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When we let our minds race back to the early New England settlements of the late 17th century, and atrocities committed during this time, we usually imagine the famous Salem’s Witch trials.
During those dark times in the states history, the belief in and fear of all manner of creatures was high.
Almost 200 years after, the last suppose witch was hanged, the fertile ground of Connecticut, cultivated in blood and superstition, burgeoned a new preternatural terror: The Vampire Epidemic of 17th and 18th hundreds.
An outbreak of consumption, what is modernly called tuberculosis, besieged the upper Eastern coast of the United Sates. Whole families were decimated within weeks and townships brought to ruins in the wake of such devastating darkness.
A populace held in the grip of terror, fell back on arcane assumptions and, remembering old world legends, blamed a vampire for the spread of the plague. So began an unrelenting and systematical exhumation, and beheading, of hundreds of recently interred bodies.
Anthropologist, scientists and forensic specialist have taken, in contemporary times, a particular interest in the phenomenon. Specially with in the borders of the Jewett City Cemetery and the case of Mercy Brown; a small girl who perished from the ravages of tuberculosis. She was said to have haunted and passed on the disease to the rest of her kin. One by one her family succumbed to the malady, and fell to death’s hand. Mercy’s body was disentombed, found to be in a perfect un-corpsefied state and put to the torch.
Like the little Brown girl, rumors of dozen of such cases flooded the primitive media during those bewildering times.
The American’s imported the European custom of a vampire burial. Some cadavers were stabbed through the chest with an iron or wooden rod; others were decapitated and their respective heads reburied, away from the neck, close to the buttocks or the feet; and those, that were already showing any of the numerous signs of vampiric tendencies, were torched until their bones turned to ashes.
Excerpt: The Wraith of The Obelisk- L.J. Gomez.
Hello, My name is Pamela Brown and the photo of the grave of Mercy Brown that you are using is mine and is covered by Copyright protection. Please take it off of your blog since you are using this photo without my permission. Thank you!
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