As I finish the revisions on Erin’s Children, the sequel to Kelegeen, to be released by BWL Publishing, Inc. in December of 2020, I’m already looking ahead to my next historical novel. It will be set in Vermont, moving between the 1830s and 1970s. One of the threads connecting the two time periods is an activity known as legend tripping. For those unfamiliar with this term coined by folklorists and anthropologists, it pertains to the adolescent rite of passage whereby a pilgrimage is made, usually at night, to a location where some horrific event occurred. If the site is rumored to be haunted, all the better!
During the 19th century several New England states, Rhode Island, Connecticut, and Vermont prominent among them, saw the odd phenomenon of what would later become known as the New England Vampire Panic.
Tuberculosis was rampant at the time, but often not well understood especially in isolated, rural areas. The highly contagious disease ravaged families and, sometimes entire communities.old Tuberculosis, or consumption as it was called in the 19th century, causes the victims to appear to be wasting away. Towards the end, they may cough up copious amounts of blood and complain that when trying to sleep it felt as though someone was sitting on their chest.
These symptoms put people in mind of a supernatural force sucking the life out of the patient. Folklorists and anthropologists believe that in their desperation to save a dying family member, people harkened back to an ancient European superstition, which claimed that a recently dead relative was returning at night to feast upon family members. The only cure for this was to exhume the bodies of relatives who had died of consumption to see if the corpse appeared fresh. If so, they had found the culprit! Removing the heart and burning it, then dismembering the corpse and rearranging it were believed to be the remedy as it prevented the “vampire” from rising from his or her grave.
Excavations have shown this practice to have been employed numerous times throughout New England in the 19th century. Once this became known in the 20th century, the graves of acccused vampires became obvious destinations for legend trips.
Interestingly, those who engaged in this practice rarely, if ever, used the word vampire. It wasn’t until this phenomenon was nearly over that Bram Stoker’s Dracula was published and became popular in the United States. Nonetheless, the notion was similar. Though it occurred mainly in rustic locales, the practice of exhuming and damaging a corpse for the purpose of stopping a vampire was well enough known at the time for Henry David Thoreau to mention it in his journal.
So how does this play into my next novel after Erin’s Children? Imagine a young woman studying for a degree in anthropology with a specialization in local folklore finding out that one of her own ancestors was one of the supposed vampires.
