Or maybe not. On September 29, 1859, three years before he died of tuberculosis, Thoreau noted in his journal, “I have just read of a family in Vermont who, several of the members having died of consumption, just burned the lungs, heart and liver of the last deceased, in order to prevent any more from having it.”
Thoreau was still alive and writing when a small family graveyard, set on a sandy knoll outside Griswold, Connecticut, was abandoned. Gradually it was overgrown, then forgotten—until November 1990, that is, when a sand- and gravel-mining operation began biting into it. As three boys played among the fresh cuts one day, they rolled down the hill and discovered two human skulls bouncing after them.
By the time Connecticut State archaeologist Nick Bellantoni arrived, any headstones that might have remained had been lost to mining machinery. So a grid was set up, and the site was mapped, photographed, and excavated. Like so many others, the site was small—about 17 yards by 25 yards—and apparently marked out by stakes surrounded by heaps of stones. That was not much to go on, but some determined sleuthing uncovered the site’s history: In 1757, a farmer named Walton had purchased the knoll from his sea-captain neighbor for 12 shillings. It was used as a cemetery by several generations—and by several families—until about 1840. Then it was abandoned to the rhythms of seedtime and harvest, summer and winter.
In the end, Bellantoni recovered from the Walton Cemetery the remains of 27 individuals: 5 adult males, 8 adult females, and, in a touching reminder of the appalling rate of infant mortality in previous eras, 14 children and adolescents.
Each corpse was carefully removed from what remained of its pine or oak coffin and was wrapped in acid-free paper. Bits of debris—artifacts, hair, wood, soil samples, or straight pins that once held a shroud in place—were painstakingly plotted, labeled, and collected. The site’s lack of machine-cut nails suggested that most burials predated the 1830s. Two of the bodies had been laid in crypts of stone and unmortared brick; spelled out in brass tacks on their coffins were the designations “NB-13” and “JB-55.” We may never know what names those initials stand for, but the numerals suggest their age at death.
All in all, it seemed to be a representative graveyard for its time and place, distressingly full of infants, perhaps—a quarter of the burials were infants under two years old—but otherwise indicative of a typically hardscrabble, physically demanding rural life. That was the story that Paul Sledzik was reading in the bones. As curator of the anatomical collections at the National Museum of Health and Medicine in Washington, D.C., Sledzik knew his bones, having the better part of 2,000 Civil War soldiers under his supervision.
It had seemed like just another day among the skeletons when Sledzik’s telephone rang. It was an old classmate of his, Nick Bellantoni, saying he had found something that Sledzik might find interesting.
Back on the knoll near Griswold, when the archaeologists had opened the coffin labeled “JB-55,” Bellantoni was momentarily taken aback. The skeleton looked like no other he had seen: These bones had been rearranged in a classic skull-and-crossbones pattern. This grave had been desecrated, apparently many decades earlier.
Though the University of Connecticut initially processed the remains from the Walton Cemetery, they were then sent to Sledzik and his colleagues for more extensive analysis. As soon as Sledzik received the bones, he laid them out and ran his trained eyes over them. JB-55, a male, showed signs of chronic dental disease, as did most of the adults from the graveyard. Its owner also showed signs of arthritis, especially in the left knee, which meant he had almost certainly limped at times. He had signs of healed fractures, too, especially on the right clavicle, or collarbone, which must have been “insulted”—broken—by some kind of direct blow. It had never been properly set.
What’s more, JB-55 had probably been coughing up blood, if the lesions on the upper left ribs told Sledzik anything. Scattered across the visceral rib surface adjacent to the lung, the pitted, whitish-gray lesions were telltale signs of primary pulmonary tuberculosis. They might have been the residue of typhoid, syphilis, or pleuritis, but tuberculosis was the logical candidate. In any event, they marked a chronic pulmonary infection that would have produced the coughing and expectoration others regarded as tuberculosis, or consumption.
Though not widely known in New England, vampire epidemics are not exactly unknown there, either. Indeed, they have provided consistent fodder for local news stories over the years. Around a dozen incidents have now been documented—mostly from rural Rhode Island, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Vermont—from the late 18th century until the 1890s. Eleven of them involved tuberculosis.
In Foster, Rhode Island, for example, Captain Levi Young and his family settled on a farm—and all too soon provided an occupant for the plot of land they had set aside as a burial ground. Young’s daughter Nancy, 19, succumbed to consumption in April 1827. Then Nancy’s younger sister, Almira, started showing symptoms—as, inevitably, did the other children in the neighborhood. Those neighbors apparently persuaded Captain Young to dig up Nancy’s casket. As the story goes, her disinterred coffin was placed on a funeral pyre and the villagers gathered around it, inhaling the fumes in the belief that this “sympathetic magic” would not only cure those infected with the disease, but also confer immunity on everyone else.
The most sorrowful tale of all, however, is that of Mercy Brown. In the late 19th century, George and Mary Eliza Brown and their seven children lived in Exeter, Rhode Island—“Deserted Exeter,” as it came to be called. In December 1883, Mary Eliza died of consumption and was buried in Chestnut Hill Cemetery. But the chain of contagion had already set in: Mary Olive followed her mother six months later. Several years passed before son Edwin fell ill as well. Edwin fled west to the dry mountain air of the Rockies, widely believed to be curative. It seemed to work.
Then, on a cold January day in 1892, Edwin’s sister Mercy Lenna died of tuberculosis. But the ground was frozen, so her coffin was laid in a mausoleum to await the spring thaw. Meanwhile, Edwin had returned home, but he immediately fell ill again. Apparently he was told—by whom we do not know—that one of his deceased relatives must be preying upon him. The only remedy anyone could suggest was to exhume his mother and sisters; if any of the bodies was still undecomposed, Edwin was to rip out the heart and burn it.
Mary Eliza and Mary Olive were exhumed and found to have decomposed into skeletons. But Mercy, her body preserved by the freezing cold of the mausoleum, was found to be in something approaching Flückinger’s “vampiric state.” Blood was in her heart, and blood was at her mouth. A victim rather than a fiend, Mercy was ripped apart so that her heart and liver could be removed and burned on a nearby rock. Edwin apparently mixed the ashes into a potion and quaffed the grisly antidote. “Not surprisingly,” reported a subsequent newspaper article, “he died four months later.”
Might the tragedies of the Young and Brown families be correlated with a forgotten cemetery near Griswold, Connecticut? Surprisingly, yes, in Griswold itself, only two miles from the cemetery and only a few years after JB-55 was likely buried.
The May 20, 1854, issue of the Norwich Courier tells the story of Griswold’s Ray family. Horace Ray died of tuberculosis around 1846. Within the next eight years, two of his sons likewise succumbed. After a third one fell ill, the now-familiar remedy was invoked: In early May, the dead brothers were exhumed and burned.
That tale had been told in books, but Sledzik’s lab contained a version of it written on bones. We may never learn anything more about JB-55, but his skeleton tells us that he probably limped about with a hacking, rattling cough that produced bloody sputum. When consumption flared up again in the community after JB-55 died, did someone remember—and blame—his limping figure? Somebody desecrated JB-55’s grave only a few years after he was laid to rest inside it. The evidence tells us, however, that whoever defiled his grave would have found only a skeleton there, with no heart left to burn. Did the invaders then improvise on the spot and rearrange
the bones in a time-honored symbol of death? Were they, in effect, using the dead to ward off death itself?
Griswold had been settled just after 1812 by farmers—probably uneducated, and almost certainly considered crude. Life was hard, and the threat of starvation was a wolf at the door. Several generations of a single family often lived together in crowded, unsanitary conditions—perfect breeding grounds for such epidemic diseases as smallpox, measles, and tuberculosis. This family dynamic, writ large, was projected into the grave.
With justifiable exaggeration, the tuberculosis bacillum might be said to consume the life force of its victim, thus overwhelming the victim’s will to live. Yet the pathogen has also evolved to spread via contagion, feeding off a new host before its old one dies, and so on down the line. Take away the understanding of microscopic pathogens, however, and what is left? A mysterious life force consuming one person after another, and believed powerful enough to act from afar—even from the grave.
The evil agent must still lurk in the heart of the recently deceased, where it continues to exhale and to seed itself into the blood and heart of the next person in the house. Burning the dead, infected heart then becomes the only way to root out the malady and destroy it. That belief might underlie this account of an unnamed Connecticut writer in 1888:
The old superstition in such cases is that the vital organs of the dead still retain a certain flicker of vitality and by some strange process absorb the vital forces of the living, and they quote in evidence apocryphal instances wherein exhumation has revealed a heart and lungs still fresh and living, encased in rottening and slimy integuments, and in which, after burning these portions of the defunct, a living relative, else doomed and hastening to the grave, has suddenly and miraculously recovered.
A more picturesque way of saying the same thing had appeared just a few years earlier, in an 1884 magazine article, whose author speculated about how galloping consumption could so quickly fell, one after another, the apparently hale and hearty members of a single family:
Among the superstitions of those days, we find it was said that a vine or root of some kind grew from coffin to coffin, of those of one family, who died of consumption, and were buried side by side; and when the growing vine had reached the coffin of the last one buried, another one of the family would die; the only way to destroy the influence or effect, was to break the vine; take up the body of the last one buried and burn the vitals, which would be an effectual remedy….
The word remedy might be the crucial clue here. As folklorist Michael Bell has surmised, these gruesome rituals constituted more an experiment in folk medicine than a belief in supernatural horrors. The word vampire, in fact, was never used—if indeed it was even known.
Yet, as forensic anthropologist Paul Sledzik and his museum colleagues concluded, the role of tuberculosis is key to understanding these folktales of New England “vampires.” Might epidemiology be fundamental to understanding the vampire wherever he has appeared?
CHAPTER FIVE
CORPI MORTI
SKELETONS AND GRINNING SKULLS in niches and church windows; “Dances of Death” woodcuts in which cadavers take people by the hand and lead them to the grave; transi tombs bearing the effigies of their occupants, who—being in transition between body and skeleton—are shown as festering corpses; a church banner depicting a spear-wielding angel fighting a winged demon clad in putrescent flesh.
Images such as these flowered, if that word can be applied to such a ghastly phenomenon, during the late 14th century—a response, some scholars believe, to the greatest pandemic of them all, the Black Death, which swept into Europe and peaked somewhere between 1348 and 1350, killing perhaps half the Continent’s population.
The plague had come from the east and had left 25 million dead in China and Mongolia, where it erupted around 1320. By 1347, it had reached the Crimean Peninsula, where Khan Jani Beg of the Golden Horde—the Mongol conquerors of Central Asia—was laying siege to the Genoese trading city of Kaffa. When the infection descended upon the encircling army, however, the besiegers became the beset. Jani Beg was forced to decamp, but not before he flung a few pestilential souvenirs at his triumphant enemy: He ordered his army to catapult plague-ridden corpses over the walls and into the streets of Kaffa. Many residents died as a result, but some escaped in ships to the west—and carried the epidemic with them.
Once those ships arrived in European ports, the infection metastasized throughout the populace. People broke out in dark spots and swollen lymph glands. They coughed up blood, vomited, writhed in agony, slipped into comas, and died. La peste was all they could call it: the plague.
Physicians of the time were baffled. Those at the University of Paris advised consuming no meat, fat, fish, or olive oil; vegetables, they decreed, were to be cooked in rainwater. Others suspected that wool, fabrics, or pelts harbored the source of the strange new scourge. Convinced that the pestilence resided in pets, some authorities killed and skinned domestic cats and dogs.
They were aiming way too high on the food chain. Instead, they should have targeted the grain sitting in the holds of ships, for grain, it seems, was a primary communicator of the plague; where grain resides, there dwell rats as well. And indeed, rats were everywhere in the medieval world: They lived inside thatch roofs and walls, in barns and in markets. Rats battened on filth. In some places, the plague was known as the “Viennese death” because, lacking sewers, that city was a byword for garbage and offal.
The real culprit was not the rat but the rat flea, whose bite might be laced with a virulently toxic bacterium, Yersinia pestis (though that crucial fact would not be discovered for another 500 years). Rat fleas can live for months inside clothes and straw mattresses. A bite from an infected flea usually transferred the bacillus to the human lymph system, where it flourished, causing the classic bubonic plague (named for the buboes, or painfully swollen lymph nodes, that erupted on victims). About half its victims died. That percentage soared, however, if the parasite entered the blood, in which case it caused septicemic plague, or the lungs, in which case the result was pneumonic plague. The latter could then be spread by the simple but brutally efficient contagion mechanism of infected droplets expelled by a cough. Both septicemic plague and pneumonic plague were generally death sentences.
People fled, sequestered themselves, or abandoned themselves to the pursuit of lust and hedonism. In Pistoia, Italy, travel was prohibited and guards were posted throughout the town. Coffins became a precious commodity; as fast as carpenters could turn a new one out, a body was placed inside and the lid nailed shut to contain the stench and contagion. Mourners were forbidden any contact with the dead. Traditional burial customs lapsed—a trend accelerated by municipal officials, who mandated, in historian Mary Ellen Snodgrass’s words, “an end to wailing for the dead and the ringing of the cathedral’s bells as a means of avoiding panic in the living when they realized how many had died.”
“It is impossible for the human tongue to recount the awful truth,” scrawled one Sienese chronicler, who had buried his five children and feared the end of the world was nigh. “Father abandoned child, wife husband, one brother another…. And in many places in Siena great pits were dug…with the multitude of dead.” In Paris, 500 corpses a day were stacked awaiting burial at Les Innocents Cemetery. In Vienna, one mass grave was said to hold as many as 40,000 corpses. And in Avignon—seat of the papacy from 1305 to 1378—it took only six weeks to bury 11,000 people in a single cemetery. As graveyards overflowed, Pope Clement VI consecrated the Rhone River so that the bodies of Christians might be dumped into its waters.
Whereas the plague ravaged lands from Armenia to India—it is known as “the Great Destruction in the Year of Annihilation” in Muslim annals—it utterly desolated Europe. Abandoned ships drifted at their moorings. Farm animals became feral, while people died in droves in the fields. Nearly 200,000 villages are said to have disappeared from the medieval map. In Scotland, a standing stone commemorates a hamlet where
everyone but an older woman perished; she collected the corpses on a donkey cart and buried them herself in a nearby field. Near Ragusa (today’s Dubrovnik, in Croatia), weakened plague victims were eaten alive by wolves.
Ragusa at that time belonged to the Venetian empire. Venice itself, despite stringent health measures—vessel quarantines, the use of barren islands as burial grounds, and the enforcement of burials at five feet deep—suffered one of the worst outbreaks, with close to 75 percent fatalities. Entire noble families vanished, while every morning, cries of “Corpi morti!” (“Dead bodies! [Bring out your] Dead bodies!”) echoed from the building fronts and along the canals.
Eventually, the plague dissipated. Venice not only recovered but also entered its golden age. “Once did she hold the gorgeous East in fee / And was the safeguard of the West,” wrote Wordsworth in a panegyric to Venetian glories. At the city’s height in the 15th and 16th centuries, much of the commerce of central Europe flowed across the Alps to Venice—whence, transferred to galleys, it was carried down the Adriatic to far-off Constantinople and the Levant.
As a maritime empire trading with lands to the east, where plague always smoldered, Venice may have been the European city best prepared to fight its eventual return. Venetian public health measures became second to none. The first lazaretto in the lagoon had been established as early as 1423; the second one, Lazzaretto Nuovo, or “new lazaretto,” came into operation in 1468, primarily as a quarantine station. Its hospital, surrounded by high walls, ensured its being used during times of pandemic as a place where people went to die.
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