Wednesday, October 30, 2013

The Vampire State

Halloween is here again, and that means 3 very important things: costumes, candy, and scary stories.

The candy is coming, we just need to beg strangers for it.  You know, I try this year round, but for some reason it only ever works at the end of October.  Go figure.

As for the costume, my daughter has chosen ninjas as this year's theme.

I was hoping for "astronauts."

And finally, the scary stories: I love scary stories in all forms.  Be it book, or movie, or TV, I love being scared.  And while it seems like every horror movie put out these days claims to be "based on a true story," the very best scary stories are 100% true.

Like the story of Mercy Brown, the Rhode Island Vampire.



Now, I'll grant you that this happened back in 1892, which seems like a long time ago, but this is also the most recent documented incident of vampirism in the United States.  And like most of my favorite ghost stories, it takes place in Rhode Island.  And the real kicker is, while Mercy Brown may be the last vampire reported in Rhode Island, she's not even close to being the first!

Our story begins in the town of Exeter, Rhode Island.  There in 1892, the Brown family had suffered a string of terrible tragedies.  Mary Brown had died the year before of a horribe illness, where she seemed to slowly be drained of all life, becoming thinner and thinner, her eyes becoming sunken, her skin pale, like she was becoming a living corpse before their very eyes.  Soon after she died, her oldest daughter (also Mary, because, you know, it was a popular name back then) contracted the same illness, and shared the same fate.

By the following year, Mary's  (first Mary, not second Mary) daughter Mercy and son Edwin were also ill.  After Mercy died, the people of Exeter were convinced that a vampire was to blame.  They exhumed the three Brown corpses, and while two of them showed appropriate amounts of decomposition, the third, Mercy, showed very little decomposition, with seemingly fresh blood still in her veins.  Seeing this, the people of Exeter, immediately cut out her heart and burned it, making her ashes into medicine for poor Edwin.  (It didn't work.  Remember that the next time your doctor prescribes "ashes of your dead sister.")

Mercy, and the rest of the Brown family, had what was known at the time as consumption, what we know today as tuberculosis.  It was a poorly understood illness at the time, with many conflicting and incorrect ideas about what caused it.  (It's much better understood now, but really, do you know what causes tuberculosis?  I didn't think so.  And if your doctor told you, "Yep, that's definitely vampire-related," you'd at least consider the possibility, so don't look down on the poor folks of Exeter.)

But why did these not-nearly-as-ignorant-as-people-think Rhode Islanders jump right to vampirism as a likely cause?  Probably because of all the times it had happened before!

The first documented case of Rhode Island vampires seems to date back to the 1790s.  And that's not necessarily the first case, just the first one where we have found clear documentation proving that said person existed, died, was exhumed and treated as a vampire.

This first case of vampirism centered on a girl named Abigail Staples of Cumblerland.  According to official town records, after her death at the age of 22 or 23, Abigail's father asked permission to exhume her body, "In order to try an Experiment on Livina Chace Wife of Stephen Chace Which Said Livina Was Sister to the Said Abigail Deceased."

(They really liked capitalizing back then.)

So, that doesn't say anything specific about vampires or consumption, simply referring to an "Experiment'" but destroying a vampire to keep her from destroying her own sister is rely the least creepy explanation I can come up with.

And soon after that, around 1799, comes another story out of Exeter.  After the deaths of between 4 or 6 (details vary) of his children, Stukeley Tillinghast (Best. Name. Ever.) decides to exhume their bodies, and ends up believeing that his daughter, Sarah, is the vampire feeding on the rest of the family.  Hilarity ensued.

Between 1799 and the finally story of Mercy Brown in 1892, as many as ten documented cases of vampirism can be found just in Rhode Island, plus a few more just over the border in eastern Connecticut.

Just ridiculous superstition, right?  Just silly folklore nonsense from those crazy, ignorant Rhode Islanders.

Well, perhaps, but this isn't fifteen or sixteenth century Europe.  This is happening in the United States, starting in the same time period as the writing of the Constitution, and on up past the end of the Civil War, almost to the beginning of the twentieth century.

But of course these folks were isolated in their small towns and not as educated as the average American.

Except that's not entirely accurate, either.  These towns kept careful records, they had newspapers, so people obviously knew how to read. If they were isolated, it was really only because they wanted to be, not because of any great distance or physical barriers.  This was, after all, just Rhode Island.  You could walk the entire length of the state without too much trouble.

So what was really going on there?  Why did so any people believe in vampires, and why did it stop after Mercy Brown?

This mystery reminds me of something I've always felt was odd about the Salem Witch Trials. Again, they happened only in one isolated area, and quite apart is distance and time from the European witch trials. And while it is obvious that most of the victims were blameless, it seems possible, just possible, that the panic could have been sparked by some degree of truth: that maybe, just maybe, someone in the village was practicing witchcraft.

Similarly, why would the people of these small Rhode Island towns be so convinced of vampires, even after consumption had been identified as tuberculosis and treatments had been developed, unless somewhere, at some point, one of these "vampires" had really been an actual vampire?!

Imagine this: One by one, members of a family become stricken by what appears to be consumption.  One by one, each family member wastes away, until their skin is drawn tight over protuding bones, their eyes so sunken into their sockets that at night, by the light of a few candles, they seem not to have any eyes at all.  And then, they die.

Perhaps, then, someone sees some creature in the local cemetery, perhaps just too big to be a dog.  Perhaps they notice a grave recently disturbed.  At any rate, they decide to investigate, to dig up the grave, open the casket.

Inside, they find something horrible; something not dead, but not truly alive either.  They realize this...thing...has been the cause of the lamented family's misery, and calling upon stories they always thought were only folklore from the Old World, they cut off its head, they cut out its heart, they destroy the thing with fire.

The town is at peace again, but none of them will ever forget the thing that they saw in the cemetery.

And if something similar happens in a town nearby, won't one of the townsfolk want to help, to warn those citizens of what it could be.  Again, they are not superstitious, do not believe in such creatures, but the man gives his word he saw it with his own eyes.

And so it continues.  Never spreading far from where it began, and the supernatural cure does not always work, for often these are just what they seem: vicims of consumption.

But once in a while, just enough to keep the stories alive...

And why did it suddenly stop in 1892?  Maybe it didn't, they just stopped talking about it!  It could be that the same thing is happening in parts of Rhode Island even now, they just don't publicize it anymore.  The Brown case got quite a bit of media attention, and maybe once the late 19th century version of Fox News descends on your village and starts openly mocking your beliefs, you may shut up about it for a while.

"Damn liberal media." - Dracula

That doesn't mean it stopped.

So the next time you find yourself driving through Rhode Island late at night, keep your eyes open. You might see a young woman walking along the side of the highway.  You might think she's looking for help, that perhaps her car broke down somewhere.

I'd advise you to keep driving.  Don't even slow down.

Because the Ocean State might just be... the Vampire State!

Happy Halloween!

I should add, I am deeply indebted to Michael E. Bell and his fantastic book on New England Vampires, "Food For the Dead."

Wednesday, October 23, 2013

Remember the Poodle

Last week, we had to say goodbye to a member of our family.

Anyone who knows me knows that I'm a dog lover. And when we bought our house nine years ago, we immediately got a dog.  My wife found him at a local shelter, a scrawny, underfed, unkempt little mutt, found wandering around, abandoned.  We named him Joe.

Believe or not, he was not always this dashingly handsome.

Soon after, my wife picked me up from work and told me, "We're going to Billerica."

"Ok," I said. "Where's Billerica?"

She didn't know.  We needed to buy a road atlas to find it.  (This was before the world of ubiquitious iphones and GPSs.)  It turned out to be almost 2 hours away.  There, in some woman's house that doubled as an "animal shelter," we got our second dog, a tiny ball of white poodle that we named Mae.

Mae, pictured moments before she tried to convince my toes to become unattached from my foot.

Mae did not immediately ingratiate herself to us.  She whined a lot, she growled, she bit, she picked fights with Joe.  But over time, she grew on us.  She would sleep at the foot of our bed, and bite my foot nearly every night.   As she got even older, we had to get used to cleaning up her accidents all over the house.

She had breast cancer, which was removed by surgery twice.  She had to have one eye removed after it became swollen and infected.

This wasn't exactly "Marley and Me."

Nine years later, last week, we took Mae to the vet for another eye infection.  They found she'd lost over 2 pounds since she'd been there last.  Considering she'd never weighed more than 7 pounds, she didn't have much left to lose.

Within a day, she'd stopped eating entirely.  The next morning, she passed away in her sleep, in her favorite bed.  We buried her in the backyard.

I don't want to talked at length about this one poodle (although I guess I am), nor do I want to talk about death, about picking up her cold body, or the smell that infused her bed.  No, that's not something I'm feeling up to talking about.

If you remember nothing else about this blog entry, please remember this: there are animal shelters near you, filled with dogs and cats that need a home.  That need love.  That need you.

Don't go to pet stores that sell puppies out of cages.  Please.  Yes, that puppy may be given a good home and a wonderful life, but you're encouraging the store to bring in more puppies, and very few of them will be so lucky.

During one of her checkups soon after we brought her home,  one vet commented that it looked like Mae had had puppies before.  They guessed that she'd been a breeder, used to churn out as many puppies as she could to sell to those same pet stores, and had probably been abandoned, literally thrown out, when she got too old to be useful.

Mae had endured 9 years of being beaten, forced to breed, forced to fight other dogs for food, for water, for a place to sleep.  And because of that, despite being given a safe home surrounded by a family that loved her, she still woke up in the middle of the night snarling and biting anything that moved nearby.  (Spoiler: it was my foot.)

The 9 years she spent with us cannot erase those first nine years, but she was able to die in her favorite bed, peacefully, and that counts for something, since it was probably the first thing she was able to do peacefully in her entire life.

So the next time you see a puppy in the pet store, please remember my little white poodle.  Remember her nine years of torment, and the nine years of peace that couldn't erase them.

Then, drive down to a shelter, and give your love to a dog that needs it.
Or else her ghost will bite your foot off.  I'll make sure of it.