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

By Michael E. Bell

These stories of vampire legends and gruesome nineteenth-century practices is “a major contribution to the study of New England folk beliefs” (The Boston Globe).

For nineteenth-century New Englanders, “vampires” lurked behind tuberculosis. To try to rid their houses and communities from the scourge of the wasting disease, families sometimes relied on folk practices, including exhuming and consuming the bodies of the deceased. Folklorist Michael E. Bell spent twenty years pursuing stories of the vampire in New England.

While writers like H.P. Lovecraft, Henry David Thoreau, and Amy Lowell drew on portions of these stories in their writings, Bell brings the actual practices to light for the first time. He shows that the belief in vampires was widespread, and, for some families, lasted well into the twentieth century. With humor, insight, and sympathy, he uncovers story upon story of dying men, women, and children who believed they were food for the dead.

“A marvelous book.” —Providence Journal

Includes an updated preface covering newly discovered cases.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Apr 16, 2013
• ISBN: 9780819571717

Book preview

FOOD FOR THE DEAD

FOOD FOR THE DEAD

ON THE TRAIL OF NEW ENGLAND’S VAMPIRES

With a new preface by the author

MICHAEL E. BELL

WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY PRESS

Middletown, Connecticut

To my parents,

Lester M. Bell and

Sarah Elizabeth Jackson Bell

WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY PRESS

Middletown CT 06459

www.wesleyan.edu/wespress

©2001 Michael E. Bell

Preface to the Wesleyan paperback edition © 2011 Michael E. Bell

All rights reserved

First edition published by Carroll & Graf, 2001

Wesleyan paperback edition, 2011

Manufactured in the United States of America

Designed by Michael Walters

Library of Congress Control Number: 2011933367

ISBN for the paperback edition: 978-0-8195-7170-0

The poem The Griswold Vampire by Michael J. Bielawa, which appears on pages 176 and 177, was first published in the Summer 1995 issue of Dead of Night. It is reprinted here by courtesy of the poet.

Frontispiece art courtesy Culver Pictures, Inc.

Map of Vampire Incidents in New England (p. xliv) © 2001 Jeffrey L. Ward Stonewall illustration by Simon M. Sullivan

5 4 3 2 1

She bloom’d though the shroud was around her,

locks o’er her cold bosom wave,

As if the stern monarch had crown’ed her,

The fair speechless queen of the grave.

But what lends the grave such lusture?

O’er her cheeks what such beauty shed?

His life blood, who bent there, had nurs’d her,

The living was food for the dead!

—From the May 4, 1822,

Old Colony Memorial and

Plymouth County (Massachusetts)

Advertiser

CONTENTS

Preface to the Wesleyan paperback edition

Acknowledgments

Prologue

1. This Awful Thing

2. Testing a Horrible Superstition

3. Remarkable Happenings

4. The Cause of Their Trouble Lay There Before Them

5. I Am Waiting and Watching For You

6. I Thought For Sure They Were Coming After Me

7. Don’t Be a Rational Adult

8. Never Strangers True Vampires Be

9. Ghoulish, Wolfish Shapes

10. The Unending River of Life

11. Relicks of Many Old Customs

12. A Ghoul in Every Deserted Fireplace

13. Is That True of All Vampires?

14. Food for the Dead

APPENDIX A

Chronology of Vampire Incidents in New England

APPENDIX B

Children of Stukeley and Honor Tillinghast

Notes

Works Cited

Index

Illustrations follow page

PREFACE TO THE WESLEYAN PAPERBACK EDITION

Vampire. One word, so many images, from Bela Lugosi as Bram Stoker’s Count Dracula, dressed in tuxedo and cape with hair slicked back, pallid face, prominent canine teeth protruding, to Robert Pattinson as the young, dark, and handsome Edward Cullen of Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight. But another kind of vampire survived in remote areas of New England more than one hundred years before Stoker penned Dracula in 1897. This book relates my attempt to unravel the mystery of these little-known, so-called vampires. Beginning with a family story told to me by an old Yankee from rural Rhode Island, my search has led me to diverse strands of evidence, including eyewitness accounts, local legends, newspaper articles, local histories, town records, journal entries, unpublished correspondence, genealogies, cemeteries, and actual human remains.

These sources reveal the tragic stories of ordinary farmers confronted with an illness that medicine could neither explain nor cure. This mystifying, fatal disease was consumption, as pulmonary tuberculosis was then called. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, New England was in the grip of a terrible tuberculosis epidemic. By 1800, nearly one-quarter of all deaths in the northeastern United States were attributed to consumption, and it remained the leading cause of death throughout the nineteenth century.¹

Not willing to simply watch as, one after another, their family members died, some New Englanders resorted to a folk remedy whose roots surely must rest in Europe. Called vampirism by outsiders (a term that may never have been used by those who engaged in this practice), this remedy required exhuming the bodies of deceased relatives and checking them for unnatural signs, such as fresh blood in the heart. The implicit belief was that one of the relatives was not completely dead and was maintaining some semblance of a life by draining the vital force from living relatives.

Vampire hunters of centuries past visited morgues and cemeteries in search of the undead. The morgues I search are old newspaper archives and long-forgotten local histories, where the stories of vampires whose bodies were exhumed and examined He waiting to be rediscovered. My task is to find them and bring them back to life. Since the first publication of Food for the Dead in 2001, the Internet has grown into a web of communication whose pervasive scope was unimaginable a mere decade ago. Access to the enormous amount of data now available online has allowed my research to expand more widely, deeply, and quickly than was possible when I was writing the first edition. My vampire trail has grown to include more than thirty new American exhumations, vampire incidents that I was not aware of in 2001. This new material extends the geographic distribution of vampiric activities well beyond New England, into the upper Midwest and, perhaps, the Deep South. The time frame has expanded as well, from 1784 to, almost unbelievably, the mid-twentieth century.

Before continuing on the vampire trail, I want to address some of the questions I’ve been asked about the book over the past ten years. At the top of the list:

Are (were) there really vampires?

In my prologue, when I suggest that readers should keep an open mind regarding the word vampire, I am not implying that reanimated corpses actually rise (or rose) from the dead to kill the living. I am warning readers that they are likely to encounter vampires who do not match their preconceptions. It should be clear, well before the final chapter, that I see the vampires who are the focus of this book as scapegoats. Everett Peck, who shares his family’s story of Mercy Brown in chapter 1, addressed the question plainly and concisely. Pointing to a newspaper article about him and his story, he said, "Now, what they do here, they change this around as if I believe in vampire [sic]. Now, that ain’t what I’m sayin’. I’m just revealin’ what they believed … see? Do I believe in vampire? he asked rhetorically, then answered his own question: No, I don’t believe in that. I’m not sure they did, but they had to come for an answer.… And some of them old people probably died with that in their mind, that they did the right thing."

I use the term vampire when referring to the individuals who were exhumed, not because I believe that they were actually vampires, or even that 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, as would putting so-called in front of the term on every use. In most cases where I refer to a vampire, the context of use—the meaning of the term—is apparent. Where I think there may be some ambiguity, I have tried to clarify the immediate context.

When I write in the prologue about the dual nature of being a folklorist, I am invoking not only an approach to gathering data that is employed by most folklorists, usually termed participant-observation, but also the pleasure that many of us find in our work. Play alleviates toil and tedium for every type of worker. I’ve accepted that, for me, it’s impossible to be serious all of the time—even if I wanted to. But it is deeper than that. We folklorists have an enduring regard for the expressive culture we interpret. Many folklorists perform what they study. At any gathering of folklorists, you will hear great fiddle playing and wonderful stories, and if you are so inclined, you can learn a variety of traditional dances. Active engagement is what has drawn some into the profession; it provides an opportunity to understand from the inside by doing. Feeling the clay imparts a quality of knowledge, a wisdom that cannot be matched by watching someone throw a pot and asking questions about the process. I don’t want to paint all folklorists with the same broad brush—we are a diverse group of scholars. Nor do I wish to trivialize what we do, for, as folklorist William Wilson wrote, Surely no other discipline is more concerned with linking us to the cultural heritage from the past than is folklore.… [A]nd no other discipline is so concerned … with discovering what it is to be human. It is this attempt to discover the basis of our common humanity, the imperatives of our human existence, that puts folklore study at the very center of humanistic study.²

Through my own two aspects, whom I label Dr. Rational and Mike, I have attempted to give readers a sense of how difficult it can be to maintain the participant-observer dichotomy while engaged in fieldwork. Mike wants to suspend his disbelief and participate wholeheartedly; he wants to experience a legend trip, for example, from the insider’s point of view without the encumbrance of a scholarly lens. This eventually proves impossible. In chapters 6 and 7, especially, it is apparent that there are occasions when I cannot stay in the moment. Dr. Rational emerges. Impatient, he interrupts to ask more questions. Give me details! I want names, dates! He is audibly disapproving of what he perceives as silliness. It can be a humbling experience to hear yourself make regrettable mistakes as you play and replay an interview while transcribing. But these are the experiences that teach us how to do better. Listening—truly listening—is an exhausting test of self-control.

I’ve also been asked whether a university professor could really believe in giants, as I wrote in the prologue. Obviously I cannot speak for Wayland Hand, and I was wrong to ascribe beliefs to him. Yes, the classroom incident I describe did happen, and Professor Hand often talked about giants and other figures of folklore as if they actually roamed the earth. It was clear to me and his other students (we discussed this among ourselves) that Wayland Hand had the gift of empathy. He was able to take us with him when he transported himself to a different time and place. If it was merely a pedagogical device, it was utterly convincing and extraordinarily successful. Perhaps it was his way of suspending disbelief. The matter of belief (and disbelief), of course, is present explicitly and implicitly throughout this book.³

What is a folklorist’s process in investigating and interpreting the vampire phenomena I write about in the book?

As I have mentioned, folklorists are a varied group of scholars. Although folklorists share many basic concepts and methodologies, there are a variety of ways to interpret folklore. I want to know what the vampire beliefs, practices, and narratives mean or meant to the people involved. In chapter 3, I raise questions that occupy a significant portion of the book: If those involved did not use the term vampire, then on what grounds can outsiders justifiably use it? How widespread was this practice of vampirism? Where did the tradition come from? How did country folk learn about it? Why did it seem to threaten certain groups of people, such as newspaper editors and medical doctors? Taking a broader view, what are its underpinnings in folklore and history? How does it fit into larger systems of healing, belief, worldview, and religion?

The early stages of my investigation require historical research. When I find a narrative that has vampire elements—typically a description of, or reference to, an exhumation for the purpose of halting the spread of consumption—I ask: Did it actually occur? If I’m fortunate, the people in the narrative are named, and I can research genealogies, census records, town histories, historical archives, cemetery databases, and similar sources. If I can establish that these people actually existed, then I can conclude that the events described in the narrative could have occurred. Dates of birth and death are important, but I also want to know the people as individuals: What roles did they play in their communities? How were they linked to others in the community through kinship and social networks? I view folklore as a process of communicating among people interacting in close groups, so these social networks are central to disseminating and validating folk traditions, such as the vampire practice.

Local newspapers help fill in these contexts. I have occasionally found newspaper references to people who appear in a vampire narrative, but not often. When there isn’t much actual information in the narrative, such as names and dates, research is more difficult. Other trails to follow are available if the author of the narrative is named. He or she may have left notes, correspondence, or other similar materials that are accessible and might offer something concrete I can pursue. Talking to local people, including historians, genealogists, archivists, town clerks, and librarians, is an invaluable way to locate resources that establish the historical, social, and cultural contexts of the event. I make a point of asking about any relevant oral tradition. And on the rare occasions when I locate descendants of the people involved in a vampire narrative, I interview them to learn what might have been passed down orally or in writing or print. Locating the cemetery where the exhumation occurred and finding the gravestone of the person exhumed adds tangible testimony to the narrative. Gravestones sometimes lend insights not provided elsewhere. Besides places, dates, and names of parents or children, inscriptions may suggest how the deceased were regarded by those they left behind, as well as indicating their connections to the wider world. There are larger contexts to consider, too. In chapter 12, for example, I discuss New England communities that were beyond the Puritan influence, were more open to a magical worldview, and experimented with alternative approaches to organizing and comprehending their world. I also discuss the tension between civilization (or official culture) and superstition (or folk culture), which increased over the course of the nineteenth century.

My folkloristic interpretation begins with a cross-cultural, comparative analysis of the elements in the narratives. This kind of scholarship is mainly library- and archive-based. There are many published sources available for tracing the historic and geographic distribution of relevant folk beliefs—including the nature of disease, relations between the living and the dead, and the significance of blood—and folk practices, such as cutting out the heart and other organs, burning the organs or the entire corpse, ingesting the ashes, and decapitating the corpse. Locating such elements in their temporal and spatial distribution provides a sort of map that guides me in determining where vampire exhumation rituals were practiced, when they first appear in the record, and how long they persisted. These kinds of data, combined with information about social networks and other contexts, help me understand and interpret such issues as the dissemination and validation of the vampire practice and its associated narratives—to draw conclusions about the where, when, how, and why of these traditions.

In cases where a vampire narrative becomes part of local oral tradition, I investigate the legend process. I collect versions of the story through interviews as well as from print sources, especially newspaper articles (which appear particularly around Halloween, of course). Where possible, I look at the legend’s variants so that I can interpret how and why it changes over time and from one group or place to another. If the cemetery or, even better, grave of the suspected vampire is known, the legend frequently functions as an occasion for people (especially teens) to take legend trips (that is, visit the cemeteries, particularly at night).⁴ In chapters 5 and 6, I show how the case of Nellie Vaughn exemplifies how legends are formed and change as they become incorporated into the folklife of local communities. I use a combination of interview and research in chapter 7 to sharpen the contrasts between history and legend, and to suggest that the interaction among tradition, community, and personality is a key element in interpreting variation in the vampire narratives.

In chapter 7, I also discuss how folk vampires were transformed into literary vampires during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and how, through feedback loops, these literary vampires and their mass-media descendants now color our perceptions of the authentic vampires of our past. I explore literary uses of folk vampires in more depth in chapter 9, focusing on works by H. P. Lovecraft and Amy Lowell, which are based explicitly on New England’s vampire tradition, and Edgar Allan Poe, whose tales follow the more heavily trodden literary path of European vampire lore.

I devote chapter 13 to discussing how the vampire tradition has been interpreted in popular or mass media, where the Dracula stereotype is unrelenting. Time has dimmed the tragic elements of intractable illness and almost certain death. Vampire narratives now unfold in a framework of entertaining contacts with the supernatural realm. This trivializing contextualization is not limited to the popular media. A recent newsletter of an international tuberculosis organization included a well-written and accurate summary of New England’s vampire ritual and the Mercy Brown exhumation. The article, Bacteria with Fangs, appeared under the heading, On the Lighter Side.⁵ When I receive interview requests for media productions focused on vampires, I now suggest to producers that they read chapter 13 of this book. If they are still interested in talking to me after reading this chapter, then we can have a discussion.

Several overlapping scholarly contexts appear in Food for the Dead, notably in the disciplines of history and American studies (medicine and healing; belief systems in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century New England; oral history), anthropology (miraculous or magical experience; healing traditions; death and the dead; oral tradition), literature (the use of folk traditions by authors), and popular culture studies (modern legends; legend tripping; and folklore as a source for popular culture). Food for the Dead has been used as a textbook or as recommended reading in high school and college classes, mainly in departments of English, history, and anthropology. (Two of those courses I would love to sit in on are a history course at a British university entitled Death and the Undead in Britain and Ireland, 1450–1750 and a microbiology and immunology seminar entitled Infectious Disease: Fact and Fiction.) The case of JB, which I discuss in chapter 8, illustrates how an interdisciplinary approach can solve even the most enigmatic of puzzles. Folklore studies, archaeology, forensic anthropology, and history come together to interpret what, at first glance, seems to be the bizarre exhumation and reburial of a middle-aged man in early nineteenth-century Connecticut.

I close the book by discussing what William Wilson termed the basis of our common humanity, the imperatives of our human existence. The vampire incidents of New England demonstrate that disease and death transcend time and place and that, despite the great accumulation of scientific knowledge since the nineteenth century, we still have our own vampires—our own mystifying, fatal diseases—to confront and defeat.

Now, let’s return to the vampire trail. The greatly enhanced research capabilities made possible by digitization and the Internet have allowed me to revisit some old trails that, ten years ago, were either dead ends or false traces. For example, in the 1990s, when I began researching Annie Dennett’s exhumation, I had no idea that I would still be following this trail more than a decade later. I first encountered the Dennett family through the diary of Reverend Enoch Hayes Place, a then-roving Freewill Baptist minister who visited Barnstead, New Hampshire, in 1810 (see chapter 12). After visiting Brother Dennett, ill with consumption, Reverend Place was asked by some of the townsmen to accompany them to the exhumation of Dennett’s daughter, who had died of consumption at age twenty-one, more than two years earlier. To see that Reverend Place’s description of the exhumation included the actual names of the people involved was gratifying. I thought this trail might not end prematurely as so many others had. But, alas, at that time, the available records were too meager to bring this family and community back to life.

Now, however, more accessible data have helped me to see beyond just the places, names, and dates of these exhumations. The details that emerge from these enriched resources allow me to put flesh on the bare bones of family trees and census entries. Understanding their upbringing, the obstacles they confronted as they moved into territory that they perceived to be an unknown and dangerous wilderness, and the families and social networks they created in building new communities makes their confrontations with the unstoppable consumption all the more heartbreaking. I now know that the young woman’s name was Annie Dennett, not Janey Dennit, as Reverend Place wrote. Her father, Moses Dennett, was born in 1758. Moses’s great-great-grandfather came to Portsmouth, New Hampshire, from England with his brother between 1660 and 1670. His great-grandfather was a blacksmith in Portsmouth for many years, accumulating considerable property for those days. At one time it was said that he was the richest man in Portsmouth.

Moses, a tailor by trade, moved to Barnstead from Portsmouth about 1769. His log house was deep in the woods on high ground facing northwest and stood on the spot still occupied by his descendants as late as 1908. For years after moving to Barnstead, Moses brought all of his provisions on horseback from Dover, a distance of about thirty miles, following a trail blazed through the forest. It was recorded that he usually left a small boy with his wife. One time the boy grew tired of the isolation and ran away to Dover, leaving Mrs. Dennett alone in her cabin for several days and nights, to be entertained by the howling wolves and the bleak storms of winter. The historical record indicates that Moses kept an excellent farm and served in Colonel Dike’s regiment for a short time in 1777, during the Revolution.

Moses and his wife, Betsey Nutter, had eight children. Their first was Polly, born in 1782, who lived for eighty years. Hannah, born two years later, lived to the age of seventy-five. The third daughter, Annie, was born in 1786 and died on March 27, 1807, three and a half years before her exhumation, described by Reverend Place. The fourth child and first son, Charles, was born in 1788 and lived at least long enough to be married. Then came Oliver, the fifth child and second son, born in 1790. He was brought up on his father’s farm, and also assisted him in his work as a tailor. He attended the district school and fought in the War of 1812. Oliver was said to be very popular among his townsmen, was for many years justice of the peace, and also served as a selectman. He died in his hometown on July 11, 1865. Olive, the sixth child, was born in 1793, married in 1812, and died at age eighty-six. The seventh child and third son, Mark, was born in 1795 and died at the relatively young age, for this family, of forty-seven. The last child, Elizabeth, outlived her first husband and married a second time. Sadly, their father, fifty-two-year-old Moses, died on December 28, 1810, not even three months after Reverend Place visited with him, prior to his daughter’s exhumation. I can imagine the anguished faces of those who, having fought in wars and endured howling wolves and the bleak storms of winter, while creating a society from scratch, stood helpless in the face of a relentless and mysterious killer. It must have been a melancholy sight, indeed, as Reverend Place described Annie’s exhumation. Like the Dennett family, many members of the families directly involved in vampire exhumations were prominent in their communities: successful bankers, lawyers, politicians, farmers, skilled tradesmen, and even physicians and clergymen.⁶

Two vampire incidents, first recorded by Moncure Daniel Conway in Demonology and Devil-Lore (1879), and both occurring just a few years before its publication, have been especially vexing for me. One was so lacking in the details needed for in-depth research that I was unable to write anything at all about it in the first edition of Food for the Dead. The other case, while supplying an apparently sufficient amount of information, never led me to a satisfying conclusion. I hope you are as pleased to read as I am to write that these shortcomings have now been addressed.

Conway wrote: In 1874, according to the Providence Journal, in the village of Peacedale, Rhode Island, U.S., Mr. William Rose dug up the body of his own daughter, and burned her heart, under the belief that she was wasting away the lives of other members of his family.⁷ In chapter 4, I describe the details of my frustrating search for the newspaper article referenced by Conway, and for the burial place of William Rose’s vampire daughter. I found neither because, as I learned from a genealogist and local historian employed at a university research library, Conway’s date and newspaper ascriptions were incorrect. Having access to extensive, digitized databases with powerful search capabilities, Bill Page, the librarian, was able to locate, in a matter of minutes, the article that I had spent countless numbing hours searching for on reels of foggy microfilm. Here, at last, was the newspaper account that I could never find because it first appeared in the Providence Herald—not in the Providence Journal—on September 5, 1872 (and not 1874, as reported by Conway):

The village of Peacedale was thrown into excitement on Thursday last, by the report that two graves had been dug up near Watson’s Corner, on the shore of the Saugatucket River. The circumstances are as follows: The family of Mr. William Rose, who reside at Saunderstown, near the South Ferry, are subject to the consumption, several members of the family having died of the disease, and one member of the family is now quite low with it. At the urgent request of the sick man, the father, assisted by Charles Harrington of North Kingston, repaired to the family burying-ground, which is located near Watson’s Corner, one mile north of Peacedale, and after building a fire, first dug up the grave of his son, who had been buried twelve years, for the purpose of taking out his heart and liver, which were to be placed in the fire and consumed, in order to carry out the old superstition that the consumptive dead draw nourishment from the living. But as the body was entirely reduced to ashes, except a few bones, it was shortly covered up, and the body of a daughter who had been dead seven years, was taken up out of the grave beside her brother. This body was found to be nearly wasted away, except the vital parts, the liver and heart, which were in a perfect state of preservation. The coffin also was nearly perfect, while the son’s coffin was nearly demolished. After the liver and heart had been taken out of the body, it was placed in the fire and consumed, the ashes only being put back in the grave. The fire was then put out, and the two men departed to their respective homes. Only a few spectators were there to witness the horrible scene. It seems that this is not the first time that graves have been dug up where consumption was prevalent in the family, and the vital parts burned, in order to save the living. A few years ago the same was done in the village of Mooresfield, and also in the town of North Kingstown, both of course without success.

The first thing we notice is that the article follows a familiar pattern by alluding to other exhumations without giving enough detail for any realistic follow-up. Still, these vague references, taken together, perform a useful function by suggesting that such exhumations were not as unusual as we might be inclined to believe.

Several potential leads in the Providence Herald newspaper article popped out at me. Having a relatively specific location for the cemetery (near Watson’s Corner on the shore of the Saugatucket River) gave me hope that I might actually find the cemetery this time. I also had a fairly restricted range of death years for the two children whose bodies were exhumed. The son, who had been buried for twelve years, must have died about 1860, and the daughter, dead seven years, died about 1865. I hoped that they would be in the same cemetery as their father, William Rose, who lived at least until September 1872. And I had a good idea where the family was residing—at Saunderstown near South Ferry, which is in southeastern North Kingstown near the South Kingstown line. Finally, I thought I might be able to track down Rose’s assistant, Charles Harrington. All in all, I was feeling very optimistic about the prospects for finally identifying the Rose family vampire and, perhaps, the cemetery, too.

Not long after I began tracking down William Rose and his family, I was contacted by a writer requesting an interview for a feature story for a local periodical. The interview morphed into more of an internship, as the reporter, Marybeth Reilly-McGreen, asked to assist me with my research. So, during the summer of 2008, Marybeth got her feet wet as a fledgling folklorist, and I was able take advantage of her research skills, not to mention her enthusiasm. The fact that she lived in South County, where the village of Peace Dale and the towns of North Kingstown and South Kingstown are located, was an additional asset, allowing her to conveniently do research in the local libraries, archives and town halls. Our email exchanges chronicle the mounting excitement we felt as we attempted to untangle the Rose family saga. The high point came as our research paths intersected.

North Kingstown Library didn’t yield anything on the William Rose you’re looking for, Marybeth wrote on June 4, 2008, though I did find a William R. Rose of North Kingstown … who tried to sell his 12-year-old daughter … for the price of $100, according to the Rose Genealogy. If only he were your guy! What a story.

That William R. Rose could be the one, I replied. I asked her to take a look at the genealogical notes I had made on the short list of William Roses who might match our criteria.

Marybeth sent me excerpts from the Rose Genealogy she had referenced, copied from a collection of papers, bound in a folder on file at the Peace Dale Library, entitled Rose Genealogy: 15 Generations in America 16__ to 1978. I had found the Rose Genealogy newsletters years before, when I was first conducting research for this book. Of course, I was focused on another Rose family, the one that seemed to match most closely the incident that was mistakenly assigned the year of 1874.

In the 1850 census, William R. Rose, age twenty-five, and Phebe A. Rose, age twenty, had a three-year-old son, John, in their household. In the 1860 census, the Roses had four children in the household: John R. Rose, age fifteen; Benjamin Carr Rose, age nine; Phebe A. Rose, age seven; and Maria Rose, age four. The vital records of Rhode Island show that William and Phebe were married in North Kingstown by Reverend Edwin Stillman on November 22, 1843. The Rhode Island Atlas for 1870 states that W. R. Rose lives in the southern part of Saunderstown, North Kingstown near Watson’s and the South Ferry—both in South Kingstown, South Ferry District, just where the newspaper article located his residence. The 1870 census shows that, in addition to William, who was listed as a stonemason, and Phebe, the household included their three-year-old son, Thomas, and Phebe’s seventy-five-year-old mother, Patience Carr. The Rhode Island Cemetery Database shows that Benjamin C. Rose, born 1851, died in 1926 and was buried in North Kingstown’s large Elm Grove Cemetery, where many of this branch of the Rose family are interred. At this point, Marybeth and I were able to eliminate both Benjamin (who lived too long) and Thomas (who was born too late) as the son who died about 1860 and was exhumed in 1872.

The Rose Genealogy contained a letter written in 1953 by Deda Belle Macdonald, the daughter of Phebe Rose Caswell and granddaughter of William and Phebe Rose. The following tantalizing piece of family history eliminates Phebe as the supposed vampire:

Phebe’s parents were no doubt poor, as people with large families were in those days. Phebe was a well developed and pretty miss at the tender age of twelve. About this time, 1865, the family lived in Saunderstown, R.I. Nearby, a James Gardiner, aged about 73, who was obviously much older than Phebe, needed a wife, as he had a large home to care for. It was an old time country house, with a huge chimney and cupboards etc. all around it. However, this man offered to pay the father, William Rose, $100 if Rose could get Phebe to marry him. Rose took the money and the daughter went to marry the old man, of whom she was afraid, and sent under protest. When it was time for the marriage to take place, Phebe could not be found. Of course the old man was put out and wanted the money back. Rose reluctantly returned the money. Phebe had hidden in the back of the old chimney. Was this white slavery? Later, under cover of darkness, she returned to her folks and lived a normal life.

The letter went on to describe Phebe’s subsequent marriage, at age fifteen, to James Caswell, a seafaring man, and the birth of their five children, including Deda Belle, the correspondent. The editor of the Rose Genealogy newsletter added the following cryptic comment: There were some unpleasant notes about William Rose, but there seems no point in noting them here. Maybe not, but I wish she had. I can’t help but wonder if the unpleasant notes concerned Rose’s exhumation of a son and daughter.

Deda’s letter, combined with the genealogical research I had been doing, convinced me that John and Maria were the likely candidates for William’s exhumed son and daughter. As for Charles Harrington, Rose’s Igor if you must, two candidates emerged from my research. One was born in 1831 and was living in Exeter at the time of the 1880 census. The other Charles Harrington, born in 1839, is buried in the Seth Harrington plot in South Kingstown. His residence in South Kingstown puts him in closer proximity to William Rose, and we have a possible occupational link between William Rose, a stonemason, and the Harrington family, as both Charles’s father and one of his brothers were stonemasons.

Marybeth and I visited local cemeteries that we thought might hold the Rose graves we were looking for. Since there are more than 3,000 documented cemeteries in Rhode Island, and early settlers often buried their kin on their own property, we had our work cut out for us. Trying to match the newspaper’s description of the cemetery with those listed in Rhode Island’s Cemetery Database was tedious and time-consuming. We came up with a short list of three cemeteries in the area of Mooresfield Road in South Kingstown, one of which, the Ebenezer Adams Lot, was on private property and could be accessed only with the owner’s permission. Naturally, this was the cemetery that held the most promise. In 1880, James N. Arnold had recorded that this lot contained the remains of seventeen members of the Rose and Adams families, but only seven of the stones were inscribed. None of the Rose stones, of course, were among the latter.

On a sunny day in June 2008, Marybeth and I arrived at the Adams Lot on the basis of an understanding with the owner that we would not reveal its exact location to the public. In recent years, vandalism has been all too prevalent in cemeteries, especially those that are purported to contain a vampire. Like so many of the state’s small burial plots, this one is undistinguished. As I gazed at the very well-constructed stone wall surrounding the cemetery, my eyes were drawn to the four gravestones within that were still upright and legible. Unfortunately, none bore the Rose name. I said to Marybeth, Uninscribed headstones are the bane of my existence. They are the worst kind of dead end. So, was the Rose cemetery doomed to be forever lost? A ray of hope shone through our gloom as further research showed that Ebenezer Adams was the grandfather of William R. Rose. Certainly, it would not have been unusual for William Rose and two of his children, John and Maria, to have been interred in his grandfather’s family plot. But for now, we have to be satisfied with the thought that we may have found the right cemetery.

Conway’s description of the other case reported in his 1879 book is lean, indeed: Dr. Dyer, an eminent physician of Chicago, Illinois, told me (1875) that a case occurred in that city within his personal knowledge, where the body of a woman who had died of consumption was taken out of the grave and the lungs burned, under a belief that she was drawing after her into the grave some of her surviving relatives.⁸ When I first encountered Conway’s book, I had no

Reviews for Food for the Dead

[setnahkt · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

In time for Halloween. Author Michael Bell is an academic folklorist. You would think folklorists would be good storytellers, and perhaps most of them are, but not Bell. While there are a lot of interesting facts in the book (for example, the 1890 Rhode Island census included “haunted” as part of a house description) they are not put together coherently. Some chapters are reasonably straightforward narrative, others are almost direct transcriptions (including the “uhs”) of tape recorded interviews Bell conducted, and some are sort of stream-of-consciousness. I suppose Bell might be insuring the reader complete the whole book because it’s pretty difficult to make sense out of things even if you do.
The condensed version: In New England (there are cases from upstate New York and Chicago) between 1793 and 1892 a number of corpses were disinterred, and something was done to the body (usually burning the heart). The deceased had died of “consumption” (assumed, almost certainly correctly, to be tuberculosis), and now one or more of the deceased’s immediate relatives had also come down with the disease. The surviving family (sometimes at the urging of neighbors) blamed things on the corpse “feeding” off the living. The grave of the last known case (Mercy Brown, Exeter, Rhode Island, 1892) has become something of a local tourist attraction; on Halloween it’s impossible to park within a mile of the cemetery and three police officers patrol to keep sightseers from breaking off parts of her tombstone or trying to excavate her. (Bell coins the useful term “legend trip” to describe situations like this).
Bell’s researches note the contamination of traditional folklore by modern media influence. None of the contemporary accounts ever use the “V” word, suggest that the corpses left their graves, or that they bit victims, yet locals he interviews describe the revenants as “vampires” that “walked at night” and “sucked the blood of the living”. Despite his disjointed presentation I do feel sorry for him; he describes appearing on various television programs trying to explain things and is invariably trapped or edited into seeming to say he believes in vampires. (He even self-deprecatingly describes his most recent encounter by writing “This time I thought it would be different”. He then, in a case of being cruel to be kind, allows his grad student intern to be interviewed, to forewarn him of what’s going to happen).
It was interesting to find that another Rhode Island resident must have done some research into these cases. One of the families involved were the Tillinghasts, with Sarah Tillinghast as the putative revenant. “Crawford Tillinghast” appears in the H.P. Lovecraft story “From Beyond”. A member of the Corwin family was disinterred around 1830; “Joseph Curwen” appears as the evil ancestor in The Case of Charles Dexter Ward. When this was made into a movie (The Haunted Palace), Roger Corman demonstrated he’d read some Rhode Island folklore too, by making Ward/Curwen’s mistress the reanimated Hester Tillinghast.
Interesting enough if you are willing to put up with the disjointed presentation. A few maps, some pictures, a good bibliography, a chronological lists of the cases, and a list of the children of Stukely and Honor Tillinghast.

[hermit_9_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Bell is a folklorist who interviews the descendants of the last person exhumed in the United States as a vampire. His excellent story telling leads you through his research and interviews with personal anecdotes, asides, and details. His thesis is that vampirism was a logical explanation for tuberculosis for people whose concept of disease theory was limited at best.

[piratejenny_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

A folkloric study of the vampires of New England. These aren't the Dracula type vampires, however; in fact, the word vampire seems never to have been used to describe those who were disinterred (isn't that a great word?).Many people have heard of Mercy Brown, certainly those who know their Lovecraft. She is the most famous "vampire" of New England. As seems to be the case in all instances, Mercy died of consumption. Other family members did succumb, and eventually the townspeople recommended a cure to Mercy's father: to dig her up and if her heart was fresh and full of blood, burn it. The ashes would then be fed to Edwin, Mercy's severely ailing brother. The heart was indeed still bloody but the remedy didn't work--Edwin succumbed to the consumption. The other cases follow mostly the same pattern, though specifics differ. In once case, the entire body was burned and the sick stood in the smoke, which was thought to heal them. Sometimes more internal organs were burned. In one case, the bones had been rearranged. All in all, a fascinating look at how some odd versions of folk healing can contribute to the growth of legends. I did have one major problem with it though. The author speaks of a house on Benefit Street in Providenced. Both Lovecraft and Poe used it as a setting for stories. When referring to the Lovecraft story ("The Shunned House"), Bell keeps calling the narrator of the story Lovecraft--as if the story were a personal experience. Anyone who knows anything about HPL knows that he wasn't one to identify with his narrators, and anyone who knows anything about fiction knows that the narrator generally doesn't represent the author. He didn't make the same mistake with Poe's story. It was jarring and annoying both--as an academic who works at the University of Rhode Island, he really should have known better on both counts. A mistake like that brings suspicion to conclusions drawn--it's really sloppy. The notes mostly made up for it, but not entirely. I just couldn't trust the author much for the second half of the book. Which is rather sad, as it was interesting on the whole.