A Rhode Island Superstition

Unknown | 1892

Belief That Consumption Is Nothing Less Than An Invisible Vampire.

Those interested in folk-lore should know of recent developments of the vampire superstition in Rhode Island. Rhode Island is a thickly settled and highly civilized state. Along the great watercourses and long the shored of the Narragansett bay it is one great village, and back toward the Connecticut line one can find forests which never have bowed to the ax and a race of people who preserve all the superstitions and traditions of another age. Among the curious superstitions among the people living in these isolated regions is that of the vampire. It is not a belief in the existence of a human vampire such as Byron told of when he curdled the blood of his hearers with the tale of Lord Ruthven, or such as forms a part of the folk-lore of certain parts of Europe, but one which seems peculiar to these people and the origin of which would repay investigation. They believe, many of them, and believe it thoroughly, that consumption is not a disease, but the result of the operations of a mysterious creature called the vampire, which fastens itself upon a family and unseen, and therefore indestructible by ordinary means, sucks the blood from first one victim and then another. They believe that from the lonely graveyard on the rocky farm an influence steals for death as long as the body of the dead consumptive has blood in its heart, for there the vampire is at work and is draining the blood of the living victim into the body of the dead.

To get rid of the vampire it is necessary to exhume the body and burn the parts, generally the heart, where the vampire lives, and administer the ashes in some manner to the living and afflicted ones. There is a strong element of mysticism in the minds of these people, and it is not perhaps strange that the dread scourge of consumption which baffles medical science and sweeps away so many of the sturdy New England race should be invested by them with the weird superstition of the vampire.

The most recent case of an outcrop of the vampire superstition occurred last March. George T. Brown, a respectable farmer of Exeter, lost his wife about eight years ago, his daughter Olive two years later and his other daughter, Mercy, last January, all dying daughter, Mercy, last January, all dying from consumption. Mr. Brown’s son Edwin, a young married man, is also a consumptive. He went with his wife to Colorado Springs, having heard of the curative properties of that Place in cases like his, and stayed there eighteen months but got no better. Then a longing came to him and his wife to see again the pine trees and the old familiar faces in Rhode Island, and he came back to Exeter, his native town.

On March 17, shortly after his return, it was decided to dig up the bodies of the his mother and sisters and sun {see?} if the vampire were still at work. A physician was sent for from the village of Wickford, a considerable distance away. He came and made an examination of the exhumed bodies. In the heart of mercy, the last of those who had died, was found blood. The heart and lungs of the dead girl were thereupon burned. How the ashes were disposed of was kept a profound secret.

Only a few people were allowed to be present at the cremation and no detailed account of it can be obtained, but it must have been a weird ceremony on the bleak New England hillside with the March winds blowing over the desolate country.

“The Gleaner,” a paper published in the Pawtuxet valley, gives an account of another case of similar nature which occurred in the town of Foster, R.I., some years ago. Levi Young, who lived on a farm in the southwest corner of the town, had a large family of boys and girls. Some of them died young from consumption and the others showed signs of the disease. When Nancy, one of his girls, had been dead three months, her body was exhumed and burned “to kill the vampire,” while the remaining members of the family stood around and inhaled the smoke. These things took place in the most densely populated state in the union, but among a people living isolated regions, among whom all ancient traditions and superstitions are tenacious of life. – N.Y. Tribune.