Food for the Dead
Subtitle: On the Trail of New England's Vampires
Publisher: Carroll & Graf
Published: October 10, 2001
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 256
ISBN-13: 9780786708994
Subjects: European history (ie other than Britain & Ireland); World history; History: World; History - U.S.; Europe; United Kingdom, Great Britain; History; Social History; United States - State & Local - General; History / United States / 19th Century; Europe - Great Britain - General
First sentence: I hated to admit, even to myself, that I was excited by the prospect of interviewing Lewis Everett Peck, an Exeter, Rhode Island, farmer and descendent of Mercy Brown, who was probably the last person exhumed as a vampire in America.
Description: "Close your eyes and imagine a vampire: Your mind's eye may conjure up Count Dracula with bared teeth and a shiny tuxedo. But, another kind of vampire was believed to live in rural New England long ago. Author and folklorist Michael E. Bell has spent twenty years pursuing this forgotten vampire tradition. His discoveries will surprise and enthrall skeptics, believers, and all readers of this engaging book.".

"Bell's odyssey began in 1981 when Rhode Islander Everett Peck told him a family story passed down for generations. In 1892, months after young Mercy Brown succumbed to tuberculosis, her body was exhumed from a local graveyard. Relatives cut out her heart, burned it on a nearby rock, and fed the ashes to her dying brother, hoping to cure him of the wasting disease. They feared that Mercy had become a vampire, sapping her sibling's vitality to provide sustenance for her own spectral existence.

Or, had she become a scapegoat, blamed for the baffling affliction ravaging her family?"--BOOK JACKET.