Woodstock's Vampire

By Jennie Shurtleff

In the fall of 1890 The Vermont Standard ran a story that recounted the story of “Woodstock’s Vampire.” The story was supposedly told to the author some five years earlier by an old woman who had witnessed the burning of the “vampire’s” heart about fifty years earlier.  According to the story in the newspaper, a young man with the surname Corwin died of “consumption, “ known today as tuberculosis, and was buried in the Cushing Cemetery in June of 1830. About six month later, the young man’s brother became ill, ostensibly with the same symptoms. The doctors of the area were all of the opinion that the second brother’s illness was the result of vampirism, and his deceased brother was the primary suspect. Subsequently, the first brother’s body was dug up and examined. His heart, which was supposedly found undecayed and filled with liquid blood (a sure sign of vampirism), was then removed, boiled in a pot, and buried in a hole with a seven-ton block of granite on top. To complete the grisly ritual, the site was then sprinkled with the blood of a young bullock.

In a 1966 article written for Vermont Life, Rockwell Stephens notes that while some of the details of the story are verifiable (for instance, the 1890 account of the event accurately lists the names of local businessmen and the doctors who were practicing in Woodstock in 1830), there are a number of other details that have can’t be (or at least, haven’t been) verified. For instance, no record has yet been found of a Corwin boy dying in 1830 and being buried in Woodstock’s Cushing Cemetery, which is located at the corner of Cloudland Road and River Road. Moreover, there is no mention of such an event in the local paper of the time, The Woodstock Observer, which seems surprising given that the burning of the heart on the village Green would appear to be an unusual event and it was supposedly attended by many local people.

On the other hand, interestingly some of the parts of the story that seem the most implausible are eerily similar to other events that have been documented. For instance,  the burning of a consumption victim’s heart as a way of staving off consumption in others, seems unlikely, especially in a place like 19th-century Woodstock, Vermont. Right? Wrong!  In 1817—thirteen years before the supposed “vampire” event in Woodstock—a young man in South Woodstock by name of Frederick Ransom died. Frederick’s brother, Daniel Ransom, wrote in 1894 the following about Frederick and the burning of his heart:

“Frederick Ransom, the second son of my father and mother, was born in South Woodstock, Vermont, June 16, 1797 and died of consumption February 14th, 1817, at the age of about twenty. He had a good education and was a member of Dartmouth College at the time of his death. My remembrance of him is quite limited as I was only three years at the time of his death… It has been related to me that there was a tendency in our family to consumption… It seems that Father shared somewhat in the idea of hereditary diseases and withal had some superstition for it was said that if the heart of one of the family who died of consumption was taken out and burned, others would be free from it. And Father, having some faith in the remedy, had the heart of Frederick taken out after he had been buried, and in was burned in Captain Pearson’s blacksmith forge. However, it did not prove a remedy, for mother, sister, and two brothers died of that disease afterward.”

There are other documented cases of a heart being removed and burned, including that of Mercy Brown who died on January 18, 1892, in Exeter, Rhode Island. As with the Ransoms of South Woodstock, the Brown family had lost several of its members to consumption. After Mercy died, the Brown’s neighbors suggested that the bodies of the deceased family members be exhumed, which was done on March 17, 1892. The bodies of two of the three, Mercy’s mother and sister, were found to be decayed, not surprising given that they had died years earlier in 1883 and 1884, respectively. However, Mercy’s body, which was still in the crypt because the ground had been frozen, apparently showed no decay. Her heart supposedly still contained liquid blood and the position of her body in the coffin had shifted. Fearing that she might be a vampire, her heart was removed and burned on a nearby rock. She was the last known person in Rhode Island to have her heart removed and burned because of alledged vampirism.

1890 article written for The Vermont Standard.

General Lyman Mower. © Woodstock History Center

General Lyman Mower, a prominent Woodstock businessman, supposedly was at the burning of the “vampire’s” heart, as was the Hon. Norman Williams.