Their hearts were then to be cut from their bodies and burned upon a rock in front of the house. The neighbors were called in to assist in the lugubrious enterprise. There were the Wilcoxes, the Reynoldses, the Whitfords, the Mooneys, the Gardners, and others. With pick and spade the graves were soon opened, and the six bodies were found to be far advanced in the stages of decomposition. These were the last of the children who had died. But the first, the body of Sarah, was found to be in a very remarkable condition. The eyes were opened and fixed. The hair and nails had grown, and the heart and the arteries were filled with fresh red blood. It was clear at once to these astonished people that the cause of their trouble lay there before them. All the conditions of the vampire were present in the corpse of Sarah, the first that had died, and against whom all the others had so bitterly complained. So her heart was removed and carried to the designated rock, and there solemnly burned. This being done, the mutilated bodies were returned to their respective graves and covered. Peace then came to this afflicted family, but not, however, until a seventh victim had been demanded. Thus was the dream of Stukeley fulfilled. No longer did the nightly visits of Sarah afflict his wife, who soon regained her health. The seventh victim was a son, a promising young farmer, who had married and lived upon a farm adjoining. He was too far gone when the burning of Sarah's heart took place to recover.

    The conditions here narrated are precisely similar to those alleged to have taken place in the Danubian provinces and the remedy applied the same. But in those countries certain religions rites were observed, and occasionally, instead of burning a part or the whole of a body, a nail was driven through the centre of the forehead. At the period when this event took place, religious rites were things but little known to the actors in the scene, and fire in their hands was quite as effective an agent as an iron nail. Those from whom these facts were obtained little suspected the foreign character of the origin of the extraordinary circumstances which they described; but extraordinary as they are, there are nevertheless those still living who religiously believe in them.

At this point in his article, Rider noted that he had sent it to the Providence Journal for their consideration, but that it was rejected because it was “too sensational.” Defending the integrity of his article, Rider provides yet two additional vampire examples, one apparently already undertaken and the other in contemplation.

    At the breaking out of the Revolution there dwelt in one of the remoter Rhode Island towns a young man whom we will call Stukeley. He married an excellent woman and settled down in life as a farmer. Industrious, prudent, thrifty, he accumulated a handsome property for a man in his station in life, and comparable to his surroundings. In his family he had likewise prospered, for Mrs. Stukeley meantime had not been idle, having presented her worthy spouse with fourteen children. Numerous and happy were the Stukeley family, and proud was the sire as he rode about the town on his excellent horse, and attired in his homespun jacket of butternut brown, a species of garment which he much affected. So much, indeed, did he affect it that a sobriquet was given him by the townspeople. It grew out of the brown color of his coats. Snuffy Stuke they called him, and by that name he lived, and by it died.

    For many years all things worked well with Snuffy Stuke. His sons and daughters developed finely until some of them had reached the age of man or womanhood. The eldest was a comely daughter, Sarah. One night Snuffy Stuke dreamed a dream, which, when he remembered in the morning, gave him no end of worriment. He dreamed that he possessed a fine orchard, as in truth he did, and that exactly half the trees in it died. The occult meaning hidden in this revelation was beyond the comprehension of Snuffy Stuke, and that was what gave worry to him. Events, however, developed rapidly, and Snuffy Stuke was not kept long in suspense as to the meaning of his singular dream. Sarah, the eldest child, sickened, and her malady, developing into a quick consumption, hurried her into her grave. Sarah was laid away in the family burying ground, and quiet came again to the Stukeley family. But quiet came not to Stukeley. His apprehensions were not buried in the grave of Sarah.

    His unquiet quiet was but of short duration, for soon a second daughter was taken ill precisely as Sarah had been, and as quickly was hurried to the grave. But in the second case there was one symptom or complaint of a startling character, and which was not present in the first case. This was the continual complaint that Sarah came every night and sat upon some portion of the body, causing great pain and misery. So it went on. One after another sickened and died until six were dead, and the seventh, a son, was taken ill. The mother also now complained of these nightly visits of Sarah. These same characteristics were present in every case after the first one. Consternation confronted the stricken household. Evidently something must be done, and that, too, right quickly, to save the remnant of this family. A consultation was called with the most learned people, and it was resolved to exhume the bodies of the six dead children.

For those who have set out to write about Rhode Island’s rich history, Rider is a familiar name. The size of the ‘Sidney Rider Collection’ at Brown University’s John Hay Library is extensive, often overwhelming those who set out to sift through it. Researchers will encounter more than 15,000 items including books, pamphlets, manuscripts, and newspaper clippings chronicling the founding of the colony in 1636 to the post-Civil War era. However, while researchers may spend months with this material, most know nothing about the man who assembled it.

As I recounted in Food for the Dead, I spent some time with the Rider Collection at Brown University's John Hay Library in early 1983. But I must have been fortunate, indeed, for I located my quarry in about an hour.

I was attempting to assemble as much information as possible that would shed some light on the extraordinary vampire narrative that appeared in Book Notes in 1888, Rider’s long-running periodical on Rhode Island history. Rider’s narrative follows a pattern similar to that employed by George Stetson some eight years later, and by the Providence Journal in 1892:

•     the definition of vampire;
•     the historical and geographical distribution of the belief and practice;
•     the local narrative(s) under consideration;
•     speculation concerning how the tradition came to New England; and
•     an attempt to contextualize the incident and summarize its meaning.

Rider sees two European vampire traditions. The first, he maintains, is an earlier form that originated in Eastern Europe (which, today, we might see as the “classic” vampire); the second is the werewolf tradition. According to Rider, the first form

came to this country, and seems to have been prevalent at one time here in Rhode Island. In fact, in may even at this day be held in her remote regions, if, indeed, that term be not inapplicable with the narrow confines of this little State. Strange, even incredible is it that anybody should believe in such absurd superstitions. It is true, nevertheless. There were, and there are now, those who do believe them, and the purpose of this paper is to narrate a case which took place here in Rhode Island at no very remote period. It was of a genuine vampire.

It is more than ironic that, following his tragic death at the age of fifty-one, on 4 April 1887, Fairfield was interred in the Old West Stafford Cemetery, the scene of the tragic events he wrote about a little more than a decade earlier. His obituary in the Kansas City Times, entitled “An Opium Eater,” ends with the following paragraph: “Divinity, journalism, literature, spiritualism, medicine, veterinary surgery, opium, Bohemianism, scatter-brained inventions, poverty, degradation, death.” [10 April 1887, p. 7]

What does filling in the contextual information regarding the author of the earliest text of this incident have to tell us? He was born and raised in the community where the exhumation was performed; he obviously was aware of, and seemed to value, the oral traditions of this community; his great-grandmother apparently was considered a witch of some sort, so she probably was attuned to whatever supernatural atmosphere existed in the community; and she seems to have been a significant source for some of the lore that Fairfield absorbed while growing up. These elements of his biography appear to reinforce a conclusion that Fairfield either heard about the exhumation through oral tradition or, perhaps, learned of it through some local printed source, such as a newspaper. On the other hand, Fairfield’s apparent misunderstanding (at best) or deliberate misrepresentation (at worst) of several of the topics about which he wrote might lead one to conclude that he was careless with facts and perhaps even blind to them if they did not reinforce his own preconceptions. From this perspective, it is possible that the exhumation story was fabricated by Fairfield.

Has forensic linguistics identified the parent of this orphan text, “Quick Consumption”? Regardless of authorship, how do we know that the narrative is fiction? Several features argue that the event did not happen as described. First, none of the named individuals can be found in the records for the town of Stafford: no contemporary birth or death record, federal census entry, or gravestone records the existence of any person identified in the narrative. Second, the patterning of the narrative motifs, seamlessly moving the action forward in regular and predictable steps, belies a sense of reality. Each person dying at three-week intervals, for example, seems just too perfect. The happy ending is just icing on the cake.

Like the events that Fairfield wrote about in the West Stafford cemetery, his own story was not without tragedy. The headlines of his obituary, in the form of a letter penned by a longtime associate at the New York Times, summarized Fairfield’s personal misfortune: “Some of the Many Tragedies of Journalism. Josephine and Francis Gerry Fairfield. Deadly Opium Leads Both to an Untimely End. Bright Writers Whose Lights Went Out Unpleasantly.” The letter related how Fairfield had graduated from college, studied theology, then earned an advanced degree in veterinary medicine. But writing was his calling, as his colleague wrote:

    In 1865 a bright-eyed, fragile-built, clean-cut young man entered journalism in this city. He was well born, well bred, and his education was along broader lines than those of most of us. He had a peculiar mind, which sought information in unusual channels. . . . No sight more common in Printing House square than Fairfield, with his cigar or pipe, a bundle of books or papers under one arm, and his little wife upon the other.

    Then, the brilliant couple began experimenting with opium. His former associate described the dimming of the once-bright lights:

    His work was as brilliant as ever, his articles, whether for magazine, weekly or daily, were as readily accepted as ever, but little by little his manner changed, and as he went so went she.

One might guess from the passage above that the word “goblin” is highly favored by Fairfield. In his thinly-disguised autobiographical narrative of becoming a writer in New York (“Timothy Tot: A Prose Story with Poetic Passages,”1872), with flashes back to his childhood and education, Fairfield ties the animism of old trees to the imagery of goblins. “There was one gnarled old oak, in particular, west of the house, that always gave me the impression of a thinly disguised goblin, I being in constant anticipation of seeing it take goblin legs and walk off, leaving neither stump nor other vestige of having stood there.” [p. 133] Fairfield uses the word “goblin” no less than a dozen more times in this article: we have “goblin moons” and “goblin hills and woods” [p. 298], and many variations on “goblin old house” [303, 387, 388, 458, 466].

 Looking at word use and phrase patterns, one can see in his two exhumation narratives the similarities of his description of New England’s vampire tradition. In “Quick Consumption” (1871) he writes: “It is one of those weird old superstitions with which the household literature of New England abounds. It is, that the heart of the dead, dying not, by some strange rapport, feeds upon the vitality of the living—the living being thus actually eaten up of the dead; and weird stories are afloat of the dead having been taken up, and there having been found, still red and warm, in the midst of ghastly rottenness, the hearts of some who have died of quick consumption. Whole families have gone of it, one after another, the dead gnawing and feeding upon the vitality of the living, until, as the last dropped into the grave, the red, warm heart in the coffined corpse, having no living relative upon the vitality of whom to feed, has wasted also and died—died at last in its coffin for want of something upon which to prey.”

    . . . memories of the old legend-life when my great-grandmother trotted me on her knee, sorceress though she was, and told me stories of ghosts and wizards, and of the goblins that lived down-cellar in the dark, and the strange voices that had been heard up-garret, while the flames in the huge fireplace crackled and laughed, and made flickering pictures on the wall, by way of illustrating her remarks—such memories as made me afraid of the dark when I was a boy, and caused me to shiver when the wind shook the garret-door of a night, come thronging from every nook in my brain, where they have drowsed so many years that I have deemed them utterly effaced. [pp. 653-55]

Fairfield’s career was not exactly a straight line. After graduating from Gettysburg College and then Hartwick Theological Seminary, he served as a Lutheran minister for two years. He also obtained a degree in veterinary medicine, experimented with improving the microscope, and published theories on a wide range of topics, from the origin of bacteria in the atmosphere to the writings and life of Edgar Allen Poe. After abandoning the pulpit for journalism, he published two books that received a great deal of attention: The Clubs of New York (1873) and Ten Years with Spiritual Mediums (1875).

But the work of the wide-ranging Fairfield was not universally praised. In A Primer of Criticism (1883), Eugene Lemoine Didier pronounced The Clubs of New York “the greatest piece of downright puffery we have ever had the misfortune to encounter.” [p. 37] Didier also wrote, “Mr. Fairfield cannot write simple, pure,—in a word, good English.”An article in the American Monthly Microscopical Journal (2:1, 1881:15) blasted Fairfield’s scientific endeavors with the following assessment: “We have read a number of articles from Mr. Fairfield’s pen, and we do not hesitate to assert that he is either woefully ignorant of science, or else a consummate humbug.” And, if such were possible, Fairfield’s interpretation of Poe was even less well-received. But, no matter how one assesses it, Fairfield’s writing style is readily identifiable. Reading the anonymous story entitled “Quick Consumption” (see entries #s 1-6) leaves little doubt that Fairfield was its author. While I have not applied stylometry to Fairfield’s texts, stylistic evidence (consisting of distinctive recurrent patterns of language preferences, such as word choices, sentence structure, syntax, punctuation, and turns of expression) reinforce the conclusion. Narrative elements also contribute. That both of these narratives— “A Century Ago in New England” and “Quick Consumption”—take place in Fairfield’s hometown, for example, seems beyond the realm of coincidence.

In the old West Stafford graveyard the tragedy of exhuming a dead body and burning the heart and lungs was once enacted—a weird night-scene. Of a family consisting of six sisters, five had died in rapid succession of galloping consumption. The old superstition in such cases is that the vital organs of the dead still retain a certain flicker of vitality, and by some strange process absorb the vital forces of the living; and they quote in evidence apocryphal instances in which exhumation has revealed a heart and lungs still fresh and living, incased in rottening and slimy integuments, and in which, after burning these portions of the defunct, a living relative, else doomed and hastening to the grave, has suddenly and miraculously recovered. The ceremony of cremation of the vitals of the dead must be conducted at night, by a single individual, and at the open grave, in order that the result may be decisive; and most old graveyards could mention nights when they have been thus illuminated; for, no longer since than 1872, the Boston Health Board reports describe a case in which such a midnight cremation was actually performed during that year. [Francis Gerry Fairfield,  “A Century Ago in New England,” Appleton’s Journal 15 (1876:652-656)]

Research showed that Fairfield was born in Stafford, Connecticut, on 18 August 1836. Much of his article focuses on that region of Connecticut and appears to be based heavily on his own reminiscences of growing up with the stories of the older generations. Here is a sampling of what he wrote:

    Ah, days of tokens and omens and revelations! How little our more fastidious civilization comprehends of the wild, stern, and daring psychic lives, of the largeness and heroism, of the gloomy and fantastic religious enthusiasm, that were nurtured in those geometrical old houses, so few of which are left as reminders of the last century! Grand men—large and able men—a little superstitious, perhaps, but all the more picturesque and manly for it! My great-grandmother Washburn had the reputation of being the most accomplished sorceress in all that region, and old people even now tell the legend of her having turned over a heavy oaken sled, loaded four feet high with heavy timbers, by just wishing it, simply because she was offended with amiable Captain Washburn.

    ON THE HILL north of the village of West Stafford is an old cemetery well worth visiting. It is the burial place of many of the early settlers of the town who, following the custom of early times, selected an elevated situation on which to build their homes, and the hilltop became the seat of a thriving village. In the olden days two churches stood nearby and the county turnpike passed the place. Near at hand a tavern did a thriving business and the stage drivers changed their horses there. On training days the state militia assembled here and the place was the center of the social activities of that section of the town.

    With  the passing of years, villages sprang up in the valleys and the churches were moved away, one to West Stafford and the other to Stafford Hollow. The tavern long since closed has been torn down and a farmhouse stands on its former site. Some of the old homesteads have been burned and others have gone to decay, until the old cemetery is all that is left to remind one that once there was life here.

    A strange tale is told of a tragic scene enacted in this old cemetery many years ago. Of a family of six sisters living in the village, five had died of consumption. The sixth seemed doomed to follow the others. There was an old superstition in such cases that the vital organs of the dead still retain a flicker of vitality and by some strange process absorb the vital forces of the living. Instances were cited where dead bodies had been exhumed and the vital organs burned, after which a living relative apparently about to die had suddenly and miraculously recovered. In the hope that this might prove true and bring about the recovery of the dying girl, it was determined to exhume the body of the sister last to die and perform the strange rite. The superstition held that to secure the desired results the ceremony must be conducted at night at the open grave by a single individual. No one was willing to undertake the gruesome task, but finally the lover of the sick girl volunteered to do it. He went to the graveyard in the dead of night and dug up the body. Silently he performed the weird autopsy and carried out the strange program in every detail. The story goes that the girl recovered and lived to be a very old woman.

This text provided the specific location of the cemetery (absent in Cole’s text), but it also generated additional questions: At night? Alone? In silence? Exhuming a corpse single-handedly is difficult, a fact one quickly learns when researching exhumations and reading numerous accounts of “resurrections” by body-snatchers. Additionally, there is the ailing girl’s lover finally agreeing to undertake the exhumation. These motifs certainly lend an air of folk tradition, capped off by the afflicted girl living happily ever after (or at least to a ripe old age). Of course, it would have been simple for someone to add these elements precisely for the purpose of “improving” the story. Although this text did little to move the investigation forward, it did at least identify which of West Stafford’s three cemeteries the sisters are (supposedly) interred.

    A quarter of a century has passed since that night; and Florry’s hair is streaked with faint lines of gray. From that morning she mended rapidly. In fact, she often tells me that she woke up about sunrise, that very morning, with a strange sense of relief, as if something had ceased gnawing internally; and—strange coincidence!—it was at that very same hour that I was standing by the lurid conical crater of the old blast furnace. I had conquered the demon of quick consumption; but whether, in that fit of “hypo,” I hurled a dead heart, or a red, reeking one into the crater, I would not like to be put upon my oath. Only this I remember—there was blood, or else I fancied it, upon the white napkin in which I carried it that long mile of horror.

The place where this tale was situated—Stafford, Connecticut—led me to a familiar story. In Food for the Dead, I had concluded that an exhumation narrative from West Stafford must have occurred sometime before 1888, the year that J. R. Cole published the account in his History of Tolland County, Connecticut. [p. 499] In a family consisting of six sisters, five died in quick succession of galloping consumption. “The old superstition in such cases is that the vital organs of the dead still retain a certain flicker of vitality and by some strange process absorb the vital forces of the living,” Cole wrote. To back up their belief, residents told of “instances wherein exhumation has revealed a heart and lungs still fresh and living, encased in rottening and slimy integuments, and in which, after burning these portions of the defunct, a living relative, else doomed and hastening to the grave, has suddenly and miraculously recovered.” To be effective, they asserted, the ceremony must be conducted at night by a single individual at the open grave. Implicit in this narrative—as we now have seen in many others—is the notion that whatever “flicker of vitality” is inhabiting the dead relatives somehow transfers itself to the last deceased. The unnamed, implicit evil seems to gravitate to the freshest corpse for its feeding, a logical proposition that explains why the alternate, and equally plausible, proposition that the first to die should be the vampire usually does not hold sway.

This case was difficult to document from the beginning. Several visits to the town’s three cemeteries failed to discover gravestones whose progression of family deaths matched Cole’s description. Lacking a surname certainly did not facilitate the investigation, which, without the intervention of some startling new evidence, appeared to have reached a dead end. Then, years later, I found a text that differed from that of Cole. In 1915 (28 March), the Hartford Courant (p. Z10) published an article entitled “Tragic Legend Of West Stafford Cemetery.” Above the article was a photograph of a cemetery with following subscript: “In This Old Cemetery The Weird Ceremony Is Said To Have Taken Place.”

In the next entry, we will examine the text of this “weird ceremony.”