The "Demon Vampire" of Manchester, Vermont
How one woman became emblematic of the Great New England Vampire Panic.
In 1790, 21-year-old Rachel Harris Burton died of tuberculosis and was buried in Manchester, Vermont’s Factory Point Cemetery. Her final rest was short-lived.
Just one year prior, Rachel married Captain Isaac Burton—but she shortly fell ill with what was then called consumption, now known as tuberculosis. The disease was the number one cause of death in the Northeast United States at the time, and its monstrous effects slowly consumed (get it??) its victim over the course of several months or even years, causing a relentless bloody cough, unending high fever, and depletion of the physical body until it was almost skeletal. Folks back then didn’t realize the illness was airborne, so multiple members of the same family often became sick in quick succession. It was a deeply deadly and greatly feared disease—and of course, where there’s a lack of scientific understanding and an abundance of dread, superstition kicks in.
Captain Burton remarried the year after Rachel’s death, to 20-year-old Hulda Powel. But Hulda was quickly stricken with the same disease as Rachel, and that’s when townspeople became suspicious. Because tuberculosis presents a lot like being eaten alive, widely-known folklore tales prevailed.
“A strange infatuation took possession of the minds of the connections and friends of the family,” wrote Judge John S. Pettibone in his 1860 manuscript The Early History of Manchester. “They were induced to believe that if the vitals of the first wife could be consumed by being burned in a charcoal fire it would effect a cure of the sick second wife.”
And so, in February 1792—believing Rachel’s corpse to be reanimated and feeding off the soul and vitality of her replacement—the townspeople dug her up, removed her major organs, and burned them in front of a massive crowd, hoping that this would free Hulda.
“Such was the strange delusion that they disinterred the first wife who had been buried about three years,” Pettibone wrote. “They took out the liver, heart, and lungs, what remained of them, and burned them to ashes on the blacksmith's forge of Jacob Mead. Timothy Mead officiated at the altar in the sacrifice to the Demon Vampire who it was believed was still sucking the blood of the then living wife of Captain Burton. It was the month of February and good sleighing. Such was the excitement that from five hundred to one thousand people were present. This account was furnished me by an eye witness of the transaction.”
Despite these extreme efforts, Hulda died a year later, in 1793. Captain Burton went on to marry two more times.
In all the articles I’ve read about Rachel’s story, no one posits that perhaps Burton was poisoning his wives. He was described as a kind churchgoing man often referred to as “Deacon,” but we all know evil loves to hide behind an easy smile and pious ways. That said, it doesn’t seem likely that ol’ Deacon had nefarious aims, as both women showed clear signs of tuberculosis. But this is me viewing the facts through a modern scientific lens—it’s a bit galling that back then, the question never even came up.
It was more believable to people that a dead woman had become a folkloric creature feeding on the living than it was that a respected white male member of the community was doing some shady shit. (See also the predecessor to this craze, the 1692-1693 Salem Witch Trials.) These stories are always equal parts fascinating and infuriating to me, because they reveal how deeply steeped in the patriarchy this country was (and still is, frankly). Capable women were witches, and even death couldn’t absolve the rest of their perceived villainy.
The episode in Manchester, VT occurred at the beginning of a century-long period in New England marked by intense fear of vampires. So far, historians have found evidence of almost 100 bodies exhumed in the region, from the late 1700s through the 1800s. Scholars are still trying to explain why the panic began—they believe, as with Rachel’s case, that they’re tied to a desperate attempt to reason away the effects of the widespread tuberculosis outbreaks.
Rituals to break a vampire’s curse varied by region, and the expeditions ranged from small overnight excavations to massive public affairs—in Maine and Massachusetts, several communities simply exhumed and flipped the deceased face-down in their grave. Folks in Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Vermont took things one step further, burning the dead’s heart (some even considered inhaling the smoke to be a curative) in front of large gatherings. This excellent Smithsonian article dives deep into the panic and the theories behind all these regional differences.
The more history I dig up from my cemetery exploits, the more I realize how intrinsically tied we are to our collective past. What happened in Manchester is a blueprint for so many modern public movements—our academic understanding of the world may be more sharply-honed, but human psychology remains a blunt force object too often wielded without pause.