Food for the Dead: On the Trail of New England Vampires

These stories of vampire legends and gruesome nineteenth-century practices is "a major contribution to the study of New England folk beliefs" (The Boston Globe).

For nineteenth-century New Englanders, "vampires" lurked behind tuberculosis. To try to rid their houses and communities from the scourge of the wasting disease, families sometimes relied on folk practices, including exhuming and consuming the bodies of the deceased. Folklorist Michael E. Bell spent twenty years pursuing stories of...