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"Close your eyes and imagine a vampire: Your mind's eye may conjure up Count Dracula with bared teeth and a shiny tuxedo. But, another kind of vampire was believed to live in rural New England long ago. Author and folklorist Michael E. Bell has spent twenty years pursuing this forgotten vampire tradition. His discoveries will surprise and enthrall skeptics, believers, and all readers of this engaging book." "Bell's odyssey began in 1981 when Rhode Islander Everett Peck told him a family story passed down for generations. In 1892, months after young Mercy Brown succumbed to tuberculosis, her body was exhumed from a local graveyard. Relatives cut out her heart, burned it on a nearby rock, and fed the ashes to her dying brother, hoping to cure him of the wasting disease. They feared that Mercy had become a vampire, sapping her sibling's vitality to provide sustenance for her own spectral existence. Or, had she become a scapegoat, blamed for the baffling affliction ravaging her family?"--BOOK JACKET.

Tuberculosis --- Diseases and history. --- Folklore --- Vampires --- Lesbian vampires --- Dead --- Monsters --- Folk beliefs --- Folk-lore --- Traditions --- Ethnology --- Manners and customs --- Material culture --- Mythology --- Oral tradition --- Storytelling --- Diseases --- History and diseases --- History --- Consumption (Disease) --- Lungs --- Phthisis --- Pulmonary tuberculosis --- TB (Disease) --- Chest --- Mycobacterial diseases --- Mycobacterium tuberculosis --- History. --- Influence on history --- New England