Hi, if you’re new here, I clean old graves.
I’m currently at 1.3 million followers on TikTok.
It goes up every day, which has been really exciting.
I’ve always grown up around old cemeteries.
They’ve always been something of fascination for me.
I think this is going to be one of the oldest,
if not the oldest, I’ve ever cleaned.
That’s a question I get a lot. It’s from 1790.
I like hearing stories about people’s lives.
We’re going to take a look at
the grave of the vampire of Manchester, Vermont.
I can do that with people that are gone
by reassembling their life based on what I can find out on the internet.
I’m Caitlin Abrams. I’m manicpixiemom on TikTok,
and I clean gravestones.
[Super_Users]
[TikTok Grave Cleaner]
I get permission from the cemeteries to clean old, historic stones.
Generally, that’s accepted to be
the 1700s, 1800s,
maybe a little bit of the early 1900s.
Each clean that I do takes anywhere from 15 to 20 minutes,
maybe a half hour, depending on the size of the stone.
I’ll clean a couple of them while I’m there.
I might just walk around and check on the ones I've cleaned before.
The solution that I use works over time,
and it works with the elements
to clean up the stones,
so they could be really different, even just from one day to the next.
And here it is, all dry.
Everything I found out was thanks to the internet.
Findagrave.com,
which is basically exactly what it sounds like.
I call it social media for cemeteries.
I signed up to become a volunteer.
And what that means is when someone who lives in Idaho
wants a picture of their family member’s gravestone in Vermont
and they can’t fly all the way out here,
they can submit a photo request.
That happened with this person out in the Midwest.
She sent the request, and it was in a cemetery very close to me.
The grave was really hard to read.
This person said,
“It’s looking really rough. Do you know how to clean a grave?”
I have no idea, but I’m happy to try.
So that’s when I spent the good five months researching it.
Opening up the grave mobile.
D2 is a non-toxic biocide.
It was designed specifically to clean stone without harming it,
especially historic stone.
Once I started cleaning, I realized,
oh, I can start digging into these stories.
If you follow me, you might remember David Lytle.
Mary is his mother.
Esther was born in 1766.
The first loss in the family was the son, Sammie,
who died at 16 in 1882 of an accidental drowning.
I realized that, just like I use Ancestry.com,
I could find information out about these people.
Pretty much just enter the person’s name,
their birth year, their death year.
And there’s a website called Newspapers.com.
I just type the person’s name in, maybe a year range and a location,
and see if anything pops up.
And it’s a very satisfying rabbit hole to fall down.
And here he is.
This is the grave of Harris Lindsley.
I cleaned the grave of his fiancee, Evelyn. She’s right there.
I cleaned that grave about two months ago,
so you can already see that the D2 has brightened it up considerably.
It used to look just like this one,
with a lot of staining here, some moss.
So we’re going to be able to clear that staining away
so that over time, his grave will look more like hers.
They were a very prominent couple.
They were about a week away from getting married,
and they decided to go to Williamstown, Massachusetts,
to get dinner.
They came to a railroad crossing,
and a train was backing up and crashed into their car.
Evelyn and her fiance were killed, almost on impact.
He was killed immediately.
She lived a couple of minutes and then she died.
When I looked up the story in various newspapers,
it was shared in Chicago and Boston and Vermont, all over,
because it’s such a tragic tale.
It’s a tragic tale, even now.
These people were young and excited
and just a week away from getting married,
and they both get killed in this absolutely horrific manner.
I came to clean Rachel’s grave right around...
I guess it was a month ago or so now.
Her grave has cleaned up really nicely.
A friend of mine connected me with this story that links to
the 1790 vampire panic in New England.
As you can see here, Rachel was married to Isaac Burton.
She died in 1790 at the age of 21,
and she died of tuberculosis or consumption.
Her husband was remarried to a woman named Hulda,
and Hulda also came down with tuberculosis.
So townspeople of Manchester came up with this idea that
a dead relative had turned into a vampire
and was essentially cursing Isaac's new wife.
The physical effects of tuberculosis
can cause an almost otherworldly appearance
of losing color, very hallow, very, very shallow-cheeked,
and your eyes kind of bug out and you’re coughing up blood.
So I think it kind of got put on vampires
just like it’s been put on witches in the Salem witch trials.
In a documented event,
the whole town got together,
they dug Rachel up,
they took out what was left of her heart and her liver,
burned them on a blacksmith’s forge, and had Holda inhale the smoke
in an attempt to ward away the evil that Rachel had brought upon them,
which did not work,
and his second wife died as well.
I do think people are drawn to
the stories that kind of pull at your heart a little bit,
that can paint a picture of a person’s life.
As humans, I think we can all connect into that.