The New England Vampire Panic

The New England Vampire Panic is apparently a bit of a misnomer–media reporting of the panic used the term “vampire” but the folks in New England caught up in the panic did not.

Still, up until the late 19th century there apparently persisted a folk belief that tuberculosis was caused by TB sufferers draining the life from their family members, including after death.

According to Wikipedia,

The [tuberculosis] infection spreads easily among a family; thus, when one family member died of consumption, other members were often infected and gradually lost their health. People believed that this was due to the deceased TB sufferer draining the life from other family members. The belief that consumption was spread in this way was widely held in New England and in Europe.

In an attempt to protect the survivors and ward off the effects of consumption, bodies of those who had died of the disease were exhumed and examined. The corpse was deemed to be feeding on the living if it was determined to be unusually fresh, especially if the heart or other organs contained liquid blood. After the culprit was identified, there were a number of proposed ways to stop the attacks. The most benign of these was simply to turn the body over in its grave. In other cases, families would burn the “fresh” organs and rebury the body; occasionally, the body would be decapitated. Affected family members would also inhale smoke from the burned organs or consume the ashes in a further attempt to cure the consumption.

Leave a Reply