[dust jacket flap]      HAS MICHAEL E. BELL DISCOVERED THE REMNANTS OF A GHOULISH SUPERSTITION OR A REASONED ATTEMPT TO VANQUISH A TERRIBLE PLAGUE?

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 Michel 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. For Bell, it all began in 1981 when rural Rhode Islander Everett Peck related a story passed down through generations of his family. 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 spectral existence. Or, had she become a scapegoat, blamed for the baffling affliction ravaging her family. While such writers as H.P. Lovecraft, Henry David Thoreau, and Amy Lowell drew on portions of the tradition in their writings, Bell captures this tale in its entirety for the first time. He takes readers on the road with him, visiting legend trippers and outspoken skeptics, age-old graveyards and small town museums. With humor, insight, and sympathy, he uncovers story upon story of dying men, women, and children who believed they were food for the dead‹the source of life after death for their vampire kin. Bell introduces us to ordinary people confronted with an extraordinary illness that pre-modern medicine could neither explain nor cure. Bell also makes comparisons to seemingly inexplicable forces in our own midst, like Ebola, mad cow, and AIDS, showing that while times have changed, our need fir answers has not. He shows that our vampire-slaying ancestors battled disease with the most potent tool humankind possesses‹an instinctual belief in their power to heal themselves, aided by their own folk customs. MICHAEL E. BELL has been the Consulting Folklorist for the Rhode Island Historical Preservation & Heritage Commission since 1980. He has a Phd. in folklore from Indiana University, Bloomington, and his recent studies deal with maritime traditions and the magical black cat bone. He lives in Pawtuxet Village, Rhode Island.

[back cover]      JOIN MICHAEL E. BELL IN HIS DISCOVERY OF A STARTLING CUSTOM

"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 descendant of Mercy Brown, whom I would soon discover probably was the last person exhumed as a vampire in America. I had been a folklorist for more than a decade and had hundreds of interviews under my belt, but no one had ever told me a vampire story based on personal experience. Of course, like most modern Americans, I have a familiar, comfortable relationship with vampires. But these are fictional vampires. Their existence requires us to suspend our disbelief, whether we're watching a movie, reading a book, or looking at an ad for beer or batteries. Everett was going to tell me about a vampire who actually existed--a kin relation, no less--not some cardboard cutout, B-movie actor, or figment of an author's imagination."

Courtesy of Carroll & Graf Publishers