On this day in 1845, 24-year-old Lemuel Ray died in Jewett City, a borough in the rural Eastern Connecticut town of Griswold.  The young man, one of several children born to the Ray family, had died from tuberculosis, a disease then commonly known as “consumption” because of the way its victims would lose weight and become paler and weaker over time.  Over the next six years, the family patriarch and another son also wasted away and then died from the disease.  When a third son, Henry Nelson Ray, started wasting away from the disease in 1854, the Ray family became convinced that their deceased relatives had become vampires who had returned to slowly drain the life from their living brethren.

Before the discovery of germ theory in the last decades of the 19th century, people in modernizing societies came up with a variety of explanations for the spread of disease that ranged from practical to supernatural, and in the former Puritan stronghold of New England, the latter sort often won out, especially among rural populations with limited access to contemporary education and healthcare.  The concept of vampires was not as bizarre then as it might sound to modern ears; unlike the quasi-romantic “fantasy” vampires of 20th century fiction, these “folkloric” vampires were believed to be a supernatural phenomenon, as real to some New Englanders as the existence of angels and demons.  The symptoms of tuberculosis in particular — with consumption sufferers slowly becoming more weak and pale — seemed to lend credence to this belief of revenants “feasting” on the living.

The Ray family, as well as many of their Jewett City neighbors, considered the possibility of vampires too serious to ignore, and proceeded to undertake drastic measures to put an end to this community threat.  In May of that year, the bodies of the recently-deceased Ray family members were exhumed and burned before being returned to their graves in hopes of preventing any further vampiric visits.  In the 1990s, Connecticut State Archaeologist Nicolas Bellantoni studied a set of  accidentally-uncovered 19th century remains in a Jewett City family graveyard that had also shown signs of being tampered with out of fears of vampirism: Inside the grave site, the bones had been drastically rearranged, with the head removed from the body and the femur bones crossed in the shape of an “X.”

As far as the Ray family was concerned, their tactics had worked: historical records suggest that Henry Nelson Ray lived for many more years after first contracting his disease.  For the Jewett City community, the danger of vampirism had passed — at least, for the time being. A supernatural panic, and then order restored — today in Connecticut history.

Further Reading

Erik Ofgang, “Belief in Connecticut Vampires Motivated by ‘Fear and Love,’” Connecticut Magazine

Abigail Tucker, “The Great New England Vampire Panic,” Smithsonian Magazine