The fact that nearly fifty vampiric events have been documented, and at least twice that number referenced in my collection of American texts, indicates that the practice was not as extraordinary as we might imagine. Reflecting on Woodward’s exhumation in 1819, an old-timer observed: “As old people will remember the notion was quite prevalent in those days.” A Maine commentator reinforces this observation by deeming the vampire tradition “one of the most popular superstitions of New England.” In 1889, Jeremiah Curtin wrote in the Journal of American Folklore, “The old lady told me the belief was quite common when she was a girl, about seventy-five years ago” in Woodstock, Vermont. The handful of cases that have come to light undoubtedly represent a much larger undocumented or undiscovered inventory of events. The “foreign doctor, a quack” who prescribed the vampire ritual in Willington, Connecticut in 1784; the “strolling Indian doctor” who did the same a few years later in Essex County, Massachusetts; the Hungarian miner from Pennsylvania who, with the assistance of his brother, exhumed his boss’s body to cure himself of consumption; the hunt for shroud-eating corpses among the Pennsylvania-Dutch; the Polish immigrant in Minnesota who exhumed two of his children, in 1922, in a desperate attempt to save his one surviving son argue for the conclusion that vampire practices made their way to America multiple times, from several different cultural groups, over a long period and in several variations. This conclusion helps explain why the task of defining a vampire, which seems simple on the surface, becomes complicated on closer examination.

All species of deadly beings lurk in the record of folklore. In the ever-changing landscape of this danse macabre, creatures and concepts merge and blend, divide and disperse, only to merge and blend again. While we have been conditioned to think of vampires only as undead corpses who leave their graves at night to suck the blood of the living, worldwide folk tradition is not so clear-cut. The distinctive forms of bringers of death are diversified, yet interconnected. Nor is it just the dead or their ghosts who prey upon the living; demons, witches, succubi, werewolves, and vampires at times are indistinguishable in the folklore record. Traditional accounts of their origins and methods of assault, as well as means to avoid their attacks and identify or destroy them, often do not differentiate among the various supernatural death-dealing creatures. Ultimately, what unites these seemingly diverse folk traditions is the belief that a corpse, possibly animated by an evil spirit, is responsible for an otherwise unexplainable series of deaths. Reduced to its common denominator, the vampire is a classic scapegoat: “a corpse that comes to the attention of the populace at a time of crisis and is taken for the cause of that crisis,” as Paul Barber argued in Vampires, Burial, and Death.

Even though vampire cases turn up in several regions across the country, the “Transylvania of America” remained non-Puritan New England—from the outlying towns in Rhode Island and Eastern Connecticut, up the Connecticut River Valley into Vermont, New Hampshire, and southern Maine, and into Upstate New York. The people of this “other New England”—some of them Puritan outcasts or those who became disillusioned with that suffocating religion—were not notably religious in an orthodox sense. Occupying philosophical as well as geographical margins, they were open to a magic world view and participated in various hybrid religions that were unofficial combinations of Christian beliefs and folk practices. (However, an account from Essex County, Massachusetts, the home of Salem Village, notorious for its witch trials in the late seventeenth century, establishes that vampire practices were not entirely excluded from areas of strong Puritan heritage.)

New Englanders long relied on self-treatment and treatment by folk healers, drawing on the lore of herbs and readily available household ingredients passed down in their communities for generations. But they were also aware of other medical traditions. Beginning in in the eighteenth century, itinerant healers—many originally from Germany and Eastern Europe—worked a circuit from New Jersey and Pennsylvania into New England. They set up shop in town, advertised in local newspapers and broadsides (most of their ads included testimonies from cured patients), and moved on when business dropped off or, not infrequently, when run out of town by officials or dissatisfied clients. One of my recently discovered cases pushes the earliest known exhumation in America back to 1784, firmly establishing vampire activity in the era when these foreign, “quack doctors” were plying their trade in the Northeast. Although this unofficial culture of occult beliefs and folk magic has received little attention from historians, it appears to have influenced many, if not most, Americans, beginning in colonial times and continuing through the nineteenth century.

American medicine in the early eighteenth century was unecrtain and changing. Astrology, religion, folk cures, and several kinds of medical systems provided alternative, often competing, approaches to dealing with sickness and healing. The ancient Greek doctrine advanced by Hippocrates remained unchallenged: the human body was regulated by the interplay of the four “humors” of phlegm, choler, bile and blood. To restore balance and good health when these fluids or vapors got out of balance, doctors would flush the digestive tract with purgatives and emetics or bleed the patient. The concept of “vitalism” held that blood, the “paramount humor,” contained the essence, or vital spirit, of the creature in which it flowed. Well into the nineteenth century in America, a physician’s duties required little, if any, formal training. The following list of self-proclaimed specialists suggests the inclusive and unsettled nature of the healing profession in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: physicians, surgeons, oculists, aurists, bonesetters, animal healers, botanic/Indian healers, pharmaceutical peddlers, medical electricians and apparatus healers, cancer curers, and dentists and surgeon-dentists. Whether treated or not, illnesses ran their natural course and most of the afflicted survived. In that regard, Voltaire (1694-1778) is often quoted, “The art of medicine consists in amusing the patient while nature cures the disease.”

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!

Thousands of our American ancestors were killed by vampires in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. By 1800, vampires could be blamed for nearly one-quarter of all deaths in North America and vampires remained the leading cause of death throughout the nineteenth century. This vampire did not resemble the clever Count Dracula of Bram Stoker’s imagination; this vampire’s cloak of invisibility was its smallness. It was so tiny that it could not be seen with the naked eye, which may explain its success as a mysterious killer. The mystery was solved in 1882, the year that Edward Koch announced his discovery of the tuberculosis bacillus. America’s vampires actually were—germs!

It is easy to identify the similarities between vampire folklore and the symptoms of tuberculosis. Vampires and victims of consumption, as pulmonary tuberculosis was then called, are the living dead. Vampires are consumption in material form, draining away life slowly and surreptitiously. Victims are walking corpses, red-eyed, pale and wasted, they embody disease and death. They suffer most at night. They awaken, coughing and in pain, sometimes describing a heavy feeling, like someone sitting on the chest. As the disease progresses, ulcers and cavities develop in the lungs and victims begin to cough up blood, which lingers at the corners of the mouth and stains the bedclothes. Family members are alarmed by what they see in the morning when they check on their dying loved one. Something is draining away the blood . . . the life. As the victim fades into death, others in the family begin to complain of the same symptoms. They wonder, Will this horror ever end? How can we stop it?