The New England Vampire

Did you know that New England is the Transylvania of the United States? What do I mean by that, you might ask? I'm talking about vampires, those blood-sucking fiends of Eastern Europe. The old-time Yankees believed in something very similar, and dealt with it in very similar ways. Specifically, they would dig up the body of the suspected vampire, remove the heart, and publicly burn it. Sometimes the vampires' victims would mix the ashes in water and drink it in an attempt to get their blood back. The vampires' victims, as in Eastern Europe, were frequently members of its own family. These kinds of rituals occurred on a number of occasions in eighteenth and nineteenth-century New England, with the last known case being the Mercy Brown incident in the 1890s.

The context for the New England vampire lore was in the fear of tuberculosis. This disease caused victims to waste away as if their blood was being drained, and medical science couldn't cure it. Even though country people were frequently aware that it was just supposed to be an ordinary disease, the lack of a cure fed into ancient fears. Some people weren't completely convinced that science had the answers, especially when victims would report having creepy dreams in which their own dead family members came back to drink their blood. If your oldest daughter dies of tuberculosis and then your youngest daughter comes down with the same mysterious disease and starts having dreams about her dead sister being a vampire, what do you do? Listen to the doctors, who admit that they can't do anything- or destroy the vampire?

 

Here's the creepy part. They didn't actually call these monsters vampires, nor did they have any other local term for them. They apparently thought that draining the blood of the living was just something dead people did sometimes- unless, of course, the living stopped them.