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The Great New England Vampire Panic | History| Smithsonian Magazine

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Two hundred years after the Salem witch trials, farmers became convinced that their relatives were returning from the grave to feed on the living

At the gravesite of Mercy Lena Brown, right, sightseers leave offerings such as plastic vampire teeth and jewelry. Left, Klaus Leidorf; right: Landon Nordeman Children playing near a hillside gravel mine found the first graves. One ran home to tell his mother, who was skeptical at first—until the boy produced a skull. Because this was Griswold, Connecticut, in 1990, police initially thought the burials might be the work of a local serial killer named Michael Ross, and they taped off the area as a crime scene. But the brown, decaying bones turned out to be more than a century old. The Connectic

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