America’s First Vampire Investigators

The Connecticut Courant article I quoted yesterday named three men in addition to Isaac Johnson, the paterfamilias so distraught by tuberculosis in his family that he had two of his children’s bodies dug up in 1784.

One was the man who wrote the article for the newspaper, attesting to what he saw. Moses Holmes (1727-1811?) was an important figure in Willington, Connecticut. He deeded to the town some of the land that became the common. Holmes held multiple public offices and had represented the town in the Connecticut state legislature starting in 1776.

Holmes mentioned two doctors who examined the remains of the corpses: “Doctors Grant and West.” I set out to identify those men and found them on the list of men who founded the Connecticut Medical Society in 1792.

One impetus for chartering such medical organizations was to differentiate their members from “quacks” (though, given the state of eighteenth-century medicine, I’m not sure quacks were necessarily worse for patients than establishment doctors). Holmes’s letter likewise complained about a “Quack Doctor.”

The first of the two doctors at the exhumation was Miner (or Minor) Grant (1756-1828) of Willington. He appears to have been more of an apothecary than a surgeon, and is remembered for the shops he ran. The one in Willington, built in 1797, is now a private residence near the center of the town. Another he built for his son in Stafford in 1802 has been moved to Old Sturbridge Village—which means that outdoor museum can say it owns a building constructed for one of America’s first vampire investigators.

The other doctor was Jeremiah West (1753-1806, gravestone shown above) of Tolland, the larger town to the west of Willington. West graduated from Yale College in 1777, served as a Continental Army surgeon during the Revolutionary War, might have taken a little more training in Boston, and settled in Tolland shortly before the exhumations.

J. R. Cole’s 1888 History of Tolland County quoted an unidentified source saying:

In stature, Dr. West was full six feet, with a large and well proportioned frame. He became exceedingly corpulent during the latter part of his life, and is represented as being unusually large and heavy. Tradition says that he weighed about three hundred and fifty pounds, and that his step as he walked seemed to shake the ground. In social life he was cheerful, humorous and pleasant.

All three of these men—Holmes, Grant, and West—were politically active. In fact, they would all serve in the Connecticut house in 1786, a couple of years after the exhumation. Dr. West later participated in the Connecticut ratifying convention for the U.S. Constitution.

Thus, when Dr. Miner Grant and Dr. Jeremiah West came to witness the exhumation of the Johnson children, and Moses Holmes added his own observations about their graves and reported all that to the Courant in New Haven, that was the Willington authorities assembling to make a strong statement about the idea of vampirism. They didn’t like it. They wanted to stamp out that false belief before it spread.

But we know that didn’t work. There are scores of reports of similar exhumations from New England in the nineteenth century, with a bit of archeological evidence as well. At the S.H.E.A.R. panel I attended last summer, Michael Bell theorized that the persistence of that practice despite legal and print hostility means it was periodically reinvigorated with new believers from Europe. But we can trace the roots of the belief in America back to right after the Revolutionary War.

TOMORROW: Vampire vocabulary.

A Double Exhumation in 1784 Connecticut

On 22 June 1784, the Connecticut Courant ran an article which has become highly significant for hunters of vampires and vampire lore. It read:

WHEREAS of late years there has been advanced for a certainty, by a certain Quack Doctor, a foreigner, that a certain cure may be had for a consumption, where any of the same family had before that time died with the same disease; directing to have the bodies of such as had died to be dug up, and further said that out of the breast or vitals might be found a sprout or vine fresh and growing, which, together with the remains of the vitals being consumed in the fire, would be an effectual cure to the same family:----

And such direction so far gained credit, that in one instance, the experiment was thoroughly made in Willington, on the first day of June instant, two bodies were dug up which belonged to the family of Mr. Isaac Johnson of that place, they both died with the consumption, one had been buried one year and eleven months, the other one year, a third of the same family then sick---

on full examination of the then small remains by two doctors then present, viz. Doctors Grant and West, not the least discovery could be made; and to prevent misrepresentations of the facts, I being an eye witness, that under the coffin was sundry small sprouts about one inch in length then fresh, but most likely was the produce of sorrel feeds which fell under the coffin when put in the earth.

And that the bodies of the dead may rest quiet in their graves without such interruption, I think the public ought to be aware of being led away by such an imposture.

MOSES HOLMES.
June 1784.

The Connecticut Courant had mentioned vampires back in 1765, as described here. Sometime around then, printer Thomas Green brought on little George Goodwin (1757-1844) as an apprentice, and by 1784 Goodwin was co-publisher of the paper. However, Green and his first partner, Ebenezer Watson, had died, and there’s no indication that anyone in the print shop remembered the earlier article. It’s significant that this item did not include the word “vampyre,” though the belief in the value of digging up, examining, and burning a body was the same.

Moses Holmes’s report was reprinted in the Pennsylvania Packet and Salem Gazette on 29 June, and possibly in other American newspapers. It’s the earliest evidence that any New Englanders seriously entertained a belief in vampires of the sort described by European authors earlier in the century—as dead people who sapped the lives of those close to them from within their graves.

In the expanded edition of Food for the Dead, Michael Bell described finding records of Isaac Johnson of Willington, Connecticut. This man was born in Windham in 1735, married in Willington in 1756, and died in Hadley, Massachusetts, in 1808. His gravestone appears above, courtesy of Find a Grave.

Isaac and his wife Elizabeth had two children die within the specified period: Amos (1760-1782) and Elizabeth (1764-1783). There may have been other children sick at the time; this genealogy page for Isaac doesn’t include all the names that appear in Willington baptismal records published in the New England Historic and Genealogical Register in 1913.

Amos Johnson was the right age to have fought in the Revolutionary War. Unfortunately, there were multiple men of that name in Connecticut records, so I can’t connect him with any particular company.

Bell reported that he couldn’t find the Johnson children’s graves in Willington. He did, however, find that on the 1790 U.S. census the household included two white males over age sixteen, no white males under sixteen, two white females, no slaves, and seventeen “other free persons”—far more than any other home in the town. That’s unusual, but what it means is unclear.

This newspaper article also offers evidence for Brian Carroll’s thesis that the vampirism belief was brought to America by Hessian military surgeons. As The Travels of three English Gentlemen, from Venice to Hamburgh account shows, belief in such vampires was established in Hesse by 1734. Hessian prisoners of war were housed in Tolland, next to Willington, during the war. Was the unnamed “Quack Doctor, a foreigner,” mentioned in the article one of those Germans?

TOMORROW: The other doctors on the scene.