Food for the Dead: On the Trail of New England's Vampires

Garnet Books

by Michael E. Bell

Forget Bela Lugosi's Count Dracula. In nineteenth-century New England another sort of vampire was relentlessly ravishing the populace, or so it was believed by many rural communities suffering the plague of tuberculosis. Indeed, as this fascinating book shows, the vampire of folk superstition figures significantly in the attempt of early Americans to reasonably explain and vanquish the dreaded affliction then known as consumption. In gripping narrative detail, folklorist Michael E. Bell reconstructs a distant world, where on March 17, 1892, three corpses were exhumed from a Rhode Island cemetery. One of them, Mercy Brown, who had succumbed to consumption, appeared to have turned over in her grave. Mercy's family cut out her heart, which still held clots of blood, burned it on a nearby rock, and fed the ashes to her ailing brother. To Mercy's community she had become a vampire living a spectral existence and consuming the vitality of her siblings. From documents written as early as 1790 to a recent conversation with a descendant of Mercy Brown, Bell investigates twenty cases in which the vampiric dead were exhumed to save the ailing living. He also explores a widespread folk tradition that has survived generations, as ordinary people today strive to battle extraordinary diseases like Ebola or AIDS with a deeply rooted belief in their power to heal themselves. "Bell's absorbing account is ... a major contribution to the study of New England folk beliefs."—Boston Globe "Filled with ghostly tales, glowing corpses, rearranged bones, visits to hidden graveyards.... This is a marvelous book."—Providence Journal

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Vampires, Folklore, Anthropology, Paranormal, Horror

352 pages, Paperback

First published October 10, 2001

Reviews

[M. Slinger-Carreer · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this!
This is non-fiction, so don't even think about picking this up if you're looking for spooky stories about vampires. The author is a folklorist. So he spends his time hunting the sources of legends down, and figure out how urban myths and old tales came to be. Lots of great information and intriguing thoughts from the author.
And yes, like other reviewers have said, there is redundancy. BUT, most of the redundancy is because Bell transcribes this conversations with people from a recorded tape. The people he interviews repeat themselves a lot (as most of us do when we're recalling something). If you listen to a lot of stories from older folks, you'll be use it. ;)

[Meg Powers · Rating 2 out of 5]

Okay, updated gripe: in spite of spending an entire chapter on global cultures' perceptions of blood as a life force (and one imbibed across time, geography, and culture, to gain the strength of others) , and in spite of discussing in previous chapters the idea of taking the ashes of the consumptive's burned heart homeopathically, we get a meandering chapter of question-mark plagued paragraphs where Bell speculates where, o where, could these isolated New Englanders get the idea of eating the ashes of the heart? He vaguely suggests an import of German Hessians during the Revolutionary War but doesn't expand upon any German vampire tradition. Instead , he implies Germany's locale is enough to draw other vampire traditions from surrounding areas.
This irritates me for several reasons, the lesser being : you're a folklorist, surely you are attuned to the concept of the collective unconscious and global archetypes? He laid the foundation for why New Englanders may have arrived at the remedy of ash-drinking in early chapters, why this condescending approach to their logic and imaginations now, towards the end of the book? I agree with a fellow reviewer that this guy must have desperately needed to fulfill a word count.
Another reason his "whoa, where did those uneducated but earthy New Englanders get this crazy idea?" approach to the chapter feels so lazy is that there is a well known precedent for drinking human remains in Western European culture that pre-dates the arrival of the colonists.* Hell, I learned about people drinking mummies as a life-tonic when I was in high school. I kept waiting for Bell to dig into this tradition, but he side steps it completely in favor of some cluttered musings and white colonist retellings of supposed Cherokee vampire tales that he disputes a few pages later.
My third complaint along this thread is : why isn't there any mention of Catholicism? Rhode Island had a Catholic population by the mid 1800s. East Greenwich, close in proximity to Exter, had a Catholic church in 1853. I am not trying to make a solid connection between taking the body and the blood of Christ (a grotesque and pagan concept to many outside of the Catholic church) and burning the life blood of the vampire and eating it homeopathically, but... isn't it there? The dead relative was thought to be sustaining itself off the blood of the living, even if through some telepathy. It was deriving a life force from its family. The corpse is exhumed, the heart, with "flowing blood" found inside was cut out, burned, and eaten. The curse is ended, the lifeforce is ingested by the living family member. If practicing Catholics imbibe the Eucharist, a practice that was granted to everyday parishioners by the 19th century, and therefore take Christ into themselves, it's not so big a jump to transfer the logic of transubstantiation to the healing property of eating the burned life blood of the undead. I don't think this a tenous connection to make, and it's certainly not as tenuous as some of Bell's connections. That's my problem with this book : he seems to only pursue branches of research that interest him or that justify his own folklore biases instead of exapanding his scope. I kept waiting for references to the Eucharist or at LEAST mummy drinking, but nope. What the heck?


an earlier gripe:

This book was clearly well researched over a long period of time, but there are some bold and baseless statements here and there that have irked the hell out of me. I had to put the book down after reading this statement: "The New England vampire tradion, as incorporated into the works of Lovecraft and Lowell, has had no discernible effect on the popular imagination." Skipping ahead, he concludes the chapter with "I have often wondered if it is possible to imagine a vampire without the shadow of Dracula." HOWEVER, in spite of his exhaustive research, Bell failed to pursue a connection between the two. Stoker was stage managing for the Lyceum and toured the US during a period overlapping the Mercy Brown event- his company stopped in Boston and Providence during the span of 1895-1896; the Mercy Brown case was circulating in papers, and if he didn't come into contact with a Providence Journal article, it was well-documented in Boston papers *, which he most certainly would have seen. Many believe Mercy's case was a source of inspiration for DRACULA (and specifically the character of Lucy) , which was published a year later. Stoker chose Transylvania because he thought it sounded cool and mysterious, not necessarily because he was well-versed in Transylvania vampire folklore . Yes, there was a vampire precedent in gothic literature that Stoker must have drawn from, but he would have very likely been exposed to the periodicals sensationalizing New England consumptive cases while touring the Northeast. Even if the strong likelihood that Mercy Brown partially inspired DRACULA could not be evidenced by clippings in Stoker's ownership, you would think Bell would bother to seek a connection. Unfortunately, he seems to have drawn such a dramatic contrast between the sauve Lugosi Dracula (the emphasis is not on Stoker's literary Dracula) of London via the Carpathians and the tubercular Rhode Island teen girl as to not even bother pursuing other branches of research. Why not turn to theatre history for clues ? You'd think theatre wasn't an evolution of the oral folklore tradition or something. Yeesh.
It also irks me as a Rhode Islander- in spite of making RI his home for years and publishing a whole ass book on New England vampires, he's displaying the outsider's denial of RI having any kind of global impact on pop culture, which I think is bullshit (he is also condescending towards the locals he interviews, even if occasionally apologetic in hindsight).
Furthermore, even if Lovecraft's SHUNNED HOUSE didn't reach DRACULA's level of pop culture saturation , Lovecraft has had an extreme impact on giants of genre fiction- we would not have ALIEN without Lovecraft, for instance. I don't mean to deliberately misinterpret Bell; okay, we didn't get a Universal film of THE SHUNNED HOUSE. But we have quite a lot of famous nerds who were influenced by his complete works and also developed an interest in RI folklore as a result, thus incorporating that influence back into pop culture.

The whole chapter I'm drawing from is a mess, anyway. Bell gives a sloppy summary of THE SHUNNED HOUSE and keeps referring to the protagonist as H.P. Lovecraft (which isn't ony incorrect, it's weird ) and thus refers to the fictional character Elihu Whipple as Lovecraft's uncle. If you were to read this book without any familiariy with Lovecraft's life and work, you might take for granted Bell was recounting actual events. He writes it that way, and it confused me, and I've studied Lovecraft's life and read that short story many times.


Anyway, this isn't a review, as I'm still only halfway through the book. I just needed to complain. Bell's confident erasure of any possibility that Rhode Island influenced vampire fiction as we know it today betrays a narrow scope of research. It leaves a bad taste in my mouth.


*https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/arti...

*https://blog.newspapers.com/the-new-e...

[Christopher Saunders · Rating 4 out of 5]

Michael E. Bell's Food for the Dead provides a fascinating sketch of the vampire craze in 19th Century New England. For the better part of a century, it was said, various northeastern states were stalked by the Hungry Undead, most famously in the Mercy Brown affair in 1892 Rhode Island which received national press attention. Bell shows that these incidents were the result of periodic tuberculosis outbreaks, which produced many of the symptoms (inexplicable bleeding and wasting away) traditionally associated with vampirism, which New Englanders (already primed by generational memories of witchcraft and the occult) seized upon to explain the unexplainable. But this isn't a straightforward debunking book: Bell notes that for most of the 19th Century, germ theory was still in its infancy and tuberculosis, in particular, seemed as mysterious in its cause as during its heyday as the "White Plague" of medieval Europe. Thus, to both superstitious "Swamp Yankees" and even nominally more enlightened folk, vampires seemed more likely than a microscopic organism that killed unseen - especially when outbreaks seemed to focus on specific families and small communities, as in Mercy Brown's case. A refreshing mixture of history and folklore study, showing that one doesn't have to be ignorant or gullible to accept absurd explanations for phenomena beyond common understanding.

[K. · Rating 2 out of 5]

Let's start with storytime: I bought this book at a discount bookstore in the Mall of America in June 2004. I was staying with a friend in Nebraska (believe me when I say that the Border Security guy was hella confused that someone would fly all the way from Australia just to visit Nebraska), and we did a roadtrip up to Minneapolis-St Paul to stay with a mutual friend. She took us to the Mall of America, and pretty much all I remember about it is that I had Dippin' Dots for the first time and was very confused by them, that there were like five of every store, and that I bought this book. When I then proceeded to spend the next week struggle-bussing my way through on my friend's parents' sofa in small town Nebraska.

I was hoping that my memories of this book being struggle bus territory were somewhat coloured by 21 year old me not really being a huge fan of non-fiction, and the fact that I was probably expecting something more akin to Buffy. So I figured I'd reread it and see for myself.

Eleven years later, this was still struggle bus territory. But not because I was expecting Buffy and it didn't deliver. No, it was struggle bus territory because it's really hard to find the cohesive storyline. The author is a folklorist, which means the book can't quite decide if it's telling the story of weird folk treatments for consumption (burning the heart of a dead relative and drinking the ashes. Ew.), or whether it's about reports of vampirism in New England. In many of the cases that Bell discusses, the exhumed individual wasn't considered a vampire at the time, but it was reported as a vampire story years later. So everything seemed a bit...vague and uncertain.

I think my biggest problem, though, is that the author has effectively turned large parts of his oral history research into text. This would be totally fine, except that he's included all the random tangents that his interview subjects have wandered off on and it often takes a few pages to get back to the point. It results in a very conversational writing style that includes discussion of the background noise like the car wipers swishing back and forth on the recording. It's not relevant and honestly, I didn't care about any of the random tangents that were discussed ("this woman knows about a vampire legend, but she also told me that her house is haunted! Here's that story. Now let's have her teenaged son recount the vampire legend and see how it's different"). Sure, those additions were relevant to Bell in his role as State Folklorist, but they don't add anything to the story except padding.

The second half of the book featured a LOT of quotations and discussion of how various New England writers had included elements of the New England vampire legend in their own work. Which worked in some ways, but it also felt like a massive amount of info-dumping with very few conclusions drawn.

It's definitely an interesting subject, and I understand why Bell spent twenty five years researching it. But at the end of the day, turning 20 reported cases - some of which weren't even in New England - into a 300+ page book was a little bit of a stretch, and as a result the book felt like it was wandering all over the place.

[Caroline · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book is unreadable. The subject matter is fascinating, but this dude mostly just quotes from other sources, says character's names like you know who they are already, and inserts himself into the action too much. I'd rather reread Salem's Lot for the bajillioneth time.

[Alex · Rating 4 out of 5]

Exceedingly well-researched and sensibly laid-out. This was a critical starting point for my research this past semester. It's accessible to anyone who is not a student of Folklore, but it definitely feels aimed at more academic parties than general-interest ones.

I still think it's an interesting read for anyone who might want a glimpse of a non-traditional viewpoint for a literal historical perspective of one of Pop Culture's most significant creatures!

[Tracy's Terrors · Rating 3 out of 5]

I’ve been taking a break from horror novels to read more non-fiction. But just because I’m shifting gears doesn’t mean that I’m leaving the darkness behind! While true crime is a popular destination for vacationing horror fiction fans like myself, serial killers and the like have never been my jam. Instead, I’m more at home in the often eldritch and overlapping worlds of history, anthropology, and cultural studies. It was while searching in these areas that I came across Food for the Dead: On the Trail of New England’s Vampires (2011) by folklorist Michael Bell. I’m from Rhode Island, a state that’s central to Bell’s study, and I always enjoy reading about its long and, some say, haunted past. Combine the chronicles of my natal backwater with the lore of my favorite mythical monsters and I’m in!

Unfortunately, when I’m this excited to read something, it almost inevitably disappoints me and that’s the case here. For starters, Bell strips the word “vampire” of its defining features and applies it in contexts where, he readily admits, it isn’t appropriate. His overarching concerns are sometimes mired in excessive genealogical detail, superfluous anecdotes, and over-long transcripts. My biggest issue with the book is Bell’s representation of his interview subjects, who are set up to be, at best, quaint rustics and, at worst, insensitive idiots. We often seem to be having a laugh at their expense and it’s uncomfortable. Nonetheless, Food for the Dead sheds light on a fascinating part of the New England folk medicine tradition and offers an emotionally compelling story of human struggle in the face of a seemingly insurmountable disease. It’s worth reading on these counts alone–no vampires required.

Intrigued by the legend of Mercy Brown, New England’s most famous “vampire,” Bell sets off to discover the real story behind the region’s supposed blood suckers. In the course of his research, he uncovers the history of what he calls “the vampire practice,” a folk medicine technique that rural New Englanders of the 18th and 19th centuries used to cure tuberculosis. He considers the possible origins of the remedy and traces how it may have spread through New England by way of troop movements, kinship ties, and itinerant healers. Descriptions of the practice, he finds, have little in common with the classic vampire myth. Most significantly, no one involved in the exhumations or in the local transmission of the stories used the “v” word to describe what was happening.

So how did the term come into use? According to Bell, it was only used by outsiders and its deployment was part of a broader cultural war between the rural and the urban, the superstitious “swamp yankee” and the “civilized” city sophisticate. With the emergence of germ theory, the release of Stoker’s Dracula in 1897, and the rise of mass media in the early 20th century, vampires became a source of entertainment, and the European literary discourse around these creatures became the primary means of interpreting New England’s stories. Much to Bells’ dismay and frustration, Dracula continues to cast a shadow that blots out the historical nuances of the region’s peculiar folkloric practice.

Bell’s sources go beyond genealogical records and old newspapers. For those of a more literary bent, he also looks at the representation of New England’s “vampire practice” in fiction and poetry, paying special attention to Lovecraft, Poe, and Amy Lowell. If you enjoy the macabre works of these authors, then you’ve probably found yourself drawn to haunted hotspots–houses and cemeteries where ghosts have been sighted. So called “legend tripping” is a popular activity in the horror community, and Bell provides interesting insights into how this modern practice shapes the evolution of local lore.

There’s a lot to like about Food For the Dead but plenty of problems, too. For starters, Bell’s generous use of the word “vampire” feels like a cynical marketing ploy because, as he persuasively demonstrates, the New England cure for tuberculosis has nothing to do with vampires as they are generally understood. If extricating this regional folk remedy from the cobwebs of misinterpretation is the main point of his book, then why does he lean so heavily on the language of said misinterpretation? Anticipating this question, he writes,
I use the term vampire when referring to the individuals who were exhumed, not because . . .
they were labeled as vampires by their exhumers, but because it is a shorthand means for
referencing them. I could have substituted a more accurate phrase, such as ‘corpses who were
suspected of being the cause, directly or indirectly, of the illness and death of their kinfolk,’
but that would soon become tedious to writer and reader alike. (x-xi)
In other words, he’s sacrificing historical precision for the sake of brevity and convenience. To me this trade-off isn’t worth it for a couple of reasons. First, the point of studies like this is to get inside the minds of historical actors by reconstructing the frameworks they would have used to understand their own behavior. What did these New Englanders think they were doing when they disinterred bodies and burned their hearts? It’s difficult to recover their intentions–or, at least, to foreground their motivations in the reader’s mind-when you import a label as heavily freighted as “vampire" into a scene that isn’t about destroying malevolent creatures. Secondly, “vampire” has a commonly understood meaning that includes active bloodsucking of the kind that forces the dead to rise from the grave. By deleting this most salient feature, Bell transforms the term into a category so broad that it could include almost anything. So much for respecting nuance. And finally, if Bell’s goal is to balance historical correctness with concision, other words would have served him better. In context, “corpse” is more than sufficient to communicate the larger definition given above and, in circumstances requiring further detail, a phrase like “consumption victim” could steer a lost reader. Generating his own substitutes, Bell suggests that “scapegoat” is likely the most accurate because it describes how exhumed bodies functioned in relation to their communities. Why doesn’t it appear on the book’s cover? I suspect it’s because it doesn’t have the powerful allure of “vampire.”

As for the book’s title, it’s easy to imagine alternatives that would give readers a better idea of its content. Instead of On the Trail of New England’s Vampires, a tagline that frames Bell’s work as an exciting monster hunt with the researcher in hot pursuit, he could have called it something more descriptive like Folk Medicine and Tuberculosis in New England. There is an audience for books on the history of medicine, a genre in which this text is easily slotted, but, let’s face it, books on vampirism have a much larger readership.

I’m deep into this review and haven’t yet begun to discuss Food for the Dead in earnest because I’m still quibbling over language. What’s gotten under my skin? Ordinarily the kind of misdirection I’ve described here wouldn’t bother me at all. I understand that authors, particularly academics, need to market their books so as to reach the widest possible audience. The real frustration for me, which I suspect I’m displacing onto Bell’s word choices, is his condescension toward fans of the classic vampire, those who prefer the Dracula myth to the true story of Mercy Brown and who feel letdown when the reasons behind her disinterment are revealed. Apparently this is a response that Bell often faces, and it makes him “wonde[r] why a person would want to cling to a tired, trite symbol” when they could embrace the fascinating history he has to offer (295). The answer, he suspects, is that vampire fans are all vapid consumers looking for reductive and, therefore, easily digestible pieces of culture. They’re intellectually vapid, wanting exciting experiences without having to think too hard about them. I, on the other hand, think that this kind of disappointment could be avoided by using language properly and setting the right expectations. If you actively solicit vampire enthusiasts, they will come. It isn’t nice to then mock their interests.

If Bell’s title is misleading in some ways, it’s spot on in others. This book is about the “trail,” the journey, the long and twisting road of scholarly investigation. Instead of leaving the research process off the page and saving that space for a neat summary of his findings, he makes it the center of the book, taking you with him to archives, cemeteries, and interviews. This approach has its advantages and disadvantages. In the first category, we get to see how legends evolve in conversation and how new variations are introduced into old stories. We also get to meet funny characters like Lewis Everett Peck, a descendant of Mercy Brown, and to hear amusing anecdotes about ghosts at URI and haunted mills. While this local lore isn’t immediately connected to Bell’s quest, it’s likely to entertain readers of this book whom I’m guessing have a general interest in the macabre. The downside is that we often get caught up in complicated family trees and are taken down paths that lead nowhere. Dead ends are revisited again and again. This may be an honest look at academic labor, but it makes for tedious reading.

What’s worse than being boring, though, is being patronizing, and some of the very long transcripts seem to serve little purpose but to make fun of the participants. The interview with town historians Cora and Blanche is a case in point. Repeatedly insisting that Nellie Vaughn wasn’t a vampire, Blanche doesn’t understand that, for a folklorist like Bell, the truth status of a claim–whether or not Nellie was an actual monster–is irrelevant. Her inability to grasp the nature of his project is an obvious source of frustration to Bell, and his account of the conversation, which includes his inner thoughts and spoken asides, seems designed to showcase her lack of sophistication.

But this implicit teasing seems gentle compared to his treatment of Jennie, a friend of his assistant, who takes him to the Young Family Cemetery and, later, on a search for supernatural light orbs. Though unrelated to his quest, Bell spends a lot of time describing Jennie’s affect and vocal peculiarities. Alternately whispering, giggling, and screaming, she rapidly modulates the volume of her voice in ways that make her seem more like a child than an adult woman. You can feel his judgement through the unnecessary inclusion of speech riddled with malapropisms (“Shunned upon!”), colloquialisms, and grammatical errors. At first I thought my reaction to Jennie was misdirected self-loathing. Whether right or wrong, I’ve worked hard to kill my New England accent and to peel away the regional usages that characterize her conversation. But Bell’s opinion of Jennie is crystal clear. “[S]tanding amid the tumbledown headstones of young adults who perished before their parents too soon,” he contemplates his emotional response to the gloomy cemetery, compares it to Jennie’s, and finds hers wanting: “Perhaps Jennie was nervous, frightened, and thrilled. I was immensely saddened” (188). What will Jennie think when she reads this book and finds herself depicted as an unfeeling yokel? As someone from the backwoods of Rhode Island, I see myself in her and, consequently, feel a little resentful of the rough treatment.

Food for the Dead has its awkward moments, to be sure, and maybe I feel them more acutely because I was once a local. But my provincial roots are also why I like it: I haven’t heard the phrase “bookin’ it” or thought of the department store Ann & Hope in decades. This isn’t to say that you have to be from New England to appreciate what Bell’s done. Through careful research, he recovers an approach to illness and healing that’s completely foreign today. What hasn’t changed, though, is our desire to protect our loved ones, and it’s in this shared aim of preserving our families at all costs that we can begin to understand the “superstitious” and seemingly grotesque actions of our ancestors. Bell brings the “swamp yankee” close, reminding us that no matter how sophisticated we think we are, we’re never that far from the darkness of the past.

[Piratedessa · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not what I expected

While there was nothing wrong with this book it was certainly not what I had hoped it to be. When I bought the book I thought it would be about New Englands "vampires", perhaps detailing cases and discussing the beliefs and practices of the time. While the author does touch on these, hes not focusing on it. Rather, he goes on long, meandering sidnotes about nothing of consequence. At one point he writes about how he missed a train, and tried to decide if he'd go look through the records some more or maybe head to a bookstore. He did, infact, end up at a library.
At another point he goes on about Lovecraft and other fictional stories, and while I love these stories I didnt buy this book to read about fictional, not-quite-vampiric revenants. I bought it to read about tubercular vampires.

Again, though, I have to admit that there really isnt anything wrong with the book. I was expecting a historical account but the author isnt a historian. Hes a folklorist, and if I can set my disappointment aside I have to admit that he told these stories the way I would expect a folklorist to do. Nothing wrong with that, it's just not what I was looking for.

[Heather · Rating 3 out of 5]

this was a fun read, even if the author frequently got in his own way. at times a bit redundant, it was still enjoyable to read about what constituted a "true" vampire in rural New England. i'll give you a hint: they didn't sparkle in the sunlight or seduce teenage girls with low self-esteem. this is much more a book about folk medicine and it's fight against the invisible world of microbes and germs. it's also a book about how legends get transmitted and what they mean to communities past and present. Fans of folklore or just the macabre will certainly find some fun facts, but be warned these are not the sexy vampires pop culture has made us accustomed to.

[Jamie · Rating 2 out of 5]

I kind of felt that the author used the word "Vampire" in the title for pure sensationalism. The people he is writing about are not vampires in the classical sense - the only relation they have to traditional, Eastern European vampires is that they are both a type of succubus.

My other complaint about the writer is that he seems to interject too much of his personal ideas and actions into the text. This actually bothered me so much that I didn't finish the book.

[Amber Ray · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book doesn't focus well on the vampirisim legends. It really talks a lot about the author's researching which is not exciting stuff. I thought also that more information on the treatments/medical issues of the day about tuberculosis would have been a good addition. Good enough as a research for my writing project, but could have had more original information and focused better on the main topic.

[Jess · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not a bad book; more about doing folklore than about vampires, I would say, and a bit more filler than strictly necessary (there's a whole chapter dedicated to paraphrasing Lovecraft), but fine for a quick October read.

[Graeme Davis · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very good account of a supposed outbreak of vampirism in New England, surprisingly recently. Highly recommended for anyone who is interested in the folklore and psychology or vampire superstitions.

[Julia · Rating 3 out of 5]

topics I enjoy - vampires, local history, and folklore - but overall pretty meh

[Megan · Rating 3 out of 5]

If you’re interested in folklore and history, this is an excellent read. If you believe in vampires, this book will be a major buzzkill.

This book starts with the story of Mercy Brown and continues to explore the surprisingly common belief in vampires/magic in parts of rural, non-Puritan New England in the late 1700s- late 1800s. I say “vampires/magic” because the belief centered around a dead person feeding off living family members - something that could be stopped by exhuming the person’s body and burning the heart- without specifying how. There were no specifics around bites in the neck, drinking blood, coming physically out of the grave to feed, or the vampire having been evil or attacked by another vampire during life. The term, “vampire,” was not even used.

All of the ghoulishness in the book comes mostly around the legendarium that sprung up around these exhumed persons. The actual histories of the “vampire” attacks are rather sad. In all cases, families (sometimes large, healthy ones) began inexplicably wasting away from tuberculosis, one family member after another. With medicine helpless to stop tuberculosis and contagion theory not well understood in rural areas, afflicted families would sometimes turn in hope or desperation to the idea that if they could just burn the heart of the first (sometimes last) to die, the rest of the family would be spared. In this way, the author argues that New England vampire history is more about folk medicine than the supernatural.

[Eileen O'Finlan · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book gives a fascinating look at a little-known phenomenon in New England history - the New England Vampire Panic. Folklorist, Michael E. Bell lays out a well-documented explanation of the 19th century practice of exhuming bodies of people who died of tuberculosis (then called consumption) and either burning the heart or the entire body in an effort to prevent the illness and deaths of other family members as the deceased was thought to be "feeding" off living family members. Though they never used the word "vampire" there are enough similarities that the term was later applied. As Bell points out, it was more of a folk remedy than a supernatural belief for those who engaged in it. In the human propensity to look for a scapegoat, the dead became such for people battling a confusing, devestating disease.

[Martha · Rating 4 out of 5]

My curiosity became peaked after reading an article about the Rhode Island vampire craze in 1894. Yes, people were convinced that interred bodies had the power to claw from the grave and inflict illness, namely consumption or 'wasting sickeness,' on healthy people which led to the secretive exhumation of bodies in order to destroy the hearts and other organs which were thought to carry infections to healthy populations. The author did extensive research including the account of the famous Mercy Brown, who died of consumption and was believed to be a vampire. He interviewed a relative of Mercy's who had kept journals and newspaper clippings from the time. The book is a fascinating piece of history. It reads like a history book, very detailed.

[Matt McKeon · Rating 3 out of 5]

Its a fascinating topic: a macabre folk ritual in rural New England in the 18th and 19th century. A person dies of TB, "consumption" and their body is dug up, and multilated or burned somehow. In the two dozen cases Bell counts up, living family members, also suffering from TB, inhale the smoke from the cremation, or ingest part of the body as a protective spell against the dread disease.

The vampire tag is a latter day label, since the practice was common in eastern Europe and the bodies being interfered with there were seen as vampires preying on the living.

Its only three bells, because Mr. Bell isn't the greatest or most organized writer. Partly because the reader wants to know the facts, and Bell, a scholar of folklore, wants to record the beliefs.

[Louise · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have a BA(hons) in Archaeology and Ancient History. My final year dissertation was about the evolution of vampire superstition (how could such legends have started and how did they differ worldwide) and burial evidence of these beliefs in vampires. This books was invaluable to my research and the author was incredibly helpful. If you have an interest in vampires and strange history that goes beyond TV and movies, this book may interest you.

[Liz Clappin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating story and really comprehensive research, my only beef is that organizationally it does jump around. There are a lot of theories and collective ideas that get lost because he diverts attention away and them returns much later. Overall an excellent look at historic folklore and the intersection of that with larger society.

[Mel · Rating 3 out of 5]

Le Sigh....AGAIN. Two in a row here.

While an incredibly interesting topic, the book was a struggle to read. I feel like the author had a certain word count he was aiming for and was determined to keep it. Another case of printing too many things that should have been left in the notes section.

[Michelle · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've read the book three times since I purchased it. There is a lot of fascinating history in the book and I'm related to a lot of people mentioned in the book. I would recommend the book to anyone doing historical research in New England. A lot of great folklore in that area!

[ℐdola ☽ · Rating 4 out of 5]

Apart from the specific case taken into consideration, this book contains more universal observations on myths and how fear often influences our believes and actions.
I have a flare for the grotesque (and philosophical discussions on the bigotry of society), so it was an enjoyable read for me.

[Kyton Cortez · Rating 3 out of 5]

i don’t think i would have licked this book up if it wasn’t for the history class i’m taking, but i liked it regardless. it was fun to take a history class about this topic and i liked going chapter by chapter with the class. it was cool book! i’m glad to know these things now.

[Katrina Thornley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reading the truth was enlightening

[Gigi Conrad · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's reads much like a textbook, but the content is interesting and gruesome. It highlights what fear can mislead.

[Francesca Astraea · Rating 4 out of 5]

337 pages and Carmilla isn't mentioned ONCE

[Mike · Rating 4 out of 5]

The front half of the book largely deals with the author's search for the various 'vampries' of New England. As that, it is largely a recounting of meeting the various sources and how he delved into the local archives. It was overly long and padded.

This said, the rest of the manuscript is informative and well written.

Michael Bell, a folklorist from New England, sets out to explain the Vampire phenomenon as it appeared in the New England states during the Nineteenth Century. How the tradition spread from the Balkans to Western Europe and then finally arrived in the United States. In the 1800s, as the Tuberculosis epidemic was responsible for millions of deaths, the helpless survivors were forced to revive ancient and barbaric customs out of desperation. Leaving in their wake the mutilated remains of their deceased loved ones.

[SmarterLilac · Rating 4 out of 5]

My Halloween read for this year. Pretty good; I was impressed that the author managed to make what could have been a tedious stroll through arcane facts about New England into something super, super creepy. I also couldn't help but be amused by the absurd quality some of the anecdotes had--like the seance held in a fraternity house in order to contact a former member (not something I'd expect to see in such a traditional environment.) And the trivia lover in me appreciated the occasional nod to other books of vampire history and lore--I was shocked to find out that not everyone loves the Florescu family's history of Dracula, and not every historian feels Vlad Tepes was the inspiration for Bram Stoker's evil Count.

[Bill · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a book on folklore, the process of discovering folklore both by interviews and by poring over historical documents. I live in RI. The author captures the flavor of the area as well as its peculiar speaking accent. He also traces the makings of a new vampire tale perhaps started in 1977, and now one of the premiere bits of folklore in the area. In addition he explores these tales' influence on H.P. Lovecraft and American literature and the decline in local and national interest due to the rise of the Hollywood vampire with Bela Lugosi. With the advent of the internet these stories and tales have risen again like the vampires of New England themselves. In all this is a well rounded, well researched book on a little known chapter of American history and folklore.