So reads the second entry in “Hampton History, copied from Johnathan Clark’s Journal”. This transcription, found in a scrapbook held by the Hampton Historical Society, is both shocking and bewildering. For what possible reason might a body be disinterred and burned?
While the report provides no further information about the incident, the most probable explanation is that John Dunham had been suspected of being a vampire, or “Vampyre”, in contemporary terms.
Beginning around the 1780s, New England was in the grip of a terrible plague which was then known as “consumption” and now as tuberculosis. While consumption had been around for centuries (at the beginning of the 19th century the disease accounted for 25 percent of deaths), it ravaged this area from the end of the 18th century right through the 19th and into the 20th century. The name “consumption” came from the way in which the disease progressed. Victims lost weight, strength, vitality and became cadaverous near the end, as if they were being “consumed” by someone or something.
The prevailing belief at the time for the cause of most disease was “miasma,” a noxious form of “bad air” emanating from rotting organic material, creating poisonous vapor or mist. Although there was ample opportunity for contact with “bad air” in colonial America, it did not explain all deaths, and survivors and relatives desperately looked for other causes.
According to folklorist Michael E. Bell, “Not willing to simply watch as, one after another, their family members died, some New Englanders resorted to an old folk remedy, who’s roots surely must rest in Europe. Called ‘Vampirism’ by outsiders (a term that may never have been used by those within the communities themselves) this remedy required exhuming the bodies of deceased relatives and checking them for ‘unnatural’ signs, such as ‘fresh’ blood in the heart. The implicit belief was that one of the relatives was not completely dead and was maintaining some semblance of a life by draining the vital forces from living relatives.”
The first recorded case of disinterment in this area involved the family of Isaac Johnson, a Hampton native, residing in Willington, Connecticut in June 1784. Two of Isaac’s children, Amos and Elizabeth, had recently died of consumption and a third was gravely ill. A “quack doctor, a foreigner,” as reported by Moses Holmes, directed that Johnson dig up and examine the bodies of two deceased family members. When evidence of living plants was found on the bodies, the doctor proclaimed this to be evidence of vampirism. While Johnson was unconvinced, the daughter was disinterred and her organs burned. The diagnosis was spread through the Connecticut Courant, under the leadership of co-publisher George Goodwin, and gained popular acceptance throughout the region. The reference to “a foreigner” may be significant, as the belief in vampirism was apparently established in the Hesse region of Germany early in the century, and Hessian prisoners of war were housed in Tolland, adjacent to Willington.
The practice did not end with the 18th century. In 1854, the family of Henry and Lucy Ray of Griswold, Connecticut, suffered the deaths of two adult sons, Lemuel and Elisha and Henry himself, all by “consumption.” When a third son, Henry Nelson Ray, was afflicted, the family disinterred and burned the two sons in the graveyard to combat the “disease.” The Ray family today is known as the Jewett City Vampires.
The most famous local case was that of Mercy Brown of Exeter, Rhode Island. As late as 1892, the belief and practice persisted. Widely documented at the time, four members of the family had perished from “consumption” over the course of a few years. Several bodies were exhumed by townspeople and a doctor. Mary Brown and her daughter Mary Olive were normally decomposed, but a daughter, Mercy, appeared to be unusually preserved and still had the tell-tale blood in her heart. This confirmed the diagnosis and her heart and liver were burned, and the ashes were mixed in a potion and given to her brother who was suffering from the disease. He unfortunately passed away two months later, however. The presence of a “news reporter” at the exhumation helped to spread the tale throughout the region.
With the development of the germ theory of disease in the late 19th century, most notably through the work of German Robert Koch and Frenchman Louis Pasteur, belief in both “miasma” and vampirism receded from popular understanding.
As regards John Dunham’s exhumation and burning on Hampton Hill, perhaps further research will reveal the true reason for this ultimate violation. Until then we can only speculate about the existence of a vampire in Hampton.
Mary Russell McMillen