Vines growing from coffins and decaying corpses were a local superstition marking the vampire graves of those who died of consumption. This was the case of teenage Annie Dennett, who was believed to be feeding off her diseased father.
In the shadowy corners of early 19th century New England, where superstition stubbornly clung to the confines of even the most respectable communities, vampire stories were not always shrouded in alien mystery. Sometimes they appear on the doorstep of a neighbor's house. Or in the family crypt. Or, as in the case of penniless Annie Dennett, in the serene cemeteries of rural New Hampshire.
While names like Mercy Brown have gained fame for their role in America's vampire panic, the story of Annie Dennett is a more unknown, though no less fascinating, chapter of this incredible story. For many years the Reverend who wrote it down called her Janey Dennit, and for a while she was quite mysterious. Particularly noteworthy is the presence of a respected clergyman who not only witnessed her exhumation, but left behind a memorable record of the event.
Consumption, fear and desperation
The Annies had lived in New England for generations when their ancestors settled in New Hampshire in the mid-17th century. Thanks to their occupation as blacksmiths, their family was at one point one of the wealthiest in Portsmouth.
She grew up in a house full of siblings, as her parents had eight children, on a hill in the forest. Her father, Moses, wanted to make his own way and moved from Portsmouth to Barnstead, working as a tailor.
Like many teenage people of her time, Annie Dennett died of tuberculosis in 1807, aged just 21 – the dreaded “consumption”. Tuberculosis was not just a disease back then; it was a riddle that hollowed out families and devastated entire communities, slowly claiming its victims in a devastating grip that no one could stop.
It's no wonder that, faced with the horrors of this situation, desperate families sometimes turned to folklore for answers. There was a belief, especially in rural parts of New England, that a deceased relative could, through some malevolent posthumous influence, take the life of the living. Rumors began to circulate that he might be one of the undead. That night she rose from the grave and returned to her family to feed on them. They believed that this could be the cause of consumption disease. And when symptoms of the disease also began to appear in the family, it was believed that the bodies of the undead contained the cure.
And when the medicine failed, the pikes fell.
Vampire hunting in plain sight
What makes the Annie Dennett case particularly intriguing is its documentation by an ordinary man. It so happened that Enoch Hayes Place, a Free Will Baptist minister from Vermont, was in town when Annie's family made the grim decision to exhume her body in 1810, three years after Annie's death and burial.
Her father, Moses Dennett, was gravely ill with tuberculosis, and in the absence of a cure, the family clung to the desperate hope that unearthing Annie's remains might reveal signs of vampire influence – perhaps a heart still full of blood or some unnatural preservation of the body.
Enoch Hayes Place was present at the exhumation and recorded the entire event in his diary. His words convey both the grim spectacle and the uneasy combination of religious authority and old-world superstition:
“They opened the grave, and it was indeed a solemn sight. A young brother named Adams examined the moldy Specticle, but found nothing as he thought he should…. Only a little remained but bones.”
Unlike some of the more infamous exhumations of the era, the Annie Dennett exhumation was anticlimactic. No heart filled with blood. No unnatural maintenance. Only the rotten remains of a teenage woman, the bones already covered by the earth. Vines were recorded growing inside the coffin, and this has been discussed in several exhumations of presumed vampire graves.
Vampire vines
One of the telltale signs of vampirism was the lack of decomposition of the body and the presence of body fluids, such as blood, in the organs. Another sign of vampirism was vines growing on the body.
In 1784, an article appeared in a Connecticut newspaper about a foreign medicine man who stated that these vines or sprouts growing on the body would also be a remedy for burns and consumption, often along with other organs.
We also see this in the Willington two-body case involving Mr. Isaac Johnson. There were also cases in Dummerston, Vermont, and upstate New York.
It was also a superstition that stated that when a vine grows from a coffin onto another (usually another family member), the next one dies. The only way to break the curse was to break the vines and dig up the body to burn its insides.
The ritual that was supposed to save her diseased father did nothing. Like many others, he would eventually succumb to tuberculosis.
However, the fact that the ritual took place and that it was recorded by a minister says much about the cultural influence of these beliefs even in “enlightened” New England. Science and folklore in early America shared an uneasy environment, and when sadness met fear, he often gravitated toward elderly ways.
A forgotten chapter in New England vampire history
Although the story of Mercy Brown attracted international attention decades later, Annie Dennett remains largely forgotten – though no less telling, a footnote in folklore studies. Its history shows that these rituals were not isolated anomalies, but part of a broader, if challenging, social custom. The fear of consumption and its deadly march through families often blurred the line between superstition and faith.
And perhaps most frighteningly, it shows that even the clergy were not immune to the temptations of elderly beliefs when faced with the inexorable hand of death.
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Vampires – American Myths, Legends and Tales: An Encyclopedia of American Folklore
http://apps.vampiresgrasp.com/Blog/?d=01/2010
Food for the Dead: The New England Vampire Trial 2011933367, 9780819571700 – DOKUMEN.PUB
Image Source: Pixabay.com
