Vampires in Easton…Sure Why Not!

I was on a Spooky Walk yesterday with a dozen fourth grade girls and their mothers. We were standing on the stage at Queset Gardens, and I was doing my best pitching the numerous rather friendly ghost sightings in North Easton when one perky fan of the Twilight series asked the inevitable question. “Were there any vampires in Easton?”

I collect Easton ghost stories and don’t believe most of them. They are a wonderful mix of folklore and poor observation and I reserve the right to change them when I tell them to young audiences. A bloody minded fifth grader once told me the story of an abusive father whose daughter pushed him off the Bridge Street bridge in front of a train one Halloween night. I’ve always found the real life part of the story unpleasant to tell to kids-yesterday a “mean man” was pushed off the bridge by an avenging “big dog.” You have to tell the story because the tagline is too good to pass up-“And you can still hear the whistle of the ghost train if you stand on the bridge on Halloween night.” And you can-every time a train pulls into Stoughton Station.

I was reluctant to just make up a vampire story on the spo, but Easton should have vampires. Sadly they wouldn’t look like the hunky or seductive actors that play vampires in movies and TV today. Why should we have vampires? We’ve had just about everything else: ghosts, the devil and his imps, witches, and in the 20^th century Bigfoot and Mothman. I can’t speak for modern times, but superstition ran rampant in 19^th century rural New England and vampires were part of that tradition. Parts of Easton were so “rural” that belief in witches and charms persisted almost to 1900.

Before Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Bela Lugosi’s film version in 1932, 18^th century European peasants believed vampires looked like this fellow:

This is the great Max Shrek from 1922’s Nosferatu, the scariest vampire movie ever, and one of the few silent films that can still be viewed with real interest today. Note the long fingernails, sunken chest, and paralyzed facial expression. Those European peasants thought that vampires were real corpses come back to suck the life from the dead.

19^th century New England saw an outbreak of similar vampire belief. Populations had reached the size where certain endemic diseases of crowding and poor sanitation became common. Here in Easton wells too close to outhouses killed many with typhoid and other intestinal diseases. The most mysterious of these diseases before the discovery of germ theory was tuberculosis also called phthisis or consumption. Spread by contaminated milk and mucous from the lungs of infected people, it was a difficult disease to diagnosis because it could attack so many parts of the body.

In many families a child would come down with the disease, waste away, die, and then a sibling would begin to show the same symptoms. It was easy for the superstition to believe that the first child had come back from the dead to draw the life out of another.

If you want to know what happened next you can read several sensationalized accounts or you can download from the internet “Bioarcheological and Biocultural Evidence for the New England Vampire Folk Belief” by Paul S. Sledzik and Nicholas Bellantoni which was published in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology in 1994. The article gives the chilling story of a corpse that was mutilated after death to stop an outbreak of vampirism. It’s a good read and indicates that there were at least a dozen similar cases mostly in Rhode Island.

Some of these cases made the papers, but it seems that only the undereducated really believed in vampires while the thoroughly modern folks of the time thought it was a ridiculous superstition. It’s likely that grave digging and corpse mutilation was often carried out in secret and thus, the real extent of the vampire hysteria may never be known.

So were there vampires in Easton? All the signs are here-only the hard evidence of skull and bones is lacking. Town records show that consumption was just as much a scourge here as anywhere else. We had superstitious and uneducated people in the rural parts of town who were not bound by rational thought. For example, in 18^th century Easton a mad woman was locked in her room with the windows nailed shut, had her head shaved and mustard plasters applied to drive out whatever (devils?) was making her crazy, and that was done by “doctor!” Easton has a record setting number of cemeteries and they were certainly not well watched in the old days. In 1862, the body of a murdered girl was exhumed in secret from one of the largest cemeteries in town and disappeared without a trace. So shall we say “Anything is possible?”

The good news is that there has never been a hint of werewolves in Easton! On the other hand, one of the witches allegedly could turn into a cat, and reports of the Big Black Cat of Poquanticut continue to this day.