Michael Edward Bell

"For nineteenth-century New Englanders, 'vampires' lurked behind tuberculosis. To try to rid their houses and communities of the scourge of the wasting disease, families sometimes relied on folk practices, including exhuming and partially consuming boddies of the deceased. Author and folklorist Michael E. Bell spent twenty years pursuing stories of the vampire in New England. In this book, he shows that the belief in vampires was widespread, and,...