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Blood in the Soil: The Chilling Tale of the New England Vampire Panic

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Centuries after the witch panic in Salem, New England was gripped by another entity – vampires! Thought to crawl out from their graves at night and back to their remaining family to feed and consume the life of them. This has later been known as the New England Vampire Panic The only way to stop them was to dig them up and set them on fire. 

In the quiet, frostbitten corners of 19th-century New England—amid snow-capped fields and rickety clapboard farmhouses—a curious darkness was spreading. But it wasn’t witches this time. It wasn’t demons, or ghosts, or devils hiding in the woods. No, what haunted the good, God-fearing folk of Rhode Island, Connecticut, and Vermont was something far stranger.

Vampires.

Not the aristocratic, silk-robed kind with Eastern European accents. Not the seductive, night-stalking vampires of Hollywood imagination. These were homegrown, farm-dwelling, dirt-under-their-nails revenants. According to local belief, they didn’t sip fine blood from crystal goblets. They clawed their way out of graves and siphoned the life from their living kin—not with fangs, but with supernatural persistence.

Read More: Check out all ghost stories from USA

This wasn’t just a gothic fever dream. It was real. It had a body count, graves empty after their families dug them up and burnt their remains to cure themselves of the curse of the undead. After it swept across the east coast, it was later called the New England Vampire Panic.

Old Graveyards: A serene graveyard in New Hampshire reflects the eerie history of vampire folklore in early New England that was gripped by fear during the New England Vampire Panic.

A Disease by Any Other Name

To understand how New England came to believe in vampires, we need to talk about tuberculosis—known in the 1800s as consumption.

Before it had a scientific explanation, TB was a horrifying, slow-moving plague. It wasted the body and if you first got infected, there was a two in ten chance of surviving it as there was no cure. Victims grew pale and thin, their cheeks sunken, eyes glassy. They coughed blood. They wheezed and gasped and sometimes appeared to grow stronger just before they died, as if something unnatural were prolonging their suffering.

The White Death: The plague of tuberculosis is a disease that has killed more people than any other microbial pathogen and mummies dating back to the 8000 BCE. Over the years, many attempts to cure it through curious means show desperation. Fresh air, bloodletting, elephant urine, eating wolf livers and human breast milk has from ancient times been tried.

It was contagious, of course, though no one knew why or how. When one family member died, others often followed. Households dropped like dominos. And so the imagination of rural folk—grounded in a stew of folklore, fear, and grim necessity—did what it does best: It reached for reasons.

They began to believe that the dead were not staying dead. 

Vampire Lore: In addition to consumption being rooted in a vampiric infliction, you also had rabies that gave strange symptoms and rare genetic disorders like porphyria that gave a sensitivity to sunlight and reddish teeth. Although in the New England Vampire Panic, it was mainly tuberculosis.

The New England Outback

Exactly why New England? After all, tuberculosis was a worldwide problem, why did the vampiric panic happen here, 200 years after the witch craze in Salem not too far from where they would begin to exhume their loved one from their graves?

There are several factors of how this particular lore and New England Vampire Panic started. One has to do with numbers. After years of civil war, the number of people living in Exeter, Rhode Island for instance, had dwindled to a few thousand, scattered across small rural communities. By some, this was later known as Vampire Capital of America and had a high count of exhumations like the case of Mercy Brown. 

Contrary to popular belief about being puritanical, the rural New Englanders in the 1800s were not overly religious and 10 percent belonged to church in these parts. Missionaries were sent to these parts to get them back to God’s words as they saw these rural communities living in cultural isolation from the rest of the world.. 

The belief of the uneducated farmers have taken hold for many in later years. But was it really so? It seems like many places like Manchester, Vermont where Rachel Burton was exhumed and burned on the town square was founded by educated and not really the most superstitious and religious men. This seems to have changed after the Revolutionary War when it was then described as a place of drinking gambling, and superstitions like vampirism. 

Read More: The Vampire of Rachel Burton: Vermont’s Gruesome 18th Century Exhumation

They were however superstitious and let their beliefs fester side by side with the industrial revolution and modernisation of the society in the cities not far from their farming communities. Also as a small community, there were a lot of relations between the exhumations. Like the case of the exhumation of Nancy Young having relation through marriage to Sarah Tillinghast who was also exhumed the same way. They were neighbors, although the farms were few and far between, family and friends, and like the sickness of consumption, so did the fear of the undead spread and infect through generations and places.

The Curious Case of Mercy Brown

The most infamous case of the New England Vampire Panic took place in 1892, in the icy hills of Exeter, Rhode Island. The Brown family had been ravaged by tuberculosis. First, mother Mary Eliza died. Then daughter Mary Olive. Then son Edwin became ill and left for Colorado in a desperate bid for recovery.

And then Mercy Lena Brown, a 19-year-old girl with dark hair and a shy smile, fell sick and died on January 17, 1892.

Mercy Brown: A historical portrait of Mercy Brown, the young woman at the center of the New England Vampire Panic.

The townsfolk were suspicious. Too many Browns were dying. Someone, or something, must be behind it. They began to murmur. Maybe one of the dead was still feeding. Edwin, now barely hanging on, had to be saved.

So in March—when the ground thawed enough to dig—they exhumed the bodies.

Mary Eliza and Mary Olive had decomposed as expected. But Mercy? Her body, kept in a crypt during the harsh winter, was remarkably intact. Her cheeks had color. There was blood in her heart, clear signs she was the vampire.

The heart and liver were removed and burned. The ashes were mixed into a tonic and given to Edwin to drink. (A sentence that should never be uttered casually, but here we are.)

Read More: Check out The Mercy Brown Vampire Incident in Rhode Island 

Did it work? Tragically, no. Edwin died two months later. But Mercy’s story endured, becoming the poster child of the New England Vampire Panic—a real-life tale so haunting that even Bram Stoker, author of Dracula, reportedly took notes.

Mercy wasn’t the only one. According to folklorist Michael Bell, there was around 80 of these types of exhumations. From Maine to Massachusetts to Rhode Island, similar rituals were performed. Perhaps as far west as Minnesota. Not always with a name. Not always with fire. But the goal was the same: stop the dead from killing the living.

The Vampire Next Door in the New England Vampire Panic

These were not “vampires” as we think of them today, but corpses with unfinished business, still feeding on their living relatives from beyond the grave. They drained vitality, not with teeth, but through a metaphysical link. The only cure? Dig up the body, examine it, and if necessary, destroy the vessel.

Some communities in Maine and Plymouth, Massachusetts, opted to simply flip the exhumed vampire facedown in the grave and leave it at that. But in places like Connecticut, Vermont and especially in Rhode Island, they took it one step further. 

If the corpse was found unusually fresh, with blood in the heart or organs (a not-uncommon occurrence in cold New England graves and those buried in the winter or put in freezing crypts waiting for the ground to thaw), it was declared the source of the curse. The heart would be removed and burned to ash, sometimes the liver, kidney or other organs were also taken. Often, the ritual was done in secret, other times it was done publicly, sometimes on a blacksmith’s anvil or just on a nearby rock in the cemetery. In many cultures it was believed that the fire in a blacksmith’s anvil was a divine gift and that they had the power to banish evil through their metal and flames.

There were also some cases where vines and sprouts growing from the coffins and bodies were seen as signs of vampiric activity, like we see with the exhumation of Annie Dennett. They believed that the vine or root growing at or by the grave reached the next coffin, another family member would be sick and die. This part of the legend is a bit more difficult to trace back to a particular superstition shared with other places.

Read More: The Curious Case of Annie Dennett and the Vampiric Vines 

As the ritual demanded, their heart and liver were burned on a nearby rock and the ashes were mixed with a tonic and given to the sick relatives to drink. Sometimes it was also said to be smoked or the fumes from the burning were inhaled by those attending. 

The Mystery of J.B: Connecticut State Archaeologist, Nick Bellantoni, was excavating the cemetery and found something no one could have expected. Among the graves, one burial in particular captured attention: a coffin marked only with brass tacks, spelling the initials “J.B. 55”. The remains inside had been subject to a post-mortem ritual that hinted unmistakably at vampire panic practices during the New England Vampire Panic. // Photo courtesy of Nicholas Bellantoni

After the ritual, it seems like the rest of the body was reburied. In Woodstock, Vermont, a father exhumed the bodies of his daughters and burned them to save his last surviving child. In Griswold, Connecticut, archaeologists discovered 29 burials in the 1990s—one with the skull and thigh bones rearranged in a skull-and-crossbones pattern. The jaw had been hacked apart. The coffin was inscribed with “JB55,” believed to stand for “John Barber,” a middle-aged man who likely died of TB. The mutilation? A post-mortem attempt to stop the spread of vampirism.

Read More: The Griswold Vampire Case and the True Identity of J.B. in the Coffin 

Where did the Vampire Lore come from?

Although it is today known as the New England Vampire Panic, the people at the time didn’t use this terminology as the term was not commonly used in the community. But when the newspapers and outsiders started to look at the phenomenon, they classified it as vampire lore because of the similarities about the lore in eastern Europe dating back to the tenth century. 

There are many versions about where the vampire lore that struck the New England coast around this time. According to residents of Exeter, Rhode Island, they claimed they got the exhumations tradition from the Native Americans that certainly had their own vampire lore. But what about the European connection? 

Vampire Lore in the World: Although New England cultivated its own vampire belief, it certainly wasn’t the first. Across the ocean in Europe, the fear of the vampires in eastern Europe took hold in the 1700 and worked its way west. In Europe the wooden stake was said to be the thing banishing the vampire. In America, they burned their organs showing signs of vampirism. This illustration comes from an 1851 book by Paul Feval titles “Les Tribunaux secrets” and was created by René de Moraine.

In this time, there was also a Vampire panic in Europe, especially eastern and central Europe. German and Slavic immigrants are said to have brought their lore and superstitions with them in the 18th century. There were Hessian mercenaries that served in the Revolutionary War and Palatine Germans colonized Pennsylvania. There were also Germans and different eastern Europeans traveling through the area as healers, bringing with them the ideas of the undead and exhumation as a cure for the terrible diseases the townsfolk didn’t yet understand. 

The Science Arrives too Late for Many

The New England Vampire Panic began to wane by the early 20th century, as germ theory and modern medicine began to explain disease in ways people could trust. TB was finally understood as a bacterial infection, not a curse.

In the meantime, there were as many as 80 exhumed graves we know of, but there were probably many more. For example, in 1862, reports of vampirism swept the community of Saco, Maine so strongly that almost every deceased resident was dug up and reburied, allegedly. Every corpse was, apparently, a suspect.

But the New England Vampire Panic hadn’t been entirely irrational. These were desperate people watching their families die horribly. They didn’t have the benefit of science. They had folk remedies, tradition, and fear—and so they reached for the most ancient tool humans possess: storytelling.

And in the dark corners of New England, those stories had fangs.

List of Vampire Cases of the New England Vampire Panic

1793 – The Vampire of Rachel Burton: Vermont’s Gruesome 18th Century Exhumation

1799 – The Rhode Island Vampire and the Legend of Sarah Tillinghast 

1810 – The Curious Case of Annie Dennett and the Vampiric Vines 

1816-1817 – A Vampire in Ohio: The Strange and Grim Superstition of the Salladay Family 

1817 – The Case of Frederick Ransom: The Woodstock Vampire

1827 – The Legend of the Vampire Nancy Young Rising from her Grave 

1843 – The Griswold Vampire Case and the True Identity of J.B. in the Coffin

1854 – The Jewett City Vampires and the Ray Family in Connecticut

1874 – The Restless Dead of Rhode Island: The Vampiric Legend of Ruth Ellen Rose

1892 – The Mercy Brown Vampire Incident in Rhode Island 

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Food For The Dead The Vampires

Bioarcheological and biocultural evidence for the New England vampire folk belief 

The Great New England Vampire Panic

New England vampire panic – Wikipedia 

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The Restless Dead of Rhode Island: The Vampiric Legend of Ruth Ellen Rose

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Dead as a young girl, the family of Ruth Ellen Rose believed her to be one of the undead, a vampire rising from her grave every night to feed on her siblings, slowly dying of the same disease she did. To stop this, they decided to dig her body up and carve her heart out. 

In the hushed woodlands and misted graveyards of 19th-century New England, terror did not always arrive in the night — sometimes it crept in through the sickroom window, carried on the breath of a wasting cough. One such unfortunate to fall victim to this grim tradition was Ruth Ellen Rose, a 15-year-old girl whose short, tragic life and eerie afterlife have lingered in Rhode Island folklore ever since.

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Born in 1859 in Exeter, Rhode Island, Ruth Ellen Rose lived — and died — in the heartland of America’s so-called Vampire Panic. New England, though a landscape of tidy farmsteads and Puritan steeples, harbored a persistent, unshakable fear: that the dead could rise from their graves, not in bodily form, but as a spiritual parasite, draining the life from their surviving kin. Consumption, what we now know as tuberculosis, ravaged families so regularly that superstitions took root like stubborn weeds.

Her Mother was Mary Taylor from the Dixon and Peckham family, but she died in 1866. Her father, William G. Rose was a farmer, mill superintendent, and first president of the Exeter Grange. He was also a lieutenant colonel in the Rhode Island militia. He remarried to Mary Ann Griswold Morrarty. Her former husband had been from the Tillinghast family, and this would likely be one of the things that sealed Ruth’s fate. 

Ruth’s illness was slow and torturous and came in waves. By 1874, at just 15, she succumbed to the wasting disease. But death, in the fearful lore of Exeter, was not always an ending.

A Family Cursed by Blood

Not long after Ruth’s death her siblings began to show the telltale signs of consumption. She had a lot of them, and although many of them lived long lives, there were some who died earlier. Like Emma Tillinghast, her step sister who died of consumption, although her death is most often noted to be in 1870 when she was 16. This epidemic also took the lives of their infant little brothers Horace and Edwin. In most documents, Ruth is not even listed in the flock of children so the details of the story sometimes become lost to legends.

William Greene Rose

And rumors swirled. William Rose, Ruth’s father, was not just a grieving parent. Whispers claimed he dabbled in Druid rituals, dark rites passed down from the Old World. At least that is how the stories about him have evolved until today. Local legend still speaks of an ancient stone altar, hidden in the woods of Peace Dale, upon which he was said to perform secret sacrifices to halt the spread of the mysterious illness plaguing his bloodline.

Perhaps it was superstition, or perhaps it was grief twisted into madness, but that same year, William disinterred his daughter’s body. He cut out Ruth’s heart himself and consigned it to the flames in an attempt to stop the curse of the undead. The ash was scattered, a desperate and macabre remedy meant to sever the supernatural link between the dead and the dying.

A Legacy of Unearthed Daughters

Ruth’s tragic end was not without precedent. The tale takes a darker turn when one examines her stepmother’s lineage. Mary, her stepmother, used to be a Tillinghast and this family came with stories of vampires. Stukely Tillinghast, whose own daughter, Sarah Tillinghast, had perished of consumption decades earlier — and was similarly suspected of preying on her family from beyond the grave. The echoes of that old curse seemed to pass through generations like a genetic illness, or perhaps, in the eyes of those fearful villagers, a vampiric inheritance.

Read More: Check out the whole story of The Rhode Island Vampire and the Legend of Sarah Tillinghast 

Thus, it wasn’t merely disease that haunted these families, but their own shared history, where graves were never truly at rest and tragedy was expected to call twice.

An Unquiet Grave

Today, Ruth Ellen Rose lies in an unmarked grave in South Kingstown Historical Cemetery #11, colloquially known as Rose’s Lot. Or perhaps she’s not there at all, as her grave has never been found. Her father and stepmother’s headstones remain standing, weathered but intact, while Ruth’s resting place is conspicuously absent of any enduring marker. Perhaps it was lost to time — or perhaps deliberately left nameless to deny the restless dead a tether to this world.

George Rose Lot

The land itself retains a peculiar unease. Locals have spoken of strange happenings in the overgrown cemetery — flickering lights, phantom footsteps, and the sound of a distant, rasping cough when no one else is near. Some say that Ruth’s spirit lingers still, denied peace by the violence of her end and the stain of her family’s fear.

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References:

Food for the Dead: On the Trial of New England’s Vampires 2011933367, 9780819571700 – DOKUMEN.PUB

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/6505849/william-greene-rose

The Vampires of Rhode Island: Not Unfamiliar With This Plague. Ruth Ellen Rose, 15, Exeter 1874 – The Avocado

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The Legend of the Vampire Nancy Young Rising from her Grave

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Said to suck the life out of her siblings, the young girl, Nancy Young was believed to be a vampire after she died of consumption in Foster, Rhode Island. To stop the curse of the undead, the family exhumed her body to put it on fire. 

When people think of America’s “vampire panics,” their minds often drift to the misty graveyards of rural New England — where names like Mercy Brown and Sarah Tillinghast have secured their place in eerie folklore. But lurking in the shadows of this unsettling chapter of history is a lesser-known, yet equally tragic figure: Nancy Young Foster of Rhode Island.

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Though her story didn’t make international headlines like Mercy Brown’s, it’s a haunting reminder of the desperate lengths 19th-century families went to when death came knocking — and refused to leave.

Rhode Island: Along the rocky shores of Rhode Island State, a lot of vampire legends took form, driving people to exhume their dead and beloved from their graves to rid themselves of the curse of the undead they believed sucked the life out of their family.

Consumption and a Curse in Foster, Rhode Island

In the 1800s, consumption, now known as tuberculosis, was ravaging families across New England. In an age before germ theory was understood, when one family member after another fell ill with the same wasting sickness, superstition often filled the void left by medical ignorance. In some rural communities, it was believed that a deceased loved one, buried in the local cemetery, was feeding on the life force of the living from beyond the grave.

She was the oldest daughter of Levi and Anna Young, living together on their farm straddling between Rhode Island and Connecticut, just a few miles from where Sarah Tillinghast farm in Exeter was. She was managing the accounting on their land filled with her siblings and an inherited slave called Elija. They had arrived on the farm in 1806 and produced corn and other produce.

Read More: Check out the story about Sarah Tillinghast that share a very similar story

Nancy, a young woman likely in her late teens or early twenties, reportedly succumbed to tuberculosis on the sixth of April, 1827 and buried her in the newly walled off burial ground close to the farm. She was one of the first in her family to be buried in this lot, but soon the number of grave would grow. 

After her death, other members of her family began to exhibit the same harrowing symptoms and now it consumed Nancy’s sister, Almira— persistent coughs, bloodied handkerchiefs, sunken eyes, and a ghostly pallor. Fear took hold as she was slowly withering away from something they didn’t know the cause of. 

One day, Levi found his daughter in her room, claiming to feel better. She told him about her seeing Nancy in her dreams at night, telling her they soon would be together. Something about this vision made Levi so concerned he went to the elders for advice. They came to the conclusion that it had to be Nancy, returning from her grave in the night to feed the life out of her sister. 

According to many legends, it is said that Nancy came back to haunt more than one of her seven siblings, sucking their blood every night she climbed out of her grave. But it seems like Almira was the only one actually sick in this timeframe and not all of them died of consumption before they took drastic measures to stop the disease from spreading. 

A Grim Exhumation

Though details of the exact year and names of those involved have grown hazy with time, local lore holds that Nancy’s body was exhumed by her desperate family and neighbors. Convinced that she was the source of their suffering — a vampire preying on them from the grave — they undertook a grisly ritual to sever the connection.

Leading them was Levi and Nathan Lennox, often called Doc according to some of the online sources. Although appearing in more than one online retelling, there really isn’t much documentation to fact check his existence and is probably just an added detail for the legend. He was, according to the stories, not a doctor, but the locals trusted him knowing about strange things and superstitions, like what to do with an undead. 

Read Also: Check out The Mercy Brown Vampire Incident in Rhode Island

As was customary in such cases, her heart was likely removed and burned, either at the gravesite or in a nearby blacksmith’s forge, a common element in these folk cures. It was believed that by destroying the heart, the vampire’s hold over the family would be broken, and the sickness would be halted. In some versions of the story, they burned the whole body, scattering the ashes.

What happened to the remains they burned though? As custom often stated, it was common to either mix the ashes into a tonic given to the sick to drink. Some sources claim that the fumes of the smoke coming from her remains were inhaled by the family to cure themselves from the family curse of the vampiric infliction. 

The details and confirmation to the details surrounding her exhumation and what happened to her remains are still up for debate. 

An Obscure, Enduring Legend

Unlike the Mercy Brown case, Nancy Young Foster’s story wasn’t splashed across the newspapers of New England or abroad. Instead, it lingered quietly in local oral history, passed down in hushed tones and fireside tales. 

There are some written accounts of it, one from a newspaper in 1936, from the Pawtuxet Valley Gleaner in 1892 and most of what we know today is from the works of Michael E. Bell who researched the many cases of exhumation based on the vampire legends, written down in his work Food For the Dead: On the Trail of New England’s Vampires. 

Now, the legend has taken hold in many variations, and some versions of the legend claim that nothing was done to Nancy, there was no ritual, no staking of the body or burning of the organs. Some say that she is still out there. 

But what of Nancy’s siblings? Almira died of tuberculosis the 19th of August in 1828, only 17 year old. Their brother Olney died a couple of years later when he was 29, of what, it doesn’t really say, but it’s likely it was from consumption as well. Many of the Young siblings died young. Huldah died when she was 23 in 1836, Caleb died in 1843 when he was 26 and Hiram in 1854 when he was 35. Two other brothers lived to be older but also succumbed. Only their youngest daughter, Sarah seemed to be the one to escape the illness and lived to an older age. 

The Vampire Legacy of Rhode Island

Today, her name surfaces mostly in the footnotes of vampire lore enthusiasts and paranormal historians, but in her time, Nancy’s fate was another somber reminder of how death and superstition wove themselves into the everyday lives of New Englanders.

Foster: The Swamp Meadow Bridge in Foster, Rhode Island. // Source: Basheer Tome/ Wikimedia

Her gravestone is still on her family plot, tipped after all these years and all this ruckus surrounding her burial. 

If you ever find yourself wandering the old burial grounds of Foster, Rhode Island, take a moment to listen. In the heavy silence of dusk, with the chill of fog threading through the trees, you might just feel the lingering sorrow of a girl accused of preying on her own blood, buried twice — once in earth, and again beneath the weight of forgotten superstition.

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Food for the Dead: On the Trial of New England’s Vampires 2011933367, 9780819571700 – DOKUMEN.PUB 

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/24831878/nancy-young

New England’s Vampire History | Legends and Hysteria

New England Vampires: Nancy Young – 1827 | What Lies Beyond

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The Ghost of a Misunderstood Girl: Nellie Vaughn and the Vampire That Never Was

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Long after the vampire manic swept through New England, a grave of a young girl with a curious epitaph became accused of being the grave of a vampire. Now it is said that Nellie Vaughn is haunting her grave now removed because of vandalism, trying to clear her name. 

Deep in the woods of West Greenwich, Rhode Island, where the wind moves with a whisper and moss grows thick on broken stones, was a grave marked with one of the eeriest epitaphs in New England:

“I Am Waiting and Watching For You.”

That chilling inscription, paired with the tragic story of a 19-year-old girl named Nellie Vaughn, has birthed decades of eerie folklore, ghost stories, and whispered warnings. But the truth? It’s not about a bloodthirsty vampire rising from her grave—it’s about a girl caught in the shadow of another legend, and a ghost story that may say more about us than about her.

A Girl in a Grave, a Town with a Legacy

Nellie Louisa Vaughn, also spelled Nellie Louisa Vaughan, died in 1889, just 19 years old, and was laid to rest in the Plain Meeting House Cemetery in West Greenwich. At a glance, her story seems tailor-made for gothic folklore: a young woman, tragically taken in the prime of her life, buried beneath a cryptic and spine-tingling epitaph.

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But her death was not accompanied by accusations of vampirism. Decades after her death, there were rumors that no plants would grow on her grave and that the grave itself was looking to sink into the ground. Was something crawling in and out? Was it perhaps something supernatural about her death and her grave?

By the 1970s, she was a well known local legend, her grave vandalised and her story made the newspapers. 

The Vampire Panic of New England

To understand how this happened, we have to rewind just a few years and drive a few miles east to Exeter, where a young woman named Mercy Brown died of tuberculosis in 1892—just three years after Nellie. Mercy’s family had already lost several members to the same wasting illness. When her brother Edwin began to fall ill, the townspeople demanded action. They exhumed Mercy’s body and found it, preserved in cold storage, with “fresh” blood in the heart.

Read More: The Mercy Brown Vampire Incident in Rhode Island 

The solution? They removed the heart and liver, burned them, and fed the ashes to Edwin in a desperate effort to save him. It didn’t work—but the story exploded. It was reported in newspapers across the country and even overseas. Some say Bram Stoker himself read about it while writing Dracula.

That gruesome tale became the definitive American vampire legend. But what does it have to do with Nellie?

The True Vampire Lore: Gravestone of Mercy L. Brown, a key figure in Rhode Island’s vampire legend, who died on January 17, 1892, at the age of 19.

Mistaken Identity—or Manufactured Mystery?

Fast-forward to the mid-to-late 20th century. A curious thing began to happen: Nellie Vaughn’s grave started attracting attention. Visitors began whispering that she, not Mercy, was Rhode Island’s real vampire. Her grave was vandalized. Her name was spoken on ghost tours. Paranormal thrill-seekers claimed to feel her presence, hear phantom whispers, or see flickers of movement in the trees near her resting place.

Some say that she was buried alive, that she got a stake through her heart and that she was one of the undead from the New England Vampire Epidemic. 

But here’s the kicker: there is no historical evidence that Nellie was ever considered a vampire by her contemporaries. 

Folklorist Michael Bell, author of Food for the Dead: On the Trail of New England’s Vampires investigated what really was going on with the lore. Bell has spent decades researching the vampire panic and says Nellie Vaughn’s legend is pure folkloric conflation—a mash-up of Mercy Brown’s well-documented case, Nellie’s proximity in age and location, and the spine-chilling line carved on her gravestone.

There is a story about a teacher at the local high school in Coventry that told about the Mercy Brown legend in the 1960s. But saying nothing about the specific name or grave, the students stumbled across Nellies’ and said it was this. There have been numerous attempts to track down the teacher, but they have been unsuccessful. 

From Human Tragedy to Urban Legend

Nellie Vaughn was a real person, not a creature of the night. She died young, likely of pneumonia or a similar illness on 31 March in 1889—tragic, but not supernatural. She was first buried on her family farm, but in October that year, her mother was given permission to move her remains to the public cemetery. 

There is not really much to indicate that her family or anyone believed her to be a vampire in that time, and the legends came after. The earliest documentations for the legend are the newspaper articles from the 70s.

The vandalism of her grave, the repeated breaking of her headstone, and the ghost-hunting theatrics are the unfortunate side effects of myth overtaking memory. In the end they had to remove her tombstone to protect it from the vandals and now, she is hidden in an unmarked grave.

Her story, like many ghost tales, is less about the dead and more about the living: our obsession with mystery, our fear of death, and our irresistible urge to turn sorrow into spectacle.

The Ghost of Nellie Vaughn

After the vampire legends started to stop, the ghost legends took over. People have now reported about hearing her voice close to her gravesite close to the large crypt, saying: I am perfectly pleasant.

There has also been said that a woman wearing Victorian clothes has been seen but vanishes. In most stories she is said to say either, I am perfectly pleasant or I am happy. 

Ghost tours mention her name. Paranormal groups claim her spirit haunts the woods. Some say that she came back as a ghost in order to clear her name. Or are we still just profiting on the tombstone of a girl that happened to die during a Vampiric Mass Hysteria?

Nellie Vaughn deserves better than the chains of folklore forged around her grave. She was not exhumed. She was not accused. She was not a vampire. But her story reveals something powerful: how easily we can reanimate the past, and how quickly history can become horror.

Because of the vandalism she suffered, the graveyard had to remove her tombstone in the 90s. Now the grass is growing freely and there is no problem with it sinking into the ground. When the people wandering over it stopped, so did the signs of the legend. 

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References:

Nellie Louisa Vaughan (1870-1889) – Find a Grave Memorial

The Unexpected Vampire Case of Nellie Vaughn – Locations of Lore

Nellie Vaughn: The Vampire who Wasn’t a Vampire | Skeptical Humanities

https://eu.providencejournal.com/story/lifestyle/2014/10/28/20141028-charles-vacca-vampires-were-thought-to-prowl-the-night-in-r-i-ece/35272924007

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The Rhode Island Vampire and the Legend of Sarah Tillinghast

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After the death of Sarah Tillinghast, the family started complaining about her coming back for them at night, draining the life out of them. The family members fall dead to consumption and thinking that Sarah was a vampire, they dug her up and burned her heart. 

In the shadowy folklore of New England, where fog drifts through ancient graveyards and legends cling to weathered headstones like ivy, few tales unsettle quite like the vampire panics of the 18th and 19th centuries. 

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While the name Mercy Brown often takes center stage in these grim histories, she was far from the region’s first alleged vampire. Nearly a century before Mercy’s exhumation in Exeter, another tragedy gripped a Rhode Island farming family — that of Sarah Tillinghast, a young woman whose death and eerie posthumous reputation would earn her a ghostly place in America’s darkest folklore.

Exeter, Rhode Island in the 1700s

In the late 18th century, Exeter, Rhode Island was a small, isolated farming village, nestled in the wooded hills and fertile valleys of southern New England. Like much of colonial America, Exeter’s people lived in fear of both earthly and supernatural forces. Disease was an ever-present specter; outbreaks of consumption, now known as tuberculosis, were especially dreaded.

Tuberculosis was a wasting disease — one that slowly robbed its victims of their strength, appetite, and vitality. Without the medical knowledge we possess today, it seemed to New Englanders of the period that the illness spread like a curse through families. And in a world shaped by superstition, when science failed, folklore filled the void.

The Death of Sarah Tillinghast

The story of Sarah Tillinghast is shrouded in between fact, folklore and local legends. Her person has also been romanticised, but truth is, we don’t know a whole lot about who she was when she lived. 

According to local lore, Sarah Tillinghast was a young woman that a source described as quiet, pious, and beloved by her family. Her description in the first written source was a comely elder daughter. How she really was like though has largely been lost to time, and now she is mostly remembered as one of the first vampires of New England. 

Her father, Stukely was a prosperous farmer in the small Exeter community, living with his wife, Honor and their fourteen or twelve children. Often Sarah is said to be the eldest daughter, but she had at least five older siblings. Her father was called Snuffy Stuke because of the brown jacket he wore and made his living by selling apples from his orchard. In 1799 towards harvest season however, everything changed. It was said that Stukely had a dream where half of his apple trees in the orchard died. When he woke up, he believed it to be an ominous warning. Some sources claim that his daughter Sarah called out for him in his dream as well. 

His daughter, Sarah returned home, feeling uneasy. Some embellishments of the legend claim that Sarah also had an uneasy feeling and confessed to her father that she had an ominous sense of death looming over their family. A strange claim, but not long after, Sarah herself fell ill.

She was stricken by consumption, a wasting sickness that sapped her strength and left her a ghostly wisp of her former self. Some think that she had the galloping kind, where it can be latent in your body for years before consuming the sick fast when it breaks out. Despite her family’s care, Sarah died — and, as the legend says, death didn’t end her role in the family’s misery. She was only 21 or perhaps as young as 19. 

In the weeks that followed Sarah’s burial, Sarah’s sister began to feel sick. It’s not said which sister, and some sources say that it could even be her brother James, only nine years old. The family lot where they are all buried are missing some tombstones, and it’s difficult to say the exact sibling. But fact was, the disease was spreading. 

According to the story, it wasn’t just the disease that terrified her — it was the whispered stories from the sickbeds. She claimed she awoke in the night to find Sarah’s ghostly figure standing by their bedsides, her cold gaze fixed upon them, her presence heavy and suffocating. She said her dead sister caused her pain as she sat on her body. As quickly as Sarah did, she died, and four more of Stukely’s children followed suit.

New England’s Vampire Superstitions

It’s important to remember that during this period, the vampire in New England folklore was not the same creature popularized by Bram Stoker or Hollywood. Instead, these were restless corpses or spirits that drained vitality from the living, usually from within their own families.

The typical signs that one of the dead was to blame included multiple deaths in a family from consumption, reports of the deceased visiting the sick, and tales of disturbing, half-preserved corpses found during exhumation. The solution? A gruesome ritual: exhume the suspected corpse, check for signs of unnatural preservation (fresh blood, ruddy cheeks, or a heart full of blood), and burn the heart or other organs believed to be causing the harm.

Cases like this were shockingly common throughout 18th- and 19th-century New England, particularly in rural communities where tuberculosis outbreaks were frequent and poorly understood.

The Exhumation of Sarah Tillinghast

Faced with death after death, and driven to desperation, Stukely Tillinghast turned to his neighbors for counsel. Together, they arrived at a grim decision: Sarah’s grave must be opened. They went to the cemetery and dug up all six children, just to make sure.

Everyone of the coffins had what they deemed normal, a decomposing and dead corpse, except for Sarah. When they exhumed her body, legend holds that it appeared unnervingly lifelike. Her eyes were open, her hair and fingernails had grown. Some versions claim her cheeks were still flushed and that a small amount of fresh blood lay at the corner of her mouth — classic folkloric signs of a vampire. Whether this detail was added by later tellers of the tale or was a genuine observation from the exhumation remains lost to history.

This was for the small farming community, proof that she was a vampire and that Sarah was to blame for the deaths in the family. To stop the deaths and end Sarah’s malevolent influence, her heart was removed and burned — the standard ritual believed to sever the undead’s grip on the living. The ashes of the heart may have been buried or scattered, though records (such as they are) do not agree on this point.

According to some versions of the story, the deaths in the Tillinghast family ceased after the ritual. Other versions suggest a few more family members succumbed before the outbreak burned itself out, as diseases often do.

Regardless, the tale of Sarah Tillinghast became etched into Rhode Island’s oral history, predating the far more famous Mercy Brown case by over a century. Both stories showcase how deeply fear and folklore entwined themselves with the harsh realities of life and death in early America.

Historical Truth or Folkloric Fiction?

Unlike the well-documented Mercy Brown incident in 1892, the case of Sarah Tillinghast is murkier. No contemporary records — such as town documents or church logs — confirm her death, exhumation, or family history. Her story has been passed down primarily through oral tradition and local legend, and most written versions appeared in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Folklorists, including Michael E. Bell, author of Food for the Dead: On the Trail of New England’s Vampires, have noted how many of these vampire panic cases share similar narrative patterns: multiple family deaths, reports of supernatural visitations, an exhumation, and a grim ritual of heart-burning. Sarah Tillinghast’s legend fits neatly into this mold, whether or not the specifics are historically accurate.

And if he didn’t find the article written in 1888 by Sidney Rider, the story might have been lost. 

The Forgotten Grave: Rhode Island Historical Cemetery Exter #14 in Stutley Tillinghast Lot, there are a lot of unmarked graves forgotten by time. One of them is probably Sarah Tillinghast’s.

A Forgotten Haunting

Today, Sarah Tillinghast is an obscure figure, overshadowed by more famous “vampires” like Mercy Brown. But her tale remains one of the earliest and most unsettling examples of America’s vampire folklore — a testament to how communities, gripped by grief and terror, can turn on the dead themselves in a desperate attempt to survive.

She is put to rest in the small and overgrown Rhode Island Historical Cemetery, Exeter 14, containing only 25 burials on a mossy hill. Beneath an unmarked grave of weathered stones and wind-swept grass, echoes of these old fears linger. And while the name Sarah Tillinghast may have faded from history books, her spectral legend still haunts New England’s darker corners — a chilling reminder that when science fails and death comes calling, superstition is never far behind.

So if you ever find yourself walking past an ancient graveyard in Exeter as dusk falls, listen carefully. They say some restless souls never quite stay buried.

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References:

The Vampire Case of Sarah Tillinghast – Online Review of Rhode Island History

https://rihistoriccemeteries.org/newsearchcemeterydetail.aspx?ceme_no=EX014

https://eu.newportri.com/story/entertainment/theater/2013/10/23/hope-gory/12775893007

https://books.google.no/books?id=aTw8AQAAMAAJ&pg=PP9&hl=no&source=gbs_selected_pages&cad=1#v=snippet&q=vampire&f=false

RHODE ISLAND’S FIRST VAMPIRE? Sidney S. Rider (1833-1917) and the Story of Sarah #3 – vampiresgrasp.com – Powered by Doteasy.com

https://www.findagrave.com/cemetery/2288060/memorial-search?firstName=&lastName=Tillinghast&includeMaidenName=true&page=1#sr-32561577

Sarah Tillinghast (1777-1799) – Find a Grave Memorial

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The Mercy Brown Vampire Incident in Rhode Island

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When the whole Brown family succumbed to tuberculosis, the townsfolk in New England started to become suspicious. They believed that one of the dead, 19 year old Mercy Brown was behind it all as an undead in the middle of the vampire mass hysteria that seemed to plague the East Coast. 

After a tuberculosis breakout in New England in the late 1800s, there was a mass hysteria growing among the people living there. The cause for tuberculosis was unknown at the time, and in some cases, people thought it was because of supernatural causes. Although the term vampire was not widely used then, this would spread and later be known as the New England Vampire Panic.

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One of the most famous “real-life” vampires from this period was Mercy Brown, a young woman from 1800s Rhode Island who had died of tuberculosis and was believed to be preying on other members of her family as a vampire. 

Following was one of the most well documented cases of exhumation of a corpse to perform rituals and banish the alleged undead manifestation that seemed to have taken hold of her. Contrary to popular belief about being puritanical, the rural New Englanders in the 1800s were not overly religious and 10 percent belonged to church in these parts. They were however superstitious. Many years later, they found her newspaper articles in the belongings of Bram Stoker, who wrote Dracula.

Exeter: The countryside of Rhode Island were plagued with a belief that consumption was caused by the undead, and the locals went through plenty of exhumations of their dearly beloved and used them for rituals trying to cure themselves. // Source: Flickr

History of Mercy Brown: The Last Vampire in America

Mercy Lena Brown lived together with her family in Exeter, Rhode Island, a place populated by Europeans since the mid 1700s. After years of civil war, the number of people living there had dwindled to a few thousand. By some, this was known as Vampire Capital of America. 

The Brown family lived on a small farm in a place with barely fertile soil and were her parents and her four other siblings. People used to call her Lena when she was alive, but has been immortalized as Mercy Brown. Over the years, sickness took the lives of many as an epidemic of tuberculosis swept through the northeastern states. Her 36 year old mother, Mary Eliza was the first to die from consumption as tuberculosis was known back then on December 8, 1883. 

Mercy Brown: A historical portrait of Mercy Brown, the young woman at the center of the New England Vampire Panic.

So did the eldest daughter, Mary Olive, six months later on June 6, 1884 when she was 20 years old. She was working as a dressmaker before she got sick. She started having terrible dreams about her life being drawn out of her. 

Two weeks before she died, she joined the church. When she died the whole village came out and sang her favorite hymn, One Sweetly Solemn Thought. Mercy was only a child then and knew little that she would be blamed for her family’s misfortune.

Chestnut Hill Baptist Church: The historic church in Exeter, Rhode Island, near the site of the Mercy Brown vampire legend. //Source: Swampyank/Wiki

After the initial deaths, it seemed like the sickness had passed through their home, but then it came back and struck her 24 year old brother, Edwin. He was seen as a strong and healthy man working as a store clerk, so it was a shock to everyone when he fell ill, becoming sickly and frail. To help, he went to Colorado Springs in hope to be cured by the mineral waters there. 

The Death and Exhumation of Mercy Brown

In 1891 the daughters Marcy got the TB disease as well. She might have had the “galloping” kind that had been inside her for years before it broke out. And when it did, it took her quickly as the doctors told her father that there was nothing to do. 

Before her death, Mercy had worked on a quilt of fabric scraps. The pattern she used is sometimes called the Wandering Foot in Rhode Island and rare. According to superstition it is said that those who sleep under it, will be lost to her family and doomed to wander forever. 

On January 18, 1892, only 19 years old she succumbed to her illness and died. As the ground was frozen, she was put inside a crypt as they had to wait for it to thaw in the spring to bury her. The feelings toward the Brown daughters had shifted, and the whole village never showed up to sing her hymns. They thought something was strange, and that something unnatural was happening. Could it be that little Lena was actually an undead?

Consumption: Before it had a scientific explanation, TB was a horrifying, slow-moving plague. Victims grew pale and thin, their cheeks sunken, eyes glassy. They coughed blood. It was contagious, of course, though no one knew why or how. When one family member died, others often followed. And so the imagination of rural folk—grounded in a stew of folklore, fear, and grim necessity—did what it does best: It reached for reasons. They began to believe that the dead were not staying dead.

The time in Colorado seemed to work for a while for Edwin and he got better. But when he returned when he heard about his sister’s passing, it was like a switch, and he got worse. It is said that he screamed out “she was here,” and “she wants me to come with her,” when he was dreaming. 

People started to talk about the undead, and that there had to be a supernatural cause for all the deaths in the Brown family. Stories about Mercy having been seen walking in the cemetery and through fields started to circulate. 

The last left alive was their father, George Brown and Edwin. George started to get desperate as his only son was withering away as he had already seen his wife and oldest daughter do. He decided to dig up members of his family to check, to appease his neighbour, and maybe, just maybe, save his son.

The Crypt: The eerie, weathered stone structure was the crypt that Mercy Brown was put inside until the ground was thawed enough to bury her. //Source: Flickr

A bunch of the villagers, the local doctor from Wickford called Dr. Harold Metcalf and a reporter from the newspapers went to Exeter’s Chestnut Hill Cemetery and dug the bodies up on March 17 in 1892. It was said that the dr. did not’ believe in the vampire stories, but tagged along to check it out, and would confirm signs of TB in her lungs. George stayed home, not wanting to see his family dug up, but desperate enough for his son to let other people do it. 

Both his wife and his eldest daughter were as expected, but Mercy, who had been buried for a couple of months, looked like she was affected by the undead. She still had blood in her heart and showed almost no sign of decomposition. They also claimed that her position had shifted since they put her down in the coffin. 

The Ritual of the Undead

As the ritual demanded, Mercy’s heart and liver were burned on a nearby rock and the ashes were mixed with a tonic. Where this ritual came from is uncertain. Did it travel from Europe through the immigrants? Was it something they had heard from the Native Americans?

This tonic made of the ashes of his sister was given to the sick Edwin to drink. It was thought to cure his illness that the undead had infested him with. Edwin died of his disease two months later on May 2 and so would two of his younger sisters as well.

The Truth Behind the Legend

After the ritual, the remains of Mercy’s body were buried in the cemetery of the Baptists Church in Exeter. What really happened when they decided to open up her grave? 

Of the decomposition it was a coffin kept in an above crypt  in the winter months in Rhode Island in the two months after her death. Her body had been kept in an almost freezer like environment and slowed the decomposition. 

The Tombstone of Mercy Brown: Gravestone of Mercy L. Brown, marking her death on January 17, 1892, at the age of 19, amidst the vampire hysteria in New England. The stone has probably been replaced over the years.

It  seems like her father didn’t even believe in the stories, he only wanted to appease his neighbors. 

What happened to the other Brown kids though is almost never mentioned. It seems like the other children Jennie Adeline Brown and Myra Frances Brown also died of consumption, although there wasn’t much talk about vampires or the undead then. 

Only Hattie May Brown seemed to have made it out alive and died at 79 in 1954. 

The Enduring Legend and Haunting

George Brown never contracted the illness and lived until 1922. By then he lived to see Calmette and Guerin discover the BCG vaccine that could have cured his family of the very non-supernatural disease they had. 

And for Mercy, her grave is still standing at the same graveyard she was dug up. During Halloween, her grave is guarded as people sometimes try to steal her headstone and vandalize her final resting place. Many rumors and legends have flourished from this cemetery, especially about the strange blue lights hovering over the family plot. She is also said to show up on a particular bridge nearby, followed by the smell of roses. She is also said to show up to the dying, telling them that death isn’t as bad as they think. 

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References:

Mercy Brown vampire incident – Wikipedia

Vampire Mercy Brown | When Rhode Island Was “The Vampire Capital of America”

Grave of Mercy L. Brown | quahog.org 

Mercy Lena Brown (1872-1892) – Find a Grave Memorial 

Have Mercy… – The Rhode Island Historical Society

Mercy Brown was 19 when she died of tuberculosis. Her town thought she was a vampire. 

The Great New England Vampire Panic 

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The Palatine Light and the Ghost Ship Behind it

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In the cold night right before the New Years, the light of a ghost ship can be seen outside the shores of Rhode Island known as The Palatine Light. The terrible fate of the wrecked ship still haunts the sea. 

Which, half in sport, in malice half,
She shows at times, with shudder or laugh,
Phantom and shadow in photograph?

For still, on many a moonless night,
From Kingston Head and from Montauk light
The spectre kindles and burns in sight.

Now low and dim, now clear and higher,
Leaps up the terrible Ghost of Fire,
Then, slowly sinking, the flames expire.
– The Palatine, John Greenleaf Whittier

The Palatine Light is something that is reported on outside of Block Island on Rhode Island in the US. It is said that on the Saturday between Christmas and New Year’s Eve you can see the lights from the ship, burning as it sails past you as a ghostly apparition. 

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The tradition of the folklore tells of a British ship with German immigrants that were on their way to Philadelphia in the 1700s. Germany at this time was ravaged by famine, war and religious persecution and many made their way towards a better future in America. Those who made it to America were known as ‘poor Palatines’. There are many variants to exactly which year this was supposed to happen, as there are many variations and different historical explanations. 

The Palatine’s Haunted Legend

The ship, known as ‘The Palatine’ came to meet its fate outside of Block Island where it wrecked. The ship had for a long time been way off course and the passengers of the ship had already, before the sinking of the ship, experienced enough hardship on the voyage to drive them mad. The crew had deserted their duties and a horrible mutiny happened onboard that left the passengers to descend into chaos. The passengers that were left were driven mad by desperation, fear and hunger. 

The people of Block Island say that the locals tried to rescue the crew and its passengers, although on mainland New England, they tell a different tale. Namely that the islanders were luring the ship towards them to steal the cargo and kill the people on board. Which is also the narrative that is told in the poem ‘The Palatine’ by John Greenleaf Whittier, which helped solidify the story to a popular legend of The Palatine Light:

Down swooped the wreckers, like birds of prey
Tearing the heart of the ship away,
And the dead had never a word to say.
And then, with ghastly shimmer and shine
Over the rocks and the seething brine,
They burned the wreck of the Palatine.
– The Palatine, John Greenleaf Whittier

Wrecking is a practice of taking the cargo from a wrecked ship, and coastal people that live in the areas where many ships go down are known as wreckers, looters of ships. In some accounts and especially in fiction, the wreckers went as far as lighting false beacons to lure the ships ashore and killing the survivors, so no tales could be told. Many people feared Block Island as they were afraid of the locals living there doing this, although there has never been any hard evidence of it.

Wreckers: Legends of islander and coastal people on purpose lured ship ashore to pillage the cargo and kill the passangers were often told and depicted in fiction. Like in Daphne du Maurier’s  Jamaica Inn, here, screenshot from the BBC adaptation of the wreckers. // photo: BBC

Both variations of the legends tell that after they had gotten the people off the ship, they set fire to the ship and it was driven out to sea. But the ship was not empty. A female passenger refused to leave the ship as it sank, and those who report seeing the Palatine Lights, claim to hear her screams from the ghost ship. 

The Wreckage of Princess Augusta

There are many ships that went down in these parts that could be the source of the legend of The Palatine Light. Many ships got off course and ended its day on the bottom of the sea this far north. One of those ships was The Princess Augusta and perhaps tells the closest story to the legend.

Like in the legend, the ship had problems onboard long before they hit the shores of Rhode Island. The water supply was contaminated and killed 200 of its passengers and half the crew, including the captain, named Captain Long. 

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It was the first mate, Andrew Brook, that took control over the ship, but a horrible storm pushed the ship of course and they ended up outside of Rhode Island. After three months of the extreme weather and no food, the state of the people on the ship was becoming desperate. Already poor, the passengers were forced to pay for the remaining rations by Brook. 

When it reached the shores of Block island it was severely damaged and leaked and finally wrecked in a snowstorm at Sandy Point in 1738. The waters around these parts are treacherous and in those times, there were at least a dozen wrecked ships every year around these parts.

Apparently Brook left all the passengers onboard and rowed to shore with the remaining crew. Although they were condemned in the public eye, they suffered no punishment for their mistreatment. 

According to the Block Islanders, they were not trying to steal the cargo at all, but help the passengers and bury the dead they could not help. It is said that they helped out all but one of the passengers in some accounts just like in the legends and a couple of the passengers actually settled down on the island, as more names of the passenger list have come to light with names. Mary Van Der Line was forgotten in all the chaos. Driven mad by her suffering and horrible voyage over the ocean, she didn’t get off the ship because she refused to leave her possessions and went down with it. 

Lights in the Sea: The islanders of Block Island have told throughout the years about ghostly lights and apparitions in the sea that are supposedly coming from the ghost ship known in the legend as The Palatine.

The fate of the ship itself is up to debate. There are some evidence suggesting that the Augusta  was repaired and sent to Philadelphia. But other accounts tell the story that sounds much closer to the legend of the ghost ship. 

The ship was seen as unsalvageable after the wreckage and pushed back into the sea to vanish. Before pushing it out, in some accounts they do actually set in on fire. There are to this day no wreck or remains of the wreck to have been found. 

The Sightings of The Palatine Light

Whether the islanders lured the ship ashore, or helped the passengers, they have countless reports about seeing the lights. One islander named  Dr. Aaron C. Willey described the light in 1811 after claiming to have seen it several times himself:

“The light looks like a blaze of fire six or seven miles from the northern part of Block Island. Sometimes it’s small, like the light from a distant window. Sometimes it’s as big as a ship and wavers like a torch.”

So perhaps, when passing through these parts in the winter time, look out to the sea. Perhaps if you look close enough, you too can see the lights of the ghost ship. 

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References

The Legend of the Ghost Ship Palatine – New England Historical Society

Shedding light on the Palatine legend | Block Island Times

The Palatine. John Greenleaf Whittier (1807-1892). New England: Block Island (Manisees), RI Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, ed. 1876-79. Poems of Places: An Anthology in 31 Volumes. America: Vols. XXV-XXIX

Passengers of the “Princess Augusta,” (1736)