The Science of Stephen King

Scraping away soil with flat-edged shovels, and then brushes and bamboo picks, the archaeologist and his team worked through several feet of Earth before reaching the top of the crypt. When Bellantoni lifted the first of the large, flat rocks that formed the roof, he uncovered the remains of a red-painted coffin and a pair of skeletal feet. They lay, he remembers, “in perfect anatomical position.” But when he raised the next stone, Bellantoni saw that the rest of the individual “had been completely … rearranged.” The skeleton had been beheaded; skull and thigh bones rested atop the ribs and vertebrae. “It looked like a skull-and-crossbones motif, a Jolly Roger. I’d never seen anything like it,” Bellantoni recalls. Subsequent analysis showed that the beheading, along with other injuries, including rib fractures, occurred roughly five years after death. Somebody had also smashed the coffin. The other skeletons in the gravel hillside were packaged for reburial, but not “J. B.,” as the 50ish male skeleton from the 1830s came to be called, because of the initials spelled out in brass tacks on his coffin lid. He was shipped to the National Museum of Health and Medicine in Washington, D.C., for further study.2

Curious about why this body was so obviously mistreated post-burial, and convinced it wasn’t the doing of a typical grave robber, Bellantoni sought the expertise of Michael Bell, New England folklorist and author of Food for the Dead: On the Trail of New England’s Vampires (2011). Bell had a chilling answer, rooted in the history of nearby Jewett City, Rhode Island, bordering the farm community of Griswold. Based on his research, Bell had come to understand that a panic had spread across the bucolic edifice of the area. Much like in Salem’s Lot, the townspeople and farmers believed there was an invading, supernatural evil. Why this shared belief swept New England, and as Bell asserts, as far west as Minnesota, is a complex question. What is an important connection, is that the exhumations of bodies, in which loved ones went as far as decapitating or burning the hearts of their loved ones in order to prevent further “vampirism,” is that tuberculosis gripped the region. Consumption, as it was called at the time, was an extremely painful and drawn out death that frightened people in both urban and rural settings. Caused by a bacterium known as Mycobacterium tuberculosis, consumption “may infect any part of the body, but most commonly occurs in the lungs (known as pulmonary tuberculosis). General signs and symptoms include fever, chills, night sweats, loss of appetite, weight loss, and fatigue.”3 It is transmitted by an active patient spitting, coughing, or sneezing into the air.

A cartoon that appeared in the Boston Daily Globe in 1896.

In 1876, two years after his assassination, Abraham Lincoln’s resting place was disturbed by grave robbers hoping to steal his remains for ransom. Thankfully, a secret service agent caught the nefarious robbers, and they were only able to lift the lid of the coffin before being arrested.

While consumption has nearly been eradicated from America, it is presently a real threat in developing countries, as nearly 50 percent of the deaths occur in India, China, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Pakistan. At the time of the vampire panic, consumption was sweeping across the world, in a time of only developing knowledge of science and disease. Robert Koch, a German microbiologist, identified the bacteria in 1882, yet it took years for the public to fully embrace the true cause of the disease. As described on the website for the Connecticut Historical Society, blame on consumption’s deadly grip shifted depending on the sufferer’s background:

The wealthy blamed it on heredity, as an issue of one’s constitution, and so took trips to warm climates for a “cure.” For literary types (think Emerson or Thoreau), the culprit was the stress of modern life and their own genius. They sought refuge in nature. The middle class saw the cause as overstimulation from an urban life, including heavy studying, and working in an office. For people living in rural areas, the causes were spiritual and often related to vampirism.4