Jewett City Vampires

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/126708052/elisha-h-ray


Connecticut: In the first half of the 19th century, Henry and Lucy Ray of Jewett City had a comfortably-sized family of five children who all grew up and survived the many natural perils and hardships of childhood that were present in colonial America.

The Icelandic Translation of ‘Dracula’ Is Actually a Different Book

The mysteries of this Gothic classic aren’t over yet
 
The Icelandic version of Dracula is called Powers of Darkness, and it’s actually a different—some say better—version of the classic Bram Stoker tale.

Makt Myrkranna (the book’s name in Icelandic) was "translated" from the English only a few years after Dracula was published on May 26, 1897, skyrocketing to almost-instant fame. Next Friday is still celebrated as World Dracula Day by fans of the book, which has been continuously in print since its first publication, according to Dutch author and historian Hans Corneel de Roos for Lithub. But the Icelandic text became, in the hands of translator Valdimar Ásmundsson, a different version of the story.


The Great New England Vampire Panic

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


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 Connecticut state archaeologist, Nick Bellantoni, soon determined that the hillside contained a colonial-era farm cemetery. New England is full of such unmarked family plots, and the 29 burials were typical of the 1700s and early 1800s: The dead, many of them children, were laid to rest in thrifty Yankee style, in simple wood coffins, without jewelry or even much clothing, their arms resting by their sides or crossed over their chests.

Except, that is, for Burial Number 4.

The Wild Evolution of Vampires, From Bram Stoker to Dracula Untold

As we’ve discussed here before, the tropes that define fantasy and horror literature are fluid, which is exactly why they persist. Vampires, werewolves, zombies, aliens, witches, ghosts—for several centuries, these archetypes have figured prominently in genre fiction, in no small part because they’ve adapted to suit the specific needs (and fears) of society at any given time.

The vampire in particular has had quite a colorful tenure. Vampiric creatures and spirits date at least as far back as Mesopotamia and Ancient Greece, but the vampire as we know it emerged in the early 1700s, when natives and foreigners alike began recording the folklore and superstitions of the Balkans, that cluster of eastern European countries that would become home to the most famous vampire of all time: Count Dracula.

Pantry Preventatives

Believe it or not, there are things that are common to most household kitchens that were once considered to be vampire-fighting ingredients.

Was a Hungarian "vampire" countess the world's most prolific serial killer?

When it comes to naming the world's most prolific serial killer, some boundaries must be established. As Soviet dictator from 1924 to 1953, Josef Stalin was responsible for the deaths of millions of citizens who died from starvation and internment in gulags (forced labor camps). Adolph Hitler's genocidal bent led to the murders of nearly 21 million people (not including those combatants who died fighting the German army).

But these men, and others like them who've issued wholesale execution orders, did not directly murder the people who died under their authority. And to be considered a serial killer, one must have personally murdered three or more people.

Luella Miller

Written by Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, taken from The Wind in the Rose-Bush
and Other Stories of the Supernatural.




CLOSE to the village street stood the one-story house in which Luella Miller, who had an evil name in the village, had dwelt. She had been dead for years, yet there were those in the village who, in spite of the clearer light which comes on a vantage-point from a long-past danger, half believed in the tale which they had heard from their childhood. In their hearts, although they scarcely would have owned it, was a survival of the wild horror and frenzied fear of their ancestors who had dwelt in the same age with Luella Miller. Young people even would stare with a shudder at the old house as they passed, and children never played around it as was their wont around an untenanted building.

The Bodysnatcher

Written by Robert Louis Stevenson, first published in the Pall Mall Christmas "Extra" 13 (Dec 1884)





Every night in the year, four of us sat in the small parlour of the George at Debenham - the undertaker, and the landlord, and Fettes, and myself. Sometimes there would be more; but blow high, blow low, come rain or snow or frost, we four would be each planted in his own particular arm-chair.