They established their thesis based on various evidence, such as a skeleton of a 50 to 55-year-old male found in a “mid-19th century Connecticut cemetery exhibiting pulmonary tuberculosis rib lesions,” observing that “in addition, certain bones in the skeleton were rearranged after decomposition was complete.”

Researching contemporaneous historical data they found a “vampire account from the same time period and geographical location” – in the cemetery in which that skeleton was located.


Putting this incident into a larger historical context, Michael Bell reported in a 2006 Anthropology and Humanism article:

“During the 18th and 19th centuries, New England was in the grip of a terrible tuberculosis epidemic. During the 19th century, this disease was the leading cause of death in the Eastern United States, accounting for nearly 25 percent of all deaths. Despite an abundance of cures offered by an eclectic mix of practitioners, a diagnosis of consumption – as pulmonary tuberculosis was then called – was the equivalent of a death sentence. Not willing to simply watch as, one after another, their family members died, some New Englanders resorted to an old folk remedy whose roots surely must rest in Europe. Called vampirism by outsiders (a term that may never have been used by those within the communities themselves) this remedy required exhuming the bodies of deceased relatives and checking them for “unnatural” signs, such as “fresh” blood in the heart. The implicit belief was that one of the relatives was not completely dead and was maintaining some semblance of a life by draining the vital force from living relatives.”

As for rising from the dead, with none of today's modern medical tools available, a victim of the nervous-system disorder catalepsy, which causes death-like stiffening of the body and a drop in heart rate and breathing, could, in an acute episode, be mistaken for dead. And it would have been a “death” from which the person would the recover and “arise,” according to science site How Stuff Works.

Early vampire researchers, however inaccurate their findings by today's standards, were attempting to unravel the mystery of diagnosis and disease.

In fact, a link between the undead and rabies was noted as early as 1773, and in 1776, Frenchman Augustin Calmet stated that those who died from the the disease stood a better chance of coming back as vampires, according to a 2014 article in “QJM: An International Journal of Medicine,” by R.P.P.W.M. Maas and P.J.G.M. Voets.

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