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.