125 - The New England Vampire Panic

The Nonsense Bazaar

We're takin' it a bit easy this week and talking about something close to home: vampires! Specifically, the so-called "New England Vampire Panic" of the 1800s. Before vampires were sexy, they were something else entirely: the reanimated corpses of your friends and family who preyed upon the living and threatened to pull entire communities down into the grave with them. In New England, and very especially in Rhode Island, this type of vampire haunted small villages all the way until the very end of the 1800's. Meaning that even at the time of the "last New England vampire," Mercy Brown, it was played for laughs in the papers. The truth though is that the blood-sucking living dead has always represented the fears that people deal with at any given time, and the macabre rites and rituals to combat the vampires represent our species-wide drive to do something, anything, to keep the illusion of control, even when we know it's only an illusion.
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