Vampire in 1790's Vermont

On September 26, 1859, Henry David Thoreau wrote in his journal,

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 & heart & liver of the last deceased, in order to prevent any more from having it.

“Consumption” is tuberculosis, from which Thoreau died a few years later, decades before the bacterial cause of the disease was identified. Until then, macabre incidents like Thoreau’s happened in New England. When a living person seemed to have their life force gradually sucked out, then family and friends might look to the graveyard to find someone who’s responsible.

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Several New England cases are alleged, well before Bram Stoker's Dracula. Some stories about how people dealt with the situation are incredible. However, this case has left some physical evidence, an unusual arrangement of family burials

There were cases of vampires all over the world before, during, and even after Dracula both seduced and frightened us -- one of these cases was Mercy Brown, the Rhode Island vampire. Mercy Brown has the distinction of being the last of the North American vampires -- at least in the traditional sense. Mercy Lena Brown was a farmer's daughter and an upstanding member of rural Exeter, Rhode Island. She was only 19 years old when she died of consumption on January 17, 1892. On March 17, 1892, Mercy's body would be exhumed from the cemetery because members of the community suspected the vampire Mercy Brown was attacking her dying brother, Edwin.

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Vampires suck!!! So do negative people. So don't be a negative Nancy....be a positive Percy!!!

Night Star

The Mercy Brown case was about a century after the Vermont cases, and almost forty years after Thoreau wrote about a Vermont case (maybe the Spauldings). It's also a different historical situation: the cause of tuberculosis was known by then, but a cure was still decades away.

It is interesting that you bring up Bram Stoker's Dracula. Apparently he might have known of the Brown case, and some people think that it was an influence on his novel. I am not sure about that, because Stoker's real innovation (I think) was to invent a Goth "vampire lifestyle," above ground and adventurous, if not really the sort of thing most people would want to do.

catfishjoe

I don't think the people who buried Reuben Spaulding (or Mercy Brown's family a century later) were being negative. They were trying to help their family. They got the science wrong, but (pardon the expression), their hearts were in the right place, IMO.

Yes, it says Mercy Brown was perhaps the last of the known cases. New England certainly is rich in history, folklore, hauntings and what-not.