You may have noticed that the exact procedures carried out by Justus Forward
are not on the list above; as far as I now am aware, reburying vital organs
in a separate container, apart from the corpse, is unique in the American
tradition.
The number of
vampire incidents—or, I think, more accurately, therapeutic exhumations—I’ve
uncovered in the Northeastern United States (and to a lesser extent, in the
South and Midwest) now totals more than eighty.
The documentation that establishes the practice is diverse, including eye
witness accounts, family stories, local legends, newspaper articles, local
histories, town records, journal entries, personal correspondence, genealogies,
gravestones, and even actual human remains. The evidence suggests that therapeutic
exhumations probably were not uncommon, especially in New England, during the late 1700s and throughout the 1800s.
As the following examples indicate, the evidence also shows that, in the early
years, at least, this practice was known to and accepted, sometimes actually
endorsed, by the community-at-large, by town officials, by medical doctors,
and, as we have just seen, even by clergymen.
In February of
1793, the friends and family of Captain Isaac Burton, of Manchester, Vermont,
disinterred the remains of his first wife, Rachel, who, “not long after they
were married . . . went into a decline and after a year or so . . . died of
consumption.” Burton
had remarried Hulda Powel, who was described as “a very healthy, good-looking
girl.” But Hulda’s heath soon began to deteriorate, and “when she was in the
last stages of consumption, a strange infatuation took possession of the minds
of the connections and friends of the family. They were induced to believe
that if the vitals of the first wife could be consumed by being burned in
a charcoal fire it would effect a cure of the sick second wife. . . . They
took out the liver, heart, and lungs, what remained of them, and burned them
to ashes on the blacksmith’s forge of Jacob Mead. . . . Such was the excitement
that from five hundred to one thousand people were present. This account was
furnished me by an eye witness of the transaction.”
[2]
At the Cumberland,
Rhode Island, Town Council meeting of February 8, 1796, Stephen Staples was
“granted liberty” to exhume the body of his daughter, Abigail, to “try an
experiment” in an attempt to save another daughter, Livina, provided that
he rebury Abigail’s body in a “Deasent Manner.”
[3]
In Woodstock, Vermont,
about 1830, the Corwin family had a deceased brother’s body exhumed and examined.
Finding his heart “undecayed, and containing liquid blood,” the heart was
removed and burned to ashes in an iron pot. According to an elderly woman,
who witnessed this event as a young girl, the ceremony “was attended by a
large concourse of people.” It was “conducted by the selectmen, attended by
some of the prominent citizens of the village then residing on the common.
. . . old men of renown, sound minded fathers among the community, discreet
careful men.” Moreover, “There was
a general consensus of opinion among all the physicians at that time practicing
in Woodstock . . . that this was a case of assured
vampirism.”
[4]
One of the most
poignant cases appeared in an old history of the town of Harvard,
Massachusetts.
The preemptive action urged by the dying girl, embedded in the following text
derived from a family story, probably occurred about 1794: “When that fell
destroyer, consumption, broke into a family circle and began to bear away
its victims in slow but sure succession, humiliating the most self-confident
physicians with a sense of their impotence, there often came to light a strange
delusion—the vulgar belief that if the heart of one who had died with that
disease were burned, and the members of the household inhaled the fumes from
it, they would escape the doom hanging over them. There is a well-attested
tradition that about a century ago, in a consumptive-stricken family of Harvard
already bereft of eight or more of it's youth, a dying girl extracted from
friends a solemn promise that her heart should be consumed for the benefit
of her sisters, and her last wish was duly carried out. One of these sisters
at least survived to acknowledge to her inquisitive granddaughter who heard
this tradition, that the story was essentially true.”
[5]
These texts are a few among many that reveal
an almost routine acceptance of therapeutic exhumations, showing that they
were not necessarily marginalized, but were, indeed, part of the official
social fabric of some communities. The texts also disclose that the tiny tuberculosis
microbe was a great leveler. The families of clergymen, selectmen, and bankers
died just as inexorably as those of farmers and laborers. If there was any
selection going on, it was not according to class, social standing, or income:
young people, especially females, took the brunt of this wasting disease.
[6]
During
the 1700s, tuberculosis infections had begun to increase dramatically in the
Northeast. By 1800, almost twenty-five percent of all deaths were blamed on
consumption (in most cases, probably pulmonary tuberculosis). It remained
the leading cause of death in North America
throughout the entire nineteenth century, where a diagnosis of consumption
amounted to a death sentence.
Responding to
an article in the Chicago Tribune that recounted the 1892 exhumation of Mercy
Brown, in Exeter, Rhode Island—one of the last, and certainly
the most well-known, American vampire incident—an anonymous letter writer
revealed a farsighted understanding of the relationship between tuberculosis
microbes and vampires, effectively bridging the widening gulf between science
and folklore. In his letter, titled “Vampires and Bacteria,” the writer noted
that “the vampire is invisible, and its ravages are supposed to be unpreventable
by any ordinary means, the most effectual method being to exhume the corpse,
burn it, and administer the ashes in some form to the afflicted survivors.”
His observation that the vampire tradition “is an idea which can be traced
back a long way in the history of human thought” seems accurate and not at
all extraordinary. But his next statement is an attention grabber: “strangely
enough,” he continued, the vampire idea “may be one of those which prove to
have a foundation in truth just about the time that the world gets ready to
reject it as a fallacy.” He preempted the anticipated objections to this startling
supposition by admitting that, while “we cannot now consent to believe in
the existence of a huge vampire capable of rendering itself invisible while
it preys upon its victim, . . . the microscope has revealed . . . a little
one equally destructive, though too small to be seen with the naked eye.”
Science now was aware of “the existence of myriads of these little entities
feeding on the larger animal organisms and literally killing them off by inches.”
Moreover, he wrote, science also “has shown that consumption is the leader
in a list of diseases which are directly traceable to the ravages of these
minute creatures. They are not called vampires, but that matters little” because
“bacilli . . . are but different names for micro-organisms which prey on the
air passages and air cells of the human frame, and number their victims by
the thousand where the vampire used to be supposed responsible for the death
of a single individual.” While these tiny “specks on the slide of a microscope
. . . may not be able to pass from the corpse within the grave to the yet
living body outside, . . . it is proven they can and do move from one animate
body to another, being transmissible in more than one way, and that they thus
carry the seeds of death far and wide, sometimes through many successive generations.”
So the writer sees “these sequences of apparent folly and ascertained truth”
as a process inherently capable of leading to empirically validated propositions.
In the late nineteenth century—as scholars such as E. B. Tylor and Sir James
George Frazer viewed superstition as a “bastard science” surviving from earlier
stages of cultural evolution—this anonymous author stood virtually alone in
finding a rational common ground in the human mind that could generate and
sanction both superstition and science: “It would be too much to say that
the vampire superstition was the parent of the bacillus discovery, but it
may be exactly true that the latter would never have been made but for the
constitution of the human mind, which sets it to inquire into the causation
of things, and makes it so anxious for an explanation that it will accept
a foolish one in preference to none. . . . Looking at the matter in this light
we may regard the conception of a vampire as the legitimate predecessor of
the knowledge recently acquired about the bacteria and their work in decimating
the race by causing the class of diseases at the head of which stands consumption
as the most pronounced example of the devastation wrought by those minute
organisms.”
[7]
What is it about
consumption that would lead the rational human mind to posit the existence
of a vampire? What do vampires and tuberculosis germs have to do with each
other? One possible link may reside in how closely accounts of vampire attacks
correspond with the symptoms of consumption. Victims of consumption suffered
most at night. They awakened coughing and in pain; sometimes they described
a heavy feeling, as though someone had been sitting on their chest. As the
disease progressed, ulcers and cavities developed in the lungs and victims
began to cough up blood, which lingered at the corners of their mouth and
stained their bedclothes. As they faded into death, others in the family began
to complain of the same symptoms. Death, itself, appeared to be contagious.
In an essay on pulmonary tuberculosis, written in 1799, doctor Thomas Beddoes
described a consumptive patient who could be the very picture of the classic
vampire depicted in history, legend, novels, and film (you might imagine Count
Orlock from the film Nosferatu,
for instance): “The emaciated figure strikes one with terror; the forehead
covered with drops of sweat; the cheeks painted with a livid crimson, the
eyes sunk; the little fat that raised them in their orbits entirely wasted;
the pulse quick and tremulous; the nails long, bending over the ends of the
fingers; the palms of the hand dry and painfully hot to the touch; the breath
offensive, quick and laborious.”
[8]
Both consumptives
and vampires are the living dead. Consumptives are walking corpses, waiting
to take their final labored breath. Pale and wasted, they embody disease and
death. Vampires provide a corporeal image for consumption, giving shape to
the unseen evil that slowly drains away life.
If we concede
that the rational human mind can accept the possibility of a corpse preying
on its living relatives, we still must ask how the corpse could infect them
with consumption. We are in murky territory here, since the documenting texts
are not (perhaps cannot be) explicit concerning this crucial question. Beneath
the attempts to explain how the vampire process works—usually offered by outside
commentators who appear to be interpreting verbal texts supplied by local
informants—lies a matter-of-fact frame of mind characteristic of the practical
Yankee. This pragmatic is more concerned with ending a plague than speculating
about the modus operandi of supernatural forces or creatures, as exemplified
in the following text, collected in the late nineteenth century by folklorist
John McNab Currier (a Vermont native and physician): “If the lungs of a brother
or sister who died of consumption be burned, the ashes will cure the living
members of the family affected with that disease.”
[9]
Texts that do
address the issue of process tend to posit some shadowy, unseen connection
between the corpse and its prey: in the American vampire tradition, the lethal
visitation is immaterial or spiritual rather than an explicit, corporeal assault
by a mobile corpse. George Stetson, in his 1896 article in the American Anthropologist, expressed the
frighteningly formless nature of this affliction:
In New England the vampire superstition is unknown by its proper
name. It is believed that consumption is not a physical but a spiritual disease,
obsession, or visitation; that as long as the body of a dead consumptive relative
has blood in its heart it is proof that an occult influence steals from it
for death and is at work draining the blood of the living into the heart of
the dead and causing his rapid decline.
[10]
The following
excerpts from American vampire texts reinforce Stetson’s assertion:. . . "victims
of vampires who work by charm, draining the blood by slow draughts as they
lie in their graves[11]
. . . his or
her “vitals,” meaning by that term the lungs, heart, and liver, became animated
after burial and came back to earth in invisible form to prey upon the “vitals”
of others in the family[12]
. . . in some
mysterious way the dead, or the diseases of the dead, may feed upon the living,
. . . diseases have their seat in the vitals of the body[13]
[Denison, Frederic 1878 Westerly and Its Witnesses. Providence, RI:
J. A. & R. A. Reid p. 255 (under the heading of “Cremation”)]. . . 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."[14]
These connections
are undeniably opaque, yet one can discern the inquiring and rational human
mind in the background. The text of an exhumation in the Connecticut River
Valley in 1869 seems to evoke the invisible powers of electricity, which,
following the path of numerous emerging “modern sciences,” became a metaphor
for any strong, somewhat-mystical power at that time: “The reason assigned
[for the continuing deaths in the family] was that there was a sort of vital
current existing between the living and dead—that these organs in the dead
body that contained fresh blood and appeared to be alive, would continue to
live until the vitality of the living subject was exhausted, unless said organs
were taken out and consumed by fire.”
[15]
An account from
an 1867 incident in Grafton,
New York, appears to explain
the then generally accepted hereditary aspects of consumption: “. . . the
decaying vitals of that body are continually emitting the elements of that
disease, which the surviving relatives will receive, and thereby generation
after generation will be followed by that dreadful scourge.”
[16]
A text that
was published in 1869 invokes an intriguing “popular theory” that links deceased
and living family members:
During the last
winter, a young man named Henry Cole, a resident of Jay Hill, Maine, died
of consumption, being the second one in the same family to fall a victim to
this great scourge of New England. Another
member of the family, Frederick, a brother of Henry, is now supposed to be
in the last stages of consumption, and in order to stay the ravages of the
disease the body of Henry has been disinterred for the purpose of removing
and burning the heart, this being supposed to be a sovereign remedy, the popular
theory being that there exists between blood relations a sympathetic link
which death does not entirely sever, and which, unless interrupted, oftentimes
works injury to the living and sometimes results in death.
[17]
The referenced
“sympathetic link” foreshadows Sir James George Frazer’s later elaboration
of “sympathetic magic” in his Golden
Bough. “Both branches of magic, the homoeopathic and the contagious,”
he wrote in 1890, “may conveniently be comprehended under the general name
of Sympathetic Magic, since both assume that things act on each other at a
distance through a secret sympathy, the impulse being transmitted from one
to the other by means of what we may conceive as a kind of invisible ether,
not unlike that which is postulated by modern science . . . to explain how
things can physically affect each other through a space which appears to be
empty.”
[18]
The archaeological
record shows that early humans had formed ongoing bonds with their deceased
companions. And, for better or worse, all human cultures continue to maintain
connections to the dead. Anthropologist Sergei Kan proposed the central position
of symbolic immortality, which is “a continuous symbolic relationship between
our finite individual lives and what has gone before us and what will come
after.”
[19]
As we have seen,
vampire cases incarnate a continuous link that is devastating to the living
and must be destroyed to return the family and community to their proper order.
Ending this evil relationship is accomplished by conducting an additional,
or secondary, mortuary ritual (the burial itself being the first, or primary,
ritual). The primary and secondary disposal of the remains of the dead—termed
“double obsequies” by anthropologists—affirms that “the process of the corpse’s
decay, the mourning regulations imposed on the bereaved and the transformation
of the spirit of the deceased parallel each other. Once the corpse has fully
deteriorated or has been destroyed by human means and the double obsequies
carried out, mourning comes to an end and the spirit of the deceased is firmly
established in its new existence.”
[20]
The secondary
mortuary ritual carried out in North America
was intended to identify which corpse had not “fully deteriorated” and therefore
was yet to be “firmly established in its new existence.” Burning the corpse
or its heart ended the unnatural relationship between dead and living kin
and, in a practical sense, completed the mourning, thus allowing the living
to leave “otherworldly concerns” and return to their “more mundane concerns.”
Death, or more
precisely, the demarcation between life and death, is at the center of the
vampire tradition (in any of its variants). When frightened people exhumed
the body of a deceased relative, they were looking for signs that would either
reassure them that death was complete or alert them that they needed to take
further steps to extinguish whatever “flicker of vitality” remained within
the problematic corpse. Reverend Justus Forward made it clear in his letter
that the remains of his mother-in-law, Martha Dicksinson, did not appear to
those present—including medical doctors—to be suspiciously fresh: her face
had collapsed and her lungs were in an advanced stage of decomposition. When
the exhumers proceeded to Forward’s daughter, Martha Dwight, the following
day, Forward wrote that he was unable to speculate on whether the state of
her corpse was natural, as he had no experience with viewing corpses after
interment. In a postscript to his letter, Forward implied that Dr. Scott—
“who opened the body”—also had no experience with human cadavers. Dr. Scott’s
supposition about the appearance of Martha Dwight’s lungs and liver—“in such
a state as he should suppose they would in a creature which was opened and
hung up till it began to taint”—reads like an analogy to dressing wild game
or slaughtering farm stock. His only direct reference to human physiology
was when he compared the blood found in her lungs to “blood drawn from a person’s
arm that has stood 26 hours.”
[21]
Dr. Scott undoubtedly
was intimately familiar with drawing human blood, as bloodletting was a core
medical procedure at that time.
It is plain in
Forward’s account, as in most of the other vampire narratives, that those
involved in therapeutic exhumations viewed putrefaction as the condition that
separated life from death. A corpse that had not sufficiently decomposed was
viewed, at best, as ambiguous and therefore a threat to the living. The crucial
test of whether a satisfactory level of putrefaction had occurred was the
absence of liquid blood (interpreted as “fresh” blood) in the vital organs,
especially the heart. As Paul Barber explained in Vampires, Burial, and Death, “Presumably the vampire-killers expected
the blood to remain coagulated,” but “were astonished to find that it was
‘fresh’.” Barber elaborated this point, arguing that the appearance of blood
in liquid form “is no cause for surprise.” Blood “does coagulate after death,
but then, depending on how death occurred, it either remains coagulated or
liquifies once again.”
[22]
But the exhumers
who found liquid blood—having no access to the reassuring science referenced
by Barber—were astonished. They were making judgments based on an ancient
and widespread folk principle that told them “liquid proclaims life,” an axiom
that goes back at least to the Greek conception of “life as the gradual diminishing
of liquid inside a man.”
[23]
“From dust to
dust” was more than a proverb or popular religious/funereal aphorism: it encapsulated
an entire theory, a folk model about the balanced, never-ending, dry-wet-dry
cycle of life. The early New England medical
community continued to put faith (and it was faith-based) in the ancient theory
of Hippocrates that the four “humors” of phlegm, choler, bile, and blood controlled
the human body. A person became ill when these fluids or vapors went out of
balance. Physicians would purge the digestive tract with cathartics and emetics
or bleed the patient to restore balance and good health. Both the scientific
and folk idea systems regarded blood as the principal humor; it contained
the essence, or vital spirit, of the creature in which it flowed. And if blood
was the river of life, the heart was its wellspring and reservoir. Margaret
Lock’s observation that, “For several centuries, the heart was usually . .
. understood as the organ that governed human life and all vital principles”
distinguishes a necessary foundation for New England’s
vampire practice: the heart’s blood.
[24]
Physicians and laymen alike believed that the bright red
(that is, oxygenated) blood from a consumptive’s lung hemorrhages came directly
from the heart. When vampire hunters encountered liquid blood in the vital
organs of a corpse, they believed that death was incomplete. Burning hastened
the necessary and irreversible drying process. The narrative recounting Rachel
Harris Burton’s exhumation in Woodstock, Vermont, clearly shows how these
long-held ideas were instantiated through application in actual social situations:
“If a person died of consumption and one of the family . . . was attacked
soon after, people . . . opened the grave at once and examined the heart;
if bloodless and decaying, the disease was supposed to be from some other
cause, and the heart was restored to its body; but if the heart was fresh
and contained liquid blood, it was feeding on the life of the sick person.
In all such cases, they burned the heart to ashes.”
[25]
Putrefaction
as “the definitive sign of death” was shared by both the folk and the biomedical
cultural systems, undoubtedly because it was regarded as a path of no return.
In her book, Twice Dead, which addresses
contemporary issues concerning the demarcation of death in context of organ
transplants, Margaret Lock asserts that “biological death has always been
recognized on the basis of changes to the body that are judged irreversible.”
[26]
At the beginning
of the nineteenth century, the biomedical community began to embrace the cardiopulmonary
standard, which marks death as the point at which the heart and lungs cease
to function. However, as Lock observed, the older conception persisted into
the beginning of the twentieth century as “eminent practitioners continued
to have doubts about their ability to objectively assess death and insisted
that ‘nothing short of putrefaction could distinguish death from life’.”
[27]
The medical
establishment’s doubts about their ability to fix with certainty the point
of death—we can picture the nervous physician holding a feather in front of
the patient’s nose—was reflected in the fear of premature burial among many
of the general populace. Indeed, premature burial even has been offered as
a reason for the origin of belief in vampires. How many people, if any, actually
were buried alive has been hotly debated. But, whether factually based or
not, people acted on their fearful beliefs, and an entire commercial industry
was created to give people the peace of mind that they could signal from the
grave to the living, “I’m not dead yet!” in case that became their horrible
fate.
Contemporary
Americans might look back to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with
smugness and see an enormous gap in knowledge; yet, as Lock has clearly demonstrated,
“the complexities of unresolvable questions about the determination of death”
continue into the present, and the ambiguities that plagued early New Englanders
have returned.
[28]
Some questions,
like the vampires themselves, will not rest easy. The medical profession’s
failure to understand and successfully treat tuberculosis prior to the twentieth
century nourished the belief in vampires. A different sort of failure by the
biomedical paradigm has reintroduced the ambiguous living dead. In Lock’s
words, “These fundamental issues remain unresolved because key concepts that
we recognize as life, such as personhood, cannot be measured by medical devices.
The work of doctors in the early twentieth century to medicalize death and
make foolproof its assessment have not withstood the test of time or the invention
of the artificial ventilator.”
[29]
When Lock discusses
the current concept of brain death, we cannot help but picture the disturbing
vampire image: “The new death, with its ambiguous figure of the living cadaver,
has rekindled doubts about error and premature declarations of death.” Her
concluding remarks on “locating biological death” echo the ancient, often
anxious, unbroken sympathetic links to the dead: “Concern about ‘bad’ deaths—those
that are unnatural, accidental, or untimely, or repugnant—is a universal,
age-old preoccupation. Technologically orchestrated deaths appear intuitively
to many people to be unnatural. We worry that individuals who die bad deaths
suffer unduly, and, even though most of us consider such thoughts irrational,
even some health-care practitioners may be harrowed by the idea that this
suffering will come back to haunt the living.”
[30]
In response to
the current ambiguity and controversy surrounding the concept of brain death,
some physicians have advocated a return to the traditional cardiopulmonary
standard, arguing that death is a biological event rather than a process requiring
social consensus. Lock observes, “The point at which irreversibility can be
confidently declared has been moved earlier and earlier over the years as
a result of systematized application of medical knowledge and technologies.”
[31]
Neurologist
Robert Taylor, quoted in Lock, asserts that the “proper” biological definition
of death is “the event that separates the process of dying from the process
of disintegration” and that, therefore, the “proper criterion” of death is
the “permanent cessation of the circulation of blood”—a formulation that seems
implicit in the vampire hunters’ search for liquid blood in the heart, taken
as evidence that “fresh” blood was still flowing and death was therefore incomplete.
[32]
By the time that
Mercy Brown’s heart was removed from her corpse and burned, in 1892, significant
cultural changes had converged to render the vampire practice obsolete (if
not completely abandoned): Edward Koch had announced his discovery of the
tuberculosis microbe, and more and more people were embracing embalming and
interment by mortuary professionals as the preferred method for treating deceased
relatives. Among the elites, there was a growing perception that “civilization”
was poised to win the war against “superstition”—and vampires did virtually
disappear from American cemeteries. But ambiguous corpses have returned in
a contemporary setting: living cadavers attached to artificial ventilators
in intensive care units. In 1788, Reverend Justice Forward wondered if the
(un)dead in the cemeteries were preying on the living. Today’s ambiguous corpses
lying in the ICU have prompted many people to question if the living are preying
on the (un)dead. “What’s past is prologue”—and death continues to mystify.
-------------------------------------------
Note: I addressed variants of these ideas in “Vampires and
Death in New England, 1784 to 1892” in “Becoming Dead: The Entangled Agencies
of the Dearly Departed,” a special edition of Anthropology and Humanism 31(2006),
pp. 124-140, edited by Bilinda S. Straight; and in “American Vampires: The
Ongoing Ambiguity of Death,” an unpublished paper delivered at the conference,
“Vampires: Myths of the Past and the Future,” November 2, 2011, at The Institute of Germanic & Romance
Studies, University of London. A more detailed interpretation of the American
vampire tradition can be found in my book Food for the Dead: On the Trail of New England’s Vampires (Wesleyan
University Press, 2011).
an international and interdisciplinary
journal of postmodern cultural sound, text and image
Volume 10, March 2013, ISSN 1552-5112
Notes
