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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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References:

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 Murderess Haunting of The Calcasieu Courthouse

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The Calcasieu Courthouse in Louisiana is said to be haunted by Toni Jo Henry, a notorious figure in local history who was executed there in 1942. Visitors often report unexplained occurrences like strange sounds as well as the smell of burning hair from the way she died.

The Calcasieu Courthouse in Lake Charles, Louisiana, is steeped in history since it was built in 1912. And the old Parish Court House on 1000 Ryan street is also believed to be haunted by the lingering spirit of its most infamous prisoner, Toni Jo Henry. She was the first, and for now, the only female executed by the electric chair in the state.

The Haunted Courthouse: Calcasieu Parish Courthouse in Lake Charles, Louisiana. Listed on the National Register of Historic Places. // Source. It is said that the court building is haunted by the murderer, Toni Jo who were put to death by the electric chair: Wikimedia

The Life and Crimes of Toni Jo

In the early 1940s, Toni Jo, a former sex worker, gained national notoriety for her cold-blooded murder of a man named Joseph P. Calloway. 

Her real name was Annie Beatrice McQuiston, and she had lived a rough life. After her mother died early on from tuberculosis, she ended up as a prostitute. She started out working in a factory, but after her foreman knew about her mother, fearing her to contaminate other workers,he fired her. When she told her father about what happened, he beat her up and she ended up leaving home in search of a new life.  

She fell in love with a man named Claude Henry, or simply Cowboy when she was working in a brothel, and it is said she got clean and wanted a new life in California. He, on the other hand, was a fugitive after killing a cop, awaiting 50 years in jail. She married him, but he was arrested soon after. 

Toni Jo wanted to get him out of the Texas jail he was serving time. She teamed up with a homeless man named Arkie and brutally tortured and killed a car salesman named Joseph Calloway who picked them up along the road in Jennings, Louisiana. 

They dumped the body in a ditch and went straight to a dive bar the same night. Drunk at a bar they bragged about it and the other people present reported them to the cops at once. 

Her charm and beauty couldn’t save her, as it took three grueling trials before a jury finally convicted her of the heinous crime three times. On November 28, 1942, Toni Jo made history as the first and only woman in Louisiana to be executed in the electric chair. And the place it happened was in The Calcasieu Courthouse.

She said in an interview right before her execution to the  the American Press’ Eliot Chaze:

“The victim does not return to haunt me. I never think of him. I’ve known all along it would be my life for his. I believe mine is worth as much to me as his was to him. I wonder, though, sometimes, why it’s legal now for another fellow to kill me.”

Outside, thousands of people had gathered. Some to see justice be done as the court had ordered, some supported her, thinking that killing her as well was no justice at all.

The Haunting of Toni Jo

Since her execution, tales of Toni Jo’s restless spirit have permeated the The Calcasieu Courthouse where the execution took place. Employees and visitors alike have reported feeling an unsettling presence, particularly in the areas where she spent her final days. Some have even claimed to smell the distinct and eerie scent of her perfume or even of burning hair, a grim reminder of her tragic end. There are also stories about hearing the sounds of her footsteps or even her dying screams.  

The ghost of Toni Jo Henry is said to be mischievous, often disrupting the daily routines of The Calcasieu Courthouse staff. Locked doors that were previously open, office equipment that malfunctions without explanation, and lights that flicker ominously are just a few of the strange occurrences attributed to her. Some workers have even reported hearing soft whispers and feeling an icy chill when passing through certain hallways.

Perhaps some have even seen her as she looked in her final moment in a simple white dress holding a white ivory crucifix. Her long black hair she got much attention for, cut off.

Face of a Killer: The case got a lot of attention by the media. Both for her terrible crime as well for her good looks. Here is a photo of Toni Jo Henry being held for press photographers by Sheriff Henry W. Reid on February 21, 1940. // Source

Toni Jo’s spirit seems determined to leave her mark on the place where she met her fate, making the Calcasieu Courthouse a focal point for ghost hunters and paranormal enthusiasts. The haunted legend of Toni Jo Henry continues to captivate and terrify those who walk the halls of the courthouse, ensuring that her story—and her presence—remain an indelible part of Lake Charles’ dark history.

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References:

Calcasieu Courthouse | Acadiana Historical 

The Story Behind the Outlaw That Haunts the Calcasieu Courthouse | by Maria | Horrifix | Medium

ABOUT US | Calcasieu Clerk 

Mysterious Happenings: Haunted Tales Surround Louisiana Courthouse

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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 Casket Girls of New Orleans: Vampires, Mystery, and a French Colonial Haunting

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Pale and with blood shot eyes, a group of mysterious women set their foot on Louisiana ground for the first time. Shipped from France, they were the promised girls for the colonial men to be their wives. Who were the Casket Girls? Just innocent women far away from home, or blood thirsty vampires?

In a city saturated with ghost stories, voodoo queens, and haunted mansions, few legends hold as eerie a grip on New Orleans folklore as that of Les Filles à la Cassette — the Casket Girls. Even today, the colonial mail order brides of Louisiana suffer from inaccurate memories and dark legends and it is difficult to separate fact from fiction.. 

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Their tale, with its whiff of vampirism, colonial intrigue, and the restless dead, is as much a part of the French Quarter’s haunted past as the foggy alleys and crumbling tombs of St. Louis Cemetery. And like all great New Orleans ghost stories, it begins with a boat ride and ends with a coffin.

The Casket Girls: The Les Filles à la Cassette as they were originally called, were a group of women shipped to the colonies in order to marry and grow the colony of New France. They got their name from their little trunks they carried all their belonging in. Years later, the supernatural rumors surrounding these women, doesn’t seem to be letting go.

Daughters of the King or the Women Without a Future

The Casket Girls were a group of mail order brides sent from the old country to New France to populate the colonies, severely lacking European females. It was not the first time the country had sent a shipment of women for this purpose. In the early 18th century, when New Orleans was a young, swampy French colony teeming with soldiers, fortune-seekers, and rogues, women were in short supply. In a move both practical and ominous, the French government arranged for young, virtuous women from convents and orphanages to be shipped to Louisiana to marry settlers and help “civilize” the rough colony.

It was not only to get the men a wife, but a white and European wife, because, as Commissary Jean-Baptiste Dubois Duclos said: “[i]f no French women come to Louisiana, the colony would become a colony of mulastres” (people of mixed race).

The Governor of Louisiana hoped for something like the Filles du Roi of Quebec in New France and Jamestown, that had young gentlewomen volunteering to go to colonies to marry the men in exchange for a dowry by the king. These were seen as proper brides and a welcome addition to creating a new world in the colonies. At first at least, and they too would later be remembered as prostitutes by many. Although much needed, the much needed brides are remembered through a thin veil of misogyny and sexism.

The Pelican Girls Comes to Louisiana

When the southern part of North America started to form as a colony, they needed brides for the frontier men here as well. The first shipments to the French colony in Biloxi in Mississippi on the Pelican in 1704. This was the capital of the French owned North America called La Louisiane. Coming on a boat known as Pelican, the woman was later known as: The Pelican Girls. The women there had been chosen for their virtue and piety. 

The King’s Daughters: The Arrival of the French Girls at Quebec, 1667. This is the type of group they were hoping to get with The Casket Girls.

Their voyage over the Atlantic held them chained together in the ship’s hold and some never made it across and died of yellow fever. After six months at sea where they stopped at Havana for supplies, twenty three women with their nun chaperones arrived. The women were accompanied by three gray nuns called soeurs grises from the charity hospital La Salpêtrière in Paris. 

The women, seeing the harsh conditions and lack of comfort felt tricked and tried to leave. Dirty shacks as houses, deer skin over the windows as curtains and men that were never home. Many of them returned to France, some were denied and forced to marry. In the end, no one wanted to come to Louisiana. They rebelled and refused to cooperate in what was known as the Petticoat Rebellion. 

Comfort Women: Engraved by Pierre Dupin ( 1690-1751 ) after Antoine Watteau, this Departure for the Islands represents the deportation of the “comfort women” to America, to whom the legend ironically invites in these terms: “Come on, we must leave without being asked, Darlings,…”

After the women started to demand a decent living, the French men changed their perspective on them, thinking the women difficult because of their demands. They thought about sending a different set of women. For the next shipments to the colonies, the government went to darker places to pick out the brides. 

A Strange Cargo from France

Then there was the Casket Girls, and there is little documentation that they ever did exist, at least as to how they are remembered in legend. 

258 women were shipped from France to Louisiana between 1719 to 1721. 80 of them came over on La Baleine in 1721 to Mobile bay in Alabama. 29 of them were orphanages, 35 were from poor houses and 194 were convicted criminals from La Force prison. French officials called them “women without futures.” Some of the womens families had even sent them there themselves to be rid of them.

Cassette: 17th century chest, similar to what the Casket Girls must have been carrying. // Source: Courtesy of the Canadian Museum of History.

These young women, the youngest a 12 year old former sex worker in Paris, arrived from France carrying small rectangles that were rather coffin-shaped luggage trunks called cassettes, meant to hold their modest belongings — linens, and clothes, caps, chemise, stockings. Over time, the word cassette became casquette and was translated from French to casket. 

Mail order Brides: In 1713 a group of 12 women arrived. They were described as ugly and poor with no linen, clothes or beauty vallet The Casket Girls. Rumours circulated that the captain had raped all of them during their voyage. Only three of them married, and that the future mail order bride should be more beautiful than pretty. Image depicting Women coming to Quebec in 1667, in order to be married to the French Canadian farmers. Jean Talon, intendant of New France, and François de Montmorency-Laval, bishop of Quebec, are waiting for the arrival of the women.

To the lonely, desperate colonists, these girls seemed heaven-sent at first, but then, fear and suspicion crept up on them. As the shipment started to give them other than the “virtuous” like the Pelican Girls, the treatment of them also worsened. To the officials in Louisiana, they were appalled by the backstory of the women they had been sent. 

Many complained about their behavior and some men even refused to marry them, although most of The Casket Girls were married within six months of stepping off the ships. Some of the women were also forced to marry. To the more superstitious locals, they seemed to bring with them something… unnatural.

The Casket Girls have later in legends been described as looking more dead than alive when they stepped off the boat. Pale from the lack of sunlight and emancipated after the long months at sea. In the harsh sun, their skin burned quickly and blistered. 

The Vampire Rumors Take Root

Soon after the arrival of the Casket Girls, strange happenings reportedly plagued the colony. Having been picked out from prisons, there was certainly an uptick in crime and prostitution from the little female population. 

Illness swept through the settlements, livestock died under mysterious circumstances, and tales of bloodless corpses began to make the rounds. Was it the humid and harsh environment of Louisiana, or something darker? Legend spoke of bodies found with their throat ripped open and drained of  blood. 

The Vampires at the Old Ursuline Convent

The most persistent version of the story of The Casket Girls claims that the cassettes were taken to the Ursuline Convent in the French Quarter of New Orleans, still an outpost of the colony. The building is still on Chartres Street and is the oldest in the Mississippi Valley. On the first floor, there was an orphanage with classrooms and an infirmary, and the nuns lived on the second floor. On the third floor there was an attic and a couple of living quarters for those in need. 

Ursuline Nuns: Sister Marie-de-Jesus, “Arrival of the Ursulines and the Sisters of Charity in New France,” Painted in 1928. Photo from the Virtual Museum of Canada. This nun order was the first nun order to set their foot and work on the New France colony.

The Ursuline Order came from Rouen in France, to the marshy frontier of New Orleans, or Nouvelle Orleans as it was then. They were said to chaperone a shipment of The Casket Girls when they arrived, but the order has denied their involvement with the mail order brides. 

In 1728, a group of Casket Girls arrived from France. They were taken to the convent for safekeeping until they could find suitable husbands to them, but soon, rumors started to form. Strange sounds were heard at night — rustlings, scratching, and sighs that no mortal throat could make.

The Sealed Attic Mystery

Perhaps the creepiest element of the legend involves the convent’s attic The Casket Girls were said to have been placed in. Some of the nuns were suspicious of the casket-like trunks they traveled in (here the lore has enlarged the trunks). Their suspicion grew when the strange deaths kept happening around the convent. When the nun checked them, the coffins were empty. Some say that the Casket Girls smuggled the vampires to the crescent city of New Orleans in the trunks or that they themselves were the vampires, sleeping in their coffins when the sun was out. 

Local lore insists that after unnerving occurrences and when the nuns discovered that the brides were actually vampires, the nuns moved the cassettes — and possibly something else — to the third-floor attic and sealed the shutters tight with silver nails blessed by the Pope himself to keep them trapped. 800 of these nails to be exact. How the Pope heard about this and sent them from the Vatican is never mentioned though. 

More Than Vampires Haunting the Convent: In addition to stories about the Casket Girls, there are also stories about ghosts of soldiers from the War of 1812 haunting the former convent as it was used as a hospital then. Ghost children from the time as an orphanage are heard laughing and playing in the garden. Later, bones from children were dug up on the property. // Source

To this day, it’s said the shutters on the attic’s windows remain closed and secured, even through the fiercest hurricanes. Some claim that attempts to open them have been met with bad luck, death, or worse. Occasionally claim to see pale faces or flickering figures at the darkened windows, said to be the spirit of The Casket Girls or perhaps the starved vampires they turned out to be.

And when tourists pass by the convent at night, many report a lingering sense of being watched — or of catching fleeting movement from the sealed windows above or hearing their footsteps from the third floor, following them through the building. 

The Undead Legacy of the Casket Girls

In the legends, the caskets are often told to fit the girls themselves, being shipped in lockdown. In truth, these trunks they were named after were small so that the women could carry them themselves. The legend of the Ursuline Convent mostly talks about them arriving in 1728, however, historical records claim that only Ursuline nuns came over to New Orleans that year and that the Casket Girls came as mentioned earlier. New Orleans wasn’t founded as a city until 1718-1721. Some even argue that there were no Casket Girls in New Orleans at all. 

In addition, the convent building we see today wasn’t even finished until 1752-1753. So where did the legends come from? Is it simply something made up in the 20th century after the meaning of the words transformed over time? There are, after all, no sources found for the casket girls being vampires until then. 

Some speculate that them being vampires, were something that came from the Anne Rice novels about vampires in New Orleans. 

But the legend is far from dead. There is also a persistent rumor that a group of ghost hunters did some investigation to the legend in the 70s. They turned up dead the next morning, and all the footage they got from their investigation was destroyed and the evidence for the lingering casket girls having anything to do with it, erased. 

New Orleans, a city forever teetering between life and death, has a knack for breathing unholy life into its own legends. Whether born from coincidence, homesick imaginations, or darker forces, the tale of the Casket Girls has never truly been laid to rest.

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References:

The Casket Girls – Women & the American Story

Lonely Colonist Seeks Wife: The Forgotten History of America’s First Mail Order Brides

The History of the Casket Girls of New Orleans 

French ‘Casket Girls’ Were Forced Into the New World to ‘Tame’ the Male Settlers | The Vintage News

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Jacques St. Germain: New Orleans’ Immortal Vampire Aristocrat

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After jumping from a balcony in New Orleans, a woman claimed the host had tried to bite her. After searching his house, police found blood and bloodstained clothes from every time period. Who was this Jacques St. Germain, dubbed the Vampire of New Orleans? And what was the connection to a mysterious immortal aristocrat from Europe?

In a city overflowing with ghost stories, grisly murders, and old-world superstition, few legends endure like that of Jacques St. Germain, the mysterious 20th-century aristocrat believed by some to be an immortal vampire stalking the streets of New Orleans’ French Quarter.

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His story intertwines with the rich, eerie folklore of the city — a place where fact and legend blur in the mist rising from ancient cobblestones. But before he became the legendary vampire of New Orleans, he was the immortal aristocrat of Europe who dined with kings and queens and watched empires rise and fall. 

French Quarter: A view of historic buildings in New Orleans, reminiscent of the eerie tales surrounding Jacques St. Germain, the city’s legendary vampire and the French Quarter where it is said he roams.

A Familiar, Yet Ageless Name of the Count of St. Germain

To understand how the vampire legend took root, we have to backtrack to the old country who the New Orleans vampire was thought to be. The origins of Jacques St. Germain’s legend trace back to an 18th-century European figure, The Count of St. Germain, a nobleman, alchemist, and alleged immortal who appeared in courts across Europe for decades without ever seeming to age. 

He really was a real man at the European royal courts, but his life and identity was a mystery, even to his peers. He ate at the dinner with kings and queens, philosophers like Voltaire, musicians like Mozart and historians like Casanova. Known for his dazzling charisma, impossible wealth, and claims of ancient wisdom, the Count of St. Germain vanished from records in the late 1700s — though some say he never died.

Count of St. Germain: This mysterious person is largely thought to be a prince of Transylvania, hiding his identity for political protection all his life. Although many speculations have been made, he still remains a mystery.

His background seems shrouded in mystery as well. He was born maybe in 1691 or in the early 1700s. Perhaps by then, he was already centuries old by then. He was perhaps from Spain, Italy or Poland, and his real name is not known as St. Germain’s refusal to give his true name, except maybe to the King of France, Louis the XV as he kept him close at his court. He knew many languages, was a skilled musician, chemist and alchemist. So much so that some believed that he had found the way to an immortal life. 

The renowned historian Giacomo Girolamo Casanova wrote of St. Germain in his memoir: “This extraordinary man, intended by nature to be the king of impostors and quacks, would say in an easy, assured manner that he was three hundred years old, that he knew the secret of the Universal Medicine, that he possessed a mastery over nature, that he could melt diamonds, professing himself capable of forming, out of ten or twelve small diamonds, one large one of the finest water without any loss of weight. All this, he said, was a mere trifle to him. Notwithstanding his boastings, his bare-faced lies, and his manifold eccentricities, I cannot say I thought him offensive. In spite of my knowledge of what he was and in spite of my own feelings, I thought him an astonishing man as he was always astonishing me.”

At the Royal Court: The Count of St. Germain knew a lot of the inner circle at the royal court in France. Here, pictured a reading of Voltaire’s L’Orphelin de la Chine (a tragedy about Ghengis Khan and his sons, published in 1755), in the salon of Madame Geoffrin

Already then he claimed to be centuries old and sold women liquids that supposedly would make them younger and stop the aging process. He would not be seen eating anything, but only drinking this mysterious tea. He claimed to have had conversations with Cleopatra and the Queen of Sheba and been present at countless historical milestones like the council of Nicea and the wedding in Cana when he turned water into wine. He was also rumored to be involved in helping Catherine the Great seize the throne, being employed by the French King although speculations about him being a spy were ever present. 

The Transylvanian Prince Theory: Prince Ferenc Rákóczi II (1676–1735) was a Hungarian nobleman who played a significant role for independence from Habsburg rule. Despite his efforts, the uprising ultimately failed, leading Rákóczi into exile in France. Some speculate that Count of st. Germain was one of his sons with a hidden identity for his protection.

At a party at the manor of Madame de Pompadour, who was the mistress of the king of France in 1760, Countess von Gregory approached him. She thought he was the son of a man she had known in 1710, but discovered that it was the same man, and he hadn’t aged a bit. A French ambassador from Venice called Rameau testified that he had known St. Germain in 1710 and that he had still looked like a man in his fifties.

In a letter from Horace Walpole, the 4th Earl of Oxford, he describes Comte St. Germain with: “An odd man, who goes by the name of Comte St. Germain. He had been here these two years, and will not tell who he is, or whence, but professes that he does not go by his right name.  He sings, plays on the violin wonderfully, composes, is mad, and not very sensible. He is called an Italian, a Spaniard, a Pole; a somebody that married a great fortune in Mexico, and ran away with her jewels to Constantinople, a priest, a fiddler, a vast nobleman. The Prince of Wales has had unsatiated curiosity about him, but in vain.”

In 1779 he moved to Germany and spent time with Prince Karl of Hesse-Kassel. He said he was 88 years old and the son of Prince Ragoczy of Transylvania, who had lost his throne. Some have claimed him to be his youngest son born in Bohemia and that his parents were Prince Franz-Leopold Ragoczy, of Transylvania and Princess Charlotte Amalia of Hesse-Wahnfried.  Then he was placed as an infant under the care of the last Medici family, Gian Gastone. 

According to records, he died February 27 in 1784, but there were sightings of him long before he reached New Orleans. But did he really die? According to more than one source, he kept appearing throughout different times, never aging at all. 

The Active Afterlife of the Count of St. Germain

Some would even venture that Comte de St. Germain was not his first life, and that he had been alive long before the 1700s, perhaps even since the time of Christ. Historian and philosopher Voltair allegedly said about him: “He is a man who knows everything and who never dies.”

In 1785 he was known to reside in Germany, befriending Anton Mesmer, the pioneer hypnotist and it was said that he had given Mesmer the ideas of it. He was also chosen as the Freemasonry representative for the annual 1785 convention. in their own records.

He went back to France after the taking of Bastille and was a counsel to Comtesse d’Adhémar who last saw him in 1822, not looking a day older. She wrote in 1821: “I have seen Saint-Germain again, each time to my amazement. I saw him when the queen [Antoinette] was murdered, on the 18th of Brumaire, on the day following the death of the Duke d’Enghien, in January, 1815, and on the eve of the murder of the Duke de Berry.”

Storming of Bastille: According to some records, Count st. Germaine appeared and told about the danger of the oncoming revolution.

Then he took on a new identity and Albert Vandam wrote: “He called himself Major Fraser, lived alone and never alluded to his family. Moreover he was lavish with money, though the source of his fortune remained a mystery to everyone. He possessed a marvelous knowledge of all the countries in Europe at all periods. His memory was absolutely incredible and, curiously enough, he often gave his hearers to understand that he had acquired his learning elsewhere than from books. Many is the time he has told me, with a strange smile, that he was certain he had known Nero, had spoken with Dante, and so on.”

The Vampire Reaches New Orleans

So how did this European aristocrat end up in New Orleans centuries later? According to the legend, by boat. In 1902, a man bearing the same name arrived in New Orleans. Like his supposed predecessor, Jacques St. Germain was described as charming, urbane, impossibly wealthy, and oddly ageless. He threw extravagant parties at his home on Royal Street, where guests marveled at the fine wines and exotic art — though curiously, no one ever saw him eat.

Jacques St. Germain knew many languages and captivated his audience with tales from hundreds of years ago, strangely with so much detail, you would almost believe he was there. 

The Terrifying Incident on Royal Street

It was said Jacques St. Germain was only observed drinking what appeared to be red wine. He claimed to be a descendant of the Comte and people pointed out the physical resemblance from portraits. Some started to wonder if it could be him. He was said to be a charming womanizer, often venturing out to the French Quarter to meet young women. 

The legend took a sinister turn when a young woman, invited to his home one evening, fled the house in terror. Some say that she jumped out from the second-story of his house. She was either a prostitute or one of the guests at one of his lavish parties he had invited to his balcony. 

Royal Street: The iconic mall building on Royal Street in New Orleans, the street where Jacques St. Germain, the vampire of New Orleans are said to have lived. // Source: Falkue/

According to police reports, she claimed that Jacques St. Germain had tried to bite her neck to draw blood. She escaped by leaping from a second-story window and running to the authorities, battered and terrified.

When police arrived at the house, St. Germain was nowhere to be found. What they did discover was deeply disturbing: bloodstains everywhere and all of his belongings gone. There were wine bottles filled not with wine, but with human blood. The incident sent ripples through the community, and though a warrant was issued for his arrest, Jacques St. Germain was never seen again. Or… perhaps he was. 

A Haunting Presence in New Orleans Lore

Since his disappearance, stories of a pale, well-dressed gentleman seen walking the French Quarter at night have persisted. There are reports about him up until the 1970s. Richard Chanfray was the man who claimed to be the Count in the 1970s.

During the 1970s, Chanfray began appearing on television, claiming to be the count and supposedly demonstrating the ability to transmute boring old lead into gold in front of an audience. However, Chanfray later died by suicide in 1983.

New Orleans: 1039-1041 Royal St. where it is said that Jacques St. Germain lived.

Witnesses describe a tall figure in old-fashioned clothing, speaking in a strange, antiquated accent, vanishing into alleyways or slipping into buildings long abandoned.

Some local historians and paranormal enthusiasts believe Jacques St. Germain to be one and the same as the immortal Count of St. Germain, relocating from Europe to America in search of fresh hunting grounds. Others remain sceptical, as there are no police reports found from the incident, and not a trace of him ever having lived on Royal Street.

Today, his supposed Royal Street residence still stands, a stop on many New Orleans ghost tours, with guides recounting the legend of the vampire aristocrat whose thirst for blood was hidden behind a facade of sophistication and charm. One of the second floor windows is bricked up, said to be the one the woman jumped from. 

Whether an immortal alchemist, an old-world vampire, or simply a creation of New Orleans’ love for the macabre, Jacques St. Germain remains one of the city’s most enduringly eerie legends. If you find yourself walking Royal Street on a misty evening, keep an eye out for the elegant stranger with a pale complexion and ageless face — and if he offers you a drink, you might want to politely decline.

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References:

Jacques St. Germain, The Infamous Louisiana Vampire

Jacques St. Germain, Vampire of the French Quarter – Locations of Lore

A closer look at Jacques de St. Germain | Author Lyn Gibson 

The Bizarre True Story Of The Count Of Saint Germain – Grunge

Walpole, Horace. Letters of Horace Walpole. Vol. 1. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1890:Letters of Horace Walpole — Volume I by Horace Walpole | Project Gutenberg.
Jacques St. Germain, Vampire of the French Quarter – Locations of Lore

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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 Curious Case of Annie Dennett and the Vampiric Vines

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Growing out of coffins and decaying corpses, vines was a local superstition that marked a vampire grave of those who had died of consumption. This was the case of young Annie Dennett, who was thought to feed on her ailing father. 

In the shadowy folds of early 19th-century New England, where superstition clung stubbornly to the edges of even the most respectable communities, tales of vampires didn’t always come cloaked in foreign mystery. Sometimes, they arrive on your neighbor’s doorstep. Or in the family crypt. Or — as in the case of poor Annie Dennett — in the quiet graveyards of rural New Hampshire.

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While names like Mercy Brown have gained infamy for their role in America’s vampire panic, Annie Dennett’s story is a more obscure, though no less fascinating, chapter of this eerie history. For many years, the Reverend who wrote it down, called her Janey Dennit and she was for a while, quite a mystery. And what makes it particularly noteworthy is the presence of a well-respected minister who not only witnessed her exhumation but left behind a haunting record of the event.

New Hampshire: Deep lakes, dark forests. The New England countryside used to be ripe with superstition and panic. Just a century after the witch panic in Salem, a fear for vampires took hold over the locals.

Consumption, Fear, and Desperation

Annies family had been in New England for generations when her ancestors settled in New Hampshire in the mid 1600s. Through their trade as blacksmith, their family was at one point one of the richest in Portsmouth. 

She grew up in a house filled with siblings as her parents had eight children, on the high ground in the woods. Her father, Moses, wanted to make his own way and had moved from Portsmouth to Barnstead, working as a tailor. 

Like many young people of her time, Annie Dennett succumbed to tuberculosis — the dreaded “consumption” — at just 21 years old in 1807. Tuberculosis was not merely a disease back then; it was an enigma that hollowed out families and devastated entire communities, slowly claiming its victims with a wasting grip that no one could seem to stop.

Faced with its horrors, it’s no wonder that desperate families sometimes turned to folklore for answers. The prevailing belief, particularly in rural parts of New England, held that a deceased relative could, through some malevolent post-mortem influence, drain the life from the living. Rumors started to go around that she could be one of the undead. That night, she rose from her grave and returned to her family to feed on them. This was something that they believed could be the cause of the consumption illness. And when the family started to show symptoms of having it as well, it was also believed that the bodies of the undead held the cure. 

And when medicine failed, spades came out.

The Vampire Hunt in Plain Sight

What makes Annie Dennett’s case especially intriguing is its documentation by a man of the cloth. Enoch Hayes Place, a Freewill Baptist minister from Vermont, happened to be in town when Annie’s family made the grim decision to exhume her body in 1810, three years after Annie was dead and buried.

Her father, Moses Dennett, was gravely ill with tuberculosis, and in the absence of a cure, the family clung to the desperate hope that digging up Annie’s remains might reveal signs of vampiric influence — a heart still full of blood, perhaps, or some unnatural preservation of flesh.

Old Graveyards: A serene graveyard in New Hampshire reflects the eerie history of vampire folklore in early New England.

Enoch Hayes Place attended the exhumation and recorded the scene in his diary. His words capture both the grim spectacle and the uneasy blending of religious authority with old-world superstition:

“They opened the grave and it was a Solemn Sight indeed. A young Brother by the name of Adams examined the mouldy Specticle, but found nothing as they Supposed they Should…. There was but a little left except bones.”

Unlike some of the more infamous exhumations of the era, Annie Dennett’s disinterment was anticlimactic. No blood-filled heart. No unnatural preservation. Just a young woman’s decayed remains, bones already claimed by the earth. It was noted that there were vines growing in the coffin that were discussed in several of the exhumations of the believed vampiric graves.

The Vampiric Vines

One of the tell tale signs of vampirism was a body not decaying and bodily fluids like blood still found in the organs. Another sign of vampirism here was vines growing on the body. 

In 1784, there was a newspaper article from Connecticut about a foreign quack doctor that said that these vines or sprouts growing on the body would also be a cure to burn and consume, often together with other organs. 

This we also see with the case in Willington of two bodies in relation to a Mr. Isaac Johnson. There was also a case in Dummerston, Vermont and upstate New York. 

It was also a superstition that said when a vine was growing from a coffing to the next (most often another family member), another one would die.The only way to break the curse was to break the vine and dig up the body to burn their vitals.  

Exhumation: A group of men performing an exhumation ritual under the moonlight, reflecting early 19th-century beliefs in vampire folklore.

The ritual, meant to save her ailing father, did nothing. He would, like so many others, eventually succumb to tuberculosis.

But the very fact that the ritual occurred, and that it was recorded by a minister, speaks volumes about the cultural grip these beliefs held even in “enlightened” New England. Science and folklore shared uneasy quarters in early America, and when grief met fear, it often leaned toward the old ways.

A Forgotten Chapter in New England’s Vampire Lore

While Mercy Brown’s story would capture international attention decades later, Annie Dennett remains largely forgotten — a footnote in folklore studies, though no less telling. Her story illustrates that these rituals weren’t isolated anomalies but part of a broader, if uneasy, social custom. The fear of consumption and its deadly march through families often blurred the line between superstition and faith.

And perhaps, most chillingly, it shows how even ministers weren’t immune to the lure of old beliefs when confronted with death’s relentless hand.

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References:

Vampires – American Myths, Legends, and Tall Tales: An Encyclopedia of American Folklore

http://apps.vampiresgrasp.com/Blog/?d=01/2010

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

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The Case of Frederick Ransom: The Woodstock Vampire

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How did a Darthmount student from a prominent family in Woodstock, Vermont end up as a vampire? The story of Frederick Ransom shows that the belief in vampirism or the fear of the undead was not just for the simple and uneducated country folks. 

When you hear the term “vampire panic”, your mind might conjure up foggy rural graveyards, torch-wielding villagers, and folksy farmers digging up their loved ones by lamplight. But history, as it often does, has a way of proving us wrong. This was the case with Frederick Ransom — a well-educated young man from a respected New England family whose story reminds us that fear, especially of death and disease, respects neither class nor education.

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The American writer, Henry David Thoreau wrote in his journal of 26 September 1859: “The savage in man is never quite eradicated. I have just read of a family in Vermont—who, several of its members having died of consumption, just burned the lungs & heart & liver of the last deceased, in order to prevent any more from having it,”

Most likely he was referring to the vampire case of Frederick Ransom. In the early 19th century, in the cold hills of Vermont, the so-called “vampire panic” wasn’t just superstition; it was desperation along the New England coast. And not even a Dartmouth College education could save Frederick from becoming a posthumous scapegoat for a disease no one yet understood.

A Life Cut Short by Consumption

Frederick Ransom was born into a prominent family as the second son and had seemingly his whole life ahead of him. He grew up in South Woodstock, Vermont with his father Richard Ransom and Elizabeth Mather with loads of siblings. By the standards of his day, he was part of New England’s educated elite — a college student at Dartmouth. But tuberculosis, known ominously as consumption, didn’t care about family names or academic ambitions.

In 1817, at the age of 20, Frederick succumbed to the wasting disease. It wasn’t uncommon — tuberculosis was the grim reaper of its time, claiming more lives in the 18th and 19th centuries than just about any other illness. Entire families were ravaged by it, and lacking the scientific knowledge we have today, people turned to folklore and desperate measures.

Grave of Frederick Ransom

The family doctor, local physician Dr. Frost tried his best, but there was no cure for the disease yet, and as a result, desperate attempts and alternative cures based on the supernatural grew forth. 

His little brother, Daniel Ransom, wrote this about him: My remembrance of him is quite limited as I was only three years at the time of his death… It has been related to me that there was a tendency in our family to consumption…

Vampirism by Another Name

Vampire panics were a tragically real response to tuberculosis outbreaks, especially in rural New England. The belief was that a deceased family member could, from beyond the grave, drain the life from surviving relatives. The “solution” was grim: exhume the suspected corpse, check for signs of unnatural preservation, and burn the heart or organs to stop the so-called vampire’s deadly influence.

Frederick’s family was no exception. Despite their standing and education, fear trumped reason. After Frederick’s death, his father, desperate to protect the remaining family from the slow death of tuberculosis, had his son’s body exhumed. He was worried that his son would rise from the grave and attack the rest of the family. 

In accordance with folk belief, they removed his heart and burned it in a blacksmith’s forge. It was in Woodstock Village Green and a public place where all could see. It was common that the ashes of the remains would either be inhaled or mixed into a medicine. It isn’t confirmed that this happened to Frederick, although some sources said that his remains were given to his family. He was buried in Ransom-Kendall Cemetery.

Daniel wrote about his father: It seems that Father shared somewhat in the idea of hereditary diseases and withal had some superstition for it was said that if the heart of one of the family who died of consumption was taken out and burned, others would be free from it. And Father, having some faith in the remedy, had the heart of Frederick taken out after he had been buried, and in was burned in Captain Pearson’s blacksmith forge. 

A Futile, Tragic Attempt

Unsurprisingly, the ritual didn’t work. Tuberculosis isn’t a vampire’s curse; it’s a contagious bacterial disease. As Frederick’s surviving brother, Daniel Ransom, would later write:

“However, it did not prove a remedy, for mother, sister, and two brothers died afterward.”

In a touch of dark irony, Daniel would go on to note that it had been said the family was predisposed to consumption, and that he, too, would likely die young. But in a final, satisfying twist to this grim tale — Daniel Ransom lived to be over 80 years old. But although he was young, he would never forget the fear and desperation that had his family and community in a tight grip. 

The Legend of Corwin in Woodstock

Another vampire story often seen in connection of the Ransom incident is that of Corwin in Woodstock. The story was retold in 1890 in The Vermont Standard, many years later, and some now believe that this story was actually a retelling and much changed version of Ransom. An old woman told about the case that had happened fifty years earlier and that she had witnessed the burning of his heart herself.

According to the story, a young man with the surname Corwin died of “consumption“, “ and was buried in the Cushing Cemetery in June of 1830 corner of Cloudland Road and River Road. Six month later, the young man’s brother became ill. The newspaper claimed that local physicians, including the respected Dr. Joseph Gallup and Dr. John Powers from the Vermont Medical College, was the ones claiming this had to be the work of a vampire.

The first brother’s body was dug up and examined. His heart, which was found filled with blood, was removed, boiled in a pot, and buried in a hole with a seven-ton block of granite on top. To complete the grisly ritual, the site was then sprinkled with the blood of a young bullock.

Although not verified, it looks eerily similar to the case of Frederick. There was no boy named Corwin in the records who died, but the names of the physicians did actually exist.

Frederick Ransom’s Legacy

Two years later, The Vampyre by John Polidori was published and is considered to have kickstarted the undead and vampires in modern literature. His death and exhumation was not the first, and it would not be the last during the Vampiric Panic that threw New England back to the dark ages. 

His grave lies quietly now in South Woodstock, a reminder of the fragile line between reason and superstition, and how grief can drive even the most educated people to light the funeral pyres of old legends.

So next time you hear a ghost story about New England’s vampire past, remember Frederick Ransom — the Dartmouth scholar whose heart was fed to fire by those who loved him most. Not because they were ignorant, but because they were human.

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References:

Woodstock’s Vampire

Valley News – Among the Undead in Woodstock

Fredrick Ransom (1797-1817) – Find a Grave Memorial

Hunting Vampires in Vermont

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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 Ouija Board Murder in Buffalo

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Many horrible things have been blamed on the Ouija Board over the years. One of the most famous cases was the murder often named The Ouija Board Murder in Buffalo were a woman in Buffalo was killed after the Ouija Board pointed her out in a mission for revenge. 

In 1930, Buffalo, New York, was the backdrop for a chilling murder case that intertwined themes of jealousy, manipulation, and supernatural beliefs. This case, often referred to as the “Ouija Board Murder in Buffalo,” involved the tragic death of Clothilde Marchand, a respected artist and wife of sculptor Henri Marchand.

The Ouija Board Told them to do it

Lila Jimerson

In the fall of 1929, 66 year old Nancy Bowen and 36 year old Lila Jimerson had a Ouija Board session. The Seneca Native women lived on the Cattaraugus Reservation where Bowen was a tribal healer and Jimerson worked at the reservation school. 

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Not long ago, Bowen’s husband had died and they tried to contact the afterlife to get an explanation. The loss of Bowen’s husband had really affected her and she was looking for answers in all the wrong places. The board started to move, and according to them, the spirit of her husband, Sassafras Charlie Bowen spelled out: “They killed me.”

When the women asked who they were, the answer was Clothilde and an address on Ripley Street in Buffalo. The board also added that she had short hair and was missing teeth. Since Bowen couldn’t read herself, Jimerson was guiding the planchette and spelled out the words. Turns out, the Ouija Board pointed them in the direction of someone they already knew. 

The Marchand Family

Henri Marchand, a 53 year old French-born artist renowned for his dioramas and wax models, relocated with his wife, Clothilde, and their children to Buffalo in 1925. She was a tiny woman who had given up her life as a painter to take care of their children. 

Henri was commissioned to create dioramas for the Buffalo Museum of Science, a project that required close collaboration with local communities, including the Seneca Nation. During this period, Henri developed a professional relationship with Lila Jimerson, a young Seneca woman who served as a model for his work. Little did Clothild know, his affairs would become the death of her. 

After the Ouija Board session, Bowen started to receive letters signed from a certain Mrs Dooley that no one knew who was. In the letter, it said that Clothilde Marchand was actually a witch who had hexed Sassafras Charlie, who was also a tribal healer, because she was jealous. After her witchcraft didn’t work, she had to kill him herself, the letter claimed. Bowen started to fear that she was next.

The Murder of Clothilde Marchand

Nancy Bowen

On March 6, 1930, the Marchand household was shattered by violence. Bowen had tried to kill Clothilde with hexes and witchcraft instead, but when this didn’t work, she showed up to do the job herself. She knocked on the door and was let in as Clothilde recognized her from the reservation. Clothilde was found dead in their home on Riley Street, having suffered fatal injuries from a hammer and chloroform stuffed down her throat. She was found by her 12 year old son when he came home from school. 

The neighbors led the police to the reservation as many natives working as models came and went to their house and Jimerson was arrested. The investigation quickly led to Nancy Bowen, after Jimerson gave her name to the police, who confessed to the murder. 

Bowen revealed that she had been manipulated by Jimerson into believing that Clothilde was a witch responsible for the death of Bowen’s husband, Charlie. Driven by these manipulations, Bowen confronted and killed Clothilde. 

The Trials and Aftermath

The subsequent trials for the The Ouija Board Murder in Buffalo garnered significant public attention. Henri Marchand’s testimony revealed his numerous affairs, too many to count as he said in court, including his involvement with Jimerson.  He claimed getting romantically involved with the native women were necessary for his artistic endeavors as they would much easily take off their clothes for his modeling then. He also said that his dead wife was fully aware and supportive of his affairs, although nothing but his testimony says this. According to Jimerson, Marchand had said that he was tired of his wife and that this led to her planning to rid them of her. At the time of his wife’s murder, he was actually driving around with Jimerson. 

Jimerson faced two trials; the first ended in a mistrial due to her health issues, and the second concluded with her acquittal. Bowen pleaded guilty to manslaughter and was sentenced to time served. Henri Marchand relocated to Albany, remarried his 18 year old niece, and continued his work until his death in 1951. Jimerson lived out her days in Perrysburg, New York, passing away in 1972. Clothilde Marchand was laid to rest in an unmarked grave in Buffalo’s Forest Lawn Cemetery. 

They never found out who wrote the letters, but it didn’t match up with Jimerson’s handwriting. If they ever tested it at Marchand’s is unclear, but doubtful. Although the murder was convicted, was it really justice served in The Ouija Board Murder in Buffalo?

The Ouija Board Murder in Buffalo

This case highlights the complex interplay of cultural beliefs, personal relationships, and societal prejudices. A lot of the focus on The Ouija Board Murder in Buffalo ended up being on the Ouija Board and witchcraft and not about how an innocent woman lost her life, and the manipulation from external forces that led to it.

The Ouija Board Murder in Buffalo underscores how deeply held superstitions and manipulations can lead to tragic outcomes, and it serves as a poignant reminder of the consequences of jealousy and deceit. Still today, you can see the sculptures in many museums to this day, including the Buffalo Science, the Smithsonian as well as the State Museum. 

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References:

MURDER INCITED BY JEALOUS MODEL; Killing of Artist’s Wife Is Confessed by Two Indian Women in Weird Story of Witchcraft. CONSULTED OUIJA BOARDHer Love for Marchand Led Her to Induce an Aged Friend to Beat Mrs. Marchand to Death. Woman Served as Indian Model. Artist Said Love Was Not Returned. MURDER INCITED BY JEALOUS MODEL – The New York Times

OUIJA BOARD MURDER TO GO TO GRAND JURY; Indictments Will Be Sought Against Indians for Slaying Buffalo Artist’s Wife. – The New York Times 

Henri Marchand (sculptor) – Wikipedia 

The Ouija Board Murder, 1930 : r/HistoricCrimes