THE ANACONDA STANDARD. — JUNE 19, 1892
Those interested in folk lore should know of recent developments of the vampire superstition in Rhode Island, says the New York Tribune. Rhode Island is a thickly settled and highly civilized state. Along the great water courses and along the shores of the Narragansett bay it is one great village, but back toward the Connecticut line one can find forests which never have bowed to the ax and a race of people who preserved all the superstitions and traditions of another age. Among the curious superstitions among the people living in these isolated regions is that of the vampire. It is not a belief in the existence of a human vampire such as Bryon told of when he curdled the blood of his hearers with the tale of Lord Ruthven, or such as forms a part or the folklore of certain parts Of Europe, but one which seems peculiar to these people and the origin of which would repay investigation. They believe, many of them, and believe it thoroughly, that consumption [any wasting disease] is not a disease, but the result of the operations of a mysterious creature called the vampire, which fastens itself upon a family and, unseen, and therefore undestructible by ordinary means, sucks the blood from first one victim and then another. They believe that from the lonely graveyard on the rocky farm an influence steals for death as long as the body of the dead consumptive has blood in its heart, for there the vampire is at work and is draining the blood of the living victim into the body of the dead.
