Hunt vampires in New England

Legend of human blood suckers, as well as violent acts of violence, once haunted New England over the past few centuries.

Two hundred years after the witchcraft trials in Salem, Massachusetts, from February 1692 to May 1693, New England farmers began to believe that their relatives had returned from graves to suck blood from living people. Rumors about vampires spread everywhere. New England families began to grave their relatives on suspicion that they had turned into blood-sucking demons. Applying ways except for vampires picked up from other places, the local people do all kinds of things, including beheading, killing the hearts of the dead and burning them. Modern scholars have continued to explore real-life vampire stories, with dramas like Dracula in Romania and Hollywood films about this hot topic.

The famous tomb of the alleged vampire
same New England - (Photo: bangordailynews.com)

According to Smithsonian magazine, the action of devouring people suspected of vampires is more likely to come from Eastern Europe, then spread to Western countries like France and England in the 1700s, before invading rural areas. New England, where vampire obsession broke out and became popular in the late 1800s, especially in Rhode Island.

For a long time, this source of fear of blood-sucking creatures started when a person died, often due to an infectious disease. In New England, in this case the dead are due to tuberculosis, and others begin to fall ill. At that time, of course, people did not know the source of the disease was caused by bacteria, and just damn it to the dead to return to the earth and suck blood from relatives. So the measures of exorcism are applied, from grazing, piling, beheading, burning corpses or whatever way they can hear from elsewhere. Often New England vampire hunters find what they want to see when opening the lid of the coffin: many signs of natural decay, as the body swells and blood drips from the mouth, nose, and ears, just like Described in the legend of blood-sucking demons.

A folklore researcher has recorded about 80 such graves in Rhode Island. In some cases, the dead are just turned to face down, but most of them are heart-wrenching or have a state of rearrangement of parts of the skeleton, such as the skull and femur placed on the ribs and spine, like the type of skull and femoral cross, according to a historian. The assessment results in a grave excavation showed that the head cut, along with other injuries, took place five years after death. And historian Henry David Thoreau of the United States also mentioned a grave excavation in 1859 in the journal, and 'horrifying superstitious actions' appeared no less than once on the front page of local newspapers. Notably, a case that took place in rural Rhode Island most recently was in 1892, specifically the Mercy Brown case, just over a century ago.

To date, vampire purges are still marked in New England history, and researchers continue to uncover the mysteries buried between the grave of ordinary graves in the cemetery, according to The Boston Globe.