Satire: Believe in Vampires 1896

NOTE:

**This article is mostly vintage satire.**

Yes, satire existed back then. No it is not to be taken seriously. It is an interesting bit of satire, though and shows us a lot about public attitudes as folks in New England found out their grandparents superstitions. And it is notable as having the etching that you see posted a lot on various twitter and facebook groups, though there is a reason people rarely, if ever include the article text.

# BELIEVE IN VAMPIRES

Rhode Islanders Who Are Sure

That They Do Exist.

Instances Told of Where the Living

Have Been Attacked and Preyed

Upon by These Representatives

of an Unseen World.

{A MEMBER OF THE ANTI-VAMPIRE PARTY}

SODON, RI., Jan 26 – You will not find this place on any map. But if you leave the railway at Wickford Junction and follow the Ten Rod road westward through Exeter until you come to Robbers Corner, and then go south a mile or two over Purgatory road, you will come to Sodom.

The chances are that you won’t know Sodom when you see it. for even in the days of its highest prosperity its population was only about 19 or 20, and now it is a great deal less. There were once four or five houses here, but now there are nor nearly so many.

Like Swamptown City and Escoheag, and Noose Neck Hill and Usquepaug, and Skunk Hill and Exeter Hollow, and Gomorrah and many other once flourishing hamlets in southern Rhode Island, Sodom is a back number.

In spirit, however, of its present insignificance, Sodom may be called the geographical center of the vampire district of Rhode Island. Now a vampire, as everybody knows who has seen one, is a blood-sucking ghost - the soul of a dead person which quits the body by night to feed upon the blood of the living, especially of it’s relatives and dearest friends, it is has any.

When the vampire’s grave is opened the corpse is always found to be fresh and rosy from the blood which it has thus absorbed; otherwise it is not a genuine vampire.

There are several excellent ways of putting a stop to the vampire’s ravages. First, you may pour boiling water and vinegar on the grave. This remedy is generally sufficient for the milder forms of vampirism, but if more energetic measures are required it may be necessary to drive a stake through the body or to cut the head off, or take out the heart and liver and burn them and eat the ashes. This last precaution, as will be seen, should not be neglected.

The persons who become vampires are generally witches, wizards, suicides or persons who have come to violent ends, ot have been cursed by their parents or the church, and in Rhode Island those who have died of consumption. But any upright, well-meaning man is liable to turn into a vampire if an animal, especially a cat, leaps over his corpse or if a bird flies over it. That is said to be the reason why undertakers do not keep cats.

All for which, and more, may be found in that entertaining work, the “Encyclopedia Britannica,” and is here given only as a preface to the following chapter of belief in vampires which still obtains among the certain of the natives throughout southern Rhode Island. The foreign-born population do not cherish the belief. It is found only among some of the descendants of those who settled this part of the state in the 17th and 18th centuries.

And not only in the country places, “where the old plain men have rosy faces and the young fair maidens quiet eyes,” remote like Sodom from the outside world, but in the centers of population along the railway and along the shore you will meet plenty of men and women who take it as an insult if you speak lightly in their presence of the belief in vampires.

At lease that was the writer’s experience - he discovered that vampires should be discussed in a serious tone and without any elevation of the eyebrows.

“Are the folks around here rather intelligent?” he asked of a native who lives on the outskirts of Sodom.

“Well, fairish,” was the reply.

“And are they quiet religious?”

“Some be, and some are Seven Day.”

Although the Seventh Day Baptists, who are numerous in southern Rhode Island, are really very pious, and just as good citizens as you can find anywhere, yet in the popular mind their custom of praying on Saturday and working on Sunday takes them out of the category of “religious.”

Perhaps the frequent intermarriage of families in these back country districts may partially account for some of their characteristics.

“If they don’t marry each other there don’t be nobody else fo ‘em to marry,” said the Sodomite, “and they do say hereabout if a woman marries a man of her own name that all the bread she makes will cure the whooping cough. There many be something to it, for what I know. Leastwise I’ve heard tell on it many times, and some old women round here would you goudy if you said it was foolishness.”

To give “goudy” is about the as “ragooing” or “ripping up the back.”

“And then, too’ said the Sodomite, reflectively, "have lots of natural remedies that the doctors don’t know nothing’ about. For instance, when you are touched with the rheumatic, and feel kina mauger like, they say there aint nothing’ better than the bile angle-worms will all the juice is out, and then mix it with some hog’s lard or mutton taller ad rub it on to the jints. Unless I {?} it” - an expression, by the way, which the writer has not hears outside the vampire belt, and which means “unless I’m Mistaken” - “There do be a good many real cures of rheumatic with angle-worm juice.”

Slowly bur surely the conversation drifted to vampire. The smoldering interest in the subject has been revived by the recent publication of a newspaper syndicate article over the signature of a rather well-known writer, who borrowed the article almost word for word from an essay by George R. Stetson in the Anthropologist.

Since Mr Stetson made his investigation, some years ago, there has been no case of the Resurrection of a body for the sake of burning the heart and liver, the last instance being in March, 1892. A firm belief is not practiced is that no one has recently died of consumption who had surviving relatives afflicted with the disease.

For in Rhode Island no one becomes a vampire after death unless he has died of consumption. And not even them unless he has next of kin, or heirs and assigns who are consumptive. Thus, for the present, the vampire industry is stagnant.

It was not always so, and these pleasant hills and valleys are full of legends and traditions. This once busy and populous region is now but sparsely inhabited, and you can travel for miles through the “south county” without seeing a house.

There are plenty of ruins of mills and factories and homesteads, but they are about the only remnants of a former active industrial life. For a few hundred dollars you can buy a great deal more land here than you can attend to. The farms are not abandoned, they are only neglected.

But sportsmen are acquainted the game in the woods, and fishermen say that there are trout in the “south county” than anywhere else in New England. Hence in the spring and fall this is by no means a deserted country, even without the vampires.

The Sodomite was quite unable to give the writer any connected history of the theory and practice of vampirism in southern Rhode Island, but he was well stocked with authentic traditions on the subject, and here are a few of them:

About 100 years ago there lived two families on the western slope of Pine hill in Exeter. They were prosperous farmers for those days. Jonathan Brown and Ezekiel Nichols were the names of the fathers.

Jonathan’s daughter, Mehitable {?}, and Ezekiel’s son Isaiah, fell in love with each other and were betrothed. Before they could get married, however, Mehitable died of consumption. It nearly broke Isaiah’s heart, and he too fell victim of the disease.

One night, not long before his death, his mother heard a peculiar groan coming from his room, and what was her horror on entering to see Mehitable, who had turned vampire, sucking Isaiah’s blood. Caught red-handed, or rather red-mouthed, in the act, she could not deny it, but she gave the mother a half-piteous, half-reproachful look, and then went and sat on the mantelpiece. She said not a word, and when the mother came out of her swoon Mehitable had vanished.

But she had staled log enough to settle once and forever the disputed question of the existence of vampires.

“You see,” said the Sodomire, “them two young folks had probably been kissing each other a good deal, and Isaiah caught the disease from his sweetheart. Contagion, they call it, don’t they?”

{THE NATIVE OF SODOM}

There was once a man named Godlove Arnold, who lived on the southern shore of Yaweoo pond in South Kingstown. He was a notorious skeptic in regard to vampires, but by and by his wide died of consumption. He and his spouse had not always been on the best of terms, and after her death, for which Godlove did not grieve too long, he begun to look around for another partner.

But Mrs Arnold became a vampire and began to pay off some of her old scores against her recent husband. She made life a burden for the unhappy man. She was far more importunate as vampire than as wife.

She chased him one afternoon all the way to Bald hill, and finally he had to give in. They found his body about a week later on the hillside, and the expression on his face was something ghastly.

“Probably died of heart disease,” said the Sodomite, as he finished the story.

Over around Kteele hole and Goose Nest spring, in the Pork {?} hill district of North Kingstown, there once lived a man by the name of Isaac Harvey. It was a good many years ago, and they said Ike died of consumption. Mrs Harvey was rather glad of it, for he had seldom contributed anything but advice to her support. It was just like Ike to go into the vampire business after death and to turn his attention to Mrs Harvey.

He tormented her by night and by day, following her around in the shape of a ball of fire until she finally hit upon the happy thought of wearing a horseshoe around her neck. The horseshoe was rather heavy and cumbersome, but it was better than being singed by a ball of fire.

For this legend the Sodomite had not explanation.

Coming down to historic events, which are matter of record, and omitting a score or more of authentic cases within the memory of any middle-aged man now living, the most important vampire incident of recient years was the celebrated Brown case.

George T. Brown is an honest and industrious farmer and horse jockey who lives on the road going south from Exeter hill. He had lost two children by consumption - there’s no help for it,“ said the neighbors, "so long as his brother and sister prey on him.”

And they kept at Mr Brown until he as almost distracted. He didn’t believe in vampires, but at last he yielded to the entreaties of neighbors to have the bodies exhumed and the hearts and livers burned.
“But I want it done decently and in order,” he said, so he sent a young man over to see Dr Harold Metcalf of Wickford about it. Dr Metcalf, being graduate of Brown university and of Harvard medical school, and medical examiner of the district, was not at all prepossessed in favor of the vampire theory, and told the young man who came to see him about it that it was all a mistake. Bit the neighbors still kept at Mr Brown, worrying the life out of him with their importunities. So the young man was again sent to Dr Metcalf to beseech him in God’s name to come and perform an autopsy on the bodies.

In a moment of amiable weakness the doctor consented to go.

One afternoon in March, 1892, he went over to the Shrub Hill cemetery in Exeter, and there Mr Brown’s neighbors opened the graves of his two children. The doctor found the bodies in a perfectly natural state of decomposition and not fresh and rosy, as they should have been if the souls were vampires. In the hearts however, was a little blood and that was quite sufficient to corroborate the vampire theory in the minds of the neighbors. One old woman present was exultant. She knew they would find blood, and where should it have come from so long after death but from the bodies of the living?

So the hearts and livers which the doctor turned over the little assembly of neighbors were burned there in the cemetery.

But it did not save the life of Mr Brown’s son. He died not long after and since then two other members of the family have passed away with the same disease.

“It was all because the ashes were not taken care of” said the vampire experts.

Since them, however, the belief of the community in vampires has been rather wavering. A great many of the leading men in Exeter do not believe in the theory at all.

For instance, there is Hon Edward P Dutemple, state senator from this town, who is a good legislator and a still better blacksmith. He is too much of a politician to make enemies by discussing the subject, but his private opinion on the vampire question is known to all his friends.

Then there is the good elder Edwards, town clerk, librarian of the public library on Pine Hill, farmer and preacher. He is one of the most pronounced of the anti-vampirites. Among the laity, the hard-headed farmers of the town who work early and late coax a living from the reluctant soil, there are plenty who are outspoken in their disbelief in vampire.

If you walk with Reynolds Lillibridge, the successful farmer, gunner and trapper of Pine Hill, you will discover that he is much more interested in minks and otters and muskrats, and the trout in his fine pond, than in the vampires.

“When a man’s underground, he hasn’t anything more to do with anybody that’s above ground - that’s my theory,” he said.

{MRS HARVEY AND IKE}

“Still, I can understand how a man like Brown must have felt. When you are in trouble you will grab at straw, and when you are in a good deal of trouble you will grab at a whole bundle.”

The lonely telegraph operator in the station up on Pine hill is too busy looking after his wires to bother about vampires. And then, too, he has just brought a charming little wife there to share his solitude and his salary.

Mme Douglass, the lone clairvoyant and business medium, who lives on the Ten Rod road, hasn’t any doubt about the existence of vampires and lots of other things, seen and unseen.

When you take this community “full and by the way” or “by and large” you will find it pretty evenly divided on the vampire issue. But it is strongly republican and so the issue has not yet crept into politics.

Over the North Kingstown and up in West Greenwich, Coventry and Foster as well as in Hopkinton, Richmond and in South Kingstown, the vampire belief holds extensive sway. There have, however, been no recent resurrections of bodies of consumptives.

As to the origin of the belief there is no satisfactory explanation given. How could it have transplanted from the old world and found a lodgment only in Rhode Island, among an otherwise very intelligent and enterprising and wide-a-wake population, is a mystery. It is not an English superstition, and yet the settlers of this region were all English.

Mr De Jongh of Wickford, who has devoted some attention to the subject, is inclined to think that it comes from the old voodoo superstition, as there were formerly many negroes in Rhode Island.

It is to be hoped that with better sanitation and a closer observance of the rules of hygiene, consumption will gradually disappear and that the vampire will retire from business and leave the good folk of Rhode Island in peace and security.

### Print Info

* Believe in Vampires.
* Author Not Stated
* Boston Daily Globe 1872;
* Jan 27, 1896;
* pg. 5
* https://www.newspapers.com/clip/36895437/the-boston-globe/

### Citations

**APA** Unknown. (1896). Believe in Vampires. *Boston Daily Globe*, p. 5. Retrieved 10 April 2021, from https://www.newspapers.com/clip/36895437/the-boston-globe/.

**MLA** Unknown. "Believe In Vampires". *Boston Daily Globe*, 1896, p. 5, https://www.newspapers.com/clip/36895437/the-boston-globe/. Accessed 10 Apr 2021.

**Chicago** Unknown. 1896. "Believe In Vampires". *Boston Daily Globe*, , 1896. https://www.newspapers.com/clip/36895437/the-boston-globe/.

**Harvard** Unknown, 1896. Believe in Vampires. *Boston Daily Globe*, [online] p.5. Available at: <https://www.newspapers.com/clip/36895437/the-boston-globe/> [Accessed 10 April 2021].

**Vancouver** Unknown. Believe in Vampires. Boston Daily Globe [Internet]. 1896 [cited 10 April 2021];:5. Available from: https://www.newspapers.com/clip/36895437/the-boston-globe/