In the 19th century, a mysterious illness struck rural New England.
Those affected had hacking coughs, a wasting fever and weight loss.
But back then, the prime suspect was vampires.
A sickly girl reclines on a chaise lounge while being attended to by three other women.
Watercolor by R.H. Giles.
It doesnt take much imagination to understand why a bacterial disease came to be associated with vampires.
In some people, the disease remains latent for years before they fall sick.
In others, tuberculosis hits them hard and fast and they die soon after.
Symptoms of tuberculosis include wasting, night sweats, and fatigue, and a persistent cough.
As the disease progresses, the lungs arent able to support the oxygen supply.
Eventually, they start coughing up blood.
Consumption appeared to run in families because of how easily and rapidly the disease spread.
If one member became ill or passed away, the others did too.
People believed that one of the dead was a vampire, who was preying upon the surviving family members.
Exhumations were frequently necessary to halt the vampire’s predations.
After the culprit was identified, a number of different ways were proposed to stop the attacks.
The most benign of these was simply to turn the body over in its grave.
In other cases, families would burn the “fresh” organs and rebury the body.
Sometimes, the body would be decapitated.
A year after her death, her widower, Captain Isaac Burton, married her stepsister, Hulda.
Her exhumation was attended by more than five hundred people.
Some versions of the story say that some of the organs were saved to prepare medicine for Hulda.
Regardless, she died in September of that year.
Shortly after Abigails death, her sister, Lavinia, had started showing the familiar symptoms of consumption.
There is no record of what came of the exhumation, or whether Lavinia was cured.
The majority of the exhumations occurred in Rhode Island.
One remarkable case that Bell has discovered is that of Rev.
Justus Forward and his daughter Mercy.
Forward had five daughters, of which he had already lost three to consumption.
His remaining two daughters, including Mercy, were fighting the illness.
One day, while travelling to another town with her father, Mercy began to hemorrhage.
The liver, I am told, was as sound as the lungs.
The act didnt save Mercy, but Forwards other children seemed to recover.
One of the best documented cases of suspected vampirism in New England was that of Mercy Brown.
Seven months later, her eldest daughter, Mary Olive, followed her mother to her grave.
The graves of George Brown, his wife Mary Brown and daughter Mercy Brown.
The doctor cut her open and found organs intact.
There was even blood in her heart.
Mercy Brown was clearly a vampire and the agent of young Edwin’s condition.
Unfortunately, the cure didnt work.
Edwin passed away two months later.
Even after the introduction of antibiotics, some remote communities continued to exhume their dead.
The last vampire exhumation that Michael Bell found took place in the mountains of Pennsylvania in 1949.
