By William Mann

It might have been rainy on the night the vampire hunters trudged into the ancient Jewett City cemetery on May 8, 1854. “The late storm,” reported The New London Daily Star on May 10, produced more rain “than has fallen since the record was kept.” Those with their spades and pickaxes might have welcomed soggy earth. It would have made the digging easier.

Gravestone of Henry B. Ray in Jewett City Cemetery. photo: Cindy Davis for FindaGrave

They stopped in front of the plain white stone of Henry Burton Ray, who had died of consumption in 1849. His son, Lemuel, had died of the same disease four years earlier, and another son, Elisha, known as Horace, had succumbed in 1851. Now, a third son, Henry Nelson Ray, a mill worker and the father of four children, was spitting up blood and wasting away. It was time to exhume the vampire who was causing all this and kill it.

Vampire folklore, brought over from Europe, has existed in New England since at least the late 18th century, according to Dr. Michael E. Bell, author of Food for the Dead: On the Trail of New England’s Vampires (Wesleyan University Press, 2011). Bell draws a parallel between the rise of vampire folklore in America and the rise of consumption, the 19th-century term for tuberculosis; both emerged alongside the early Industrial Revolution when many people left family farms for work in mills and factories. According to the 1840 census, Henry Burton Ray and his entire family, even the youngest children, worked in manufacturing (as opposed to agriculture). Jewett City was an industrial town with sawmills, fulling mills, and gristmills. For Henry Ray, his children’s wages were an economic necessity. According to The Norwich Courier of March 19, 1828, he’d been declared an insolvent debtor by the court.

Disease spread easily in the crowded mills. By the middle part of the 19th century, consumption was endemic in parts of America. The Norwich Courier of June 29, 1836, ran a death notice for “Mr. Joseph Edgerton, aged 34, the last of a family of eleven, who have all died of the Consumption.” Although statistics for Griswold, of which Jewett City is a part, are not readily available, in nearby Windham, which also included an industrial borough, consumption was the leading cause of death (about 20 percent of the total) in the year leading up to the vampire hunters’ raid. The median age of those who died was 26.

Since doctors and medicine had proven ineffective, people looked elsewhere for healing. As witnessed during the COVID-19 pandemic, people become particularly susceptible

“Strange Superstition,” The Hartford Times article of May 27, 1854, about the exhumation of the vampires.

to myths and false information during public health emergencies. The Black Death of the 14th century, seen by many as God’s punishment, led some to flagellate themselves in public displays of penance. In 1918, many seized on a rumor that whiskey was a cure for the influenza virus. In the mid-19th century, charlatans promised an end to consumption. “A cure for that most fatal of all maladies, Consumption,” promised an advertisement for Pease’s Compound Extract of Horehound in The Norwich Courier of January 26, 1846. One of the most popular remedies was Holloway’s Ointment, marketed in The Connecticut Courant on January 21, 1860, as a triumph of “modern science” over “ancient superstition.”

But when such “science” failed, people turned to superstition. According to Bell, the grave exhumations of the mid-1800s were based on the belief that “the deceased consumptive in a family has been possessed by a vampire that has fed on the living of such a household.” The solution was to exhume the family member’s body and burn the heart, which was expected to be filled with fresh blood.

The folklore of what’s come to be known as the “vampire panic” of 19th-century New England is usually quite different from later vampire stories, such as Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). Yet the idea of a vampire as an elegant creature of the night so common today was also current at the time. John Polidori’s story “The Vampyre” (1819) had been adapted into a play, The Vampire, or the Bride of the Isles, by J. R. Planché in 1820. Its titular vampire, Lord Ruthven, was a debonair nobleman. In 1821, Planché’s play was among those available from Hatch’s Circulating Library in Hartford. “Of all the horrific beings with which the creative power of superstition has peopled the supernatural world,” judged The New York Evening Post on November 2, 1820, “the Vampire is certainly one of the most striking and picturesque.”

This was the vampire of the literate classes, however. While the Ray brothers seemed well known in town (The New London Daily Chronicle on October 4, 1851, praised the giant peaches from Henry Nelson Ray’s tree), they were unschooled mill laborers, unlikely to have read plays. The word “vampire,” however, would have been known to them, even if newspaper accounts of the exhumations rarely used it. The Hannibal (MO) Gazette of September 9, 1847, described a vampire that was probably closer to the Ray brothers’ view: “When buried, it did not decay like other dead bodies, but remained uncorruptible, lying still by day, but by night leaving its damp cold bed, to go forth and feed upon the living above ground.” The only method of destroying a vampire, the account read, was to “exhume it during the day light and thrust a stake through its heart.”

Instead of heart-staking, the Rays went in for corpse-burning. “A strange and almost incredible tale of superstition has been related to us of a scene recently enacted at Jewett City,” reported The Hartford Times of May 27, 1854. (The article was credited as being first published in The Norwich Courier, but that edition appears not to have survived.) “The family and friends of the deceased dug up the bodies . . . and burned them on the spot. We seem to be transported back to the darkest age of unreasoned ignorance and blind superstition, instead of living in the middle of the 19th century, and in a State calling itself enlightened and Christian.” The ritual did little good: seven months later, Henry Nelson Ray died. His one-year-old daughter soon followed him to the grave.

The newspaper’s horror over the event made it seem like an isolated case, but it was not. The Republican Farmer (Bridgeport) reported on September 9, 1851, that a family in Cayuga County, New York, had attempted to stop the spread of consumption by disinterring the brother who’d first contracted the disease. They took it a step further, however, burning the heart “in the presence of the family, who inhaled the fumes and afterwards ate the ashes.” A similar attempt was made in Glens Falls, New York, in 1858, but when the heart of the deceased was found not to contain fresh blood, “the project was abandoned” (Norwich Aurora, April 24, 1858). As such rituals were likely conducted in relative secrecy, there were probably many more than just the few that made the newspapers. Secrecy shouldn’t imply shame over the proceedings, however: Bell cites examples of physicians and clergymen accompanying family members to exhumations.

The Ray case is the only historical record of a Connecticut vampire ritual. But archaeological evidence has revealed another in the same town. In 1990, boys playing in a gravel

3. J. B. Grave. photo: Office of State Archaeology and Paul Grant-Costa

pit in Griswold discovered bones; a team led by Connecticut state archaeologist Nicholas Bellantoni unearthed a long-forgotten graveyard used by the Walton family, farmers who’d lived in the area before 1850. Bellantoni identified the bones as belonging to 29 individuals: 7 men, 7 women, 12 children, and 3 infants. But one skeleton was unlike the others. Its head and femur bones had been removed after the initial burial. The skeleton was then turned over and the femur bones arranged over the spine; the skull was placed over the crossed bones, a symbol of death used since medieval times. The skeleton was then reburied. Spelled out in brass tacks on the casket was the legend JB55, presumed to be the individual’s initials and age.

At first, Bellantoni didn’t know what to make of the desecration of JB55’s remains. “Obviously, we had never seen a burial rearranged in this manner before and struggled to understand the behavior behind it,” said Bellantoni in an email interview. “I was totally befuddled until one of my colleagues mentioned the story of the Jewett City vampire and the Ray family exhumations.”

Genealogical and DNA detective work eventually identified JB55. The two closest matches to his Y-chromosomal profile in the public FamilyTreeDNA R1b Project bore the surname Barber, “a compelling result given the expectation that the surname of JB55 also begins with a B,” wrote the team who conducted the study in September 2019 (Jennifer Daniels-Higginbotham et al, “DNA Testing Reveals the Putative Identity of JB55, a 19th Century Vampire Buried in Griswold, Connecticut,” Genes 10, no. 9). But it was another coffin near JB55, this one with tacks arranged as NB13, that clinched his identity. An obituary of Nathan Barber of Griswold, age 12, in the August 16, 1826, edition of The Norwich Courier identified the decedent’s father as John Barber. (The 13 had probably been deduced by subtracting Nathan’s year of birth from his year of death; the obituary indicated he hadn’t yet turned 13, however.) Another casket bearing an adult female skeleton was marked IB in tacks (no age given), presumably John’s wife.

The historical record of John Barber is scant. He may have been the son of Benjamin and Lucy Barber, born on July 23, 1788, in Canterbury, ten miles north of Griswold, according to the Barbour Collection of Connecticut Vital Records. He was possibly the John Barber enumerated in the 1820 census, also in Canterbury, a farmer with a wife and two children. After this, Barber may have become an itinerant farmer, working for the Waltons; when he and his family died, they were buried in their employers’ cemetery.

DNA evidence gives us what the written record does not. John Barber was extraordinarily tall, about 6 ft. 2 in., making him a giant in the early-19th century. He suffered severe osteoarthritis in his left knee, which would have caused a limp. About five years before he died, Barber suffered a major injury that crushed his right side and broke his collarbone. The bone wasn’t set, which gave him a large hump on his right shoulder. Walking around Griswold, Barber would have struck an imposing, perhaps frightening, figure. Lesions on his ribs indicate he died of consumption, probably in 1843, a date calculated by adding JB55’s age at death to the birth year of John Barber of Canterbury.

It may have been easy to blame the giant of the Walton farm when a series of consumption deaths followed his own. Indeed, several of the other skeletons from the family cemetery also bore the telltale tuberculosis lesions. “Our hypothesis,” Bellantoni recalled, “is that they went into JB’s grave about five years or so after he died. As a result, all soft tissue may have been decomposed, so unable to remove the heart (since it was no longer present), they chose to uproot his legs and decapitate the skull, just in case. They wanted to be sure he was dead dead, and not just dead!” When Barber was reburied, stone slabs were added to the sides and tops of his coffin.

The vampire hunters who dug up Barber’s bones were not written about in the local papers as the Ray brothers would be a decade later. But the exhumation ritual may have passed from family to family in the Griswold-New London area and may have inspired the Ray brothers to take up their spades.

After the Civil War, newspaper accounts of vampire rituals in Connecticut largely disappeared. The second half of the 19th century saw the increasingly literate working and middle classes gaining greater access to popular entertainment. The vampire was a common character in penny dreadfuls (lurid periodicals often with supernatural themes), dime novels, and vaudeville. It’s possible that such commercial exposure made the vampire seem less threatening. Yet the old rituals didn’t entirely vanish. J. R. Cole, in his History of Tolland County, Connecticut (W. W. Preston, 1888), included a story of five sisters in West Stafford who had all “died in rapid succession of galloping consumption” and were then disinterred to spare more deaths in the family. Whether all the bodies were burned or only the one with a “fresh and living heart,” Bell points out, is unknown.

Some clung to the old beliefs almost into the 20th century. In March 1892, George Brown of Exeter, Rhode Island—just twenty miles across the border from Griswold—had his three daughters, all of whom had died of consumption—exhumed. Present were the local doctor and a newspaper reporter. Two of the daughters had decomposed as expected, but Mercy, who’d died three months earlier, still had blood in her heart. The fact that Mercy’s body had been kept in a cold, aboveground crypt because the ground was too frozen for burial seemed irrelevant to her father. Her heart and liver were cut out and burned, and her ill brother Edwin was given a tonic of her ashes to drink. He died two months later (Abigail Tucker, “The Great New England Vampire Panic,” Smithsonian Magazine, October 2012).

An excerpt of the 1850 U.S. federal census showing the entry for Henry N. Ray.

In 1922, 68 years after Henry Burton Ray and his sons were exhumed from their graves, Albert Calmette and Camille Guérin developed the Bacillus Calmette-Guérin, a vaccine against the bacteria that causes tuberculosis. George Brown was still alive at that point. So were the children of Henry Nelson Ray, who’d arranged the exhumations of his family before he, too, died.

William J. Mann is a New York Times–bestselling author of several books on film and political history, including Tinseltown: Murder, Morphine, and Madness at the Dawn of Hollywood, which won the Edgar Allen Poe Award for Best Fact Crime. He is also a member of Connecticut Explored’s editorial board.