People were dropping like flies; the young, the middle-aged and the old.
One day these people were healthy and the next day they came down with something
quite awful. It was as if the devil himself moved through towns like a miasma, filling the mouths of
the innocent and silently killing them, draining them of their blood... of their very lifeforce.
“Vampires!” screamed the townsfolk, “Here they be vampires! Evil has announced itself in this town.”
It seemed a good enough theory to good Christian people who believed
evil was as omnipresent as the air they breathed. During the night the mobs got together, the flames
from their tiki torches blowing in the wind. They went out in search of the maleficent spirits,
the dead that had risen again to plague the town. They would find the vampires, and exorcise them so
they could cause no more pain and death. This happened late 1700s and throughout
the , in the USA, a time of vampires that most of America has now forgotten.
Fast-forward to the year 1990 and some kids are playing on a hillside
in a small town called Griswold in the state of Connecticut. One of those kids finds something,
something that makes his blood run cold. He runs home to his house and says to his
mother, “Hey mom, look what I found.” In his hands are a human skull. The mother
almost drops the dish she’s holding, and gets on the phone to the police.
It turned out that this kid had discovered a cemetery that dated back to what archaeologists
thought was the late 1700s or early 1800s. They started digging, and soon discovered a number
of skeletal remains, many of them of children. That wasn’t too unusual. Back then life was tough,
people died young, and folks didn’t have the money to erect large gravestones.
But what was certainly unusual, was the fact some of those graves contained the bones of people
who’d been accused of being vampires. Let’s take you back to the start.
So, when this kid revealed to his mom that skull her first thoughts of course were not,
“Hmm, that could be the remains of a vampire.” What she thought was,
“Oh my God, someone may have been murdered.” That’s exactly what the police thought, too, since
a serial killer named Michael Ross had killed eight people in the 1980s and three of the victims
were from Griswold. Maybe there were more victims, and so the cops made the hillside a crime scene.
But then more remains were found, 29 in all. A forensic archaeologist was called to the scene
and he soon explained that there was no way those skeletons were once the living victims of Ross.
They dated back to the colonial era, a time when people in that area buried their loved ones in
uncomplicated wooden coffins. The remains, for the most part, were found in the normal position.
They were laid down with arms folded over the rib cage or down by their side.
But not “Burial Number 4”, this was a special case and it confounded archaeologists.
They had to dig deeper to get to this crypt, and unlike the others it was made of stone.
It was as if this person had been buried in a way so that it could not rise again.
The archaeologists struggled to remove the heavy stones that were guarding the coffin,
a box that strangely had been painted red.
What they found was not the skeletal remains of someone laid to rest intact,
but bones that had been severed. The limbs had been cut up and the head had been chopped off,
and the bones had been rearranged to look something like a pirate’s Jolly Roger flag.
Not only had the remains been smashed and taken apart, but the coffin had been partly wrecked.
Someone had dug those remains up and proceeded to tear them apart.
How unusual, thought the team of archaeologists. Those guys and some historians were confused by
what they saw before them. None of the bodies were buried with any valuables so it wasn’t a case or
grave-robbing, and it seemed highly unlikely that anyone would have made the effort to dig
down deep, cut apart what was left of a dead body, and then re-bury it, for no good reason.
Then one historian’s mind lit up and he believed he knew what had gone down. He
asked his colleagues working on the case if they had ever heard of the Jewett City vampires.
“What,” his colleagues said, “vampires in the USA!?”
“Yep,” said the historian, New England was once plagued by vampires…or
at least that’s what people thought. Jewett City was a settlement in the U.S.
that now stands in the town of Griswold. In fact, that hillside cemetery is located in Jewett City.
In 1845, a young and healthy man from the Ray family suddenly became very sick and he died
shortly after. The next to go was the father a few years later, and a couple of years after that,
another child of the family died. A year later and yet another member of the Ray family died,
and people began to think the family was cursed…Perhaps evil
spirits were at work, namely, vampires. Word got around, and soon various parts
of New England thought they were under attack from vampires. People indeed were dropping like flies,
and the townsfolk weren’t exactly familiar with medical science.
The dead were rising again and taking others down with them,
so someone had the bright idea of tearing out the heart, or lungs, or head, of the deceased
and burning them. This, they thought, would keep the dead down and no one else would die.
But more people kept dying, despite the ad hoc surgery and the burning of the vital organs.
More drastic measures had to be taken, and that meant exhuming more bodies and cutting the remains
apart. The rationale was that the dead couldn’t rise if they were legless, heartless and headless.
This wasn’t only happening in Griswold. In New Hampshire in the mid-19th century there
were many small towns where people believed they were under attack from the evilest of spirits.
A newspaper clipping from 1840 explains how vampire panic was moving through other towns in
New Hampshire. This is what was written about what people did to the corpse of one alleged vampire:
“This was disinterring a human body, which belonged to a family all strongly predisposed
to consumption, for the purpose of removing the heart, which was burned, the ashes of
which were considered a sovereign remedy to those of the family who were still living,
and might be afflicted with the same disease.” The practice didn’t only happen in New England,
and historians now think that if bodies all over certain parts of the USA were exhumed
it would be found that ribs had been cracked open and heads had been chopped off.
Sometimes this happened right after the death, but at other times the bodies were
dug up and the dismantling and burning began. There were reported cases in Massachusetts,
Ohio, and Vermont, and each involved many members of families suddenly getting very ill and dying.
In each case, in each state, to save anyone else from an early death, either the head,
or the heart, or the lungs, or all three, were removed from the deceased and burned.
They watched the burning of the heart, each clinging to the belief that now
they were safe from this man turning into a vampire and taking their family members out.
Newspapers across the U.S. gained knowledge of this strange practice pervading small towns in
the North East., with some of them calling the townsfolk superstitious and ill-educated, writing
that entire communities believed they had been stricken by evil spirits rising from the grave.
Some newspapers called it “vicious” and “barbaric” and said in this day and age
people should not believe in vampirism. As for the townsfolk, they thought they knew better,
and as you’ll soon see, it wasn’t only the uneducated rabble that believed in vampires.
Why were they doing this? Where did the belief come from?
Well, vampirism in the USA goes back a long way. In 1793, in New England a dead man’s heart was
burned at a Blacksmith’s forge and this is what was written about that at the time:
“Timothy Mead officiated at the altar in the sacrifice to the Demon Vampire who it
was believed was still sucking the blood of the then living wife of Captain Burton.
It was the month of February and a good slaying.” A good slaying! And this happened during a period
called, “The Age of Reason.” The age of un-reason more like.
In Woodstock, Vermont, in the early 1800s a 20-year old man named Frederick Ransom suddenly
fell ill and died. He was buried, but then his father decided to have the body of his son exhumed
and his heart burned on a blacksmith's forge. Was he under pressure from the townsfolk to
do this or did he do it to save the rest of his family? We ask that because hundreds of
local people turned up to watch the burning of this recently deceased dead man’s heart.
The whole town was possessed by the belief that vampires were killing their young.
Now we can fast-forward to the year 1892 and look at the death of a 19-year old girl
named Mercy Brown. Her death and subsequent accusation of being a vampire is perhaps the
case that was most reported in the media. She died in Exeter, New Hampshire,
but not before her mother and elder sister died. Mercy and her elder brother then got sick,
and soon people living within the vicinity became very scared, believing that this family would rise
again and infect them with the illness. More members of the Brown family died
and one of last surviving members under pressure from the townsfolk
granted the town permission to exhume the bodies. The mob got their shovels ready and headed over to
the place where the dead were buried. Most of the corpses were horribly decomposed, but not
Mercy…Mercy looked almost as sweet as she had been when she was alive and it was said
blood was still in her heart. An actual newspaper report from
back then said, “The heart and liver were removed, and in cutting open the heart,
clotted and decomposed blood was found.” The people didn’t understand that Mercy
had been stored in a cold crypt during the winter, and so her body was preserved. Nope, they believed
that the girl was undead and she was to blame for numerous other Browns’ deaths. Her brother
at the time of her death was now very ill, and the people thought that maybe he could be saved.
At the time the “Providence Journal” wrote that Mercy had likely been surviving in the
afterlife by consuming the “living tissue and blood” of her brother. The journal mentions the
word “vampire” but it’s unlikely that this word was used by locals. That’s debatable at least.
The locals burned Mercy’s heart and lungs and turned them into ashes. They then mixed those
ashes with a tonic and gave the drink to Mercy’s brother, since he was now knocking
on death’s door. Did the drink save him? The answer is no. The boy died two months later.
Still, that didn’t stop local communities in various states digging up more of the dead.
Historians and folklorists now say this vampire panic swept through many towns and communities
in the region and there are newspaper clippings and other historical data that shows it. Even
the great American philosopher Henry David Thoreau wrote about the vampire superstition.
In 1959, he wrote, “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
heart and liver of the last deceased, in order to prevent any more from having it.”
There is evidence that it wasn’t only the ignorant locals that got down with burning
parts of corpses, sometimes local doctors and even members of the church gave their
blessing or even took part in the ceremonies. The people were not possessed by any kind of
evil spirit, and we think that we don’t need to point that out to you. What they were dying of was
tuberculosis, which was then called consumption. In towns throughout the North East of the U.S,
many of them blighted with abject poverty, this disease was killing
about a quarter of the people in the 1800s. The problem back then was that there was no
cure for this disease and it wasn’t understood very well, so the townsfolk were pretty much
constantly worried out of their minds. Organ burning was their only hope…albeit one that
was macabre, unholy, and just plain wrong. But then what could they do? People would
watch in terror as their once healthy family members became horribly feverish
and later started coughing up blood. This is how it was described by one writer back then:
“The emaciated figure strikes one with terror. The forehead covered with drops of sweat; the cheeks
painted with a livid crimson, the eyes sunk.” They’d then start coughing up blood and it
seemed to onlookers that blood was being drained from them.
What kind of evil thing would do such a thing? A vampire of course. These people,
isolated as they were from most of the world, did in fact believe in evil spirits.
They hung things in their houses to ward off the devil…some of them even thought that dead
people bled when in the presence of the person that killed them. How’s that for police work…
It wasn’t always the family that wanted to exhume the bodies to save the rest of the members,
but pressure came from the people of the town. They didn’t want those
undead to enter their houses. It was simply a case of mass hysteria in a time when many
seemingly healthy people were dying. It was the historical equivalent of hoarding toilet paper.
To be fair to the townsfolk, there was nothing they could have done to save the victims. There
was no cure until the 1940s, and until then, people died a horrible death, and indeed,
it seemed that something sinister was draining the blood and lifeforce from entire families.
They prayed and prayed and said things like, “I blow the wind of God on you. You
are destroyed forever, and you’ll never be back.” Unfortunately, their prayers were never answered,
so they went after the devil by themselves. Are people still superstitious in those parts?
Well, there are rumors right now that when the spirit of Mercy hangs around,
a person’s olfactory sense notices the sweet smell of roses. In the cemetery where she’s buried,
some people believe her voice can still be heard. As for the devil...he’s still doing his dastardly
business for a lot of people in those parts. Now you really have to watch, US Soldiers
Use Vampires To Terrify Enemies. Or, watch this one instead… if you dare.