The REAL New England Vampires

From Michael Bell's Food for the Dead.

The Boston Globe ran several articles this week about a vampire rumor sweeping through the student body at Boston Latin, the oldest public school in the US. (It was founded in 1635!) It turns out the rumor was being spread about a Goth girl by a clique of bullies. Oh, the joys of high school. A related rumor was that the vampire girl's boyfriend, who was a werewolf, was going to wreak his vengeance on the school. Again, not true. However, I do find it interesting that Boston Latin's official seal features a wolf suckling Romulus and Remus.

There may not be any vampires at Boston Latin, but there were vampires in New England's past, according to Michael Bell's book Food for the Dead. On the Trail of New England's Vampires. Bell has a Ph.D. in folklore and is the official folklorist for the state of Rhode Island.

Unlike Hollywood vampires who have fangs, wear capes and suck blood, the New England vampires were much more understated. Usually the victims of tuberculosis, they were blamed after their deaths for spreading TB from their grave among family members. They were believed to be feeding off the life essence of their relatives.

Unlike Hollywood vampires who are dispatched with a stake through the hear, the proper way to stop a New England vampire from spreading disease and death was to unearth their body and burn their heart. Sometimes there variations on this theme. In Woodstock, Vermont, the blood of a young bull was sprinkled on the vampire's grave. In Connecticut, an alleged vampire's skull and thigh bones were arranged in a skull and crossbones position.

The New England vampire tradition ended in the 19th century, as tuberculosis became less of a problem. Michael Bell lists at least 20 cases of vampirism in his book, from Rhode Island to Maine. None of them happened at Boston Latin.

Indian Pudding!

It's been a while since I've posted anything. I could tell you it's because work has been so busy, but there's another reason - it's because I've been busy making Indian pudding!

A quick FAQ about Indian pudding:

- It's not from India. That delicious pudding you get in Indian restaurants is called kheer.

- American Indians didn't create it, either. But, since it is made with cornmeal, the Puritans called it Indian pudding. (What modern Americans call corn, a.k.a maize, was originally called Indian corn, to differentiate it from what the English called corn, which was really any grain. Hopefully, that's not too confusing!)

- Indian pudding is a dessert that has been made in New England for hundreds of years. The basic recipe involves cornmeal, milk, molasses, and some spices. There are lots of recipes floating on the Web: traditional, microwave, and even vegan.

- I think it's one of those dishes, like baked beans, that a Puritan housewife could just throw in the stove while she went to church for a long, long time. Then, when church was over, she could come home and make herself feel better after all the damnation talk by eating slow-baked cornmeal sweetened with molasses.

- When I was in middle school, it was sometimes served for dessert as part of the hot lunch program. I don't remember any school lunch desserts except this one, and that's because it's so darn delicious.

- When I was a kid, you could also buy it canned in any supermarket. Now, the only place I've seen it is Whole Foods, where you can buy Bar Harbor brand Indian pudding. I've never tried it, but there's no such thing as bad Indian pudding.

- Although, these taste testers at the Onion really don't like it. I can tell they're not from New England, though, because they had never even heard of Indian pudding. I don't think you should trust their opinion.

- Indian pudding is sometimes called hasty pudding, which is also a venerable Harvard theatrical troupe known for its comedic drag productions. They serve Indian pudding at all their banquets.

Is The Necronomicon Hidden Under Bradford College?

Photos from the Institute of Urban Speleological Studies and Archeology.

At a party last night I met someone who graduated from Bradford College in the 1980's. Talking with him reminded me of my favorite piece of modern folklore floating around the Web - The Necronomicon is hidden under Bradford College! Cue dramatic music.

For those readers not well versed in nerd culture, The Necronomicon is a book of evil magic that first appeared in the short stories of horror writer (and Rhode Island native) H.P. Lovecraft. Although Lovecraft died in 1937, his fiction grew in popularity posthumously, and other writers imitated his style and adopted his monstrous deities as their own.

Strangely, copies of The Necronomicon, began to appear for sale. In the 1940's, ads in book-seller's guides requested copies of it, or advertised copies for sale at high prices. In the 1960's, a copy of The Necronomicon was printed in a limited edition of 600, and by the 1970's several different versions of the cursed tome could be purchased in paperback. Although most of these are clearly hoaxes, the pagan author John Wisdom Gonce III claims that the most popular of these Necronomicons, writen by Peter Levenda under the pseudonym Simon, actually contains harmful magickal instructions. The Necronomicon has also appeared in countless horror movies, most famously The Evil Dead series. (The Necronomicon Files by Daniel Harms and John Gonce III is a great source for details about all this.)

But again, The Necronomicon is just fiction, isn't it? Lovecraft just made it up because he needed a spooky magical tome for his stories, right? Some modern occultists have disagreed. For example, Kenneth Grant claims claims that Lovecraft was a natural born adept, although he didn't know it and traveled in his dreams to astral realms where he found The Necronomicon. He then used materials from this book in his fiction, not realizing he was transmitting true magickal knowledge. Others think that although Lovecraft wrote fiction, he was actually a powerful occultist, and incorporated real occult lore into his stories for the initiated to find.

Even if The Necronomicon is real, why would it be under Bradford College, a small liberal arts school that closed in 2000? Well, according to the story floating around the Web, Lovecraft hid the book in one of the college's tunnels while he was dating a Bradford co-ed. (Apparently, even demented evil geniuses need to get out and date.) Recent Bradford students seem to have accepted the story as part of the college's lore. You can see some photos by ghost hunters of the tunnels here.

Bradford College closed in 2000 due to fiscal problems, and is now the campus of Zion Bible College. It seems ironic that a school training Pentecostal preachers would be located on top of the world's evilest book, but stranger things have happened.

The Black Fox

I've had a gross stomach bug the last few days, so I haven't updated this as much as I should. Luckily, I had this post pre-written from a while ago. The weather is still wintry outside, so this little piece of New England Gothic works well today.

Pre-stomach flu post:

Foxes, sly and crafty, are notoriously difficult to catch. The Narragansett Indians, however, knew about mysterious black foxes that were impossible to catch or kill.

In 1643 Roger Williams, the founder of Rhode Island, wrote:

"The Indians say they have black foxes, which they have often seene, but never could take any of them. They say they are Manittooes, that is Gods, Spirits, or Divine powers, as they say of everything which they cannot comprehend."

As the years passed, the black fox took on more sinister connotations among the British settlers, and a particularly nasty black fox was said to haunt the Salmon River in Connecticut. Poet John Brainard made this legend into a verse that was well-known in its day. Later, John Greenleaf Whitter, a poet from from Haverhill, Massachusetts, expanded the legend in his own poem in 1831, incorporating elements of the Wild Hunt myth and Algonquin shamanism.

According to Whittier,

"They said it was a Fox accurst
By Hobomocko's* will
That it was once a mighty chief
Whom battle might not kill
But who, for some unspoken crime
Was doomed to wander still."

*Hobomocko is one name for the Algonquin god associated with death, night, water and shamanism.

One winter, the black fox appears near a New England town, and two cocky young Yankee hunters chase after it with rifles, vowing that they will kill it. The local Indians disagree.

"They told us that our hunters
Would never more return
That they would hunt for evermore
Through tangled swamp and fern
And that their last and dismal fate
No mortal ear might learn."

Hmmm. Obviously, these hunters had never seen a horor movie or read a horror story. When the old guy at the gas station tells you to avoid Camp Crystal Lake, avoid it! When the local Indians tell you something's cursed, it really is!

In the spring, the hunters' corpses are discovered deep in the forest. Nothing ever grows on that spot again, and animals and birds avoid it.

"For people say that every year
When winter snows are spread
All over the face of the frozen earth
And the forest leaves are shed
The Spectre-Fox comes forth and howls
Above the hunters' bed."

It's a nice little story, and it's interesting to see how over two hundred years the black fox changed from something spiritual to something spooky.

Valentine's Cards, Naked Romans, and Human Sacrifice

An Esther Howland Valentine's Card, from Victoriana.com.

Happy Valentine's Day!

The first Valentine cards in the United States were produced right here in Massachusetts by Esther Howland, an enterprising Worcester resident who made her first cards in 1847. She soon couldn't keep up with the demand, hired people to make cards for her, and eventually sold the company and retired on the profits.

People who don't like Valentine's Day disparage it as a "Hallmark Holiday" - a commercial holiday created just so corporations can make some profits. But Hallmark didn't invent the holiday, and neither did Esther Howland. It actually has a long and somewhat murky history. According to Wikipedia (which also can be murky), the first written evidence connecting Valentine's Day and romance comes from "Parlement of Foules," a poem written by Geoffrey Chaucer around 1382. As far as I know, Chaucer didn't work for Hallmark.

No one is really sure why we celebrate love on Valentine's Day. The day is named after one of the several different Saint Valentines, but none of them are famous for being lovers or romantic. One of the Valentine's was supposedly martyred on February 14 by the Romans as part of the Lupercalia festivities.

Romulus, Remus and their nurse.

On every February 14 the Romans celebrated Lupercalia, a holiday devoted to Lupercus, a god with a wolfish name who protected the flocks. Men of noble birth would sacrifice a dog and/or a goat in the cave where Romulus and Remus supposedly were suckled by a wolf. After the sacrifice, the men (either nude or scantily clad) would run through the streets striking women with strips of bloody animal skin to purify them and encourage fertility. February is named after the bloody strips, or februa, which means instrument of purification. There's no proof that Valentine's Day is related to Lupercalia, but it's interesting that a day celebrating sex and fertility was replaced by a holiday celebrating love and romance.

The Romans faced the same questions with Lupercalia that we face with Valentine's Day - where did this holiday come from, and why do we celebrate it? Just as we look to the Romans for clues, they looked to the Greeks and their even more ancient holiday Lykaia. According to Walter Burkert's book Homo Necans, Lykaia was celebrated in Arcadia (considered the most ancient and primitive part of Greece) with athletic competitions and animal sacrifices.

It was rumored, however, that at the heart of Lykaia was a human sacrifice. One unlucky man was killed, and a small piece of his body was put into a stew. All the Arcadians sat around a big pot to eat. Whichever Arcadian got that little sliver of human flesh in his stew was transformed into a wolf, and could only regain human form if he avoided eating human flesh for seven years.

That Arcadian stew does it every time!

The Arcadians, like ourselves and the Romans, also wondered why they celebrated such a strange holiday. They attempted to explain it with a myth that an ancient Arcadian king, Lykaion, was transformed into a wolf by Zeus after he offered a human sacrifice to the god. But does this really explain anything, or only describe the ritual in a mythic way? Walter Burkert thinks the Lykaia dramatizes some type of ancient primal guilt around killing animals for food. It sounds good to me, but we'll never know for sure.

It's been a long trip from Arcadian werewolves to Esther Howland (a Holyoke grad and presumably not a werewolf) making her cards and a small fortune here in New England. I'm just glad I can eat chocolate today and don't have to worry about finding myself in a big stew pot.