In Food for the Dead I concluded that Americans who exhumed the corpses of their kinsfolk to stop the spread of consumption did not use, perhaps were unaware of, the term “vampire.” My conclusion has been called into question by a recently discovered gravestone in Rhode Island. Simon Whipple Aldrich died in 1841 at the age of twenty-seven. He was preceded in death by a sister who also died at the age of twenty-seven, and followed in death by another sister; she, too, died at the age of twenty-seven. Simon’s gravestone had been broken at the base and then cemented into place, revealing only the first two lines of an obviously longer epitaph:
Altho’ consumption’s vampire grasp
Had seized thy mortal frame,
The detective work of a fellow scholar and vampire researcher has led to the identification of the complete inscription, which was taken from a lengthy poem commemorating the death, in 1838, of Joseph Horace Kimball, a young, but celebrated, abolitionist. The Aldrich family obviously was plagued by consumption, the metaphorical vampire. The following questions, in particular, have been set aside for further exploration: Was this use of “consumption’s vampire grasp” only metaphorical, or were corpses actually exhumed? Was Simon, himself, or, indeed, the entire Aldrich family, strongly abolitionist?
The antislavery movement did play a role in the life of an author who was, as far as I can determine, the first to incorporate an unequivocal recounting of an American vampire exhumation into a literary work. Mary Andrews Denison’s novel, Home Pictures, published in 1853, includes a chapter entitled “Old Superstition,” which opens with the following lines: “One learns many a curious little thing in a village like this. I listened to the narration of a most singular incident yesterday at the house of a neighbor. It seems that there is an old superstition, strongly believed by the credulous even at this day, that if the heart of the last deceased member of a consumptive family is taken from the body and burned, and the ashes reserved as a medicine to be given to the rest in small doses, no other person of that family will die of this terrible scourge.” I assume that the ensuing narrative is fictional, although it does have the ring of truth and may well have been inspired by a newspaper account. Denison (1826-1911), who authored more than eighty novels, was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts—a hotbed of abolitionist convictions—and married the Reverend Charles Wheeler Denison, a Baptist minister and editor of the Emancipator, New York’s first antislavery journal. Denison’s vampire-pioneering novel predates Amy Lowell’s poem, “A Dracula of the Hills,” by seventy-three years and H. P. Lovecraft’s short vampire-based story, “The Shunned House,” by eighty-four years.
The appearance of America’s authentic vampires in poetry and prose may seem surprising at first glance. After all, it was European literature that first mined the rich vein of vampire folklore—European vampire folklore, of course—which ultimately led, through German Romanticism and Gothic literature, to the vampires of film, television, romance novels, young adult fiction and advertising. These ubiquitous, shape-shifting vampires, with a European pedigree, are the ones that we embrace as they continue to embody the things that we most desire . . . and fear. Although the impact of America’s vampires on literature and popular culture does not compare to that of the Old World’s undead, it is appreciable and, as we shall see, has been growing in recent years.
