Lifeless as a younger lady, the household of Ruth Ellen Rose believed her to be one of many undead, a vampire rising from her grave each night time to feed on her siblings, slowly dying of the identical illness she did. To cease this, they determined to dig her physique up and carve her coronary heart out.Â
Within the hushed woodlands and misted graveyards of Nineteenth-century New England, terror didn’t all the time arrive within the night time — typically it crept in via the sickroom window, carried on the breath of a losing cough. One such unlucky to fall sufferer to this grim custom was Ruth Ellen Rose, a 15-year-old lady whose quick, tragic life and eerie afterlife have lingered in Rhode Island folklore ever since.
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Born in 1859 in Exeter, Rhode Island, Ruth Ellen Rose lived — and died — within the heartland of America’s so-called Vampire Panic. New England, although a panorama of tidy farmsteads and Puritan steeples, harbored a persistent, unshakable concern: that the lifeless might rise from their graves, not in bodily type, however as a religious parasite, draining the life from their surviving kin. Consumption, what we now know as tuberculosis, ravaged households so commonly that superstitions took root like cussed weeds.
Her Mom was Mary Taylor from the Dixon and Peckham household, however she died in 1866. Her father, William G. Rose was a farmer, mill superintendent, and first president of the Exeter Grange. He was additionally a lieutenant colonel within the Rhode Island militia. He remarried to Mary Ann Griswold Morrarty. Her former husband had been from the Tillinghast household, and this may probably be one of many issues that sealed Ruth’s destiny.Â
Ruth’s sickness was sluggish and torturous and got here in waves. By 1874, at simply 15, she succumbed to the losing illness. However demise, within the fearful lore of Exeter, was not all the time an ending.
A Household Cursed by Blood
Not lengthy after Ruth’s demise her siblings started to indicate the telltale indicators of consumption. She had loads of them, and though a lot of them lived lengthy lives, there have been some who died earlier. Like Emma Tillinghast, her step sister who died of consumption, though her demise is most frequently famous to be in 1870 when she was 16. This epidemic additionally took the lives of their toddler little brothers Horace and Edwin. In most paperwork, Ruth just isn’t even listed within the flock of youngsters so the main points of the story typically turn out to be misplaced to legends.
And rumors swirled. William Rose, Ruth’s father, was not only a grieving mother or father. Whispers claimed he dabbled in Druid rituals, darkish rites handed down from the Previous World. No less than that’s how the tales about him have advanced till right now. Native legend nonetheless speaks of an historic stone altar, hidden within the woods of Peace Dale, upon which he was mentioned to carry out secret sacrifices to halt the unfold of the mysterious sickness plaguing his bloodline.
Maybe it was superstition, or maybe it was grief twisted into insanity, however that very same 12 months, William disinterred his daughter’s physique. He lower out Ruth’s coronary heart himself and consigned it to the flames in an try and cease the curse of the undead. The ash was scattered, a determined and macabre treatment meant to sever the supernatural hyperlink between the lifeless and the dying.
A Legacy of Unearthed Daughters
Ruth’s tragic finish was not with out precedent. The story takes a darker flip when one examines her stepmother’s lineage. Mary, her stepmother, was once a Tillinghast and this household got here with tales of vampires. Stukely Tillinghast, whose personal daughter, Sarah Tillinghast, had perished of consumption many years earlier — and was equally suspected of preying on her household from past the grave. The echoes of that outdated curse appeared to go via generations like a genetic sickness, or maybe, within the eyes of these fearful villagers, a vampiric inheritance.
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Thus, it wasn’t merely illness that haunted these households, however their very own shared historical past, the place graves had been by no means really at relaxation and tragedy was anticipated to name twice.
An Unquiet Grave
Right now, Ruth Ellen Rose lies in an unmarked grave in South Kingstown Historic Cemetery #11, colloquially referred to as Rose’s Lot. Or maybe she’s not there in any respect, as her grave has by no means been discovered. Her father and stepmother’s headstones stay standing, weathered however intact, whereas Ruth’s resting place is conspicuously absent of any enduring marker. Maybe it was misplaced to time — or maybe intentionally left anonymous to disclaim the stressed lifeless a tether to this world.
The land itself retains a peculiar unease. Locals have spoken of unusual happenings within the overgrown cemetery — flickering lights, phantom footsteps, and the sound of a distant, rasping cough when nobody else is close to. Some say that Ruth’s spirit lingers nonetheless, denied peace by the violence of her finish and the stain of her household’s concern.
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References:
https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/6505849/william-greene-rose
