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The New England Vampire Panic
Halloween16 min

The New England Vampire Panic

For more than a century in rural New England, a string of deaths from consumption convinced families that something was feeding on the living. They didn't wait for answers. They grabbed shovels and went digging.

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Show notes

Rural New England families exhumed around eighty deceased relatives between seventeen eighty-four and eighteen ninety-two.

Tuberculosis wiped out nearly one in four northeastern adults by eighteen hundred, mimicking slow predatory feeding.

Frozen winter soil delayed corpse decay, tricking families into believing relatives were still alive beneath the earth.

Relatives burned exhumed organs and fed the ashes to bedridden siblings as a folk cure.

Archaeologists confirmed the practice after finding a skeleton rearranged in a skull-and-crossbones pattern.

In this episode
  1. 01Intro1 min
  2. 02The Forgotten Grave Robbers of New England2 min
  3. 03The Myth of the Midnight Monster3 min
  4. 04The Biology of Consumption and Cold Earth4 min
  5. 05Grave Truths and Bone Records3 min
  6. 06A Rational Response to an Invisible Plague3 min
  7. 07Outro1 min
Sources
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