express a harsher, more paranoid view of reality than others.

Some are openly racist and xenophobic, and some are more concerned with issues of treatment and prevention than blame.

But all revolve around a single emotion in all of its many forms.

Fear in the quote So when we look at tuberculosis today, we see an old fear that has come back to haunt us.

Worldwide, tuberculosis is still a major health crisis.

According to the World Health Organization, a total of 1,000,000 and a quarter people died from TB in 2023.

It has probably now returned to being the world's leading cause of death from a single infectious agent, following three years in which it was replaced by COVID and tuberculosis and now has now become drug resistant.

And since the US just recently stopped funding aid programs in other countries, TB is now surging.

And there was an article in the New York Times like 2 days ago about this.

So, and also at this very moment, the state of Kansas is undergoing an alarming, alarming outbreak of tuberculosis, to quote an author of a recent book about tuberculosis.

I like this quote.

Like vampires, TV has a way of reinventing itself for new eras and new populations.

End Quote.

So we're not out of the woods yet.

And although I doubt that we're going to see people exhuming their red the relatives corpses, we still need to find a way to get beyond current crises.

Michael, it's been so fascinating to to talk to you again.

I mean, it was such a pleasure to chat to you last time and it's been equally as pleasurable to to be able to talk about vampires gross with the U2 with you 2IN in today's chat.

I will of course make sure to include in the in the podcast description notes and, and on the website links to where people can access your books, etcetera, because they are incredible reads.

They are just a real treasure trove of resources and materials and helping to understand this particular folklore and the history involved.

I highly recommend people take a look at those and I will do my best to make sure that all of those are included so that people can easily find them.

Well, thank you, Michelle.

I appreciate it.

It's a pleasure to talk to you anytime.

And I will say goodbye to everybody listening.

Bye everybody.

Thank you for joining us on this journey into the unknown.

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