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

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A cold day in February, the village people in Manchester, Vermont gathered in the square to stop a vampire thought to suck the life out of a young woman. By burying her up and burning her remains, they thought they could fight back the curse of the undead. 

New England, with its brooding forests, craggy hills, and centuries-old graveyards, has long been fertile ground for ghost stories, witch trials, and spectral folklore. But perhaps one of its grimmest and most unsettling chapters comes from a sleepy little village in southern Vermont — Manchester, 1793 — where townsfolk turned on one of their own dead in a desperate bid to halt a creeping, invisible killer: tuberculosis.

Read More: Check out all ghost stories from USA

This is the eerie tale of Rachel Burton (née Harris), a woman whose body was unearthed, mutilated, and burned in front of a crowd of hundreds, believed to be a vampire draining the life of her husband’s new wife from beyond the grave. 

The Death of Rachel Harris

In the late 18th century, Captain Isaac Burton, a respected deacon in the local Congregational church, buried his first wife, Rachel Harris, after she succumbed to consumption (the old term for tuberculosis). Consumption was a slow, wasting disease — it could pick off entire families one by one in a cruel, unrelenting sweep. To early New Englanders, it made sense to suspect some supernatural culprit.

We have the story of her, told by Judge John S. Pettibone (1786-1872). Already from this source, a lot of time had passed. She was a young woman, around 20 and was buried around 1792 and described by the judge as “a fine, healthy, beautiful girl”  before her death. The ritual was described in his History of Manchester manuscript from around 1860 under a section titled Tale of the Demon Vampire.

Within a year of Rachel’s passing, Captain Burton remarried, taking Hulda Powell as his second wife. But it wasn’t long before Hulda, too, began to wither away. She suffered the tell-tale signs: a persistent cough, fatigue, night sweats, and alarming weight loss. The similarity of her symptoms to those of Rachel raised superstitious suspicions. In an era without germ theory, people didn’t understand how tuberculosis spread — but they did know when a deathly pattern felt unnatural.

And in New England folklore, there was a chilling explanation for such tragedies: the dead could feed on the living.

The Vampire Cure for Consumption

According to local belief, if a deceased family member was suspected of preying on their kin, there was only one way to stop them. You had to exhume the corpse and destroy the offending organ — typically the heart or liver — sometimes feeding the ashes to the afflicted, or simply burning them in the hopes of severing the connection between dead and living.

Sources vary about when the exhumation took place. Some say it was around three years after Rachel died. Some say that it was In February of 1793, after Hulda’s health worsened, the townsfolk and Burton’s family settled on this morbid course of action. Rachel Harris’s body would be exhumed, and whatever malevolent hold she had over Hulda would be broken in a public ritual.

Accounts suggest that between 500 and 1,000 people gathered at the graveyard in Manchester to witness the ritual — an astonishing turnout for a remote colonial village, but a testament to the grip of fear and superstition on the community. 

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. 

Leading the ritual was Timothy Mead, while his relative, Jacob Mead, fired up his blacksmith’s forge nearby. The chilling operation was carried out in broad daylight, with Deacon Burton, a religious leader, presiding over the spectacle.

Rachel’s heart, liver, and lungs were removed, though contemporary accounts do not detail whether there was anything particularly ‘unusual’ about the condition of her remains — though it hardly mattered. The ritual was the important part.

The organs were then placed onto Jacob Mead’s blacksmith’s forge and burned to ash in front of the assembled crowd. As the account from 1860 says: “It was the month of February and good sleighing”. The belief was that by burning the vital organs, they would destroy the vampire’s connection to the living and halt the spread of the disease.

Often in these rituals, the sick would ingest the ashes of the burnt parts, often mixed into a tonic for them to drink. It’s not explicitly said, but it’s likely this also happened here. But for what purpose? Hulda Burton died in September of 1793, just months after the gruesome exhumation. The disease had already claimed her, and no amount of superstitious ceremony could stop it.

But the ritual’s failure did little to dissuade similar practices throughout New England. The vampire panic would continue for decades, culminating in famous cases like Mercy Brown’s exhumation in 1892 — a remarkably similar incident a century later, in the same region.

An Eerie Reminder

Today, there’s little to mark the site where Rachel Harris Burton’s grave was disturbed in Factory Point Cemetery in Manchester. Time and weather have worn away many of the old headstones, and the blacksmith’s forge long since cooled. 

In the cemetery, the Vermont Folklife Center put a sign and marker in 2022, commemorating the story of Rachel Harris Burton. Her grave is noticeable because of the distinctive stone that was carved by Zerubbabel Collins, which was a very famous family of carvers.

But if you find yourself in Manchester, Vermont, wandering one of its ancient cemeteries on a fog-laden evening, spare a thought for poor Rachel — accused in death, desecrated in superstition, and forever part of America’s eerie legacy of vampire panics.

After all, history’s most unsettling tales aren’t always buried as deep as we think.

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References:

MANCHESTER VAMPIRE | William G. Pomeroy Foundation 

Manchester commemorates resident ‘vampire’

Manchester Vampire

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The Berwick Vampire: A Blood-Soaked Legend from Berwick-upon-Tweed

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In the midst of border disputes between the English and the Scottish as well as the looming threat of the plague, a new monster started lurking in the dark street. The Berwick Vampire is one of the oldest vampire stories from the UK. 

Berwick was besieged on more occasions than any other town in the world with the exception of Jerusalem, changing hands between England and Scotland 13 times and as a cultural identity not in unison about who they are between the two. It also has more than one vampire story, one of them from a time before the vampire term was even a thing.

In the shadow of ancient battlements and along the fog-laden streets of Berwick-upon-Tweed, lingers the sinister tale of the Berwick Vampire. Though far less famous than its Eastern European counterparts, this chilling account has earned its place in folklore as one of Britain’s earliest recorded vampiric encounters.

A Town Haunted by Blood and Death

The story takes us back to the medieval period, when Berwick was a frequent casualty of border wars between England and Scotland in the 12th century. Life was brutal and death was a constant companion. Among the many tales of plague, battle, and witchcraft that circulated during these turbulent centuries, the legend of a bloodthirsty revenant rose to prominence.

As the story goes, a local man of ill-repute — sometimes described as a wealthy landowner or merchant, died suddenly, his life claimed by an unspecified illness or misdeed. Sometimes it’s said that everyone believed he was an upstanding citizen, and that his misdeed and corruption was only found out after he had died. 

This is why they denied him to be buried on consecrated land after he died of the plague. Death did not lay him to rest. Within days of his burial, villagers began whispering of a pale figure stalking the streets after nightfall. Livestock were found drained of blood, and children complained of night terrors and unexplained bruises upon waking.

The Vampire’s Reign of Terror

It wasn’t long before these sightings took a darker turn. Townsfolk claimed to encounter the man’s corpse-like figure lurking in graveyards and near the town walls. Those who crossed his path reported feeling an intense, unnatural cold and being overcome by a sense of impending doom. It is also said that two children went missing, and they all believed it had to be him. 

Revenant: The term vampire or the undead was not used in medieval time, but several of the stories about the Revenant, Sanguisa or the bloodsuckers of folklore bear resemblance to what the modern world would classify as a vampire legend. In folklore, a revenant is a spirit or animated corpse that is believed to have been revived from death to haunt the living and was in medieval times used interchangeably with ghosts. They come from various cultures like the Celtic and Norse, some reminding more about a classic ghost story, some more of a vampire legend. Although today a mixed version of the western and eastern European mythologies of the undead.

As he was running down the street, a pack of howling dogs followed him, keeping all the villagers awake. He shouted out: “Until my body is burnt, you folk of Berwick shall have no peace!”

The Vampire Hunt

The villagers gathered and decided to fight the vampire after several days had forced them inside after dark. Ten young farmers were selected to dig up his body, hack it up to pieces and burn it. 

They did so, but it wasn’t the end of their misery. After burning him to ash, the plague returned and took half the population of Berwick. When they buried the dead, the villagers insisted that they could hear the sound of the vampire followed by his pack of hounds.

Howling Hounds: Often in William Newburghs tales of the undead, there is a pack of dogs following as the dog motif has been connected with death for ages in European mythology. The black dog is a supernatural, spectral, or demonic hellhound. It is usually unnaturally large with glowing red or yellow eyes, is often connected with the Devil, and is sometimes an omen of death.

The Legacy of the Berwick Vampire

The Berwick legend also highlights how vampire hysteria in the medieval and early modern periods often paralleled outbreaks of disease and unexplained deaths, as communities struggled to explain misfortune with supernatural causes as well as border disputes. Something that many of the vampire legends we have from William Newburgh, like the story of the Berwick Vampire, shares.

William of Newburgh: Many of the tales about the British vampires comes from the 12th century historian, William of Newburgh. William’s major work was Historia rerum Anglicarum or Historia de rebus anglicis (“History of English Affairs”), a history of England from 1066 to 1198, written in Latin. It is written in an engaging fashion and still readable to this day, containing many fascinating stories and glimpses into 12th-century life. He is a major source for stories of medieval revenants, animated corpses that returned from their graves, with close parallels to vampire beliefs.

Today, Berwick-upon-Tweed is a picturesque town known for its Elizabethan walls and coastal charm. Yet for those who listen closely, especially when mist rolls in from the North Sea, old stories persist. Locals still recount the ancient tale of the Berwick Vampire — a reminder of a time when the veil between life and death felt perilously thin, and the dead were not always content to stay buried.

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Berwick upon Tweed Vampire

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The Jewett City Vampires and the Ray Family in Connecticut

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In the midst of a consumption epidemic ravaging whole families on the coast of New England, the Ray family took drastic measures to save the eldest son from illness. The Jewett City Vampires were believed to be behind the consumption running in the family’s veins. Could burying up the bodies and burning them keep them from feeding on the living?

Buried in the annals of Connecticut history is a lesser-known, chilling chapter of American vampire panic — the unsettling case of the Jewett City Vampires.

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This grim and fascinating story unfolded in the mid-19th century in Jewett City, a quiet mill town in Griswold, Connecticut. And like many such tales, it was rooted not in mythic monsters, but in the all-too-real terror of tuberculosis, known back then by a far more ominous name: consumption.

The Ray Family: A Family Struck by Death

The story centers around the Ray family, whose seemingly cursed lineage became the focus of the town’s fear and superstition. The Rays were a large farming family that were greatly affected by the tuberculosis epidemic ravaging the coast of New England. Between 1845 and 1854, several members of the Ray family died in rapid succession from tuberculosis. In an age before germ theory, the illness seemed almost supernatural — wasting away the victim’s body, leaving them pale, weak, and sunken-eyed, sometimes for years before death.

And in those uncertain days, when science faltered, folklore eagerly filled the void.

The neighbors of Jewett City began to murmur. Surely this wasn’t natural. The idea took hold that perhaps the dead of the Ray family were not resting peacefully in their graves, but rather rising at night to drain the life from their surviving kin.

The Exhumation of The Jewett City Vampires

The first in the family to die of consumption was 24 year old Lemuel Ray in 1845. Then his father, Henry B. Ray followed in 1851 and his brother, 26 year old Elisha Ray in 1853. 

The eldest son in the family, Henry Ray got the disease the year after and panic started to set into the community. Surely there was something supernatural at play? 

In 1854, driven by grief and superstition, the surviving members of the Ray family took a drastic step. According to contemporary accounts, they exhumed the bodies of Lemuel and Elisha from the Jewett City Cemetery on the 8th of May. The remaining and extended Ray family together with their friends and neighbors, gathered in the cemetery to perform the ritual.

At the time, it was believed that if a body was too well-preserved — particularly the heart or vital organs — it meant the deceased was still spiritually active and preying upon the living. In such cases, the suspected vampire’s heart would be cut out and ritually burned to sever the unnatural bond.

Records from the era confirm that at least one body was exhumed and burned on a nearby hill. The hope was that this morbid ritual would stop the deaths within the family and finally lay the restless spirit to peace.

They burned the heart of the corpses in the graveyard and most likely mixed the ashes of it into a mixture for Henry to drink or ingest in some way. This was believed to protect and cure him from the vampiric feeding they believed his brother did. Or was it enough to burn their bodies to keep them rising from their graves at night to feed on their remaining family? The sources of this detail remain inconclusive.

But what happened to Henry? Some say that they don’t know and that Henry most likely lived on and that the ritual cured him. Perhaps this is because his tombstone is not right next to his brothers in the cemetery that people believe it. Other sources claim that he died the same year, only 34 years old. In addition to his demise, his own children and wife also followed shortly. Because, a little further behind his brothers and family, his grave can be seen.

Echoes of a Broader Vampire Panic

What makes the Jewett City Vampire Panic especially significant is that it wasn’t a lone case of morbid superstition — it was part of a broader phenomenon that plagued New England throughout the 18th and 19th centuries.

Between 1790 and 1890, multiple cases of so-called vampire exhumations were documented in Rhode Island, Vermont, Massachusetts, and Connecticut. All were responses to consumption outbreaks that ravaged families and small towns, where fear was a tangible, everyday companion.

The famous Mercy Brown case in 1892 was the last well-documented vampire exhumation in America, but the events in Jewett City nearly forty years earlier reflect just how widespread and desperate these beliefs were.

Modern Discovery and Legacy of Vampire Graves in Connecticut

The graves of the Ray family remained largely undisturbed until 1990, when nearby, another unsettling discovery was made — the now-famous Griswold “J.B.” vampire grave, with remains arranged in a classic anti-vampire configuration: skull and thigh bones crossed beneath it.

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

Though unconnected officially to the Ray family, the proximity of these two cases in Griswold illustrates just how deep the vampire panic had gripped rural New England communities. Had the Rays heard about the rituals the Walton family had done decades before? Was the contagious disease actually fear?

Today, the Jewett City Cemetery still stands, an unassuming plot of land in a quiet town. Although the original graves from the cemetery were moved in recent years because of a building project. The graves of the Ray family look like they are still buried, six feet under.

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References:

The Jewett City Vampires, Griswold – Damned Connecticut

Jewett City vampires – Wikipedia

Jewett City Vampires – Atlas Obscura

Vampire Case: The Ray Brothers of Jewett City – Locations of Lore

March 8: Death of a Vampire

1854-05-24-Jewett City Vampires – Newspapers.com™ 

Cemetery Holds Tales of Vampires – The New York Times

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The Buckinghamshire Vampire: England’s Forgotten Blood-Drinker

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Coming day after day to torment his wife, the Buckinghamshire Vampire terrorized an entire town for days. And he wasn’t stopped until the Bishop intervened. 

Hidden among the villages and misty woodlands of Buckinghamshire in south east England, a county better known for its pastoral landscapes and historic estates, lies a strange and unsettling tale of a vampire said to have once terrorized the area. 

Unlike the famous aristocratic bloodsuckers of Gothic fiction, this legend, whispered among locals for generations, speaks of a malevolent revenant risen from its grave to prey upon the living.

A Folkloric Fragment from Rural England

This story is also one of the vampiric tales we have from the historian William of Newburgh who wrote down many of the monsters and ghost stories from medieval England and Scotland. Allegedly he got the story from Stephen de Swafeld, the archdeacon of the diocese of Buckinghamshire from 1194-1202. 

William of Newburgh: Many of the tales about the British vampires comes from the 12th century historian, William of Newburgh. William’s major work was Historia rerum Anglicarum or Historia de rebus anglicis (“History of English Affairs”), a history of England from 1066 to 1198, written in Latin. It is written in an engaging fashion and still readable to this day, containing many fascinating stories and glimpses into 12th-century life. He is a major source for stories of medieval revenants, animated corpses that returned from their graves, with close parallels to vampire beliefs.

A well respected man of Buckinghamshire died unexpectedly in 1192 and was buried by his family and his grieving widow on the eve of Ascension Day. He must have been a rich man, as he was buried in a tomb. Buckinghamshire had acquired a lot of wealth during the Anglo-Saxons, soon to be taken by William the Conqueror.  

The next night the widow was awakened at night when something laid next to her in her bed. When she opened her eyes, she saw it was her dead husband laying next to her, staring at her with dead eyes. It was said he got on top of her, pressing her down into the bed.

It is unsure and not specified what this actually means. Did he paralyze her like a night terror thing, did he force himself on her?

When the sun rose, the man went back into his tomb. But he would return the next night. Some say he did the same for a second time. But for the third, the widow was prepared. She had invited her friends and family to watch over her, in case her dead husband came back. 

He crept through her window, but when he was heading for her bed, the walking dead was attacked by her protectors who chased him off with loud noises and into the fields where the animals were grassing. Some say that he went to attack his brothers instead who were living in the same town.

Revenant: The term vampire or the undead was not used in medieval time, but several of the stories about the Revenant, Sanguisa or the bloodsuckers of folklore bear resemblance to what the modern world would classify as a vampire legend. In folklore, a revenant is a spirit or animated corpse that is believed to have been revived from death to haunt the living and was in medieval times used interchangeably with ghosts. They come from various cultures like the Celtic and Norse, some reminding more about a classic ghost story, some more of a vampire legend. Although today a mixed version of the western and eastern European mythologies of the undead.

For a long time, the vampire kept appearing in the town, attacking sleeping people as well as resting animals. Soon, every household was up all night, guarding to defend themselves from the vampire stalking them. 

It got so bad he started appearing in broad daylight, seen by big groups of people in the streets and in the fields. Often he was seen with a pack of hounds following him, something the undead in William’s writing did, as well as other British ghost and vampire stories. 

Howling Hounds: Often in William Newburghs tales of the undead, there is a pack of dogs following as the dog motif has been connected with death for ages in European mythology. The black dog is a supernatural, spectral, or demonic hellhound. It is usually unnaturally large with glowing red or yellow eyes, is often connected with the Devil, and is sometimes an omen of death.

Blessings from the Bishop

The story of the undead reached the Bishop and they decided to do an investigation. This has also been said to be the Archdeacon Stephen. He had written to St. Hugh, the bishop of Lincoln, asking for advice. It was said that they had to open his tomb and burn him to ashes, but the archdeacon didn’t want to and asked if there was another way. 

They decided to open his tomb and exhumed his body. When the tomb was opened the body was found to have not decomposed. The bishop had written an absolution that they placed on the man’s chest before the tomb was sealed up again. 

It is said that this helped and the blessing  from the bishop made so the revenant remained in his grave and he never bothered anyone ever again. . 

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References:

Buckinghamshire Vampire – OCCULT WORLD

William of Newburgh: Medieval Vampire Hunter? | Our Ancient History

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

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Dug up after his first burial, the mysterious grave of J.B haunted New England as one of its vampire graves from the New England vampire panic. Who was this man, and what happened to make his friends and family dig him up and rearrange his bones, actually turning him in his grave?

When people think of America’s vampire folklore, names like Mercy Brown often rise to the top. But lurking deeper in the shadowy annals of New England’s vampire panic is the strange and unsettling case of a man identified only by his initials: J.B. His grave, discovered in 1990 in Griswold, Connecticut, became the centerpiece of a chilling historical mystery that hints at the desperate and fearful superstitions of rural 19th-century America.

Read More: Check out all ghost stories from USA

But who was J.B? And what happened back then that was so horrifying, they had to dig his corpse up to make sure that he would stay dead?

A Grim Discovery in the Griswold Woods

In 1990, three young boys playing near a gravel pit in Griswold stumbled upon something macabre — a collection of human bones near a sand and gravel mine. When they told their mothers what happened, they didn’t believe it, but when they returned with a skull.

The police first thought it had something to do with the serial killer, Michael Ross, but they soon realized that the bones were from something much older. What was initially believed to be the remains of a modern crime victim quickly turned into an archaeological investigation when it was determined that the bones belonged to an early 19th-century graveyard known as the Walton Family Cemetery.

Photo courtesy of Nicholas Bellantoni

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. The skeleton had been exhumed and carefully reburied with its head decapitated and put on the chest. Its thigh bones were placed in a cross beneath the skull — a classic “skull and crossbones” arrangement used in old folklore to prevent the dead from rising.

Photo courtesy of Nicholas Bellantoni

This was no accident. This was a deliberate act meant to keep something sinister at bay.

The New England Vampire Panic: Death’s Superstitious Grip

The grave of J.B can easily be seen together with a string of exhumations in the New England area during the 19th century as a part of the vampire panic that grew forth after a tuberculosis epidemic broke out, that made even the most logical man hunting for the undead.

During the 18th and 19th centuries, tuberculosis (then called “consumption”) was an incurable and terrifying disease. It slowly wasted away its victims, hollowing them out until death. In the face of its horrors, rural communities often turned to folklore for explanations.

One deeply held belief was that when several family members fell ill in succession, it might be the work of a vampire among the dead — a family member or neighbor who, from beyond the grave, was spiritually draining the living. 

To stop them, they thought they had to dig them up and perform a ritual on the undead. Signs of vampirism were blood left in their organs, unnatural lack of decomposition, their hair and nails growing and bloated bellies, looking like they had recently fed. If some of these signs were present in the grave, they believed that they were a part of the undead and vampires. The grim solution? Exhume the suspect’s body and perform a ritual to stop them.

This often involved cutting out and burning the heart, decapitating the body, or rearranging the skeleton to prevent it from rising. The Griswold case suggests this very ritual was carried out on poor J.B who had been exhumed around five years after his death and where they removed his heart in an attempt to stop the undead from rising and feeding on the living. 

Who Was J.B. and What Happened to his Grave?

Despite modern forensic analysis, the identity of J.B. remain a mystery for decades. Archaeologists and historians placed the burial in the 1830s to 1840s, based on coffin construction and burial artifacts. Forensic examination of the bones revealed that J.B. was a middle-aged man who had indeed suffered from tuberculosis. His bones bore signs of the disease’s toll — lesions on the ribs characteristic of pulmonary tuberculosis.

Photo courtesy of Nicholas Bellantoni

The practice of marking coffins with initials was common in the period, but unfortunately, no surviving burial records from Griswold matched those initials, and no contemporary accounts of a local vampire panic in the area have yet surfaced. Yet the condition of the grave makes it clear: someone believed J.B. was a threat from beyond the grave.

When scientists revisited the case, they turned to a farmer named John Barber. Next to him, where a grave marked IB45 containing a female around 45-55 years old. Could it be a family laid to rest next to each other? There was also a grave marked NB 13, suggesting a father son relationship. Something an obituary from 1826 supports. This was for the 12 year old Nicholas Barber where they also mentioned his father, John Barber. This was also confirmed through DNA testing. 

Face of the Vampire: Using DNA extracted from a skull, a forensic artist created a facial reconstruction of a man believed to be a vampire from the 18th century. Using 3D facial reconstruction software, a forensic artist determined that JB55 likely had fair skin, brown or hazel eyes, brown or black hair and some freckles, according to a statement. (Image credit: Parabon Nanolabs, Virginia Commonwealth University)

Most often, the organs to those accused of vampirism were cut out and burned. Most often it was the heart, or perhaps the kidneys. Often, it wasn’t years before they dug them up, so what happened if there were no organs left?

When the townspeople opened his grave, his body was probably a skeleton already. To get to his decomposing heart, they most likely broke open his ribs to remove it, removed his head and put it back together. His heart and organs were most likely burnt. Most often the undead showed these signs of something being wrong, but what if there were nothing to take?

If there were no organs to take, the separation of the skull from the body was a part of the ritual instead, many that have looked into the case have hypothesized. The rituals craved for people to ingest the ashes of what they cremated, but we simply don’t know what really happened when they exhumed J.Bs body.

It is also said that there were no signs of tuberculosis in the other bodies found near J.B in the cemetery. So for what reason did they dig him up?

Fear Beyond the Grave of John Barber

The story of J.B. of Griswold is a chilling reminder of the power of fear, folklore, and superstition that seems so foreign and barbaric to people not believing in them. In a time before germ theory and antibiotics, death crept so relentlessly through small communities that people were willing to embrace the macabre to protect the living.

Today, the remains of J.B. are studied and preserved as part of Connecticut’s archaeological history, but his story — or rather, the silence of it — still haunts the annals of New England folklore. His grave stands not just as a testament to a forgotten life, but to the uneasy marriage of death and superstition that once gripped early America.

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New England ‘Vampire’ Was Likely a Farmer Named John 

DNA Testing Reveals the Putative Identity of JB55, a 19th Century Vampire Buried in Griswold, Connecticut

Bioarcheological and biocultural evidence for the New England vampire folk belief

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The Vampire of Alnwick Castle: Northumberland’s Restless Dead

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In the castle often dubbed the Windsor of the North, the Alnwick castle also houses some dark legends. One of them being that there once was a vampire demon lurking in the dark corners of the castle. 

Alnwick Castle in Northumberland, England has been called  the Windsor of the North and has been the home for the Percy family since 1309, including the current 12th Duke of Northumberland. It has played a crucial role in the history of England, as a stronghold in the border wars with Scotland as well as the power battle in the Wars of Roses.

Long before Alnwick Castle gained modern renown as a filming location for Harry Potter’s Hogwarts or Downton Abbey, it was home to far darker, bloodier folklore. In the 12th century, this formidable Northumbrian stronghold was at the center of one of Britain’s most unnerving medieval vampire tales — chronicled by the historian William of Newburgh.

The Tale as Told by William of Newburgh

William, writing around 1196, recounted the terrifying legend in his Historia Rerum Anglicarum, documenting the story of a long-deceased servant to the Lord de Vesci of Alnwick in the 11th century who refused to stay buried. It was said he came from Yorkshire to escape the law. Or was it the master of the castle himself who stayed underneath his castle after his death? According to local accounts, after his death this malevolent soul rose nightly from his grave to prowl the surrounding village.

William of Newburgh: Many of the tales about the British vampires comes from the 12th century historian, William of Newburgh. William’s major work was Historia rerum Anglicarum or Historia de rebus anglicis (“History of English Affairs”), a history of England from 1066 to 1198, written in Latin. It is written in an engaging fashion and still readable to this day, containing many fascinating stories and glimpses into 12th-century life. He is a major source for stories of medieval revenants, animated corpses that returned from their graves, with close parallels to vampire beliefs.

He was said to be a horrid man, although his misdeeds aren’t always specified. He was also a very jealous man and suspected his wife had taken a lover and wanted to caught her in the act. He told her he was going out on a journey for many days, but in secret snuck back after dark. He went to spy on her and climbed to the roof of his house to look in her window. Some say that he was hiding on a beam overhanging her room. 

Whether his wife cheated or not is debated. Some say that a man really did enter her room, causing him to lose his balance and fall down. He fell through the roof or off the beam and crashed to the floor and injured himself badly. As he lay dying on her floor, he refused to repent his sins, and died with the cursing words of his wife looming over him. 

The creature, often referred to simply as the Alnwick Vampire, brought with it a pestilent air of death. Villagers spoke of a sickening stench and oppressive atmosphere whenever the restless corpse stalked the streets. It is also said that a pack of hounds howling was following him. In the original source, it’s not often mentioned they feared for their blood to be sucked out of them, but being “beaten black and blue by this vagrant monster.”

Howling Hounds: Often in William Newburghs tales of the undead, there is a pack of dogs following as the dog motif has been connected with death for ages in European mythology. The black dog is a supernatural, spectral, or demonic hellhound. It is usually unnaturally large with glowing red or yellow eyes, is often connected with the Devil, and is sometimes an omen of death.

The villagers were so afraid they started to lock themselves inside of their homes at night. It is also said that the castle was close to being abandoned and that people started to move away. Soon after the nightly disturbances began, a dreadful plague outbreak swept through the village, and the suffering townsfolk laid blame squarely at the feet of the wandering revenant.

A Grim Solution: Dismemberment and Burning

Local priests and terrified townsfolk, desperate to end the curse, gathered on Palm Sunday at two brothers who had lost their father to the plague and wanted to stop it before it consumed them as well. and decided upon a grim but time-honored medieval remedy: they would exhume the vampire’s corpse and destroy it.

A band of brave men dug up the grave. He was not found six feet under as he had been buried the first time, but right under the surface with just a bit of soil barely covering him. 

His body was naturally preserved and bloated. It was said it had swollen to almost twice its size and his flesh was more pink than deadly white. Although the stench of flesh was overwhelming. 

To put an end to the horrors, they dragged the body from the earth, hacked it to pieces as gallons of fresh hot blood poured out of him, pure evidence of him being a bloodsucking monster. The body pieces were taken outside of the town and burned the remains to ash.

William of Newburgh recorded the event in chilling detail, remarking on how the decay and pestilence lifted almost immediately after the body’s destruction.

Vampire or Revenant? A Medieval Fear

This account from Alnwick is one of the earliest written vampire legends in England. Even to this day, William de Newburgh is claimed to have been a serious historian who relied on good and trustworthy sources. 

In the story though, he does call the castle Anantis, and it has since then been affiliated with the Alnwick Castle. This sort of became canon lore after Montague Summers published The Vampire in Europe in 1929 where he called the legend the Alnwick Vampire. 

There have been some that have speculated that the castle from the story was actually Annan Castle of the Bruce family in South West Scotland. However, the structure of the story does remind quite a lot of an Irish vampire story about an evil lord jealous of his wife and dies when spying on her and her suspected lover.

Read More: The Legend of Ireland’s Vampire King Abhartach and the Haunted Giant’s Grave

It is also said that William heard the story from an old monk who lived when the story happened, meaning it must have been sometime in the late 11th, early 12th century like most of his vampire stories. It wasn’t called vampire though, but some sort of bloodsucker or sanguine, the latin word for it. 

Revenant: The term vampire or the undead was not used in medieval time, but several of the stories about the Revenant, Sanguisa or the bloodsuckers of folklore bear resemblance to what the modern world would classify as a vampire legend. In folklore, a revenant is a spirit or animated corpse that is believed to have been revived from death to haunt the living and was in medieval times used interchangeably with ghosts. They come from various cultures like the Celtic and Norse, some reminding more about a classic ghost story, some more of a vampire legend. Although today a mixed version of the western and eastern European mythologies of the undead.

In the medieval mind, such revenants were often considered a cross between a ghost and a vampire who were physical corpses that left their tombs to infect the living, causing plagues, death, and despair. The cause of their resurrection was often attributed to sin, improper burial rites, or a cursed nature in life.

Other Ghosts at Alnwick Castle

In addition to a legend of a bloodsucking undead, it is also said that the ghost of a Grey Lady is haunting the castle grounds. It is said that a young teenage girl was working as a maid in the castle in the Victorian time. One day she was working in one of the kitchens. She fell down a chute to the tunnels below the castle. The dumb waiter used to raise and lower food between the castle floors and broke and fell on top of her. It crushed her to death. 

It is said that she is walking in the tunnels and dark corridors deep below the castle. 

Today, Alnwick Castle embraces its eerie history, and there is even a gin inspired by the legend. Ghost tours and local folklore evenings recount not only the vampire of the 12th century but also tales of spectral knights, weeping women, and shadowy figures that stalk the castle halls and grounds after dark.

And though centuries have passed since the old master’s body was consigned to the flames, some claim that on misty nights, a strange stench lingers in the old graveyard, and figures are glimpsed where no one should be.

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1196 (ca.): Vampire of Anantis | Anomalies: the Strange & Unexplained

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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 Last Strigoi Hunt: The Vampire Panic of Marotinu de Sus, Romania

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In the rural and more superstitious parts of Romania, the fear of the undead is not necessarily something of the past. Although mostly done in secret and as a family business, the hunt for vampires or strigois, still happens. Something the family of Petre Toma experienced when he was accused of haunting extended family after death. 

In the shadowed villages of southern Romania, ancient beliefs about the restless dead linger alongside the hum of modern life. For while the medieval terror of the strigoi, vampires and morois may seem a distant superstition to outsiders, in certain corners of Dolj County, these spectral fears still pulse through the bloodlines of families whose lives are shaped by old-world rites. And if we are to believe some of the comments of the locals, it’s not necessarily that rarely it happens, it’s just not every case that makes it to the newspapers. 

Read More: Check out all ghost stories from Romania

In the tiny village Marotinu de Sus where around 700 people live scattered around in the countryside,  locals gather in the village’s only store and bar for a chat, often drinking hard. If you ask them, they will say they have at least one vampire story in their families and that they have been thought to hunt down and kill vampires, or the strigoi since they were children. One of the most notorious modern vampire cases in Europe occurred not in some fog-drenched, Gothic past, but in February of 2004.

A Haunting in Marotinu de Sus

One dark night that December the year before, Petre Toma, a 76 year old villager had driven in a carriage pulled by his horse through the village southwest in the country close to the Bulgarian border. He was drunk and fell off the carriage, scaring the horse that stomped him dead. He was buried in the local cemetery and his family started their morning process. But it would not be in peace. 

In death, it seemed, he had not severed his connection to the mortal world and became a moroi, an undead. 

Moroi and Strigoi: Strigoi in Romanian mythology are troubled spirits that are said to have risen from the grave. Moroi are often associated with other figures in Romanian folklore, such as strigoi (another type of vampire). In some versions, a moroi is a phantom of a dead person which leaves the grave to draw energy from the living. They are also sometimes referred to in modern stories as the living offspring of two strigoi.

His own sister, Flora Marinescu, started to complain that her daughter-in-law had fallen ill and that it was Petre who was to blame. It was also said that their son and grand daughter became ill. The woman reported terrifying nocturnal visitations: a pale, spectral figure appearing in her room, its face unmistakably that of her deceased uncle.

According to Toma’s neighbour, Mircea Mitrica, she had been shouting: ‘He’s on top of me! He’s eating me! He’s killing me!’ She couldn’t walk and complained about feeling drained, as if something had taken her blood. In Romanian folklore, such occurrences were seen as ominous signs of a strigoi. Fearing this ancient evil had once again returned, Petre’s brother in law and husband to Flora, Gheorghe Marinescu, took decisive — and deeply traditional — action.

The Ritual of the Dead

They could have called for the local Orthodox priest to perform an exorcism, but he would have needed a permit, and they feared it would take too much time. After a couple of nights discussing and drinking, they decided to act themselves. After all, they all knew how to rid themselves of the strigoi according to the old ways. 

The first time Gheorghe Marinescu tried to do the ritual, he ended up drinking too much liquid courage and couldn’t use the shovel. But in his mind, it needed to be done. Marinescu gathered a small group of family members, friends and neighbours and tried again. Also in attendance was his neighbour, Mircea Mitrica. 

And after steadying their nerves with alcohol, the party made their way to the cemetery under the cover of darkness. They exhumed the body of Petre Toma to look for evidence of him being one of the undead. According to those present, they claimed that the man had what looked like fresh blood around his mouth, for them, clear signs of vampirism. 

After confirming their suspicions, they split his ribcage with a pitchfork to remove his heart and staked through the rest of his body for good measure. In some sources they say they sprinkled garlic over it, but this part is rarely mentioned from the sources of those actually in attendance. Many tall tales were added over the years of this mission. The neighbour, Mitrica, claimed that the heart was still pumping when they pulled it out from his chest and that the face of his former neighbour was red and his beard had grown. 

The group put his heart in a plastic bag and put the body back in the grave. According to some sources, they didn’t put it back with care, and left it in a state of filth, earth and decay. They went to a nearby crossroad to start the ritual, where the world of the living and dead meet. 

According to Gheorghe Marinescu, his heart squeaked and tried to jump away when it was burned on the bonfire, also something that happens to a strigoi heart according to legend. This was all to perform an age-old vampire ritual believed to protect the living from the vengeful dead.

According to custom, the heart of a strigoi must be burned. Its ashes are then mixed into water and drunk by those afflicted by the revenant’s haunting, believed to break the malevolent bond between the strigoi and its victims.

This is what they did when they went home and lit a second bonfire to make the mixture. They gave the tincture to the sick woman to drink. A local named Anisoara Constantin who lived there at the time commented in an article: ‘Well, the sick woman got better again, so they must have done something right,’

According to the party, they all went back to see the woman afflicted with the illness they tried to cure the very next day. She was better and could walk and talk without any pain and invited them all to her house to eat, drink and celebrate her recovery. 

The ritual, grisly as it may sound to outsiders, has ancient roots in Eastern European lore. The strigoi were thought to rise from the grave to drain the life force of their relatives, and unless dealt with through fire or staking, would slowly devastate entire families.

Modern Consequences for Ancient Beliefs

The following day, news of the nocturnal disinterment and ritual reached Dolj County police when his daughter complained about the disturbance and desecration of her father’s grave and corpse. 

The six who attended the ritual were arrested and charged with “disturbing the peace of the dead.” Despite their protestations that they had only acted in defense of their loved ones, they were each sentenced to six months’ imprisonment and ordered to pay damages to the family of the deceased.

In the end, they did not end up serving their sentence and had to pay a total of 900 Euro in damages to the family. The case drew widespread media attention, becoming a sensation in Romania and abroad, with international headlines decrying it as evidence of vampire hysteria persisting in 21st-century Europe.

A Legacy of Fear and Precaution

The case left a lingering mark on the region, but if we are to believe the comments of some of the locals, it seems that this case didn’t happen in isolation.  

‘No one is bothered who did it, it’s their own business. This ritual often takes place, but in secret, within the family. The problem comes when the police get involved.’ says 80-year-old Tudor Stoica in an article. 

In the nearby village of Amărăştii de Sus, local custom adapted to meet the lingering fear. Now, as a preventive measure, it’s reported that villagers drive a fire-hardened stake through the heart or belly of the recently deceased, especially those thought to have harbored grudges or strange tendencies in life. In the village where Peter Toma was exhumed, they also do something similar with knitting needles or other sharp objects.

Such rites, though rarely reaching world wide headlines, serve as chilling reminders of how the old beliefs still hold power in places where death is regarded with a wary eye and where the border between the living and the dead remains perilously thin. And most likely, this was not the last Strigoi hunt at all. 

As his sister and wife of the man accused of disturbing his grave, Flora Marinescu said: “What did we do? If they’re right, he was already dead. If we’re right, we killed a vampire and saved three lives. … Is that so wrong?”

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References:

How Balkan vampires captured the world’s imagination – Emerging Europe

A village still in thrall to Dracula | World news | The Guardian

Romanian villagers decry police investigation into vampire slaying | McClatchy Washington Bureau

“I dug out his heart with a pitchfork” | Michael Bird Writer & Journalist

I-am scos inima cu o furcă – The Black Sea

VIDEO/ Reportaj în satul unde țăranii au dezgropat un mort și i-au înfipt un țăruș în inimă. Oamenii încă mai cred că l-au împiedicat să devină strigoi și-au salvat o fetiță!

Strigoi – Wikipedia 

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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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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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    The Danish ghostly horse spirit Helhest is said to roam around St. Canute’s Cathedral in Odense, Denmark. It is believed seeing the three legged horse is an omen of imminent death.
  • The Helhest Haunting Saint Olaf’s Church in Helsingør
    According to old legends and Danish folklore, there are stories of three legged horses haunting the churches and graveyards in the country. in Saint Olaf’s Church, the spirit of the helhest is said to be the omen of death.
  • The Hauntings of Gamle Aker Church Over a Dragon’s Den
    Could it be that the oldest church in Oslo also has the oldest haunting? From legends about a dragon’s den underneath the structure and the ghostly silhouette haunting, the Gamle Aker Church perhaps has more activity than what meets the naked eye.
  • The Janissaries Vampires in Veliko Tarnovo
    During a time when Bulgaria was under the Ottoman Empire, there was talk about a vampire haunting the streets of Veliko Tarnovo. The rumours got so bad, that the Islamic rulers had to turn to pagan belief to rid themselves of the bloodthirsty creatures.
  • The Legend of the White Lady of Utstein Monastery
    In the windswept landscape of Norway’s west coast lies the Utstein Monastery, a site steeped in history and haunting tales. Known as Norway’s best-preserved medieval monastery, its ancient stone walls and iconic Gothic windows whisper stories of faith, love, and loss as well as the ghost of a Lady in White.
  • The Lord Edward Pub: The Rebel’s Restless Spirit
    After dying for the cause of Irish Independence, it is said the ghost of Lord Edward is haunting the pub he is buried close to and bears his name.
  • St. Patrick’s Cathedral: The Restless Spirit of Jonathan Swift
    In the ancient St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin, there are said to be restless spirits still lingering. One of the more well known is said to be the ghost of Jonathan Swift, perhaps best known as the author of Gulliver’s Travels.

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