Lunatics Radio Hour: The History of Horror
Lunatics Radio Hour is a non-fiction history podcast about the history of horror and the horror of history. Each episode explores real, documented events where fear, violence, survival, and the unknown shaped human lives and cultures. The show also traces how historical events influenced film, examining how real-world horrors became the stories and images that appear on screen.
Topics include dark history, psychological phenomena, folklore rooted in fact, and the historical roots of horror cinema. Most episodes focus on researched historical subjects. Occasional short fiction stories are included and clearly labeled.
If you’re drawn to the darker side of history and the real events behind horror films, Lunatics Radio Hour explores where history, fear, and cinema intersect.
Lunatics Radio Hour: The History of Horror
Episode 145 - The History of The New England Vampire Panic
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Abby and Alan discuss the history of the New England Vampire Panic and how it influenced some of the most prominent examples of vampire horror literature, including Bram Stoker's Dracula.
Get Lunatics Merch here. Join the discussion on Discord. Listen to the paranormal playlist I curate for Vurbl, updated weekly! Check out Abby's book Horror Stories. Available in eBook and paperback. Music by Michaela Papa, Alan Kudan & Jordan Moser. Poster Art by Pilar Keprta @pilar.kep.
Listen to our episode on the history of Samhain and All Hallows Eve.
Sources
- Smithsonian Magazine Article by Abigail Tucker: The Great New England Vampire Panic
- A NewEngland.com article by Joe Bills: New England’s Vampire History | Legends and Hysteria
- A NewEngland.com Article: Vampire Mercy Brown | When Rhode Island Was “The Vampire Capital of America”
- A History.com article on Vampire History
- How the Rise of Vampire Fiction Coincided with The Real Life New England Vampire Panic by Nat Brehmer on bloodydisgusting.com
- Thanks to April Brenker for research help!
Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the lunatics Radio Hour podcast. It is officially our Halloween episode. I am so excited for this very spooky topic. I am Abby Brinker sitting here with Alan Kudan.
Speaker 2Hello.
Speaker 1And we have finally come to the most magical, magical time of the year.
Speaker 2I gotta say our other October content did not seem spooky. I know that you think that I get all.
Speaker 1Actually, I know that you think that, but again, I'm just going to reiterate that Hitchcock really did so much for horror that it's a building block for us to. Why do you say that? All right, well, you can listen to our Hitchcock episode if you want to go back into that argument. However, today we are here to talk about the New England vampire panic, and I could not be more excited. However, I'm going to say right off the top, alan has limited my creativity, as usual, and thus this episode is only going to focus on the New England Vampire Panic. We're not going to talk that much about vampires broadly and the mythology throughout Transylvania and other places.
Speaker 2Well, yeah, because there's a lot of really cool stuff if you want to get into like the lore of, like Transylvania and whatnot, but I feel like that's a whole separate episode.
Speaker 1Yeah, this would be a very long episode. If we combined everything, we actually have a really early episode where we covered vampires broadly.
Speaker 2Well, that's because we did like a whole series on the universal monsters, which was a lot of fun, but to your point, it was very early and I don't know that was, I don't know. Do we even use the internet then?
Speaker 1We use the internet but probably worth revisiting at some point. Okay so we've all heard about the Salem witch trials, but the New England vampire panic feels a little bit less known to me.
Speaker 2I didn't know about it at all.
Speaker 1The vampire panic took place a century later, over a century after the witch trials, proving that we learned very little from that tragedy.
Speaker 2I feel like New England panics about a lot of things.
Speaker 1Well, so does Europe. I'll also say that it's really part of this is really personal for me, because a big part of this story literally takes place in the town that I grew up in.
Speaker 2Oh.
Speaker 1So that's fascinating and it was really cool to learn about it, because I kind of knew that vaguely but I didn't really know the details of that. So that was really really cool.
Speaker 2I don't know where the satanic panic happened, but I feel like a big chunk of it was centered in New England.
Speaker 1Well, the satanic panic was really throughout the whole United States, but New England is part of the United States, so right Despite, despite, the name Right.
Speaker 1Today's sources. First of all, I want to say thank you to April Brinker for all of the help researching today's topic. We used a Smithsonian Magazine article by Abigail Tucker the Great New England Vampire Panic. A NewEnglandcom article by Joe Bills New England's Vampire History, legends and Hysteria. A Historycom article on vampire history, how the Rise of Vampire Fiction Coincided with the Real-Life New England Vampire Panic by Matt Bermer on bloodydisgustingcom. And we will, of course, link all the sources in the description of this podcast episode so that you can follow along and read those. If you'd like to do some digging on your own, hold on.
Speaker 2Back it up. When did this take place? What century are we talking about?
Speaker 1We're really talking about the end of the 1700s, mid 1700s, into the 1800s and throughout, so maybe, like for, I would say, a solid 100 years.
Speaker 2That's a long time to be thinking about vampires.
Speaker 1It's a long time. And also they, when, when all this stuff happened and people were panicking and doing all the things we're going to talk about, they weren't really calling the entities that they believed to be vampires vampires.
Speaker 2What were they calling them?
Speaker 1They largely called them, I think, corpses, some newspapers, some historians, other people. Now, like when you write about it, vampire is used and we're going to talk about all this. However, when the people experiencing the panic were going through it, they didn't necessarily say oh man, I believe this person is a vampire. They believed they were, you know, coming back after death and causing a lot of issues, but they they didn't use that word hmm, it's kind of cool yeah so.
Speaker 2So it's like an accuse, your neighbor thing, and it's like I think you died, but you're back like that.
Speaker 1Well, guess what the good news for you is? That I'm about to tell you all about it. But before we do, I want to really atmospherically set the scene here. Okay, it's smoky. Close your eyes for me, okay, all right, not if you're driving, but close your eyes if you can. Or walking, skydiving, you're skydiving, yeah, I mean at that point, I guess, and close your eyes. Okay, what?
Speaker 1no, you know, pull the parachute and just like glide on in you still what you think it auto lands. If you are listening to this podcast while you're skydiving, there's other issues. It's kind of cool you should hear.
Speaker 2You know like what a way to go out a history podcast on vampires while you skydive.
Speaker 1All right, anyway, close your eyes, alan okay you know the movie the witch right no, oh uh, yes okay, so that's kind of the vibe, right oh yeah they.
Speaker 2They panic like crazy well I mean kind of aesthetically.
Speaker 1So it's nighttime, you're in the new england forest it's dark there's a you know, colonizer settlement that you're part of and you're're living in, you know, a very sort of rudimentary 1700s home.
Speaker 2Okay, what does that mean?
Speaker 1Everything is lit by candles. You probably you and your family built this home yourself. There's no electricity. Obviously there's no plumbing. You have to go outside to use the bathroom. You know, this is where we are. We're living in the world of the witch. Suddenly, your mom gets sick and she starts to develop kind of weird symptoms that nobody can really understand, and after months of being ill and being in bed, she passes.
Speaker 2What was it?
Speaker 1Next, your sister gets sick. Oh sort of the same thing different symptoms, perhaps vague, ambiguous. It's really hard to kind of describe what they are, but after a few more months she passes.
Speaker 2I'm feeling quite helpless.
Speaker 1Quite helpless. Maybe your younger brother also goes through this, so now maybe it's just you and your dad. The rest of your family has died.
Speaker 2That's our whole family. I have a family of five.
Speaker 1That's right. And there's other people in town that live near you, in the village, that are going through similar things. Some people are surviving, some people are dying. There's no way to really understand how this illness is spreading what it is. It's kind of very, very slowly creeping its way around.
Speaker 2What's the state of the animals? Do we have animals?
Speaker 1The animals are okay.
Speaker 2Oh.
Speaker 1You have animals. Didn't see that coming. The animals are okay, and so you're not really sure what's going on, right?
Speaker 2No.
Speaker 1But then a neighbor comes over, an old, elderly neighbor, and they explain to you that there's some belief, some old world belief that maybe you didn't know about, that there must be some sort of curse or plague on your family and that you will be next right. You could see the pattern one by one, very slowly, this is coming for your family. So the only way to counteract and to save the life of you and your dad is to check the graves of the family members that you've buried to make sure just to make sure that they're really dead, because this is something that this old neighbor has seen before, and the only way to save your life is to go and exhume those bodies and make sure that they're okay, so say make sure they're okay make sure they're decomposed, that they're dead, that there's no signs that they could be undead.
Speaker 1So you say, okay, you know what? This is maybe a little bit folk tale-y to me, a little bit folk magic, but you know what, just to feel better, now that this seed has been planted in my brain, I'm going to agree to just visually look at these bodies and make sure everybody in the town knows my family is not undead. Right, we're all okay.
Speaker 2Do you have to like do this in front of witnesses?
Speaker 1So well. You need a lot of people to come and help you dig up these graves. It's manual work, so a bunch of men from town come, they meet you at their local burial ground. They bring their shovels. Maybe they dig up the body of your mother first, right, and she looks okay. She looks very decomposed, exactly as expected. There's no signs that she's rising from her grave every night, right.
Speaker 2This still feels rather traumatic.
Speaker 1Oh, certainly Then. Okay, we go to the next grave, we go to your older sister, we dig her up. She looks fine, same as your mother right Now. Here's the thing maybe they died in the summer, but maybe your little brother died in january. We dig him up. He looks perfectly preserved. He's not decomposed at all. In fact, there's still blood in his heart we check the heart.
Speaker 1We check the heart, we cut him open and check if there's blood in the heart because when he looks perfectly preserved, the neighbor says, okay, see the difference, see how he looks like he's not dead at. Okay, see the difference, see how he looks like he's not dead at all compared to the other two. And so you say, yes, I see the difference. You agree to check the organs and you see there's still fresh blood in the heart. And so the older neighbor says, okay, this is the culprit. The only way to save the life of you and your father is to remove the heart from your little brother, to grind it up, burn it, turn it into a tonic to drink. It's the only way to really kill your brother. How do you?
Speaker 2burn it and then turn it into a tonic.
Speaker 1Well, you take the ashes.
Speaker 2You make an ash tonic. Yeah, that's gross. Yeah, I guess it's more sanitary than not burning it.
Speaker 1But you're convinced, you have no other explanation.
Speaker 2I'm sold.
Speaker 1You have no other explanation of this disease, of what's happening. You agree? Give me the tonic. This happens hundreds of times in the New England Vampire Panic. How many family members am I going to lose? You can open your eyes now. I'm saying two hundreds of families.
Speaker 2That's crazy. There's clearly that one person that was like hey, you know what we should? Um, we should turn that uh heart into a drink you would be that person like someone had that idea first, yeah, and said this needs, we need to do this well, let's talk about someone's weird fetish got turned into a cultural practice.
Evolution of Vampire Folklore and Superstitions
Speaker 1Though the belief in entities similar to vampires dates back to the earliest civilizations, the term vampire came about in the 1700s. Around that time is when the folklore as we know it today started to solidify. Even before the 1700s, there were various folk beliefs across Eastern Europe and China. For instance, in both Slavic and Chinese folklore, an animal jumping over a corpse was feared to be undead. In Russian folklore, vampires were thought of as witches who had defected from the Russian Orthodox Church. So even before the word vampire existed, there was this fear that a loved one who died could turn into the undead or something evil post-death right. I'm just really talking here about some of these old folk beliefs that could have migrated to New England right over the years and that some of these people were calling upon when this strange, bizarre illness started to take hold.
Speaker 2Just made me think of I don't know where this bit came from Vampires, you know, immortal beings, and they, you know they're existing for thousands and thousands of years. And then one day some guy shows up holding two sticks into the sign of the cross, and then suddenly it's your downfall.
Speaker 1Oh, they hate that, they hate that Apparently. So, but actually that's a really timely example because, right, I just said, in Russia this really came about as an evolution from believing that witches were people who defected from the church, right? So some things like that carry through that. Okay, there's this belief that people who reject religion for whatever reason are othered or evil and they must be a witch or a vampire, right? So that's part of that through line that you just brought up as a joke.
Speaker 2Typical colonizer talk.
Speaker 1And, in turn, traditions arose that were meant to prevent the turning of a corpse into something sinister, for example, burying a body upside down or planting scythes or sickles around the grave meant to satisfy approaching demons. Approaching demons Similar to the ancient Greek method of placing an obelisk in the mouth of a deceased person as a way to pay the passage along the river Styx, or the idea of putting a coin in the body to keep evil entities away.
Speaker 2I see, I thought you put the coin in the mouth so that they have money. I guess an obelisk is money.
Speaker 1Right, it's sort of like, I guess in a mini way similar to the Egyptian pyramids full of wealth. Right, it's like setting them up for the afterlife.
Speaker 2Well I mean yeah, that's just because they wanted their money later.
Speaker 1Right, this is like a superstition micro version of that.
Speaker 2Right, otherwise they have to like what. I feel like there was some kind of like waiting period as opposed to like you're just fucked forever or you had to swim.
Speaker 1I forget what it was. It was something, but it wasn't great. Wasn't there some anime about this we were watching recently?
Speaker 2anime involving the river styx. Yeah, I don't know. I know they talk a lot about it in lost gods by brahm and so like. For me it's pretty visual there. Maybe, but animated huh, obviously, in the game Hades, which you wouldn't associate with.
Speaker 1No, it's too hard.
Speaker 2I don't know if they did it in Blood of Zeus. I think you watched a little bit of that too. That's a fun one.
Speaker 1Well, if anyone knows what I'm thinking about, please let me know. Once vampire tradition started to form, some of these practices turned into things like putting a cross on the body to keep the body from becoming a vampire. Right? So it went from putting a coin in the body to protect it from demons in the afterlife to putting a cross on the body to protect it from becoming a vampire. So you can very clearly see how these things evolve and start to take shape, right.
Speaker 2I think they should have just carried around their dead family with them at all times, just to make sure that no vampires got them well, that's really like sleeping with the enemy.
Speaker 1What then? They're closer to you and they become a vampire and turn on you.
Speaker 2You just watch them 24 7. That's not you have to sleep, or you just.
Speaker 1You just lock people are like fucking tilling the fields, like they're not just sitting around playing video games, they have like very manual jobs. What?
Speaker 2if you just lock their coffin.
Speaker 1No one thought of that no one thought of that.
Speaker 2That's brilliant, yeah. Well, how are they gonna get out? Huh wait, what was the theory? That they were coming out of the grave and doing things?
Speaker 1yeah, that was the theory that they were exiting the grave and causing chaos can't they just make sure the ground was fine?
Speaker 2No, no.
Speaker 1Because they did believe that they had obviously supernatural powers to do that, you know. So maybe, like their essence was exiting or whatever, Should have just tied them all together.
Speaker 1Another example of this was severing the tendon of the deceased to make sure they couldn't become a vampire and leave their grave and cause harm. There's also a curious cultural practice related to this, which was putting poppy seeds on the ground outside of the grave. The idea here was that the vampire would become obsessed with counting the seeds and it would keep them busy. This is thought of as a link between some of the vampire folklore and Sesame Street and the condition of arithmomania, which is very similar to ocd.
Speaker 1And this wasn't only a european belief. Strangely, in china there was a very similar belief, that if a vampire encountered a bag of rice, it would need to count each grain. So, again, some of these early vampire traditions evolved from, like this, fear of other, right this like someone has ocd or some kind of, they must be evil well, yeah, you're not even going to acknowledge my sesame street comment it was a good funny joke because of count, count you.
Speaker 1What's his name? Count the count, the count. Yes, he's a vampire and he counts things yes, what was?
Speaker 2there's a very serious vampire movie where, like somebody, just like no, or someone just like throws a bunch of crap and the and the vampire has to count them.
Speaker 1Oh, interesting.
Speaker 2What is that?
Speaker 1We're really batting O for O today on remembering pop culture references.
Speaker 2It's terrible, but that happens in a movie that I've seen.
Speaker 1All right, so you're hip with what I'm saying. Yes, I love to hear that that I've seen. All right, so you're hip with what I'm saying. Yes, I love to hear that. Not to suck the fun and mystery out of vampire mythology, but it very clearly is rooted in the misunderstanding of disease and the misunderstanding of the decaying human body, especially in the Middle Ages. This is something that we've seen on other episodes of this podcast, most recently with the dancing plague of 1518, where there's really just a misconception around something that we're really hyper aware of today. Right, science has caught up. We understand how humans decompose and we understand how epidemics, plagues, illnesses are spread. We don't need to create mythology to explain those things.
Speaker 2I love how somehow every episode somehow gets linked back to Dancing Plague now.
Speaker 1I just really miss it.
Speaker 2I really love that time of our lives. Yeah, those were happy times. Yep, that was our peak.
Speaker 1So, as we discussed right, there's this pre-existing superstition and folklore that follows people as they immigrated to the United States and really sets the stage here. Once disease and plague hit, it was easy for those physical symptoms to be interpreted as something sinister. So, for instance, right, the bubonic plague caused bleeding mouths and in turn it was believed that those victims were vampires. As the hysteria and panic grew, it became more common for folks with a wide range of physical or mental conditions to be labeled as a vampire.
Speaker 1And there's going to be a ton of themes and a ton of lessons I think we can kind of extract from this topic. But one of them is also that, in general, when we talk about things like werewolves, vampire, panics, witches, we're really talking about people who were othered for some reason, and that's true of a lot of folklore across cultures. But it's just something to keep in mind. That it was especially in you know, not to make it political but especially in the times of today Alan's giving me the eyes I think it's important for us all to try and understand people instead of just putting them in a box.
Speaker 2Oh, there we go. There it is, that's all I'm going to say. I would love to put and understand people instead of just putting them in a box. Ah, there we go. There it is, that's all I'm going to say. I would love to put people in a box and lock it, because that is the only way that you stop them from becoming vampires.
Speaker 1I'll keep that in mind when you die.
Speaker 2Also I just Googled and the instances of someone defending themselves by throwing a bunch of crap at a vampire and having them count them are Dracula 2, the Ascension, which I have not seen, Okay, Dracula 2000, which I have seen, so possibly there. But also an X-Files episode known as Bad Blood, where Fox Mulder throws a bunch of sunflower seeds at the supposed vampire, who is then forced to count them.
Speaker 1X-Files always gets it right. They always do their historical research. So I want to quote from the Historycom article on vampire history Quote Many researchers have pointed to porphyria a blood disorder that can cause severe blisters on skin that's exposed to sunlight, as a disease that may have been linked to the vampire legend. Some symptoms can be temporarily relieved by ingesting blood. Other diseases blamed for promoting the vampire myth include rabies or goiter. Goiter is a swelling in the neck that occurs when a thyroid gland enlarges. It can be like a big lump. Yeah, sounds it Okay? Back to the quote here. When a suspected vampire died, their bodies were often disinterred to search for signs of vampirism. In some cases a stake was thrust through the corpse's heart to make sure they stayed dead. Other accounts describe the decapitation and the burning of the corpses of suspected vampires well into the 19th century End quote. So that's really setting the stage. That kind of stuff is happening across Europe. That really plays a large part into overall vampire mythology.
Speaker 2Okay, we're done setting the stage.
Speaker 1Now we're going to talk about the New England vampire panic.
Speaker 2So I can finally open my eyes. You can open your eyes, thank you.
Speaker 1Despite Vlad the Impaler's fame and renown for inspiring Bram Stoker's character of Dracula, it's actually Mercy Brown from Exeter, Rhode Island, who did the most for vampire mythology.
Speaker 2What.
Speaker 1When tuberculosis came to southeastern Connecticut and Rhode Island in the 1730s, it wasn't immediately clear what was happening. By the 1800s, when the vampire panic was in full swing, tuberculosis, or consumption, was the number one cause of death throughout New England, responsible for about 25% of all deaths.
Speaker 2Wow, I thought it was going to be heart disease.
Speaker 1Tuberculosis spread in a very different way than some of the illnesses that we are used to. The symptoms were different across different people. Some people were totally spared, and the example I gave at the beginning is a very common one that one or two people survive and every other member of a household dies, and so it kind of also creates this confusion around why are you spared? Why am I not spared? Why did it take you and not me right? In some people the disease lay dormant for a very long time before symptoms set in, even years. The New England vampire panic came after similar panics in Europe, including the great werewolf panic. Tuberculosis was also known as consumption, because it appeared to consume a victim's body. Deceased loved ones were often blamed as turning into vampires and then spreading the illness even further to their surviving family members, which means that most often the folks who were accusing someone of being a vampire were related to that person. It was a hysteria that threw all etiquette around not speaking well of the dead out the window.
Speaker 2That's mean.
Speaker 1I'm going to quote from the Smithsonian article by Abigail Tucker. Quote the particulars of the vampire exhumations, though very widely. In many cases only family and neighbors participated, but sometimes town fathers voted on the matter or medical doctors and clergymen gave their blessings or even pitched in. Some communities in Maine and Plymouth, massachusetts, opted to simply flip the exhumed vampire face down in the grave and leave it at that. In Connecticut, rhode Island and Vermont, though, they frequently burned the dead person's heart, sometimes inhaling the smoke as a cure. In Europe, too, exhumation protocol varied within region. Some beheaded suspected vampire corpses, while others bound their feet with thorns. End quote.
Speaker 2You gotta do what you gotta do.
Speaker 1In most states this ritual was secretive, often done at night, with the exception of many disinterments in Vermont, which were sometimes turned into a reason to celebrate. There is documentation of a suspected vampire heart being burned on the town green in Woodstock, vermont, in 1830. And even earlier, in the late 1700s, hundreds of people attended a heart burning at a blacksmith's forge in Manchester. Quoting again from Tucker's Smithsonian article, quote Bell attributes the openness of the Vermont exhumations to colonial settlement patterns. Rhode Island has about 260 cemeteries per 100 square miles versus Vermont's mere 20 per 100 square miles. Rhode Island's cemeteries were small and scattered among private farms, whereas Vermont's tended to be much larger, often located in the center of town. In Vermont it was much harder to keep a vampire hunt. Hush-hush end. Quote.
Speaker 2I just imagine, hey Rodney, you coming to the heartburn later. I'd love to. I got to work though.
Speaker 1See if I can get off. I don't want to be offensive, but it is very Vermont of them. You know Vermont very like open hippy-dippy, like let's all do it in the community, let's have a festival.
Speaker 2Let's hands, let's hold hands, burn this guy's heart. Yeah, connecticut, rhode island. A little snippier, little uppity, typical, do things you know keep.
Speaker 1Keep it within the family. Yeah, I mean, they're just burning their hearts, eating their ben and jerry's. The story of the new england vampire panic really starts in vermont in 1790 with the death of rachel harris. Harris died of tuberculosis that year, and a year later her widowed husband, captain Isaac Burton, married her stepsister Hulda, and it didn't take long for Hulda to start to demonstrate similar symptoms to her late sister.
Speaker 2I mean, did you not expect trouble from marrying the stepsister named Hulda?
Speaker 1I know, very spooky. It was assumed that Rachel was causing Hulda's illness from beyond the grave because of jealousy, obviously. Quoting from the New England article by Joe Bills quote In February 1793, more than 500 Manchester residents braved frigid temperatures to watch the liver, heart and lungs be removed from Rachel's exhumed corpse and burned on a blacksmith's forge. How do they?
Speaker 2do that? How do they exhume parts in front of everyone?
Speaker 1They literally crack the rib cage, cut them open and pull it out.
Speaker 2Do they like? String her up like jaws.
Speaker 1No, they just pull her out of the grave and do those things and probably throw the body back in the grave and then take the heart to the forge, where everyone comes to watch it be burned. Back to the quote here. Everyone comes to watch it be burned back to the quote here. According to some versions of the tale, portions of the organs were preserved to make a medicine for holda.
Speaker 2Regardless, she died that september do you think they're giving her dead body part medicine?
Speaker 1following her death did the good people of manchester realize the error of their ways? Sort of they reasoned that perhaps rachel hadn't been a vampire at all, but rather a witch ah, end quote.
Speaker 1Good of course, so obvious and that's something that happened so often. Like so often there was reason to doubt that this would work right. It's not that it ever worked. There were so many times where they're like okay, we have one family member left, we have to do this, and still that person died. But it didn't stop the panic from being the way that this was dealt with.
Speaker 2I just imagine, like you know, the guy being like oh sorry, my bad Called it wrong, she was not a vampire, she was a witch. Oh, of course, it's all right.
Speaker 1Yeah, we should have handled this with the other set of superstitions that we have for witches.
Speaker 2We should have handled this with the other set of superstitions that we have for witches. You'll get them next time, Rodney.
Speaker 1One account of the New England vampire panic comes to us from the diary of naturalist and writer Henry David Thoreau. Thoreau wrote, quote the savage in man is never quite eradicated. I have just read of a family in Vermont who, several of its members having died of consumption, just burned the lungs and the heart and the liver of the last deceased in order to prevent any more from having it end. Quote the diary is even dated September 26, 1859, though it is believed to reference an event involving the Spalding family from Dumberson, vermont. From 1790. After six of his 11 children had died from tuberculosis, lieutenant Leonard Spalding was willing to try anything once the seventh child became ill, and thus one of his deceased children, the most recently passed, was dug up and their organs were burned. I'm going to quote from the bloody, disgusting article. Quote Maine unfortunately had the least amount of documented cases of vampirism.
Speaker 1This probably doesn't mean it was happening any less, only that it wasn't making it into the town records as often. Still there are a few, and while they're less detailed, they're not remotely small. For example, in 1862, reports of vampirism swept the community of Saco so strongly that almost every deceased resident was dug up and reburied. Every corpse was apparently a suspect. In Maine, however, these situations were handled a little differently. Rather than go through the hassle of removing the heart or organs and burning them, the dead were simply dug up and reburied face down in the hopes that it would keep them from getting up.
Speaker 2End quote Okay, you've been to a lot of very, very early American cemeteries.
Speaker 1Yes.
Speaker 2Have you ever encountered evidence in a graveyard, placards or any kind of notation that indicated that a grave had been dug up and reburied because of this?
Speaker 1No, but there are a few famous graves, one really in particular that have become famous because of this, which we're going to talk about in a little bit, and what the cemetery had to do was add metal bars because it was such a risk that somebody would steal the stone because it was so famous.
Speaker 2Oh, oh. So To protect the stone, the headstone.
Speaker 1Yeah, the headstone, yeah, the headstone I thought you were saying they had to put metal bars over the grave so that it would keep the body in no, but I have seen graves like that, like not so much in the us, but there are graves in certain cemeteries, especially in like the uk, where there's like metal bars, like cages over them, dating back hundreds of years, because they were afraid of that corpse getting out for some reason. That's crazy I don't think it's related to just cut the tendons just cut the tendons.
Speaker 1Yeah, I've been saying that for years other families in new england would behead corpses in an effort to keep them from rising again or shatter their bones. Just take the bones, make some jewelry can't move, you don't got bones. That's true, that's fact In 1854, the locals living in Jewett City, which is the dirt town directly next to where I grew up. It's where my post office and library were located.
Speaker 2Druid City.
Speaker 1Jewett City. Jewett, my town, was so small there was no post office, police department or library, and I was about a four second drive from the border with jewett city or griswold, and so that's really like was an extension of our town and and we're going to talk about one of the kind of creepiest examples of vampire panic evidence. We don't actually know a ton about the family, but the evidence of those graves were found and they're very bizarre.
Speaker 2Okay.
Speaker 1So 1854, locals living in Jewett City, which is in Connecticut, had exhumed a number of corpses because they were suspicious that the deceased were actually vampires and as vampires they were believed to rise from their graves and kill those that were still alive in the community rise from your grave. And so how it kind of happened was that, I believe in the year 1990 they were, I think it was like from like they realized there was graves because they were building something, some construction was happening and like near an old mill or an old factory, something like that, they stumbled upon these graves like unmarked or whatever. They dig them up and they look at them and I think they like the whole construction right, they get a historian to come and see what they have. So the researchers found that bodies had been put back into graves post organ removal with broken ribs Right, that's how we know that they would break the ribs and take the organs out.
Speaker 2Yeah.
Speaker 1But in strange patterns. So, for example, one of them, which really became the famous grave here was the person was put back in the pattern of a skull and crossbones.
Speaker 2What does that mean? So when the picture of skull and crossbones in your head. Oh, I guess they already have the skull Right and they have the bones.
Speaker 1So they put them back in that pattern in, you know, the 1800s. And when people in 1990 opened the grave 150 years later, why would they do that? Because they were building a thing. They found the graves, they opened them up, they wanted to know if they could move them to continue building the thing, and they were put together in that way.
Speaker 2Because it was a vampire.
Speaker 1Right, it was like a protection thing.
Speaker 2Did it have fangs?
Speaker 1Doesn't say in the article. Perhaps New England's most famous suspected vampire was Mercy Brown.
Speaker 2They made a whole show about her.
Speaker 1What show?
Speaker 2Murphy Brown.
Speaker 1No, mercy Brown, Not Murphy Brown.
Speaker 2That's different.
Speaker 1I bet Mercy Brown would wear both straps of her overalls strapped. Why do you say?
Speaker 2that I bet Mercy Brown would wear both straps of her overalls strapped.
Speaker 1Why do you say that Murphy Brown would always wear like one of her overall straps unstrapped? I understand as like a look.
Speaker 2Please continue.
Speaker 1The Brown family lived in Exeter, Rhode Island, a border town often referred to as deserted Exeter.
Speaker 2What does that mean?
Speaker 1Just that it was a farming community that was founded on land without much fertile soil which we see a lot kind of at this time and so it was really hard to kind of build a lasting community there, because it was really hard to actually grow anything.
Speaker 2That's why they have to be nomadic. Yeah, or do slash and burn farming.
Speaker 1And a lot of the local population was also lost to the Civil War. So it kind of just became this almost like ghost town.
Speaker 2Well, they need more vampires then.
Speaker 1In the mid to late 1800s, tuberculosis eviscerated the Brown family, starting with Mother Mary Eliza. The disease found its way to daughter Mary Olive in 1882. Quoting from Mary Olive's obituary quote the last few hours she lived was of great suffering, yet her faith was firm and she was ready for the change. End quote what does tuberculosis do to your body?
Speaker 2I imagine it's not good.
Speaker 1So the main thing was a cough. A cough that would last for a very, very long time. It would start with phlegm and could eventually turn into coughing up blood. Sure, chest pain, severe weight loss. There were fevers, sweats, that kind of stuff. Pretty severe weakness and tiredness, fatigue, just like no longer being interested in food, having chills from the fever and then swelling. That kind of wouldn't go away ever.
Speaker 2So it's a. It's a lung infection that just ends up wrecking the rest of the body.
Speaker 1Right, it's an airborne respiratory disease.
Speaker 2Like COVID.
Speaker 1Yeah, like COVID, but different. So the son gets sick, right, edwin gets sick. He ends up living with tuberculosis for a very, very long time, but he gets sick, and so he goes to Colorado Springs in the hope to find naturalistic healing. And this is something I actually remember from our Waverly Hills episode.
Speaker 2What was that.
Speaker 1We did an episode with our friend bob dawn, on their kind of haunted experiences going to this old tuberculosis ward which is very famous called waverly hills, oh yeah, and with the ball down the hall. With the ball down the hall, and it's interesting because like the belief then was like, okay, people needed fresh air which is so funny because they, all of these people, only had fresh air at this time but they would like put them in these hospitals and like put them outside. Like the idea is they just need to go to the country, like they just need some fresh air and that will be the cure.
Speaker 2Well, it does stand to reason that people are getting more sick. When they were in confined spaces because we know how airborne illnesses travel, yeah, and when there was like lots of ventilation, then there's a good chance that people didn't get sick.
Speaker 1Right. So, anyway, he goes to Colorado Springs, kind of seeking fresh air In 1892, a decade after the death of her mother and sister. So this is what I mean about the illness sitting dormant in somebody for a really long time Daughter Mercy Lena fell ill and ultimately perished. While Mercy was still suffering, her brother returned to town. So she's really, really sick. He comes back, he's in terrible shape and he would also eventually pass away. Pre-existing superstition in the area had laid the groundwork for attributing so many deaths in one family to the undead. It felt targeted, though the term vampire again wasn't used here. Friends and neighbors started to suspect that one of the deceased Brown family members was in essence a vampire. Not only was it believed that one of the Browns were a vampire, but that they had caused the illness and passed it on to Edwin. So at this point, right, you're the dad, you're George Brown, your wife, two of your daughters have died. You have a very sick son. What are you going to do, right?
Speaker 2Dig them all up. Puree the hearts, Smoke them right, you're exactly right.
Speaker 1After much convincing, the father of the family, george Brown, allowed for the disinterment of several family members so that they could review their bodies, and on the morning of March 17, 1892, a group of men gathered at the cemetery and picked up their shovels. The bodies of the deceased Brown women were dug up and examined. So Mary Eliza and Mary Olive, mother and daughter, looked to be decomposing at an expected rate. But by comparison, mercy Brown's body seemed to have barely decomposed at all and there was actually still blood in her heart. The country folk were also suspicious that her hair and nails had grown post-death.
Speaker 2Again, they had the heart and they're like OK, do you think they cut it open? I think they used a knife, or do you think they?
Speaker 1just like give it a little squeeze. You're so gross and weird. They obviously cut it open. What do you think we're doing here? Give it a little squeeze. Or maybe when they pulled it out, like blood got on their hands, you know, and they were like oh, there's blood in here.
Speaker 2I mean it would have 100% coagulated. I don't think it's going to pump.
Speaker 1No, it's not going to pump. It's not going to. It was a liquid. That was the point.
Speaker 2Blood can't sit for more than like a couple hours.
Speaker 1Well, just let me get through this. Okay, maybe I'll explain it to you. Maybe, if you're really lucky, I'll give you an answer.
Speaker 2Yeah, if I'm lucky, I'll get an answer on this one, thanks, and thus Mercy Brown was decided to be the culprit.
Speaker 1But here's the thing Mercy Brown, as a reminder, died a decade after her mother and sister, and she had died only a few months before she was exhumed. So to compare the rate of decomposition of her mother and sister, who had died 10 years earlier, to the decomposition of Mercy, who not just died a few months earlier but also died in the middle of winter, is not the same thing, because her body was kept in a frozen. There's some debate whether she was in kind of this, like built up outdoor tomb, because the ground was too frozen to bury her for a few months, or if she was in you know, buried. But either way she was outside in the freezing, freezing, frigid temperatures so her body was incredibly preserved.
Speaker 1She's in a meat locker, exactly. So they were like oh man, look at her. Compared to her mom, she's a vampire.
Speaker 2I've always referred to New England as the meat locker.
Speaker 1That's true. So in an effort to save the life of poor sick Edwin, mercy's heart and liver were removed from her body and burned. The ashes were turned into a tonic or a drink for Edwin and the hopes to cure his illness. What do you think happened, alan?
Speaker 2They drank it.
Speaker 1Yep Did Edwin survive.
Speaker 2No, because how could he? That was like hundreds of years ago.
Speaker 1Well, did he survive to see a full?
Speaker 2life To be to the ripe old age of 23?
Speaker 1Probably not no. He died two months later. Mercy's body was buried in the churchyard of the Baptist Church in Exeter, rhode Island. Today it's known as Chestnut Hill Cemetery.
Speaker 2Have you been there?
Speaker 1I have not, though it's also very close to where I grew up. The incident caused Rhode Island to be known as the Vampire Capital of America.
Speaker 2By whom? Who gave that title?
Speaker 1Some newspaper man. Rhode Island is also the home of the vampire legend of Nellie L Vaughn from 1889, who died at the age of 19. Nellie was laid to rest in what is known as Rhode Island's historical cemetery number two, and local urban legend tells us that her grave is cursed.
Speaker 2And here we have Rhode Island's historic cemetery number two.
Speaker 1I'm going to quote here from a New England article by Charles Robinson. Quote one local university professor who studied vampirism claimed that no vegetable or lichen would grow on Nellie's grave, despite numerous attempts to plant there. And people are still taken aback by the inscription along the bottom of Nellie's tombstone. The curious words read I am waiting and watching for you. End quote who? I fucking love that. Give me a quote like that on my gravestone. Who makes the people trying to plant lichen because there's this folklore.
Speaker 1So they're like, okay, there's this weird urban legend, we're gonna disprove it, and they can't really how do you do that? Well, the lichen is probably related to werewolf mythology. I would assume obviously no A lichenthrope.
Speaker 2Sure, it's a similar name, but it's just like a moss that grows on rocks. It's really slow. I don't think you can plant lichen. I mean, I don't know much about planting.
Speaker 1Yes, you can encourage lichens to grow in your garden. How Create a damp and shady area. Likens to grow in your garden.
Speaker 2How Create a damp and shady area? Sure you can encourage.
Speaker 1Tuck it into fallen debris.
Speaker 2Okay, so basically make a graveyard.
Speaker 1Mix it with moist substances.
Speaker 2Yeah, so all these things are already done.
Speaker 1Right, it's not growing. There's a vampire afoot.
Speaker 2I mean sure that's suspicious. If lichen's growing, though, it's a very good sign of the ecosystem.
Speaker 1It's actually one of the good benchmarks, but it's not growing.
Speaker 2Clearly they have a poor ecosystem.
Speaker 1Yeah, they need more moisture.
Speaker 2And less vampires.
Influence of New England Vampire Panic
Speaker 1George Brown never got tuberculosis and he lived long enough until 1922 to see the discovery of the vaccine. In all of these cases and there are many, many more it was typically older family members or neighbors that would convince the grieving family that a vampire or undead family member was to blame. There was a continuation of the old folklore beliefs that persisted. Couple extreme loss and unexplained devastation with old folklore and mythology and you get the New England vampire panic. It's not so different from the rise of spiritualism during the Civil War. People need an explanation, they need to be able to understand during extreme loss and horror and they need some way to move through that and feel like they're in control. But when Bram Stoker wrote Dracula in 1897, he used newspaper articles about Mercy Brown in his research. One of the biggest reasons that we chose this topic is because the rise in vampire literature seems to correlate quite perfectly with the rise in vampire mythology and panics in the United States.
Speaker 2It seems very after hearing all this, the whole vampires being having to sleep in coffins makes a lot more sense.
Speaker 1This topic is incredibly exciting to me because it's such a clear case of history impacting horror, which, of course, is what we aim to explore on this podcast. On an infamous rainy vacation in Geneva, mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein and John Polidori wrote the Vampire, which predated Dracula by 78 years. The Vampire was released in 1819 and is generally thought of as the kindling that first started the vampire literature movement. Also in 1819 was a story called the Black Vampire, a legend of Saint Domingo. Between 1845 and 1847, 876 pages of a vampire serial called varney the vampire or feast of blood was released in penny dreadfuls the same year that varney the vampire was released, which is the longest epic vampire story maybe to date varney the vampire yeah, so the very same year that it was released does he teach moral lessons to kids?
Speaker 1No, it seems to have very little to do with children actually.
Speaker 2I was making a joke, because the alliteration makes him seem like he'd be friendly.
Speaker 1Yeah, he sounds cartoonish.
Speaker 2Very cartoonish Varney the vampire.
Speaker 1But the very same year that Varney was released, lemuel Ray of Griswold Connecticut again shout out to my hometown was released. Lemuel Ray of Griswold Connecticut again shout out to my hometown along with his father and brother, all of whom had died from an illness, were disinterred, their hearts removed and one of the three had been reburied in a skull and crossbone pattern. In 1872, one of my favorite stories, carmilla, was released. Carmilla also kick-started the lesbian vampire tradition, which has since erupted into a major subgenre. Carmilla was written by Sheridan LaFonu and is often considered one of the most influential stories on Bram Stoker's Dracula. Have you read it? I've read it multiple times.
Speaker 2Do you like it? I do. I have not read it.
Speaker 1I have a copy if you'd like it.
Speaker 2I'll give it a thought.
Speaker 1I actually read it in Transylvania on our trip to Romania this month.
Speaker 2We're not allowed to talk about that until our Vlad the Impaler episode, I think we can say that we went there. We did go there.
Speaker 1It's pretty clear on social media that we went there.
Speaker 2What's social media?
Speaker 1And finally, in 1897, dracula was released. And, as we know, dracula has endured and influenced vampire horror far more than other works. Quoting again from the Bloody, disgusting article, quote Throughout the 1800s, vampirism had begun to pick up steam as a recurring theme in Gothic literature, becoming the focal point of more and more stories. Before Dracula finally cemented the vampire as a cornerstone of popular culture once and for all, it was a century that saw the undead grow stronger and stronger as a fictional tradition. End quote Dracula is an epistolary novel that takes place in Transylvania and while we cannot deny the influence that Vlad the Impaler and other local Wallachian folklore had here, we also have to understand that one, bram Stoker did not invent vampire mythology and, two, he was influenced by Mercy Brown when he was writing the novel, in addition to other Slavic traditions.
Speaker 2He invented some.
Speaker 1Not broadly. I just referenced like three or four works that predated Dracula.
Speaker 2Yeah, but he invented some vampire mythology that I think that's the first instance of vampires controlling wolves.
Speaker 1Okay, well, we'll fact check that.
Speaker 2It's a wild, baseless claim.
Speaker 1Yeah, I know.
Speaker 2How about vampires turning into smoke?
Speaker 1We'll have to check it out While I'm trying to get out of the habit of quoting Wikipedia. This is a really good explanation of Stoker's influences.
Speaker 2Since when are you trying to get out of the habit of quoting Wikipedia? You say that every time.
Speaker 1This is from the Dracula entry. You've never said this before. End quote. Dracula was mostly written in the 1890s. Stoker produced over 100 pages of notes for the novel, drawing extensively from Transylvanian folklore and history. Some scholars have suggested that the character of Dracula was inspired by historical figures like the Wallachian prince Vlad the Impaler or the Countess Elizabeth Bathory, but there is a widespread disagreement. Stoker's notes mention neither figure. So his notes do not mention Vlad the Impaler, but they do mention Mercy Brown. Back to the quote. He found the name Dracula in Whitby's public library while on holiday, thinking it meant devil in Romanian end quote. So we know, because we just went, that there's act. The word Dracula is also associated with Vlad the Impaler. His father was Vlad Dracul, dracula's son of Dracul, and we'll talk about that on this other episode when we get to it. But Bram Stoker didn't know any of that. He found the word dracula in a dictionary. Yeah, I went in a dictionary in whippy's public library while on holiday typical and again he thought that it meant devil in romanian.
Speaker 1The rise of the new england vampire panic was very entangled with the earliest versions of vampire literature, and tracing the folklore behind this mythology is a topic for another episode. Though these stories seem outdated to us now and historic, we do have to acknowledge that the 1800s are far more recent than the Salem Witch Trials of 1690. And especially in today's political climate, again it's a good reminder that we don't know everything about how the world works and sometimes it's better to try and force ourselves to take a look at something in a new way. I'm going to quote one final time from the Bloody Disgusting article Quote. During that time frame, vampires were being established as a cornerstone of horror fiction and at the same time New England was gripped by a genuine panic as people were digging up and desecrating their loved ones out of fear that they were rising from the dead. It is absolutely fascinating that these two things, which should be polar opposites, were happening simultaneously. One can't help but look at these dates so close together and wonder how it was even possible. How did a boom of vampire fiction and a resurgence in the belief of vampires happen at the same time? It sounds completely contradictory. In some ways it is and in some ways it isn't. End quote.
Speaker 1There's a socioeconomic answer to this. The writers of these stories were all from affluent and educated backgrounds and the folks in New England digging up their dead loved ones not to minimize and whatever. But they were not looking at this through this educated lens, right, they were going through something horrifying and they were desperate. You really do have two different types of people living in two different worlds. You don't have local people in New England whose family members are mysteriously dying, creating vampire horror fiction. That's happening in Europe and in other places. So I think it's a really good point that the article makes about how wild it is that these things are happening at the same time. You really just have to look at the world, hypothetically speaking, that each of those groups were living in. Right. John Palidori vacationing in Geneva with Mary Shelley and Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron is a totally separate thing than being in colonial New England and everybody's dying, your food is failing and you're just kind of fucked, you know.
Speaker 2It's not fun.
Speaker 1And that, my friends, is the history of the New England vampire panic and how it influenced the rise of horror vampire tradition.
Speaker 2Are there any movies on this? I don't think I've seen a like colonial horror vampire movie.
Speaker 1I actually just assumed that there weren't, because I can't think of any either, and just a quick Google I don't really see anything coming up beyond documentaries.
Speaker 2I don't know. I feel like colonial horror is kind of cool, expensive to make, of course, but I don't know People like the Witch.
Speaker 1People love the Witch. You also have Scooby-Doo and the Witch's Ghost.
Speaker 2Which is not colonial horror.
Speaker 1Well, it takes place in Plymouth. You're craving new england vampire panic specific horror. The good news is that we are going to have one more episode this month, if you can believe it, and we will present to you three vampire themed horror stories are they good?
Speaker 2they're excellent. Well, that's great.
Speaker 1The other thing that I want to say is that our friend, the very, very talented Pilar Kep, designed a beautiful illustration of the New England Vampire Panic. In my opinion, it is our best and scariest design that you can find in our merch store. So if you head to lunaticsprojectcom and click on merch, you can take a look at what's available there. We also are sending out postcards and stickers with the beautiful design on it. If you'd like one and you're not already in touch, please reach out to us on social media and we have some extras to send out this year.
Speaker 2Abby said that if she sells 1 million stickers she'll get the design as a tattoo.
Speaker 1Absolutely no problem. Does it matter where, what body part I get it on?
Speaker 2Forehead.
Speaker 1No, I'm not going to get my forehead, but I will get it. I have to ask Pilar permission.
Speaker 2Oh, that's right, Otherwise you have to pay your licensing every time someone looks at you.
Speaker 1That's right. It's not sustainable.
Speaker 2All right, Well, I hope Alan did this scratch your Halloween itch a little bit more Slightly more than Hitchcock, despite the fact that there are no movies, which is a bummer yeah, it is a bummer, I do.
Speaker 1I already have a plan for next year and I think you're gonna like it. I think you're right, alan, that this, this topic, doesn't call upon specific horror films. However, it calls upon dracula, you know.
Speaker 2It kind of goes back a layer uh, sure, yes, and Dracula being a Halloween staple, I will give you that.
Speaker 1And if we were going to broaden this up and just talk about vampires in general, then of course we'd have like an infinite number of movies to watch.
Speaker 2Did we do a series? It was just on vampires, right, it wasn't Dracula.
Speaker 1Well, it was part of the Universal Monster series.
Speaker 2So I think it kind of had like a focus on Dracula, but we talked about just generally how vampire mythology developed, I understand. So, okay, I have a better scope of our upcoming encapsulation of future vampire related topics.
Speaker 1There you go, as always. Thank you all so much for being here. Hope you are enjoying the spookiest and last days of October and, of course, we will talk to you one more time before the end of this month and on the holiest of days, when the veil is absolutely the thinnest, and I hope everyone goes out there and really communes with your loved ones who have passed, as is tradition. Speaking of which, I also just want to say episode 49, which is quite old. The Samhain episode remains one of my favorites. We had our friend Miranda Orzel on to really talk about pagan history. If you're wondering what the history of Halloween is, I'll link that episode in the description as well, but I really, really love that exploration on the history of Halloween going back thousands of years. So just a little if you're trying to get in the Halloween spirit and learn something new. But, as always, thank you guys so much for being here. Stay safe, stay spooky, don't forget to vote and we'll talk to you soon.
Speaker 2Bye, bye you.
