#or. long rant about New England 19th century ‘vampire’ epidemic

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Current situation, if I ever seem what I’m doing it’s fake

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What exactly happened in New England during the 19th century?

Time for some real life vampire folklore time!!

(Sorry this is gonna be an unnecessary long rant)

The YouTube channel Ask A Mortician has a video about it, was a while since I saw it but I remember it as great!

I’m a bit rusty in all the exact details so sorry if I get some stuff wrong, but there was a tuberculosis epidemic (an illness that renders you weak, pale, anemic and hollow-eyed, perhaps even coughing blood! Which has become part of vampire victim canon in pop culture!) which killed a lot of people. Entire families died en masse, and it was obviously horrifying for everyone. Often, one family member would become sick, and then, one by one the rest would become weak and die.

This lead to rumours being spread that it was actually the dead that was leeching off the energy of their living relatives, slowly draining them. Which led to people, in a few cases, digging up their dead and in some cases burning their hearts/removing heads, etc. Sometimes sick family members were made to breath in/consume the ashes from the burning. But basically. Classic vampire exhumations.

Even at the time this was considered strange, ‘barbaric’ and unscientific! People were sceptical! Especially outsiders, but even the people doing it! In one family, a father dug up his daughter, even though he didn’t personally believe it. But the science about tuberculosis was pretty new and offered no hope nor cure + the rest of the community wanted him to +and his last living child was terribly ill so like.... would he be able to live with himself knowing he hadn’t done every possible thing??

From the book “Food for the Dead” by Micheal E. Bell who is probs the main expert on the topic:

And:

But since then these town has been overrun with ghost hunters/vampire fanatics who are all super interested in finding the truth (!!!) about the vampires or communicating with the ghosts or whatever.

Whereas the takeaway is rather that this wasn’t really any occult encounter with the supernatural. It was a sincere attempt at folk medicine. The term “vampire” was hardly used by the people doing it. And the story is honestly kinda misrepresented as an “uhhhhh scary vampires” or “dumb villagers” when in reality it was just people doing their best at a fucking horrifying illness. Which might be is a boring conclusion but from a plain human perspective is very compelling, and honestly more interesting!

I did all this research bc I wanted to make a comic based on the vampire tale until I read enough about it that I didn’t really want to, at least not without making it a way more elaborate thing than I initially thought about:)

TLDR: tuberculosis caused people to believe that exhumating their dead relatives would save them. Got spun into epic vampire tale when in reality, it was just trying to save your community from an epidemic.