Food for the Dead: On the Trail of New England's Vampires - Softcover

Bell, Michael E.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0786710497 ISBN 13: 9780786710492

Publisher: Basic Books, 2002

Synopsis

Forget Bela Lugosi's Count Dracula. In nineteenth-century New England another sort of vampire was relentlessly ravishing the populace, or so it was believed by many rural communities suffering the plague of tuberculosis. Indeed, as this fascinating book shows, the vampire of folk superstition figures significantly in the attempt of early Americans to reasonably explain and vanquish the dreaded affliction then known as consumption. In gripping narrative detail, folklorist Michael E. Bell reconstructs a distant world, where on March 17, 1892, three corpses were exhumed from a Rhode Island cemetery. One of them, Mercy Brown, who had succumbed to consumption, appeared to have turned over in her grave. Mercy's family cut out her heart, which still held clots of blood, burned it on a nearby rock, and fed the ashes to her ailing brother. To Mercy's community she had become a vampire living a spectral existence and consuming the vitality of her siblings. From documents written as early as 1790 to a recent conversation with a descendant of Mercy Brown, Bell investigates twenty cases in which the vampiric dead were exhumed to save the ailing living. He also explores a widespread folk tradition that has survived generations, as ordinary people today strive to battle extraordinary diseases like Ebola or AIDS with a deeply rooted belief in their power to heal themselves. "Bell's absorbing account is ... a major contribution to the study of New England folk beliefs."—Boston Globe "Filled with ghostly tales, glowing corpses, rearranged bones, visits to hidden graveyards.... This is a marvelous book."—Providence Journal

About this title

About the Author

MICHAEL E. BELL was the consulting folklorist at the Rhode Island Historical Preservation & Heritage Commission in Providence. He has served as a scholar or consultant on numerous projects for the media, particularly those concerned with folklore, folk art, oral history, and humanities programs for young adults. He splits his time between Pawtuxet Village, Rhode Island and McKinney, Texas.

From Publishers Weekly

The "vampire" threat here has little in common with your garden-variety Dracula, the fanged menace of Transylvania; these quiet apparitions are in some ways more macabre. In historical New England, consumption claimed thousands of lives. When several family members fell in quick succession, some suspected interference from the grave the "dead" extending their own lives by claiming those of others. Corpses were disinterred. Hearts were extracted and, if found to contain "living," or fresh, blood, subjected to an elaborate cremation and exorcism. Bell, a folklorist, pursues this grisly tradition one that still survives in legend throughout the Eastern seaboard and records his observations here. Despite tantalizing chapter headings ("I am Waiting and Watching for You," "Ghoulish, Wolfish Shapes"), Bell strives laudably for responsible scholarship, and the book is as much a critique of myth transmission as it is a tale of one man's vampire hunt. He goes to great lengths to forestall and undo exaggerations of his findings, advocating a very qualified and moderate use of the word "vampire" and transcribing oral interviews so painstakingly they can be difficult to read. But Bell himself is a talented stylist, and academics working in folklore and myth will find his study a refreshing departure from the dry fieldwork ordinarily on offer.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Basic Books
• Publication date: 2002
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0786710497
• ISBN 13: 9780786710492
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 352