A diagnosis of consumption amounted to a death sentence. Medical practitioners offered many cures; none worked. Unwilling to do nothing as their loved ones faded away, some families turned to an old folk remedy. They exhumed the bodies of deceased relatives and checked them for signs considered to be extraordinary. Liquid blood in the heart, especially, was interpreted as “fresh” blood, proving that the corpse was responsible for the continuing plague of consumption. To stop the disease, the heart (and sometimes other organs) was cut from the body and burned to ashes. One variant of the practice prescribed that the ashes be fed to any in the family suffering from consumption. Another version was to burn the entire corpse, sometimes specifying that the dying inhale the smoke.

In Food for the Dead: On the Trail of New England’s Vampires (2001 & 2009),  I presented a detailed account of my twenty years of research into this practice. My vampire hunt began in 1981 when, as Rhode Island’s State Folklorist, I had the opportunity to interview Lewis Everett Peck, a descendant of the family of Mercy Brown, whom I soon discovered was probably the last person exhumed as a vampire in America. Captivated by this case, I began searching for data that would shed some light on the origin and extent of these rituals. I uncovered accounts of nearly twenty vampire incidents in Rhode Island, Vermont, Maine, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire, as well as a rich folk tradition that inspired the fictional vampires of H.P. Lovecraft, Edgar Allen Poe, and Amy Lowell.

In Food for the Dead, the reader accompanied me on my journey as I uncovered clue after clue in old newspapers and long-forgotten manuscripts, on crumbling gravestones, from the mouths of reluctant interviewees, and even, on one occasion, in the rearranged bones in a newly opened grave.

Upon publication of Food for the Dead, I was confident that I had followed New England’s vampire trail to the limits of available resources. I never imagined that a few months later I would be back on the trail with more than thirty new cases to explore, in addition to significant updates for several old ones. From a mummified corpse with a wooden stake through her heart, unearthed in the mountains of southeastern Tennessee, to the fearful search for shroud-eating corpses in a Pennsylvania-German community, the additional data expand our view of America’s vampire tradition. The new cases extend the geographical distribution of the tradition, both within and beyond New England. I now know that vampiric exhumations were carried out as far south as North Carolina, westward through Pennsylvania, into Chicago and to Minnesota, and northward to Ontario, Canada. The timeframe for this tradition also has been extended in both directions: I now have cases beginning in 1784 and continuing to 1949. Yes, 1949, the middle of the twentieth century!