Moon Mausoleum
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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.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
MANCHESTER VAMPIRE | William G. Pomeroy Foundation
Manchester commemorates resident ‘vampire’
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