Northern Supernatural, Part II
An excerpt from Justin Geoffrey's "Full Moon Reaction"
A Christian burial, indeed, he received, though unworthy of it; but it did not much benefit him: for issuing, by the handiwork of Satan, from his grave at night-time, and pursued by a pack of dogs with horrible barkings, he wandered through the courts and around the houses while all men made fast their doors, and did not dare to go abroad on any errand whatever from the beginning of the night until the sunrise, for fear of meeting and being beaten black and blue by this vagrant monster — William of Newburgh
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Medieval Darkness & Shadows in Colonial America
One of the strangest events (or rather series of events) in American history concerns the Great New England Vampire Panic of the 19th century.[i] All six of the New England states experienced some kind of vampire outbreak, from the charred remains of a Connecticut farmer[ii] to the infamous tale of Mercy Brown, the Exeter, Rhode Island girl accused of plaguing her family as one of the undead. One writer believes that the case of Massachusetts sailor James “Jimmy” Brown provided the prototype for Count Dracula in 1867.[iii] In short, the Guyana-born Brown murdered 19-year-old seaman James Foster by plunging a dagger into his chest. This rather mundane murder took on a supernatural hue once the newspapers published an account suggesting that Brown killed multiple sailors and used his dagger to make drinking holes in their bodies. Brown, they said, was a real-life vampire.
What should be made about colonial and Early Republic New England’s obsession with vampires? The Massachusetts Bay Colony’s witch madness is well-documented, but it is important to note that Virginia had its own witchcraft trials. [iv] Fears of malevolent witches was endemic in European society at the time, and America, as an extension of England, was certainly not immune. Vampires, on the other hand, seem to be a uniquely New England phenomenon.
Several suppositions have been put forward about this:
The Great New England Vampire panic coincided with tuberculosis, scarlet fever, and other health crises. The vampire accusations mainly occurred in small towns or rural villages, where medical emergencies were interpreted through a paranormal lens.
The New England states seemingly most impacted by the vampire panic were Rhode Island and Connecticut. These colonies tended to tolerate religious dissent (except for the theocracy of New Haven), with Rhode Island explicitly established as a refuge for Protestant dissenters banished from the Massachusetts Bay. Therefore, it seems plausible that older, pre-Reformation superstitions flourished in Rhode Island and Connecticut. Vermont, which was a frontier settlement for most of existence and out-of-range for Boston’s Puritans, also contributed to vampire tales.
It is likely that both of these ideas are true or have truth in them, but what is fascinating is that New England produced a vampire lore of its own. Whereas peasants in Serbia or Hungary dispatched vampires with wooden stakes and decapitation, New Englanders rid their communities of the undead by exhuming the suspected vampires, removing and burning their organs, and then mixing the ashes with water in order to feed the concoction to the afflicted.[v] This seems to be an autochthonous practice that was influenced by Enlightenment science to a degree.
But where did this tradition come from? While the idea of the walking undead can be found in Ancient Sumer and Egypt, the true heimat for vampires is in Eastern Europe. Most ethnographic studies on the topic have focused on Serbia, the old Austro-Hungarian Empire, and Romania for a reason—these are the areas where the most documentation exists. We know that colonial New England had next to no settlement from Eastern Europe, so there must have been another source.
Look no further than medieval England. William of Newburgh (1136-1198) was an Anglo-Saxon historian and priest who lived in Yorkshire. In the 12th century, he committed to parchment Historia rerum Anglicarum (“History of English Affairs”). Part-history and part-ethnography, William’s work displays some of the earliest stories of the revenant. It seems that Anglo-Saxons (and likely their Norman cousins) believed in revenants, which were reanimated corpses that returned to haunt and/or drain the life force of the living. In one passage, William describes the destruction of a suspected revenant in detail:
Thereupon snatching up a spade of but indifferent sharpness of edge, and hastening to the cemetery, they began to dig; and whilst they were thinking that they would have to dig to a greater depth, they suddenly, before much of the earth had been removed, laid bare the corpse, swollen to an enormous corpulence, with its countenance beyond measure turgid and suffused with blood; while the napkin in which it had been wrapped appeared nearly torn to pieces. The young men, however, spurred on by wrath, feared not, and inflicted a wound upon the senseless carcass, out of which incontinently flowed such a stream of blood, that it might have been taken for a leech filled with the blood of many persons. Then, dragging it beyond the village, they speedily constructed a funeral pile; and upon one of them saying that the pestilential body would not burn unless its heart were torn out, the other laid open its side by repeated blows of the blunted spade, and, thrusting in his hand, dragged out the accursed heart. This being torn piecemeal, and the body now consigned to the flames....
Notice how the Anglo-Saxon peasants removed the creature’s heart prior to immolation. A similar ritual would be performed again and again in New England, thus suggesting an ancestral link. William of Newburgh was not the only English author to speak of revenants. The Abbot of Burton, a churchman of likely Anglo-Saxon origin, wrote of an occult occurrence in 1090 in the Staffordshire village of Stapenhill. Two Anglo-Saxon peasants fled their native Burton for Drakelow, which was then ruled by a Norman baron named Roger. Roger helped the peasants to loot the abbey of Burton until Roger’s knights were defeated in battle by the abbey’s knights. Without warning, the two villagers who started the mess died. The following describes the reported haunting of the village:
…the very same day in which they were interred they appeared at evening, while the sun was still up, carrying on their shoulders the wooden coffins in which they had been buried. The whole following night they walked through the paths and fields of the village, now in the shape of men carrying wooden coffins on their shoulders, now in the likeness of bears or dogs or other animals. They spoke to the other peasants, banging on the walls of their houses and shouting “Move quickly, move! Get going! Come!”
For their blasphemy, the peasants returned to Earth as revenants, although those of a more residual character.
Not to be outdone, the Welsh chronicler Walter Map (1140-1210) recorded an account of a morally wicked Welshman who tormented the town of Hereford by chanting the names of those doomed to die of the plague. The man, it seems, was a revenant who had died at some undisclosed time.
While the gulf of centuries between these tales and the Great New England Vampire panic is large, it is not absurd to believe that the English settlers who built towns all across New England were familiar with revenant tales. These stories metastasized until finding firm soil in Rhode Island, Vermont, and elsewhere. This is not silly; early American literature, including Washington Irving and Charles Brockden Brown, began their careers by writing spooky stories that drew heavily from colonial American folktales. The most famous is Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” which casts a decapitated Hessian mercenary as an equestrian revenant. (It should be noted that Irving placed most of his ghost stories within the milieu of Dutch New York, rather than the more thoroughly Anglo-Saxon South or New England.) This only makes sense in a culture flush with memories of campfire tales.
Overall, the Great New England Vampire Panic can and should be seen as yet another Anglo-Saxon inheritance in America. Folktales and myths that began in medieval England, where the cultures of the Anglo-Saxons, Celts, and Norman conquerors commingled, found new ground in New England, and were carried on all the way into the first days of electricity. Again, as Lovecraft wrote in “Supernatural Horror in Literature,” there seems to be a strong thrust of the weird and macabre in Northern blood, and the stories with the most power in Early America were the dark tales of revenants and other figures of the night.
[i] Abigail Tucker, “The Great New England Vampire Panic,” Smithsonian, Oct. 2012,
<https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-great-new-england-vampire-panic-36482878/>.
[ii] Michael Ruane, “A ‘vampire’s’ remains were found about 30 years ago in Connecticut. Now DNA is giving him new life,” Washington Post, Jul. 31, 2019, < https://www.courant.com/news/connecticut/hc-news-connecticut-vampire-20190731-oo4trsxg3vakflfiddzvipepri-story.html>.
[iii] Dale M. Brumfield, “An American Nosferatu,” Medium, Apr. 1, 2019, < https://medium.com/lessons-from-history/an-american-nosferatu-dc13b2f6ce80>.
[iv] Monica C. Witkowski and Caitlin Newman, “Witchcraft in Colonial Virginia,” www.encyclopedia.org, <https://encyclopediavirginia.org/entries/witchcraft-in-colonial-virginia/#:~:text=Though%20witchcraft%20cases%20in%20Virginia,defamation%20suits%20to%20criminal%20accusations>.
[v] Paul S. Sledzik and Nicolas Bellantoni, “Bioarcheological and Biocultural Evidence for the New England Vampire Folk Belief,” The American Journal of Physical Anthropology, No. 94 (1994).
Never trust those Guyanese!