Food for the dead : on the trail of New England's vampires

For nineteenth-century New Englanders, "vampires" lurked behind tuberculosis. To try to rid their houses and communities from the scourge of the wasting disease, families sometimes relied on folk practices, including exhuming and consuming the bodies of the deceased. Author and folklorist Michael E. Bell spent twenty years pursuing stories of the vampire in New England. While writers like H. P. Lovecraft, Henry David Thoreau, and Amy Lowell drew on portions of these stories in their writings, Bell brings the actual practices to light for the first time. He shows that the belief in vampires was widespread, and, for some families, lasted well into the twentieth century. With humor, insight, and sympathy, he uncovers story upon story of dying men, women, and children who believed they were food for the dead. This Wesleyan paperback edition includes an extensive preface by the author unveiling some of the new cases he's learned about since Food for the Dead was first published in 2001.

These stories of vampire legends and gruesome nineteenth-century practices is "a major contribution to the study of New England folk beliefs" ( The Boston Globe ). For nineteenth-century New Englanders, "vampires" lurked behind tuberculosis. To try to rid their houses and communities from the scourge of the wasting disease, families sometimes relied on folk practices, including exhuming and consuming the bodies of the deceased. Folklorist Michael E. Bell spent twenty years pursuing stories of the vampire in New England. While writers like H.P. Lovecraft, Henry David Thoreau, and Amy Lowell drew on portions of these stories in their writings, Bell brings the actual practices to light for the first time. He shows that the belief in vampires was widespread, and, for some families, lasted well into the twentieth century. With humor, insight, and sympathy, he uncovers story upon story of dying men, women, and children who believed they were food for the dead. "A marvelous book." — Providence Journal Includes an updated preface covering newly discovered cases.

"Close your eyes and imagine a vampire: Your mind's eye may conjure up Count Dracula with bared teeth and a shiny tuxedo. But, another kind of vampire was believed to live in rural New England long ago. Author and folklorist Michael E. Bell has spent twenty years pursuing this forgotten vampire tradition. His discoveries will surprise and enthrall skeptics, believers, and all readers of this engaging book.". "Bell's odyssey began in 1981 when Rhode Islander Everett Peck told him a family story passed down for generations. In 1892, months after young Mercy Brown succumbed to tuberculosis, her body was exhumed from a local graveyard. Relatives cut out her heart, burned it on a nearby rock, and fed the ashes to her dying brother, hoping to cure him of the wasting disease. They feared that Mercy had become a vampire, sapping her sibling's vitality to provide sustenance for her own spectral existence. Or, had she become a scapegoat, blamed for the baffling affliction ravaging her family?"--BOOK JACKET. Has Michael E. Bell discovered the remnants of a ghoulish superstition, or a reasoned attempt to vanquish the terrible plague of tuberculosis? Close your eyes and imagine a vampire: Your mind's eye may conjure up Count Dracula with bared teeth and a shiny tuxedo. But another kind of vampire was believed to live in rural New England long ago. Michael E. Bell has spent twenty years pursuing this other vampire tradition, and the discoveries he reveals in this volume will surprise and enthrall skeptics and believers, and all readers of his beguiling book. Startling true stories behind New England's vampire legends-back in print with a new preface by the author