Forty Whacks: A Visit To The Lizzie Borden House

Lizzie Borden is Fall River's most famous resident, and let that one sink in for a second.

Marshfield's most famous resident is Daniel Webster. The village of Monponsett has the "Kilroy was here" guy. Ruth Wakefield rules Whiman's history for inventing the Toll House Cookie. Frances Ford Seymour was Henry Fonda's wife, Jane Fonda's mother, and a Fairhaven High School graduate.

Myles Standish (or perhaps Joe Perry) is the most famous person from my hometown of Duxbury. He killed more people than any Borden did, but he also had a job where killing was sort of expected of him.

Lizzie Borden, if you believe the Hype, did her dirt by her lonesome, and pretty much for personal reasons. She didn't use the typical Angel Of Death poisoning motif, no. She got her hands dirty.

Lizzie Borden is famous for the alleged axe murders of her parents. It is a crime that has transcended time, and even has a nursery rhyme attached to it.

Seeing as Fall River became famous as the town with the worst crime rate in Massachusetts, with a pile of different nationalities killing/assaulting/raping each other, it's kind of funny that the tone was set by a blue-blood white girl from that era when everyone walked around all herky-jerky like a Charlie Chaplin film or Babe Ruth highlights.

Fall River has always been a little bit ugly ever since.

Special rates for serial killers and patricide proponents...

It all started on a nice street in Fall River, directly across from a brand-spankin' new St. Anne's church.

Kids will be kids, and Lizzie was just like lots of spoiled rich ones. Lizzie and her sister had a rich father (Andrew) and a new stepmother. There were some money issues with the miser father, and the kids hated the stepmother, Abby. Lizzie referred to her stepmom as "Mrs. Borden."

At 9 AM on 8/4/1892, everyone was all right. By 11 or so, the Borden sisters were orphaned.

Abby got done up first. Her attacker was facing her, and hit her right in the face with an axe. She fell, the attacker pinned her down, and Abby took 18 more axe shots to the back of the head. Andrew, who was sleeping, took 11 shots, including one that split his eye.

The murders were remarkably brutal and bloody, although the "forty whacks" thing is an embellishment. Of course, when you're talking "axe wounds to the dome," the numbers are merely academic and matter only to coroners and nursery rhyme writers. Very few people are going to say "Bah, she only took 19 axe strikes to the head, not 40. What a lightweight!"

S'up?

It looked just like that, except it was more bloody, less blurry, and Chloe Sevigny wasn't there. No, I don't know what Chloe was doing in Fall River. She has been linked romantically to Duxbury philanthropist Stephen Bowden before, but we can find no confirmation of that story and it may be apocryphal.

Lizzie looked shady almost right away. A maid put her upstairs with the stepmom's body at the time of her murder. Lizzie found her father's body, perhaps by looking under her axe. This was 122 years before that crime scene investigator show with LL Cool J, so forensic investigation was piss-poor during this time- despite this being an era when Sherlock Holmes was popular.

Lizzie was too calm, gave the 5-0 many contradictory answers, and she was caught burning a dress on the stove after the murders. She was shown to have been seeking to purchase poison before the murders. The attorney trying her later sat on the US Supreme Court, but Lizzie handled him, too.

About 100 years before the term "OJ jury" was coined to describe a dozen stupid jurors, Lizzie Borden found an OJ jury. As guilty as Lizzie looked, there was little forensic evidence standing against her. She was acquitted of the murders, after the jury had deliberated for only 90 minutes.

"Yeah, I'm a backdoor mannnnnn..."

Fall River wanted nothing to do with her, even after she was Not Guiltied. She bought a new house, changed her name to Lizbeth and set about spending her share of Daddys loot (Andrew Borden was worth whatever 7 million dollars was worth back then). She threw lavish parties that many contemporary celebrities attended.

The Lizzard may have even snagged herself some celebrity skin, as rumors of an affair between her and actress Nance O'Neill still get kicked around. There are some interesting letters between the two, although NON went strictly dickly with her 1916 marriage. Borden lived and died as a spinster, albeit a well-off one.

Lesbian or not, I bet Nance slept with one eye open at the Maplecroft house that Borden moved to after the trial.

Other than a shoplifting incident that didn't result in an arrest, Borden lived the rest of her life quietly. She patronized the arts, left a fortune for the Animal Rescue League, and didn't, say, hack anyone (else) to death with an axe.

A black cat... crossing our path... at Lizzie Borden's House... on October 13th

Lizzie got a nursery rhyme ascribed to her for the rest of History. I was unaware of there being more than one version, but there seem to be three.

From Wikipedia

Lizzie Borden took an ax
And gave her mother forty whacks.
When she saw what she had done,
She gave her father forty-one.

Also

Lizzie Borden took an axe
Gave her mother forty whacks,
Then she hid behind the door,
And gave her father forty more.

Also

Lizzie Borden took an axe
and gave her mother forty whacks,
when the job was finally done
gave her father forty one


Remember, kids... Mom got 18 or 19, Dad got 11. Even combined, no one got 40 whacks... except the lady who runs the B&B there now, of course....

Lizzie got pneumonia, and died in like 1921 or something. Plenty of good seats were left at her funeral. She was buried next to her estranged sister.

She was a force of nature, a murderess during a time when women were supposed to be timid. She was a wealthy woman, but ostracized by the local well-to-do. She was a patron of the arts, a lover of animals, and only Paul Bunyan- maybe- is more famous for swinging an axe.

Some of the better theories:

- Fugue State Lizzie, who was Miss Borden operating under a Dissociative Disorder featuring reversible amnesia.

- Lesbian Lizzie, caught in the act by Stepmomma while slappin' hips with Bridget Sullivan. Stepmom was less than understanding, so Lizzie brained her with the first heavy item she found, and then finished her off with an axe. She confessed this crime to Dad, who also reacted in an axe-worthy manner.

- Perfectly Reasonable Lizzie, daughter of a miser millionaire who refused to put indoor plumbing into the house.

- Sullivan, the Borden's maid, confessed to helping Lizzie by changing her testimony. Sullivan is also listed as a suspect. She married a man later, so she was bisexual at best and abused help at worst in this scenario.

- William Borden, an illegitimate son, may have killed him after an extortion bid failed.

- Emma Borden, Lizzie's sister, kills for the same cash Lizzie scored. She established an alibi in Fairhaven, snuck back into Fall River at just the time when both parents were napping, killed both parents, and then galloped back to Fairhaven ahead of the telegram man with the bad news. Emma inherited a pile o' money after the deaths, and scrutiny fell upon her more oddball sister.

- John Morse, Lizzie's uncle. An infrequent guest at best, he arrived in town one night before the murders.

- A guy named "Manny."

- OK, I just made Manny up.

Bad Axe, Michigan deserves a franchise, as does the lesser known town of Patricide, Utah.

Lizzie is long gone, but you can still check out her spot. The Lizzie Borden Bed & Breakfast is just the place to take Mom and Dad when you see the nursing home bills. Hell, bring your disaffected goth teen daughter, she might get into History.

They also have tours. As the sign says, they run from 11 AM to 3 PM. I think it was $17 to get in, I may have it confused with nearby Battleship Cove, which I was also too cheap to pay for.

I went to the Cove back when I was teaching, with a bunch of my ghetto landlubber kids. It does rule, but it doesn't fit into this story, so we'll come back to it later.

Battle Cove is part of Free Family Fun Days or whatever that program we wrote about is. We'll check it out then. Two adult admissions to Battleship Cove would be worth more than Cranberry County Magazine is currently worth, although we may rally between now and Thanksgiving.

I don't think that the Lizzie Borden B&B is part of the Free Family Fun Days.

Of course we looked for ghosts. The B&B is rumored to be haunted, and it does have an eerie vibe about it. A lot of blood spilled in that house, and they even have the horror-movie-requisite scary ass daughter.

The Borden website does have Ghost Cams, but I was already on the grounds. Granted, I was too cheap to go in, and I don't work for the newspaper that my only press pass is from anymore.

So, being 6'5" or so, I just walked by the rooms, stretched out my big geek arm, and fired a few shots into whatever windows I could reach. I was hoping to sneak up on the ghosts.

Yeah, it worked about as well as you'd think it would. Don't say that I didn't try. I just didn't try for $34 worth.

Nothing to see here, let's move along...

The scene of a double axe murder is a funny place to put a B&B. I wonder what else is out there? Is there a Jeffrey Dahmer Steak House in Wisconsin? Maybe there's a Lane Staley Apothecary or a Christopher Reeve horse-racing track?

Come to think of it... not too far to the North, there's a city getting a lot of tourist money out of the fact that a bunch of near-primates slaughtered every sketchy person in town in a witch hunt.

I think Salem got 19 bodies, but our Lizzie did her dirt by her lonesome... always impressive. The first two are always the hardest.

We bought a coffee mug. I try not to disappoint people like the Bordens. I don't even like to disappoint the people who own the house now. I'm a bury-the-hatchet type, if you'll pardon the pun.

It may have been done before my time, but why is there not a Lizzie Borden movie?

Chloe Sevigny or however she spells that could play Lizzie. She can at least find the house. If she did play Lizzie, I'd go heavy on the Bridget Sullivan angle.

Hey, it's two murders, pretty much one after the other. We'll get a little Johnny Cochran or maybe Atticus Finch in the court scenes, but we need Action. Chloe and Bridget type action. This isn't 12 Angry Men we're talking about, folks.

Spooky Local Places To Avoid On Halloween

Halloween is the spookiest night of the year, the night when the dead walk the Earth. Throw in a neighborhood full of costumed children, on the only holiday I can think of where you roam around on a dark October night... Very spooky!

New England itself is pretty spooky, Massachusetts especially so. Unless you are one of our urban readers, you most likely live on some dark side street, surrounded by ancient trees.

You roam the land of King, Lovecraft and Hawthorne. If you leave a blank spot after "Boston" and ask people to provide the next word, you won't wait too long after answers like "Massachusetts" and "Bruins" before words like "Massacre" and "Strangler" start coming up. We're a creepy place.

If that's not enough for you this Halloween, might we recommend some spots with a bit of Evil for you to visit? Please note that the "Places To Avoid" part of this article's title can be interpreted as "Places To Check Out" by people with the proper mindset.

Here we go...

LIZZIE BORDEN HOUSE, FALL RIVER

No, "Fall River in general" doesn't count.

The Lizzie Borden house is where America's most famous axe murder went down. These days, it is run as a BnB place, because of course it is.

It is widely rumored to be haunted, and you can take a tour or even go to the gift shop.

Please note that, unlike the homes of axe murderers in the movies, this is a fine Victorian era home rather than an abandoned haunted house type place like, say, the Myers house in Haddonfield, Illinois. If you lurk around in the bushes like Dr. Loomis here, they're gonna call Johnny Law on you.

EXETER, RHODE ISLAND

Exeter is where the bodies of Mercy Brown and Sara Tillinghast lay. Both were exhumed by local farmers, who had farmer-type reasons to believe that they were vampires.

They had actually died of tuberculosis, but that just gets in the way of a good ghost story. The farmers thought they were vampires, and that's good enough for me.

Their graves, while in different cemeteries, are about 200 yards apart.

If I lived in Exeter, I'd be anywhere but Out on Halloween, lest I take a walk and run into two weird sisters.

THE SUN TAVERN, DUXBURY

While stumbling around a misty cemetery on Halloween makes for a better Travel Channel show, there is no iron-clad rule in ghost hunting that prohibits you from doing it in a fine Duxbury restaurant. You wear the night vision goggles, slappy... I'll have me some steak and wine.

You just have to choose the right restaurant. The Sun Tavern fits the bill. It was once the home of Lysander Walker, who one day in 1928 hung his flag upside down (an international symbol of distress), then went inside and had himself a Colt .45. I do not mean the malt liquor.

His home is a restaurant now, but he still hangs around. Candles light on their own, chairs with no one in them move and there was a famous incident where a Duxbury cop actually drew his weapon when responding to a burglar alarm there. The footsteps he heard, however, came from no living man.

I do believe that they are open for business on Halloween.

ROUTE 44, SEEKONK/REHOBOTH

This is where, at night, you might drive by a redheaded man dressed as a lumberjack. He will flash the thumbs-up universal gesture of the hitch-hiker.

Now, picking up lumberjack (who are known to carry axes) hitch-hikers at midnight is probably not on your menu anyhow, but Route 44 is the very last place you'd want to try it out.

I'm not 100% sure what the Redheaded Hitchhiker does, but I presume that he kills whoever picks him up. He might just vanish when you give him a ride, which would fit the Vanishing Hitchhiker motif.

If you don't pick him up, they say that you can hear him laughing in the static if your radio is set between stations. Other tales have him suddenly appearing in the back seat, although you want to throw the vodka bottle far into the woods before trying that story out with a Seekonk cop who is asking about your wrecked car.

FREETOWN STATE FOREST, FREETOWN

This is deep Bridgewater Triangle.

This area lacks a superheavyweight like Lizzie Borden or Mercy Brown, as the big name here is the Mad Trucker of Copicut Road.

However, it is a genuinely creepy place, and it checks off a lot of boxes. UFOs, ghosts, giant snakes, Satanic rituals, orbs, "Cursed Forest" nickname... this is where you find it.

The Bridgewater Triangle has 4-7 of our top 10 spots on this list, depending on how you draw the boundaries.

WITCH ROCK, ROCHESTER

Short, provable story: Rochester has a rock with a witch painted on it.

Longer, spookier story: Rochester has a rock with a witch painted on it that also cackles, emanates mist, swallows up bad children and God knows what else.

It appears to be a lighthearted piece of work, but it would be a very spooky Halloween if you walked by Witch Rock at night.

Please note that this rock lays in the yard of someone's private home before planning any Blair Witch sort of expeditions.

HILLCREST CEMETERY, PLYMPTON

Mother Crewe is said to be buried here.

Mother Crewe comes from a book, but facts only get in the way of a good Witch story. She was most likely based on a pair of "real" Plymouth witches, Aunt Rachel and Bethia Hazel.

Mother Crewe, who wasn't in the 2 Live Crew, was known for a pair of curses. The first was on Ansel Ring and his family. Ansel had been betrothed to Bathsbeba Crewe. Bats fell ill, and local girl Molly Peach was sent to nurse her.

Molly and Ansel soon had a thang goin' on. Bats found out, and died of a broken heart. Ansel then took Molly as his bride. Mother Crewe cursed their whole family.

Rings started dying shortly after. Ansel was a sailor, sailors are superstitious and no one wanted to sail with him. Once, during a storm, they were going to throw him overboard. He left voluntarily, braving storm waves in a small dory. His lifeless body later washed up on Duxbury Beach. This story is very similar to the Aunt Rachel legend.

Mother Crewe was just warming up.

Shortly after, someone who apparently hadn't heard the Ring Curse story tried to evict MC from her squatter shack on the Carver Road. Crewe cursed him as well. Immediately, Crewe's black cat attacked the man as he got on his horse. The horse reared up, threw the man from the saddle and dragged him to his doom.

Mother Crewe died in Plympton, and is supposedly buried there. I took the picture of Plympton's cemetery during broad daylight about a week ago while parked next to a Plympton cop. I know the story is some bullship from a novel. I was still scared.

THE MOORS, TRURO AND WELLFLEET

Cape Cod leaps into the mix with a truly spooky pair of stories.

This was the stomping grounds for the Beast of Truro, who was either a cougar, a werewolf, a dog pack or a legend.

He was around in the early 1980s, and hasn't been seen since.

Much earlier than that, we have a ghost catfight. In 1850, opera singer Jenny Lind oversold a show in Boston. To prevent a riot, she climbed a tower in a railroad station and sang to the crowd from there. The tower was later disassembled and built back up in North Truro.

More than 100 years before that, the pirate ship Whydah Gally went down, killing Captain Samuel Bellamy. His lover, Wellfleet's own Goody Hallet, was known locally as the Sea Witch.

The Witch of Wellfleet took it well, if "well" means "roams the moors of Wellfleet and Truro, using a Banshee cry to curse boats sailing by." Wellfleet and Truro had an enormous amount of shipwrecks, right up until the Cape Cod Canal was built the Jenny Lynd Tower went up in Truro.

It is said that when the ghost of the Sea Witch begins her Banshee cry, the ghost of Jenny Lynd will appear in the tower and begin singing. Her song overpowers the Sea Witch... sometimes.

Never mind sharks or Suicide Alley... I'd rather I be chased down Suicide Alley by a shark than to find myself trapped on the moors while these two ladies slugged it out.

HOCKOMOCK SWAMP, BRIDGEWATER

Hockomock translates into "place where the spirits dwell." Paranormal enthusiasts consider it to be the heart of the Bridgewater Triangle. It is 16,000 acres of evil.

It is, to my knowledge, the only place in Massachusetts where someone has reported seeing a Sasquatch. A Bridgewater man claimed to have seen one there, eating a pumpkin.

There have been Thunderbird sightings by police there, as well as cattle mutilation (more of the ritual sacrifice type than the UFO sort) and even Pukwudgies.

It is the Superheavyweight of this list.

DUXBURY BEACH/GURNET/SAQUISH

Duxbury Beach is long, dark and isolated. The Gurnet/Saquish area is much darker and much more isolated. Gorgeous during the day, ominous at night... no one will hear you scream here.

Duxbury Beach is where Ansel Ring washed up. It is where Daniel Webster saw the sea serpent. It is also a Great White Shark hunting ground.

It is home to the Blue Lady myth, which also gets tied to Onset and Sagamore Beach. A ghostly young woman shining pale blue light has been seen on certain nights. I assume that she either drowned herself in misery, or is waiting for a love who never returned from the sea. Molly Peach is mentioned as a suspect in the Duxbury version.

Gurnet Light dates back to 1769. It is located at the Plymouth end of the beach. It is reportedly haunted by the ghost of Hannah Thomas.

Thomas was the first female keeper of the lighthouse, taking over after the death of her husband, the prior keeper, in the Revolution.

They say that when a priest gave her the news, she said a quick prayer, then went back to tending the light before the priest left. That is the kind of dedication that keeps someone at her post even after death.

****Note that some places should have made the cut, including Taunton State Hospital, the Myles Standish State Forest, Dighton Rock, Suicide Alley, Burial Hill and the old Plymouth County Tuberculosis Hospital.

Daniel Webster's Sea Serpent

Loch Ness sort of has sea serpents locked down, but the South Shore has a pretty good serpent story.

Ours was "witnessed" by no less than Daniel Webster.

You can read all about it right here.

Daniel Webster And The Sea Serpent was written by Stephen Benet. He also wrote The Devil And Daniel Webster, where Webster goes to trial against the devil for the soul of a farmer. Benet had a Daniel Webster man-crush, or at least an author-crush.

SPOILER ALERT!!!

In this fictional story, Daniel and his friends are fishing for cod off of Duxbury Beach when Daniel gets something on his line that pulls "like a pair of steer."

Eventually, a vast sea serpent arises, shakes out the hook and charges the boat. Some men cower and one man faints, but D Web just stares it down. It goes away, and the men- to save their reputations- agree to not speak of it.

The serpent then haunted Green Harbor, letting out an eerie cry that drove local livestock mad with fear.

Hoping to prevent it from eventually killing a local, Webster armed himself and headed to the mouth of the Green Harbor River. The beast appeared, and Webster gave it both barrels. The creature sounded, her fate unknown.

Webster heads to Washington, where he is to negotiate a treaty with the British. However, he hears the sea monster again, this time coming up the Potomac.

He sends back to Marshfield for a local eccentric who claims to know the monster. The local speaks to the leviathan, who is female, and finds out that she loves Daniel Webster.

Webster, fearing monsterly retribution, enters into a relationship with the beast. I assume it was platonic. He'd bring her fish every day, Italian sardines.

Before he can sever the courtship, his treaty enters into jeopardy. The British have a powerful Navy and are threatening to use it. Webster takes the Brit to meet the monster, who prefers to be called Samanthy. She is large enough to reduce London to rubble. This revelation moves the naval treaty along quite nicely.

He inducts Samanthy into the US Navy, with a rank of Rear Admiral. She patrols the seas, and is seen with Teddy Roosevelt's White Fleet in the South Seas. Samanthy is even credited with helping out with the Monitor. As she ages, reports come in about her having 7 children.

They all fly Old Glory.

Storm To End Fall Foliage Season

If you love fall foliage, today may be your last chance to see local color. 

So we heartily recommend that you get out and hit the country.

There several reasons why this is so.

The main reason is because a storm is due to hit us on Sunday.

It isn't one of those knock-your-house-down storms, but you don't need those kind of storms to ruin our fall foliage.

That said, it will be rainy and windy for most of Sunday.

Rain is good for trees, but wind is bad for the leaves.

There could be splashover at the coast, due to a persistent East wind.

That wind will also blow leaves off of the trees.

Even without the storm, we are late in foliage season anyhow. Those leaves are ready to drop.

The end of foliage season is another reason to Go Rural today.

Much of our region- especially the upper South Shore and much of the interior- is close to Past Peak.

There is still color out there, but you have to look for it.

Our season usually runs through Halloween...

...Unless, of course, if a storm comes around.

We are being somewhat ambiguous, as the leaves may survive the storm.

If that's the case, we are good for another week.

We just don't want you to set aside a day for leaf-peeping, only to see bare trees.

So get out there today!

You'll do OK south of a line running from Duxbury to, say, Easton. There is good foliage north of that line (foliage doesn't work in a manner where Easton is peaking but North Easton is past peak), but south of that line maximises your chance for success.

Try Route 106 for a while, then break south at Route 105. Head back north up Route 58 or Route 79.

Don't be afraid to break off onto a side street, especially a long one. For those of you enjoying the benefit of GPS technology, try to use longer side streets. It never hurts to check by a lake, either.

Happy hunting!

The New England Vampire Craze

New England is home to Harvard, Hancock, Hawthorne and a gang of US Presidents. We have intellectual stripes that few regions can match.

We also would blame tuberculosis deaths on vampires and desecrate corpses to kill mythical undead beings now and then.

New England had a period running from 1784 through 1949 (editor: the 1949 exhumation was in Pennsylvania) where 80 bodies were exhumed from graves to be treated as vampires. Various folk-remedy methods of vampire extermination were utilized.

This wasn't medieval stuff... a vampire was exhumed in Rhode Island about 20 years before Ronald Reagan was born, not too long before the Wright Brothers got an airplane off the ground. This was 200 years after the Salem Witch Trials. People were living during that exhumation who, in the same life, watched a moon landing on TV.

What's up with these people? What's the dilly? As you might imagine, several factors were at work.

Understand that the Internet sucked in 1892, with "sucked" meaning "didn't exist." Literacy, while on the upswing from near-zero in feudal times, was still a rare thing, especially in rural communities. The newest medical journals were slow to get to western Rhode Island farms. Doctors were rare, many were quacks, and even President McKinley had a doctor check a bullet wound by sticking a finger in his abdomen and poking around... in 1901.

If educated city-folk were that dangerous, you can imagine how much damage a farmer could do when faced with a disease or infection that he had no idea about.

Tuberculosis was only really figured out recently, and doctors would just throw up their hands when they saw it in 1892.  Their cures were often worse than the illness- Doc Holliday was sent to a sulfur spring to treat his tuberculosis in 1887.

Rhode Island farmers had even less understanding of tuberculosis, which they referred to as "consumption." The name was fitting. A person with tuberculosis would lose weight, become pallid, refuse to eat, fear light, labor to breathe... they wasted away before your eyes. It would also tear through families, many of whom were piled 8 deep in a house and sharing one bed.

While a doctor might recognize this as tuberculosis, a farmer would have a different diagnosis set. It might include the spirit of a deceased relative leaving the grave and feeding on the life energy of their surviving family.

Belief in vampirism goes back to Mesopotamia, and was still in effect in many parts of the world by 1892. This was before Bela Lugosi and Twilight, so no one thought of a vampire resembling a Hungarian count or a pouting teenage boy. When it wasn't being described as a sort of energy force, a vampire was viewed as more corpse-like than a Brad Pitt-looking fellow.

While a diagnosis of vampirism might get you laughed out of Tufts, an illiterate farmer might think that it sounds as good as whatever the city slicker was telling them. You have a definite cause-and-effect thing working, always valuable to a man playing doctor who can't read. A diagnosis of tuberculosis requires medical knowledge and intense examination. All you need for a Vampirism diagnosis is for the TB to run through the rest of your family.

Consumption happened a lot in rural communities. It was the leading cause of death in the northeast in the 1800s. To their credit, most farmers recognized it as a natural illness without paranormal overtones. That's why farm families crank out so many kids. Children are Labor, and even Dowry. They are also vulnerable, which is why many farmers banged out 12 kids in hope that 5 would survive to run the farm.

However, historians have uncovered at least 80 instances where corpses were exhumed and desecrated because someone thought that they were vampires.

Cases run from Maine to Minnesota , but New England holds the title. We do have places like Yale and enlightened cities like Boston, but we also had many areas chock full of susperstitious farmers.

We are also heavy-handed with the punishment. We performed the first legal execution of a juvenile in America... for Bestiality, I believe.

That tendency towards draconian superstition, much of it brought over from Europe, gave New England the title belt with both Witchcraft and Vampirism.

There's a good reason why Shirley Jackson didn't set The Lottery in Manhattan, and why Stephen King set Salem's Lot in Maine. The stories work here.

A relatively isolated area in Rhode Island and Connecticut could do a pretty good Salem's Lot impression, as a great % of the recorded Vampire exhumations went down there.

You can't blame them totally- there was a prominent exhumation in Vermont in 1817, Thoreau wrote about one in 1859  and even America's Hometown of Plymouth has someone buried face down to prevent them from being able to dig their way out of a grave- but they were into it the most.

A newspaper from Connecticut in 1784 denounced exhumations. The Tillinghast family of Exeter, which saw consumption run through it after the father's 1790s dream of a blight killing half of his orchard, lost half of their children even though they exhumed 17 year old Sarah and did a ritual. Jewett City, Connecticut, Saco, Maine (15 miles from where Salem's Lot was based), Loudon, New Hampshire, Belchertown, Massachusetts, Woodstock, Vermont, Cumberland, Rhode Island, Manchester, Vermont and Griswold, Connecticut- among dozens of other New England communities- went all Buffy on someone in the course of their histories.

Exeter, if not the epicenter of the vampire craze, serves as the main neighborhood. They acted like Gypsies. They also are notable for their brutal exhumation techniques, their near Reagan era survival of vampire superstition and for being the home of America's vampire queen.

Mercy Brown, "pictured" below, is the most famous of the 80 recorded cases where a vampire-themed exhumation went on.

Mercy was one of an unfortunate group of children that George and Mary Brown bore. George was a farmer living a hard life working a rocky Rhodey homestead. The consumption came for his family, taking Ma Brown and a daughter. The mother and daughter were Mary and Mary Olive. There was also a sister named Mercy Lena.

Mercy fell sick and died in 1892. Then her brother Edwin fell sick. This set off a superstition algorithm involving multiple consumption deaths in the same family equaling undead predation.

That was enough for the villagers. Perhaps fearing that Mercy would move on to their own families after polishing off the Brown blood bank, several locals- after a vote- approached George with a folk remedy. It may have been the last conversation of the Dark Ages.

Although he gave his permission, George was not in attendance when a Frankenstein-style mob moved on the crypt that held the remains of Mercy Brown. Distinct among the group, which was most likely smaller than a mob, were a wildly protesting doctor and a Providence Journal reporter.

Mercy was a winter death, and she was stored in the above-ground crypt that we have a picture of somewhere in this article. She was kept this way until the ground thawed enough for a burial. You should note that her crypt was very much similar to how they stored ice back then.

They checked the coffins of all the Brown women. Two of them were Corpsing along as they should have been. Mercy was a whole other story.

Mercy didn't look that bad for a corpse. The cold had preserved her well. They cracked open her chest and cut out her heart. It still had blood in it. Bingo! We got us a vampire!

Since this was 5 years before Dracula was written (Bram Stoker had an article about the Brown exhumation among his papers, and may have based Lucy Westenra on Mercy Brown), the people- who only acted like Serbians, and didn't actually use Serbian words like vampyr- probably just called her Mercy or Lena... especially around George, who most likely had to be handled diplomatically.

Vampire slaying methodology varied from region to region. Both Plymouth and Maine, connected by maritime trade, favored burying the corpse face down. Vermont was more brutal, and their methods spread down the Connecticut River into eastern Connecticut and western Rhode Island.

Mercy's heart was placed on a nearby stone and cooked to a cinder. The ashes were then fed to her ailing brother, most likely in a tea. It worked so well, he was dead in two months, and is buried next to the sister that he consumed.

Opinions vary as to whether it was effective. The doctor pointed out that Mercy's lungs showed tuberculosis. He no doubt spoke up when the remedy failed to cure Edwin. The locals pointed out that no Browns got sick after Edwin.

Michael Bell, the authority on such matters, says that exhumations occurred in America until the mid 20th Century. The last one Bell is aware of went down in the Pennsylvania mountains in 1949. A construction crew in Griswold, CT dug up an ancient cemetery in 1990. One of the graves had been broken into. The corpse was beheaded, the heart was torn out and the legs were broken off. The damage was done 5 years after death.

Mercy wasn't the last one, but is the most famous one. Her desecration got national publicity, all negative, and western Rhode Islanders were known as superstitious and "vicious" by neighboring communities, with the Boston Globe suggesting inbreeding as a cause for the vampire panic.

We checked out her grave recently, as one of our road trips took us into that Rhodey/CT midst. Route 95 goes through there now, and Exeter is a charming bedroom suburb of Providence. You can still see the Old Days if you poke around some.