An Explanation of the Rhode Island Vampire
The
term vampire conjures various images in different minds, however the following
is a clarification on the matter as it pertains to Rhode Island lore. The old
Rhode Island vampire was often a young girl, who was the first to die from an
outbreak of a contagious disease. Survivors of the outbreak often distraught at
watching their families die around them were desperate for a cure. Since
science could not offer any cure at that time, many turned to folk tales and
remedies.
One folktale surrounding
infectious diseases involved the idea that the first deceased’s soul was
feeding off of loved ones vital energy; this was the vampire myth. These visits
were predominantly nocturnal occurring during dreams, when the visited person
was usually delusional from fever or fear of death. During these encounters,
many reported that the vampire was “sitting on their chest” or “sucking the
wind from them”. These are also the same sensations of the late stages of
tuberculosis and pneumonia. According to the vampire myth, the deceased soul
was sucking the life out of the still living family and friends. Since life is
so closely related to blood, often times the two words where used
interchangeably. In the Rhode Island vampire cases, there is no legends
pertaining to the vampires physically leaving their graves to literally suck
blood from victims, most of the legends point towards a ghost contributing to the
illness of late loved ones. The vampire folk tale was an explanation as to the
spread of disease, for these rural farmers since there was no knowledge of
germs.
One remedy for laying the
vampires soul to rest, was to exhume the body and “disrupt” it in some way.
This disrupting of the alleged vampire's body involved dismemberment in some
fashion, in other words making sure the person is dead. Often times, the bodies
of vampires had reportedly not decayed, this is probably due to fact that the
bodies been buried only weeks before the exhumation.