Food For The Dead: On The Trail Of The New England Vampire With Michael Bell

Speaker A: Hi everyone, and welcome back to Haunted History Chronicles. Before we introduce today's podcast or guest, if you like this podcast, please consider leaving a review. It costs nothing, but it helps share news of the podcasts and guests I feature with others interested within the paranormal. It's a simple and easy way to help the podcast continue to grow and be a space for people to chat and come together. If you haven't already found us on the Haunted History chronicle's website, Instagram, facebook or Twitter. You can find links to all social media pages in any of the notes for an episode. Come and join us to get involved and gain access to additional blogs, news and updates. And now let's get started introducing today's episode. Consumption today is known as tuberculosis. It's an infectious disease that causes a chronic cough with blood containing mucus fever, night sweats and weight loss across the states of Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island and Vermont. Outbreaks of TB spread amongst family members and households. So severe was the epidemic that it claimed about 2% of the region's population from 1786 to 1800. For 19th 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. Author and folklorist Michael Bell spent 20 years pursuing stories of the vampire in New England, bringing these practices to light for the first time. Through his careful research, he's been able to show that the belief in vampires was widespread and for some families, lasted well into the 20th century. In 1990, the Connecticut state archaeologist was asked to look at a newly discovered burial site initially believed to be the work of a local serial killer. It was soon determined that the 29 burials were in fact typical of the 17 hundreds and early 18 hundreds. Except, that is, for burial number four. The coffin in this case had been smashed and the skeleton had been rearranged, with the skull and thigh bones resting atop the ribs and vertebrae. Analysis later showed that the beheading, rib fractures and other injuries occurred years after death. With more than 80 plus examinations of similar eximations reaching as far back as the late 17 hundreds, michael Bell is familiar with accounts of disinterred bodies, violated corpses, posthumous inflicted injuries and subsequent rebrials. Bell believes hundreds more cases await discovery, with most graves lost to time. Bell hunts for handwritten records in town hall basements, consults tombstones and old cemetery maps. Traces obscure genealogies and interviews descendants in his quest to document the recurring patterns in communication and ritual, and the stories that sit alongside these rituals and how they changed, evolved and were passed on over time. Joining me today is Michael Bell as we discuss the public hysteria surrounding tuberculosis outbreaks, the involvement of family, neighbors and the wider community in vampire exhumations, and how these rituals could vary from clandestine affairs to something sometimes more public. We look closer at who these communities and individuals were and how difficult it would have been to exhume a loved one superstitions of vampires consuming the living may seem illogical and irrational, but folk practices and beliefs could offer hope in situations where there was no other recourse. So get comfortable as we meet our guest, Michael Bell, and examine the trail of the New England vampires and how the living could become food for the dead.

Speaker B: Hi, Michael. Thank you so much for joining me today.

Speaker C: It's my pleasure, Michelle. Thank you for inviting me.

Speaker B: Honestly, I think the pleasure is mine. I think this is going to be a really interesting discussion and chat, to be honest. Do you want to just start by telling us a little bit about you and your background?

Speaker C: I got my undergraduate degrees in anthropology in archaeology, and I pursued a master's degree in that also. And then I changed to folklore because to me, archaeology was very interesting, but when I would excavate something, it didn't come alive to me like it should have. Not like when Schleyman describes finding Troy and how he could see the whole Homeric epic unfold before his eyes. And that kind of imagination didn't really grab me. So I wanted to go into something was more, I guess you could say, the archaeology of memory. And so that's why I went into folklore, so I could study traditions that had been passed down from the past, but at the same time were still alive and viable and so that I could interact with people and collect their traditions without having to put together the archaeological imagination of finding just artifacts. But I had actual words, which to me would made it a much more richer study. So I went and got a master's in folklore and also a PhD in folklore with a minor in anthropology. I concentrated basically on belief systems and the narratives or stories that are used to either promulgate those beliefs to reinforce those beliefs, and on the other hand, narratives that undermine those beliefs or call them into questions.

Speaker B: I think it's a fascinating study and I think the phrase that you use there of the archaeology of memory is absolutely perfect because I think there is a richness to this and I think it speaks so much to who we are today, to be able to examine these traditions, these belief systems, these stories from our past, because they tell us so much about life, then existence, then. But I think it also resonates with us today. And making those connections, I think, is something very powerful about connecting with history. But folklore, I think, allows us to connect with people as well as history. Stories are something very powerful, medium and tool to help us to do that.

Speaker C: Absolutely, I agree.

Speaker B: So you've written an incredible book, food for the Dead, and do you want to just start off by telling us what people could expect if they read that it's about and what kind of inspired you to focus on this aspect of folklore.

Speaker C: Really, I was predisposed to follow this trail when I first encountered it because I'd done my PhD dissertation on African American beliefs surrounding what's often called conjuration voodoo, voodoo root work, things like that. And so when I encountered the vampire tradition after relocating to Rhode Island to do some folk life research, then I really was, as I said, predisposed to look at it and dig deeper into it. I wasn't really prepared to find vampires in America, in New England and in Rhode Island, but I did, and it was to me, it was such a fascinating thing that was so unanticipated that I felt compelled to follow it as far as I could. And in food for the dead. Basically. I take the reader along with me as I followed this trail, starting with my first encounter of the vampire story. And from there it developed until the end of the book. I've discovered over 20 cases that I detailed as well as I can. Many of these things exist in old archives, and most of them turn up in old newspapers. So it takes quite a lot of research to find an incident, say, in a newspaper, and then just try to follow it, to see who the people are, where they were, what the circumstances are, and try to develop as richly as I can the context around each event. And then I've tried to connect these events by the patterns that underlie them and end up asking, what do these things tell us about ourselves, not just in the past, but also in the present. And I think perhaps going forward into.

Speaker B: The future, too, looking at the wider landscape and how the vampiric legend, folk stories, folk tales that were very much prevalent across Europe, to see this shift from the types of patterns, the types of rituals that were associated with them, to see it making its way to the US. And then to see how things change as well. And exploring that, I think, is also as interesting as kind of diving into these accounts, what they tell us, what they uncover, to spot some of the wider patterns, changes also across more than one kind of landscape. And one of the things that I was really interested in is kind of picking your brains about how this very rich culture in belief system managed across from Europe to America. How do we go from these stories across Germany, et cetera, and traditions and rituals, how does it make its way into the US?

Speaker C: That's probably, if not the number one question, certainly up there in the top five questions that I have asked and other people have asked, because, as we know, New England was settled mainly by people from Great Britain, where the vampire tradition is not. Well, I think it's an understatement to say it was never strong. It's stronger in Europe, especially eastern and parts of Northern Europe. And so how did it get to New England at least by 1784, which is the earliest account I have, and I think that particular incident really gives some clues about how it came here and why it came here. So in 1784, in Wellington, Connecticut, a man named Isaac Johnson. According to the newspaper article written by an eyewitness account, isaac Johnson was convinced by what was called someone who was called a foreign quack doctor to exhume two of his dead children in order to try an experiment to save other children who were dying of what was called, at that time, consumption, which now we know was mostly it was pulmonary tuberculosis. And so that clue a foreign quack doctor. Now, I don't know who it was. I don't even know of what background, what country, what ethnic background the quack doctor was from. But I think it's a clue that the practice probably came to New England by people who had come to this country, immigrated, I'd say perhaps from Germany. There were a great many German immigrants around that time and of course this is just after the American Revolution. And during the American Revolution, there were many mercenaries fighting for the crown for Great Britain and many of them came from Germany and Poland and associated countries where the vampire practice was known. I think that it probably came to this country via some of these immigrants. And we do have many accounts of roving or traveling quack doctors, they were called, who were selling cures to make money, but they weren't selling an entire tradition. So when this guy in Willington, Connecticut shows up and talks to Isaac Johnson and says, here, I think you should do this, I don't know if there was any payment involved, but I would be surprised if there wasn't some payment involved. What he wanted him to do was just perform this simple ritual. He wasn't selling an entire tradition. So nobody here in this country, when it came here, we're talking about vampires. It wasn't called vampires. It was basically a folk medical practice that was being sold to people. And then I think once it took hold here in different places, probably from different times and brought in by different people from different areas of Europe, which is why we have some variations in the ritual. Once it caught on here, then it became part of the New England folk tradition so that in one community someone would say, oh, yeah, I've heard that you do this if you want to cure consumption. And then they would talk about how maybe even provide a story about how someone in the next county over had performed this ritual and how it had put an end to this consumption plague or epidemic.

Speaker B: I think we can look back at our past and think with this very moral standing of, how could they possibly do something like that? How could they possibly believe in something like that? We kind of take ourselves as the higher, more intelligent being. But actually, when medical science was much cruder, when things were not known, when in terms of medicine and disease, so little is known compared to what we know today. And in 100 years time, we'll know even more than we do right now when things are constantly evolving, we as human beings still have a need to try and latch onto things, to do all that we can, because essentially this is out of fear. It's out of trying to control a disease that is running rampant, that takes away your loved ones. And so in its place are people trying to treat, to cure, to cause no harm, but to actually survive something quite terrifying that they felt they had very little control over. And I think when we strip it back to that, we can understand when disease is running so prevalently and the devastating effect that it can have on a family, in a community and how it takes hold. We can start to understand how something like this really can become so very prevalent in practice, in storytelling, but in practice, in what people were doing.

Speaker C: Yes, I think you're perfectly correct in that assessment. And I like to say, please, let's not break our arms patting ourselves on our backs over how smart we are, because the truth is, we're no more or less intelligent than our ancestors were. We have a lot more knowledge at our disposal. So that makes us seem like we're smarter, but we really aren't. I don't think we have to look too far back maybe two or three years to the COVID epidemic. And when it started, look what people were doing and maybe still doing. You have science now that tells us what we should be doing. But look at all the conspiracy theories that have been surrounding the COVID epidemic. Antivaxx are saying, well, no, that's going to make it worse. It's just a plot. And then folklores started collecting right away all the different treatments and methods and rituals that were being promulgated out there on the world wide web, and some of them were even embraced by our leaders, but they're not scientific. And so people are still, as you say, grasping at straws. When it seems we're in a dire situation and there's no other way out, we'll find a way. And folklore always has an answer. It may not be the scientifically correct answer, but sometimes people just need to have an answer, even if it's not the one that would be rational, it could be reasonable. And that's what I think the so called vampire ritual in New England, I think that's the function that it served. Because if you can imagine yourself, let's say in around the turn of the 19th century, early 18 hundreds, and somebody in your family gets this disease and you may not even know if there's a name for it. And they start getting weaker and weaker and eventually they're coughing up blood and it looks like literally something is draining the life, the very blood out of a person, and then another person in the family starts showing the same symptoms and so on and so on. So you have a chain of deaths in the family. Of course, you go to whoever passes as a medical doctor at that time, and medicine was not formed the way it is now. We didn't have what we would call the biomedical paradigm here. Doctors were still doing things like opening up veins and bleeding people to cure them. Well, that's probably one of the last things you should do if you have a disease where you're losing blood to start with. And so if a medical doctor was being honest with the patient, the medical doctor would say something like, I'm sorry, there's nothing more I can do. It's in the hands of God. Or they might say, well, open up all the windows and let the bad vapors out. Or another doctor might say, well, close all the windows to keep those mysmas out those bad air that's causing this. Or they might say, oh, well, you've got to stay warmer because you're getting too cold and that makes you get the grip and then you'll get the consumption. But in the end, no matter what was prescribed, if anything at all, it didn't work any better than doing nothing. And so what was the head of a family supposed to do? Well, the head of the family, the man usually would want to do anything and everything possible to save his family and also the community, because it would spread out into the community to neighbors and kin. And so why would he turn down an opportunity that might work? Now, the ritual, we haven't discussed what the ritual was, but yes, it was horrible. It was horrible to contemplate and it was also a terrible thing to put your family through. But in the end, doing something was better than doing nothing. Because if you're the head of the family and you don't pursue every opportunity to save your family, I'm sure there's going to be some guilt in your mind that maybe I should have tried this again.

Speaker B: I think we can look at it and think how barbaric it's a degradation. It seems inhumane. But actually, if we ask ourselves the question, what would take somebody, what would drive someone to exhume a loved one? Maybe a daughter, a son, a spouse, someone so close to them, what would take them to exhume that loved one and do the things that they're doing as part of this ritual? And when we ask that question, I think what we get is a very human answer, which is profound love. Again, like you were mentioning, just this real need to try and do everything that they could to safeguard the rest of those that they loved in their family. And also possibly this moral compunction to also safeguard their neighbors, their community, because, like you said, it ran so rampantly across a community. And so you also have their responsibility to try and safeguard everyone around you as best you can. And so I think when we can look at it with less judgmental eyes, we can see that, really, like you were saying, what drives this compunction to do something like this is essentially a need to do all you could to protect those around you that you cared for. And I think when we understand that, it makes for a much more interesting discussion because we see this as much more nuanced than it actually is. It's a far more complex topic than simply saying, well, this was a really barbaric practice. How could they possibly do it? There's so many more levels to this.

Speaker C: Oh, yeah, I think you're perfectly right there again, it's an expression of love and concern for your family and also for your neighbors and your kin, because people realize, and I think the folk, the people realized even before medical science, that this whatever it was, mysterious disease was in some ways contagious. Now, they didn't understand the contagion the way we do now, because nobody until 1882 understood that this disease was caused by a microscopic organism. 1882 is when a German medical doctor and scientist released his findings and showed that he had actually found the little bacterium that was causing the tuberculosis. But before then, it was basically a mysterious disease, and many of the physicians in both America and Great Britain thought it was hereditary. Now, on the continent, in France and Germany, the physicians were more inclined to think that it was indeed contagious. But for a long time, those two different perspectives were battling it out. And so now we know, actually, yes, it was contagious.

Speaker B: And this is where for the common layperson just trying to raise their family exist, do whatever they did to survive as part of their community, they're just part of all of this. They have less medical understanding than the experts, and the experts themselves are fighting it out. And so they're left to turn to who is around them to tell them, this is how you deal with it. This is how we can get through this, and what else can we expect them to do, really? I think the ritual element is fascinating. And it's fascinating for different reasons to me, one of which is something that I kind of started talking about earlier, which is this movement from Europe into the United States, because in just that movement, you see a shift in the types of ritual behavior around these practices. Europe was very much focused on the deceased having to come out of their grave, and they were attacking family members. They were draining their life force. And that you had to then go to their grave to perform these different rituals. And what is fascinating when looking at a lot of the accounts from the US. Is this less of the need for the deceased member to actually come out of their resting place, that they could almost do it remotely, that they had this power to consume the life force of others living from within their resting place. And so it fascinates me again just how these practices, these rituals could change so drastically or subtly from country to country but then region to region and why that happens. And I'd love to hear some of your thoughts on that and some of the rituals that you've encountered across the US.

Speaker C: Well, in Europe, the vampire belief in practice existed in a large social and cultural context. And so it starts with perhaps family obligations. And when a person is deceased, the belief was that if for some reason that soul is dissatisfied with social relationships before death then that person may come back to make things right, to settle scores. And so in Europe, there was this whole complex of social and kin relationships, obligation that had to be met. And if you didn't meet these obligations, then this was, in a sense, a way to sanction those who failed to live up to what they were expected to do. And then there were, in Europe ways to prevent a corpse from becoming a vampire. Don't allow a cat to walk over the corpse, for example, and things like that. And then once a corpse did become a vampire, then in Europe there were ways to prevent it from coming back to protect yourself and so on and so on. So I think when it came to the New World and to New England it came basically as just a folk medical practice. And the reason is going back to say, the foreign quack doctors who brought it here, they weren't trying to sell an entire tradition. What they were selling was a quick fix. So there was no reason to get into like, well, why did Mercy Brown become a vampire in the first place? Nobody asked that question here. Basically, it was the Pragmatic Yankee going like, what do I have to do to stop this? You don't have to give me all this other stuff, this theory about why it's happening and all this. Just tell me what I have to do and I'll do to get rid of it. And so that's why I think what it's been reduced to in New England is a medical practice simply that and not a larger cultural social enterprise that's integrated into all other aspects of the community.

Speaker B: So what kind of ritual experiences do you see across these accounts in the US. How are they different? What would you typically see or some of those small changes that you might encounter from area to area across the States?

Speaker C: Well, the fact that there were changes from one place to another and through time suggests that it was probably part of folk tradition because that's one of the very hallmarks of a folk tradition is that you find different variants or versions of the very similar act or ritual or belief. In New England there were three and sometimes four basic acts for performing the ritual. The first thing was to confront the corpse and usually that meant exhuming the body. Now, sometimes these rituals were performed before a person was actually interred or buried. But in most cases they would have to go to the cemetery and exhume the bodies of dead relatives. And then would come the diagnostic part of the ritual to find out which of these corpses was responsible for killing family members from the grave. As you mentioned, there's no indication in the New England tradition that a corpse actually left the grave in corporeal form and attacked relatives. It was some mysterious and really ill defined sympathetic connection between a dead person and a living person. So that there was some sort of an evil angel perhaps, or a demon existing in the corpse of the dead person, perhaps in one of the vital organs. And it was using that as a kind of hiding place for draining the life out of a living. It's not very explicit in this tradition of how that actually would happen. But in any event, to diagnose which family member was responsible after exclamation, people would look at the corpses and try to find identifying markers. Mostly they were looking for fresh blood, that is liquid blood, which was interpreted as fresh blood in the vital organs, especially the heart. So that would be for most people, that would be in an unnatural condition. How could this dead corpse still have liquid blood? And liquid blood is fresh blood. And so that would be the one that would be marked as the offending dangerous corpse. And so the third act in the ritual, I guess you could call it the healing act or the transformational act, that is to eliminate the threat. Now, in many cases you would cut off the organ that had the fresh blood in it and burn it to ashes. Sometimes you would burn the entire corpse and in some variants you would just simply turn the corpse face down and rebury it. Now, an interesting aspect of some of the rituals is looking for a vine that was growing sometimes out of the corpse, out of the breast of the corpse, perhaps out of the coffin. And some took this as a sign that that was how the contagion was being transmitted from one corpse to the next or one person to the next. So the vine would go from one coffin and then to another coffin. And when that happened, the belief was another person in the family would die. And so in these cases, the patient might be told to cut the fine and also burn that sometimes, along with the vital organs. And the fourth ritual act usually was to heal or cure the patient. And so the patient would be told to ingest the ashes from the burned vital organs or sometimes inhale the smoke from the burning corpse, a kind of fumigation. And in a sense, you can see that as a reasonable form of inoculation. What you've done is you've taken some evil thing that you've identified, you've burned it. And burning is a purification ritual in many cases. And then having purified it and neutralized it, you reintroduce that in the form of the ashes to the sick person, which will absorb or neutralize the evil that's within them.

Speaker B: Do you have any theories as to why there were subtle differences between region to region, how this type of treatment might change, or some of the steps as part of this process might be slightly different from place to place? Do you have any worries about that?

Speaker C: Yes, I think it very much brings us back to the oral tradition in the process of folklore, that's how things get transmitted from one person to another, from one community to another, by imitating customary examples. So you see someone doing this or you hear a narrative of how someone did this, and so that's how you do it.

Speaker A: Absolutely.

Speaker B: And it makes perfect sense, doesn't it? It's a bit like Chinese whispers. You hear of something happening somewhere and you're replicating it because you want to have success, you want to cure the community of this problem, your family of this problem. So it gets acted out that something might subtly change. And I would imagine as well, for the people that were the quacks, if you like, there's also an element of possible difference between how they were doing things too, because medicine was so different and thought behind how you cure was different. And so they may have their own twists on things too, I would imagine, again, subtle changes because of what they thought was necessary as part of their procedures, if you like.

Speaker C: Right. So there were variations in Europe too, in different locales and communities, variants of this ritual. So some of that would depend on where the person came from who came to this country, to New England, and brought that with them. They would bring usually their own. The tradition is they knew it in their homeland. But you have people coming to this country from many different parts of Europe, even in the early years, in the colonial era. And so they would bring with them the way that they knew from the old world. And so that would create the seed here, which might grow within a community, let's say 100 miles east, another seed would have been planted, and these would spread in the natural way with people who were traveling around, relocating, and also just through stories that were being told and transmitted across different communities. And so that's why I. Think you have the variation that I found in the ritual procedures that are undertaken, if you'll pardon the point.

Speaker B: No, I think it's absolutely apt to kind of put it like that. And I think for people maybe who've had an interest or know of something, a story within their local community, for example, of something like this, it may kind of stun them to realize that something, say, 300 miles away, 200 miles away or across the ocean in Europe was being practiced. But it might look different. I think there's this assumption that it's the same thing happening and being replicated wherever this kind of vampire panic is springing up in and that's just not true. And I think this is, again part of the interesting exploration of this topic. It is much more complex, it's much wider and you can really see these subtle differences and changes. I think it's what makes part of this so interesting. Like you mentioned, it's the folklore aspect that, again, provides that kind of richness to it in understanding what was happening. Do you have any particular popular, memorable cases from back then that really did spark people's interest or interest today?

Speaker C: To me, the most extraordinary cases are the ones that are written by eyewitnesses, especially by those who are actual participants in the ritual. And I think I have, let's see, a little over a dozen cases that are recorded by eyewitnesses. Probably the most fascinating one. Comes from Belcher Town, Massachusetts. In 1788, the Congregational minister of the town wrote a letter to his friend in a nearby community and he writes about embarking on a trip with his daughter whose name happened to be Mercy, not Mercy Brown, to another town. And he describes how she begins to hemorrhage, which of course, he says worries him especially because three of his other daughters had already died of consumption. And he writes in the letter, two others were suffering. And so he writes, I had consulted many about opening the graves of some of the deceased to see whether there were any signs of the dead praying on the living. And he noted that some advised him to exhume, but others disagreed. So he wrote, Most thought it was awful, but in the end, however, they consented. So then Reverend Forward goes on to describe in the letter how on the previous Friday they had opened the grave of his mother in law, Martha Morton Dickinson. Here's what he writes about that. She had been buried almost three years but she was wasted away to Amir's skeleton. So it was suggested that perhaps she was not the right person, so she was reburied. And then the reverend continues since I had begun to search, I concluded to search further and this morning opened the grave of my daughter who had died, the last of my three daughters almost six years ago. On opening the body, the lungs were not dissolved but had blood in them. The lungs did not appear as we would suppose they would in a body just dead, but far nearer a state of soundness than could be expected. The liver, I am told, was as sound as the lungs. We put the lungs and liver in a separate box and buried it in the same grave, ten inches or a foot above the coffin. Well, the ritual did not save Mercy, the daughter who was dying, but Forward's other three children were spared. So you might guess that he would conclude that the ritual was a success, at least partially. But to me, that's just an extraordinary first person account. Not just because of the detail. I condensed the letter. I didn't read the entire thing and I condensed the detail, but it's almost a dispassionate account of what was going on. He's standing away from it and looking at it from the outside, even though it's his own family that was being exhumed. And in a sense, I guess you would say, mutilated. And another interesting thing about this case is that there's a verification from a woman's diary who happened to live near the cemetery where this was done, and so she describes it in her diary. So we have two different accounts to kind of reinforce the veracity of this.

Speaker B: Particular incident, which is incredible, isn't it, to have, like you mentioned, just these firsthand accounts of something that was devastating a family at the time, to have letters documenting this. It's that kind of element, isn't it, of connection with history and people again. And I think it's what makes history so fascinating to explore, when you can really start to try and understand and see the person as real people. And I think there's nothing more real than when you get to see firsthand accounts and documentation. And there's not often many examples of things like that, but when you get it, it's really quite like we were just talking about memorable.

Speaker C: It's something you can't take my intent, especially in the second book that I've now completed, waiting to be published, called The Vampire's Grasp the Hidden History of Consumption in New England. What I've tried to do, and it's, I think, probably one of my number one goals in that book, is as far as I could to put a face, an actual face, on each of these ritual accounts. Now, that's not always possible. I've collected approaching, let's say, 90 now, up from the 20 I had when I wrote Food for the Dead. Some of them are very detailed, like Reverend Forward's account in his letter, and others are just one sentence. And that becomes virtually a dead end if I don't have a place, if I don't have names that I can research. But when I do get the information, then I find it very exciting that I can bring this family back to life.

Speaker B: Well, I think it brings them to the fore of the story. I think, with this kind of subject matter. We can forget the human element. We can forget the family. We can actually forget that this is about real people. And so I think when you are documenting and bringing these very real, tangible, written sentences, accounts, diaries, however long it is, even if it's just a few words, it's from someone we start to remember and realize this was someone living and experiencing this, and these are their words. And I think that's it's it's more impactful. We're less, like we're less inclined to to look away. We're less inclined to think of it with this dispassionate kind of viewpoint. We can really understand these people as people. And I think we can really start to understand the complexities of this kind of phenomena and desperation in what they were doing. Again, like we were saying, this is about love, this is about protection. This is about trying to be the head of a household, trying to be someone that's a good member of the community. It's doing all of these things. And I think we start to see this much more viscerally than we ever would if it was just a clipping from a newspaper or these are the things that we know about what happened with this particular case. It suddenly is almost like a photo. We can picture these people as people.

Speaker C: Yeah, you can see that in a sense, this ritual was a lifeline in the sea of despair.

Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker C: It was a bridge from fear and death to hope. Everybody needs hope, no matter how hopeless your situation may seem. I think it's a human trait that we seek the light, hope, a way out of the darkness.

Speaker B: I think when we start to realize that, it becomes, like you said right at the very start, it's just a much richer discourse around this topic, provides us with a far better understanding of what was happening. And I think that's what if anybody loves history or exploring their ancestry in the past, that's why we do it. That's why we want to have these kinds of discussions. And when we can start to make those connections as human being to human being, I think it can be really profound. And I think this is where these primary sources really kind of help to bridge that and to understand, like you were saying, this sense of hope, of bridging grief, of bridging desperation into something that feels more hopeful. And we can recognize that because we have the same kinds of feelings and experiences. And you touched on COVID, but we all had those same types of feelings of despair and looking for hope and how to cope with what was happening at a time when it felt very much out of our control. And so when we can make these connections as human beings, I think we understand our past and who we are and how we behave far better when we have these types of open conversations.

Speaker C: Absolutely true. I agree with you that if you know what they went through, at least if you know enough to be able to paint a picture of what they were doing, then perhaps it creates some empathy. You have feelings for them because you can relate to it in your own life, in your own surroundings. And then that brings our ancestors closer to us. It makes them real people and not just not just little squares on a genealogy family tree.

Speaker A: We are about to celebrate hitting our 100th episode of Haunted History Chronicles on the last Friday of April 2023 to say thank you for the months of May, June and July. There are going to be daily paranormal podcasts available to enjoy on all tiers over on Patreon, as well as the usual additional items available over there. Signing up now will gain you access to these as well as all previous archived content. For as little as one pound, you could be getting hundreds of podcasts to enjoy and more and know that you're contributing and helping the podcast to put out another 100 episodes. You can find the link in the episode Description Notes as well as on the Haunted History Chronicle's website, along with other simple and great ways to support the podcast directly. It's all truly very much appreciated. And now let's head back to the podcast.

Speaker B: So in terms of coming back to some of your research, were there any particular cases that when you were exploring them and researching them really stood out as being quite unusual in terms of events or things that kind of came out of that moment in the community or for the family? That for you. Had this one example maybe stand out compared to other examples that you've been researching.

Speaker C: Well, of course, the one I just mentioned of Reverend Forward in his letter. I mean, that's extraordinary and it's a very moving narrative, first person narrative. There are a couple of cases where young women who are dying of consumption begged their parents to have their hearts removed and burned when they die to spare their sisters. And to me, that's also a heart wrenching situation.

Speaker B: Again, it's very much that human element, isn't it? You can have no clearer kind of indication of wanting to protect your loved ones than to say, I want you to do this to me in the event of my death. To almost have that kind of level of sacrifice that you want them to do all they can to protect those that you are still living, that you love.

Speaker C: Now I see you and I agree about that perspective on what was going on. But of course, there was another side to this coin, and that is the outside commentators who either failed or did not want to see the compassion and the love, but instead just labeled a horrible superstition, a barbaric practice from a savagery past or something like that. That was, I would say, the normative interpretation by people outside the community, particularly in newspapers and of course, sensation cells. And these stories were sensational, and I think that's a reason that most of them have turned up in newspapers at one time or another. Even Justice Forward's letter that he had written to his friend about having his family exhumed, that was published many years later in a newspaper when it was found in the possession of one of his descendants who had just passed away. I don't know how he got the letter, if it was a copy of the letter or what it was, but the newspaper was published in the newspapers, published that letter several decades later. When newspapers publish these accounts, they're really looking at the most sensational aspects, because that's what draws people's attention and that's what sells newspapers, especially in the days of developing journalism when facts weren't so important. What was most important in many cases was just telling us a good story that could propel people to buy your newspapers in being compassionate and empathetic about what was going on probably would have been a little too sentimental and perhaps mushy for selling newspapers. Headlines like Testing horrible superstition in the town of Exeter, bodies of dead relatives taken from their graves and mutilated and burned and ashes were fed to the very sensationalistic kind of treatment, but it did attract attention.

Speaker B: Well, I think it also has that kind of distance perspective, doesn't it? And I think this is possibly one of the differences, is that, like you said, sensation sells. But also, if you're not caught up in a situation like this yourself, if it's not your family that's directly being affected in some way or your community, you can have that distance perspective. You can look at anything. How shocking. I would never do that. Until you're part of that same scenario, you don't know how you're going to respond. And I think we can be very critical in throwing stones until the situation comes round and we're in the thick of it. And I can imagine how that also played a part. People could be very quick to judge until something like that came to their door and their household and directly impacted on them. What would they then do? Would they do things differently or would they do things the same?

Speaker C: Right.

Speaker B: It's in itself an interesting question, I think.

Speaker C: Well, that's what folklores refer to that phenomenon as the esoteric exoteric factor in folklore. So if you're on the inside looking out, it's a very different perspective from being on the outside looking in. And so it's easier to cast it in any kind of mold that you think is suitable for your own purposes, which may not be to look at it from the inside and what people were doing and why they were doing it from their perspective. Just put it in a different framework, it's a different window for viewing what was going on. That's how I've organized the second book, The Vampire's Grass, according to different storytelling or narrative contexts. So you have the first person account, the family accounts. You also have newspaper accounts. I have accounts from the medical profession, medical doctors. I have accounts from local histories. And all of these different paradigms will shape the story and interpret it and put it in different and contextualize it in different ways too. And so that that to me is very interesting and important way to look at these these events because I think.

Speaker B: There'S going to again be subtle differences, isn't there, between each of those different perspectives. And when you mentioned journalists and that approach that they're going to have, of course they're going to have a very different perspective and viewpoint because of their own agenda of what they're trying to get out of it. And so, yes, I think it's really important to kind of look at and explore each of the different viewpoints that each of the different narratives because each shape this story and give it this completeness. And I think we can easily look at newspaper reports or historical documents of those kinds of nature and think, well, that's the complete picture. But actually it comes back to what we were saying. We don't get that fullness without seeing all sides of this for what it is. And that means exploring the people. It means exploring the community. It means exploring what was happening and piecing all of these things together. A bit like a jigsaw puzzle, right?

Speaker C: Well, you had physicians looking at it from the point of view of the medical establishment. This is at a time when the medical establishment was just being formed as an established, recognizable organization. And so it became sort of a territorial imperative for them. They didn't like other people impinging on what they thought was their medical province. And so they would put in the same category the quack doctors along with the regular people who were performing these rituals. They were all outside of the established way of doing things. And so in a sense, they were just drawing a line around their own particular profession. And then evolutionists, who were just beginning to form theories about cultural evolution based on Darwin's earlier idea of biological evolution, they were looking at these practices as survivals from a lower order of culture. But the theory went, for this kind of unilineal cultural evolution, the theory went culture progressed from savagery through barbarism into civilization. And of course, civilization were the scientists who were doing the proclaiming. And so they were looking at these events as survivals from a lower level of cultural evolution. And so their attitude was these things must be found and rooted out and eliminated so that we can all rise to civilization.

Speaker B: But it's again, it's interesting just to interrupt because it's this idea of putting a circle around themselves and saying, again, I'm the expert. What I'm doing as a vendicle professional at this time, in this time period is superior than these quack methods that are coming in from elsewhere. But again, we now look back at these and think, gosh, some of the things that they did to treat tuberculosis were horrific in hospitals and facilities and actually caused death much quicker. Sure. And yet they're looking at this from their perspective of superiority, again of, well, we have this higher kind of understanding of what's going on. These are the things that we endorse. These are things that we're doing as medical practices, as kind of treatments. And again, somehow we're better than these things that are happening at the kind of ground level in some areas.

Speaker C: Right. Then there's another interesting context. And they're like the community based storytellers and authors who would take these events and then fashion them into fictional stories or semi fictional. It's a gray area when you get into historical fiction or memoir and all that sort of thing. But these authors would take these events and then weave them into a much larger, more complex narrative.

Speaker B: So in terms of kind of the implications for the community at the time, I can see how if we've already kind of touched upon the fact that if something like this took hold, you might have a duty, a real driving need to try and protect those around you. But I can also understand how people might get caught up in someone else's narrative to say this is something that we should be doing, this is a necessity. And maybe some of their own thoughts get pushed to the back of their mind type thing. Is that something that you've explored and you've looked at? This kind of the ripple effect, if you like, of how this spread in terms of how the community responded to these types of incidents in their own backyard, if you like?

Speaker C: That's an interesting question because I don't think there's just one cut and dried path communities took. I have one case that occurred in Pennsylvania, and it's a family that immigrated from or relocated from Rhode Island. Perhaps they brought the tradition with them. But the head of a family took out an ad in the newspaper and the ad said, on Sunday at 10:00 a.m.. At such and such a cemetery, we will be exhuming the bodies of the people in this family to try to stop consumption. All interested parties, he said, I'm putting this ad in so that all interested parties may attend. Now, that's extraordinary.

Speaker B: I think it's certainly a different type of invitation to an event, isn't it?

Speaker C: Yes.

Speaker B: It's not your usual birthday invite.

Speaker C: He paid for this ad in the newspaper twice. He put it in and then the newspaper ran its own little article and said, we would like to clarify things that Mr. Robert Frost, I think his name was Frost does not believe. He wants the community to know he does not believe in this, but he's doing this for the benefit of the family because they want him to. So there again, you have the idea of the pressure that ahead of a family would feel. And then what makes this event even more extraordinary is that someone who saw the ad went to the ritual and then he wrote a very long description of what happened. You're getting the entire history of this in a nutshell, from the very beginning of an ad being put in the paper and all the way to the description of the actual event. And then if that's not enough, this story was read by someone in another community who subscribed to this paper because he used to live in that community and that moved him to describe an event that he had witnessed years earlier in another community. So then again, we get another narrative because of this particular account. Those are the kinds of things that really are exciting when you're doing research and you find things like that.

Speaker B: Well, I think they just prompt questions. I think it tells you a lot about, like you mentioned, that you can see his desire completely to fulfill his duties as head of the household and to protect those around him. But at the same time, you have to ask the question why put the ad? Is this down to fear of social repercussions if he doesn't do something? Is there other elements at play also as to why people acted in some of the ways that they did, whether it was the ritual itself or how they spoke to their community about it? What does that say about the fear around tuberculosis? Again, that you have this need to publicize it in the way that he did by putting it in the newspaper to begin with and invite people to attend, to see he's almost doing his duty in trying to protect all those around him.

Speaker C: Right.

Speaker B: It poses other interesting questions that I think just again, add to this narrative and to this very rich tapestry of history, of what really was going on for people at ground level.

Speaker C: Those are the things that I try to find. Unfortunately, they're more rare than I would like. In many cases, all you get is something like from, say, a local historian saying, oh yes, there were three vampire incidents in the county, but because they are so horrendous and repulsive, I'm not going to record them here.

Speaker B: Yeah, well, I think we like to cover up, we like to ignore some aspects of history. And history is very much about who tells it and who writes it down and who records it. And there's so much whitewashing of some aspects of history and that when it tends to be something that makes them uncomfortable. Yeah, it's something we often see, isn't it? Or if they've been part of it, it can be recorded differently. I mean, just that in itself is the whole other topic point, I think.

Speaker C: Well, most of the local histories. That where I found these incidents recorded were written by people who lived in that particular community. And many of these were written on subscription. So if say someone could get 300 people to subscribe for like $10 each, then that would make it worth his while to write a history and then they would each get a copy. But that also meant that those who were subscribing had a personal interest in what was being recorded in the history. And so in many of these local histories, you'll find genealogies or you'll have biographies of the so called important people, and then you can see why they might want to leave out vampire incidents. Because it doesn't fit the kind of idealized picture that people had of New England that emerged in the middle to late 19 hundreds when people were seeing that, oh, this old New England is being eroded, it's falling away. So we need to record for posterity what was going on. But in most cases, it was a very idealized view of what life was like. And so a lot of the crude stuff, the difficult stuff, the horrific stuff was either left out or dislightly mentioned. So when I find an account in one of the local histories, it's exciting. And at the same time, I have to be cautious about trying to find more verifiable facts about what happened because everyone has a viewpoint. You have to just viewpoint is, yeah.

Speaker B: It'S a bit of a murky water sometimes, isn't it? You have to really be able to critically evaluate what you're reading because like you said, you've got to evaluate the narrative who's writing it. It's what we've been saying all along, though. It's a very complex, multifaceted exploration. And this is what you are working through in terms of that research and that analysis. You're looking at it from all sides and evaluating what each and everything is kind of showing you and kind of bringing these threads together. And like you said, those are the moments that are exciting when you can start to piece them together and explore what's happening and kind of help to show that narrative of what was happening and the understanding for the people of the day just to bring it to us to have this greater depth of understanding as to what life was like.

Speaker C: It's interesting to follow some of these stories through time. You see that they change over time. Even some of the basic facts might be reinterpreted or some facts will be left out and other things will be brought in. So over time, these narratives tend to change to be made more suitable for whatever particular context exists at that moment, at that period.

Speaker B: Did you encounter any memorable characters whilst you were kind of exploring this research? Because I would imagine that would also factor into part of that research. And again, how things shift and how things change or how things are put across but also just memorable people that are coming out as part of this research in terms of their moment in this event, if you like. I mean, are there any people for you that stood out as being memorable characters as part of that kind of journey to getting to the truth and the heart of what was happening with a particular encounter and a report?

Speaker C: Oh, yes, that would be the very first encounter I had with this particular belief and practice in New England. In most of these cases, what I have are recorded narratives, recorded, meaning they were written down. They might have been oral at one time, but by the time I get to them, they've been, I guess you could say, solidified in print, whether in a newspaper or recollection a letter or an archive or whatever. So when I find stories from families that were involved, I mean, that's pretty rare. And it just so happens that my very first encounter with the vampire tradition was from someone who was descended from the family of Mercy Brown. And mercy Brown was, in a sense, I guess you would say, the last person exhumed as a vampire in America. And that was in 1892 in Exeter, Rhode Island. And I was doing a survey of folk traditions in the southern part of Rhode Island, and a person was an intern with me said, you really have to talk to this man in Exeter, Rhode Island, who knows everything about the town history. And she said, when we talked to him, you have to be sure to ask about the vampire and his family. So obviously that caught my attention because I had no idea about this tradition at the time. This was in November of 1981, so it was a long time ago. And so I sat down with Everett Peck that was his name, and he started to tell me the story. And I was just kind of blown away, really, with him saying, describing how the family had gone into the cemetery and exhumed the bodies of two of the people in the family that had died, and the mother and the sister had basically wasted away to skeletons. But then they went to Mercy Brown, who had died in January of 1892, and this was in March when they went to the cemetery to try to save her, mercy Brown's brother Edwin. And she had been placed in an above ground crypt because they could not actually put something in the ground when it was frozen. So in those days, they would just thor the corpses. This was before embalming was really common, especially in the rural areas. And so they brought her out of the above ground crypt, and she looked fresh, according to the people who were there in their statements. Well, of course, she died in January. She'd been above the ground there when most of the time the weather was freezing or around freezing or below. And so. She would look fresh. Everett Peck went on to described how they were surprised when they saw her because she had turned over in the grave, according to the family story. And so that was a tip off that she might be the one. And then they performed the ritual, they examined her heart and her liver and found what they interpreted as fresh blood and they took the organs and put them on a nearby rock and burned them to ashes. And then they were supposed to have fed the ashes to her brother Edwin, who was in very bad shape at that time. There's no verification that Edwin actually consumed the ashes, but that was what supposedly he was done with them. It didn't work for Edwin because he died in May a couple of months later. But according to the family story, that took care of the problem because no one else died after that. But when you look at the family history, that's not exactly the case that several more in the family did actually die. But that was to me an extraordinary family story that Everett had heard from people who were alive at the time that this was done. That's a pretty unusual kind of narrative for this particular practice.

Speaker B: I'm glad you kind of mentioned this one because it was one of the ones that for me really stood out and I think for all the reasons that you've just said it is this other narrative of, I would say, one of the more kind of common examples well known amongst people of this type of practice. I would say Mercy Brown's story is more well known around the world for different reasons. It's been put out as podcasts or as books, or as short films and programs and parts of series. There was something, I think, about the young, beautiful young girl who's been caught up in all of this, the beautiful vampire girl, if you like, I think sells. It's the sensationalist part of the story that hooks people in and kind of then takes them off on this journey of, well, this is something interesting to explore. So I think it is something that people are very much aware of. But here you have this perspective from someone within the family and that's a very different take on this where you're able to look at this again if you like, you're seeing a different viewpoint of what happened that's been told and passed down generationally. And it's again just this other layer, isn't it, to the story of Mercy Brown.

Speaker C: Again, it takes us back to storytelling context. What is the situation wherein the story is being told now in the family story? It wasn't ever described, the family storytelling event. It wasn't we're sitting around a campfire around Halloween and trying to scare each other. The story was told in a very natural way when children would go to the Grange, which is next to the church in both or next to the cemetery for Children's Day in June when school was out, that's where they held their Little Children's Day. Or sometimes they would go there for Memorial Day or Decoration Day, they called it, which is the last day in May when you decorate the graves of your deceased relatives. So the children would be there with the grownups, and the grownups would tell the children, now, don't go over to this stone and don't touch this stone because of this awful thing that took place years ago. And so then the story would be retold every season, year after year, as new people in the family came up, new children in the family. Then they would have to hear the story again for the first time, and then other children would hear it again and again. And so it would reinforce the story. But it wasn't to scare kids so much. It's to just warn them away from playing over there and also to give them a bit of their family's history.

Speaker B: Which is fascinating, isn't it? And again, just to see the power of storytelling within families, within communities, and then further afield. And I think what you've got here is an interesting example of seeing how it's played out within a family, filtered out to the wider community, is, again, just that interesting perspective. It's that interesting exploration of how this story can be different depending on who it's for and who it's being consumed by, if that makes sense.

Speaker C: Yeah. And once again, the story can change over time, and the family story has changed over time, which I find fascinating. There's kind of a feedback loop. The family story is told by someone like Mr. Peck, and it gets into the newspapers. Of course, he then becomes an audience because he's reading the story as it's put in the newspaper. Well, whether in his awareness or consciousness or not. I mean, the story changes over time. So in the beginning, I was told that it was some mysterious illness that was killing the family. Didn't know what it was. Later, after these stories have been published in the newspaper, then he says, well, it was consumption or tuberculosis that was killing them. And so the story changes. In one case, one of the older family members, someone who is even more connected in terms of time than Everett, actually talked about the girls having bite marks on their necks. Now, that's not recorded in the contemporary newspaper accounts that started being published a day after the event in March of 1892. There's no one's saying that the body had moved in the grave or there were bite marks on the neck. But these elements come in even to the family stories later. And I think it's because, whether consciously or not, they're absorbing a larger context for this story and they're trying to make it understandable to an outside audience. And so people are calling it the vampires, even though at that time they didn't use the term. The people in the families didn't use that term. But then that term gets picked up in the family stories and then you have elements of popular culture and the popular notion of the vampire coming into the family stories. Because I think of that kind of feedback loop, it would be kind of.

Speaker B: Unthinkable for it not to have an impact. And again, I think this is the interesting aspect of exploring folklore to see how it changes based on what's happening, that wider picture of the day and what's influencing kind of stories that are being told and how they change. To take on aspects that are coming.

Speaker C: In, you also have to look because the function in the meaning, the function of these stories changes over time and through different context. Also in some cases you're trying to teach a lesson or educate people. In your family cases you simply want to entertain people and so that's going to change the narrative, the structure as well as the content.

Speaker B: Well, it kind of comes back to what we were saying, isn't it? It depends on in some cases the purpose of why the story is being told and someone's own agenda like we were talking about with the journalists wanting to sell their newspapers. It depends on the perspective that they've got and the agenda that they've sometimes got and that sometimes shifts and changes and morphs.

Speaker C: It's a natural process, absolutely human interaction.

Speaker B: And again, I think this is for anybody who hasn't read Food for the Dead. It really does allow you to look at something that is like we've been saying is so much more complex, complex than I think people are aware of and to have a much greater understanding of the events of what was happening. And you mentioned that you've got vampires grasp coming out. I don't know if you want to just tell us a little bit about that in terms of if there's an idea of when you think it's going to be published or what people might expect from that in terms of any new research that you've been focusing on. But certainly Food for the Dead is something I would advocate people picking up and taking a look at and having a read of. And certainly when the next book comes out it's going to be on my list of things to read. So I'm sure other people will find it just as fascinating if they enjoy what you've already put out.

Speaker C: Well, I hope so. I think the first book, Food for the dad, is written in a different way from the second book, Vampire's Grass. And Food for the dad is written in the first person. And so I tried to take readers along with me as I did research what I found and how I found it. And so in that sense it became partly my story as well as the story of all of these families. Now in vampire's grass. I've tried to step back and not put myself in the story so much, but so it's written in basically the third person. So they're very different approaches, but I think they're both revelatory sometimes the same ways and in different ways too. Food for the Data was pretty much just bringing people along with me when I following the thread of my research and what I found, hoping to share some of the concerns as well as the joy of finding narratives and putting narratives together and interpreting them in the vampire's graft. I have so many cases to discuss. I mean, I've gone from like 20 to over 80 and some of them are just dead ends and some of them are very rich. Like the story of Isaac Johnson or the story of Reverend Forward or the Mercy Brown story, which has probably been pushed and pulled and put into every possible shape that a story can over the years, especially with now the spread of her story through social media and through the World Wide Web. So we were getting many variants of Mercy Brown's story that basically are almost not recognizable at all when you look at the factual elements that we can define about what happened at that time to Mercy Brown in some of the stories now, she's still haunting the cemetery. In some of the stories, she's not bad, but she's good. And she'll visit people who are sick in the hospital to tell them that it's okay, that you'll be all right. I mean, it has very little to do with the original events, but you can just see how a story takes shape over time and in different contexts, used, as you said, for different purposes and for different functions.

Speaker B: And so folklore and story comes in, fills that gap for us, and likewise then over time continue to fill that gap because here's someone that intrigues us and we don't want it to end. And so it evolves. It keeps evolving. And so then you start having stories of her, like you mentioned, as the ghost law of it coming through with her, haunting various places. We again start to make these connections with her because it's something that fascinates us and we don't like. Quinn Marks I think, seek out story answers and folklore helps to do that. Ghost Law helps to do that, yes. Honestly, I can't wait for the next book. I'll be avidly waiting so that I can read it and just see what.

Speaker C: It'S hard for me to wait.

Speaker B: Do you have any idea when it's coming out, or is it top secret hush hush type thing?

Speaker C: Well, I haven't gotten a publisher yet, but I think it's going to be coming out soon, honestly, one way or another. Because if I don't publish it now, it's just going to keep growing.

Speaker B: I was going to say, if it doesn't get published soon, I'm sure you'll just end up adding more content to it. And I think this is the type of nature of this. The more you start researching, you do come across more cases and they are interesting and they do have their place. And so at some point it must be quite hard to say enough is enough. I need to kind of bring this together and get this out there and then see what the future then holds in terms of other books.

Speaker C: Exactly. If I keep getting more information, it will have to go into another book because exactly.

Speaker B: Well, if you do do book three, I will read that one.

Speaker C: Okay, hold you to that.

Speaker B: Michelle, one thing that interests me, and I just kind of would like to have the chance to ask you for your perspective and your take is whether you think this type of material and the research and what you've discovered really does have any implications for modern politics practices that we see and things that we hear about. If you see that and if you think there are those connections that can and should be made, well, I will.

Speaker C: Go back to saying looking at the recent COVID epidemic or pandemic and looking at that next to the consumption, it wasn't really a panic. People have called it a panic, but it was endemic. It was in the community and it just wouldn't leave. It just stayed there. But I think that one of the lessons that I draw from this, and it's a pretty simple lesson, really, is just for us to have some humility when we judge people from in the past by looking around at what we do now and how we're dealing with intractable problems or problems that seem to have no solution, especially diseases and epidemics. We're still plagued by cancer, heart disease, diabetes, things that we can do some things for, but in the end it can render you to feeling helpless. But then you realize that they're paths forward that you can take. They don't always have to be the path that everybody else is taking. Sometimes you have to go a different direction. And in a sense, I think that's what these communities were doing. They weren't following the establishment path because the establishment path was basically a dead end for them. And so they found other ways to give themselves relief from the fear and the dread and to find some light or hope.

Speaker B: And it's that light and hope that I think, again, as human beings, we all look for. And I think that's a kind of a fitting way to kind of bring this together, really, that let's look at this with fresher eyes, maybe with a less judgmental set of eyes and see the human nature in it and see ourselves in some of what has happened in our past and how we behave too. And I think if we can do that, I think we learn a lot about history and a lot about humanity and we learn about our ancestors and about us and who we are as human beings. And I think that's an interesting part of history to explore too. Just as valuable as learning facts and places and dates and all these other things. This takes history right back to its very core of this is about people.

Speaker C: Put it at eye levels. The way I look at it.

Speaker A: Absolutely.

Speaker B: Honestly, it's been so interesting to chat to you and like you just mentioned, to look at this at eye level, we can start to see this in all of its color and richness and it takes life, it becomes real. I really do appreciate not only the research and the work that you do, but the fact that you've come along today to talk about it and to give us some of that insight. I'm very much appreciative. So thank you so much. And I will make sure that alongside the podcast description notes and on the website, we get your details and we have them up there so that people who want to read the book or be signposted to you. They can easily find you. Hopefully read some of this and vampires grasp when it comes out because it's something I recommend very strongly. So thank you for coming in, sharing some of that insight with me today.

Speaker C: Thank you, Michelle, it's been my pleasure.

Speaker B: And I will say goodbye to everybody listening for now. Bye everyone.