Rising out of coffins and decaying corpses, vines was an area superstition that marked a vampire grave of those that had died of consumption. This was the case of younger Annie Dennett, who was thought to feed on her ailing father.
Within the shadowy folds of early Nineteenth-century New England, the place superstition clung stubbornly to the sides of even probably the most respectable communities, tales of vampires didn’t all the time come cloaked in international thriller. Typically, they arrive in your neighbor’s doorstep. Or within the household crypt. Or — as within the case of poor Annie Dennett — within the quiet graveyards of rural New Hampshire.
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Whereas names like Mercy Brown have gained infamy for his or her position in America’s vampire panic, Annie Dennett’s story is a extra obscure, although no much less fascinating, chapter of this eerie historical past. For a few years, the Reverend who wrote it down, referred to as her Janey Dennit and he or she was for some time, fairly a thriller. And what makes it significantly noteworthy is the presence of a well-respected minister who not solely witnessed her exhumation however left behind a haunting report of the occasion.
Consumption, Worry, and Desperation
Annies household had been in New England for generations when her ancestors settled in New Hampshire within the mid 1600s. By their commerce as blacksmith, their household was at one level one of many richest in Portsmouth.
She grew up in a home full of siblings as her mother and father had eight kids, on the excessive floor within the woods. Her father, Moses, wished to make his personal method and had moved from Portsmouth to Barnstead, working as a tailor.
Like many younger individuals of her time, Annie Dennett succumbed to tuberculosis — the dreaded “consumption” — at simply 21 years previous in 1807. Tuberculosis was not merely a illness again then; it was an enigma that hollowed out households and devastated whole communities, slowly claiming its victims with a losing grip that nobody might appear to cease.
Confronted with its horrors, it’s no marvel that determined households typically turned to folklore for solutions. The prevailing perception, significantly in rural components of New England, held {that a} deceased relative might, by means of some malevolent autopsy affect, drain the life from the residing. Rumors began to go round that she might be one of many undead. That evening, she rose from her grave and returned to her household to feed on them. This was one thing that they believed might be the reason for the consumption sickness. And when the household began to indicate signs of getting it as nicely, it was additionally believed that the our bodies of the undead held the remedy.
And when drugs failed, spades got here out.
The Vampire Hunt in Plain Sight
What makes Annie Dennett’s case particularly intriguing is its documentation by a person of the material. Enoch Hayes Place, a Freewill Baptist minister from Vermont, occurred to be on the town when Annie’s household made the grim choice to exhume her physique in 1810, three years after Annie was lifeless and buried.
Her father, Moses Dennett, was gravely in poor health with tuberculosis, and within the absence of a remedy, the household clung to the determined hope that digging up Annie’s stays would possibly reveal indicators of vampiric affect — a coronary heart nonetheless filled with blood, maybe, or some unnatural preservation of flesh.
Enoch Hayes Place attended the exhumation and recorded the scene in his diary. His phrases seize each the grim spectacle and the uneasy mixing of spiritual authority with old-world superstition:
“They opened the grave and it was a Solemn Sight certainly. A younger Brother by the identify of Adams examined the mouldy Specticle, however discovered nothing as they Supposed they Ought to…. There was however a little bit left besides bones.”
In contrast to a few of the extra notorious exhumations of the period, Annie Dennett’s disinterment was anticlimactic. No blood-filled coronary heart. No unnatural preservation. Only a younger girl’s decayed stays, bones already claimed by the earth. It was famous that there have been vines rising within the coffin that have been mentioned in a number of of the exhumations of the believed vampiric graves.
The Vampiric Vines
One of many inform story indicators of vampirism was a physique not decaying and bodily fluids like blood nonetheless discovered within the organs. One other signal of vampirism right here was vines rising on the physique.
In 1784, there was a newspaper article from Connecticut a couple of international quack physician that mentioned that these vines or sprouts rising on the physique would even be a remedy to burn and devour, usually along with different organs.
This we additionally see with the case in Willington of two our bodies in relation to a Mr. Isaac Johnson. There was additionally a case in Dummerston, Vermont and upstate New York.
It was additionally a superstition that mentioned when a vine was rising from a coffing to the following (most frequently one other member of the family), one other one would die.The one option to break the curse was to interrupt the vine and dig up the physique to burn their vitals.
The ritual, meant to avoid wasting her ailing father, did nothing. He would, like so many others, ultimately succumb to tuberculosis.
However the actual fact that the ritual occurred, and that it was recorded by a minister, speaks volumes concerning the cultural grip these beliefs held even in “enlightened” New England. Science and folklore shared uneasy quarters in early America, and when grief met concern, it usually leaned towards the previous methods.
A Forgotten Chapter in New England’s Vampire Lore
Whereas Mercy Brown’s story would seize worldwide consideration a long time later, Annie Dennett stays largely forgotten — a footnote in folklore research, although no much less telling. Her story illustrates that these rituals weren’t remoted anomalies however a part of a broader, if uneasy, social customized. The concern of consumption and its lethal march by means of households usually blurred the road between superstition and religion.
And maybe, most chillingly, it reveals how even ministers weren’t proof against the lure of previous beliefs when confronted with demise’s relentless hand.
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References:
Vampires – American Myths, Legends, and Tall Tales: An Encyclopedia of American Folklore
http://apps.vampiresgrasp.com/Weblog/?d=01/2010
