THE ELK COUNTY ADVOCATE — MARCH 14, 1872
There is a strange vampire superstition associated with that scourge of New England, “quick consumption”—which differs materially from the Tartar and Semitic legends of the vampire. In the Semitic, the ghost is a demon in the shape of a beautiful woman, that lives among tombs and subsists on corpses. In Tartar and European legends, the vampire is the horror of the living—a demoniac musquito [sic] that, issuing from the graves of the dead, attacks its victims by night, and subsists on their blood.
Some analogy there is between this and the Now England superstition of quick consumption ; but, in the New England version, no actual demon is presupposed. By some strange aberration of the ordinary laws of dissolution, the heart is supposed to retain its vitality after death, and lives on in its coffin, drawing, by some weird, sympathetic influence, its support from the vitality of some living relative, who wastes into the grave in consequence of having to sustain two vitalities instead of one ; and thus, whole families drop off one after another, with singular regularity of interval. The remedy is to take up the body of the dead, and burn the organ supposed to exercise the deadly vampire function ; and odd legends are afloat of instances in which the remedy has been successfully tried.
A second vampire superstition, very prevalent in portions of New England, is, that cats suck the breath of
