FtV – The Vampire of Cumberland
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Welcome, legendary listeners. Thanks for tuning in to From the Vault, a second look at some of our classic episodes. Look for a new episode every week. Now, can you go back and listen on your own at OurNewEnglandLegends.com? You bet. But you won't get the added bonus of an After the Legends segment featuring new commentary about that episode from your old pals Jeff and Ray. So let's open up the New England Legends Vault and revisit another legendary episode.

Hey, welcome to the vault, kids. We're glad to have you here in the vault where there's a vampire in here with us. We've covered these stories before, but this is The Vampire of Cumberland, first aired February 6th, 2020. Enjoy. Do we really have to be out here at night, Jeff? No, I guess technically we don't, but there's something about an ancient cemetery under the moonlight. Yeah, right. Hey, shine your flashlight on that sign, Ray. Okay. It says Rhode Island Historical Cemetery, Cumberland,

Number 17. We're standing in a little hillside clearing dotted with some tall trees right off of Route 120. There's an old colonial stone wall standing guard around some small headstones. There's only a few burials in this little plot. Right. I already heard that howl. Yeah. There's several dead people buried at our feet. So are we looking for a ghost or a werewolf? Neither. We're in Cumberland, Rhode Island, searching for Abigail Staples. She might have been a vampire. ♪

Hi, I'm Jeff Belanger, and welcome to episode 129 of the New England Legends podcast. If you give us about 10 minutes, we'll give you something strange to talk about today. And I'm Ray Osher. Thanks for joining us as we chronicle every legend in New England, one story at a time. And we love when you folks get involved. We do. So please share your feedback. Tell us about your own local legends.

Contact us through our website at OurNewEnglandLegends.com or call or text our legend line anytime at 617-444-9683. You can also leave our show closing on our voicemail. And this episode was brought to you by our growing army of Patreon patrons. These are the folks who kick in just three bucks per month to help us with our growing expenses associated with producing the show. Plus, they get bonus episodes and content that nobody else gets to hear. If you want to become a bigger part of the movement,

Head over to patreon.com slash newenglandlegends to sign up. All right, so we're here in a small dark cemetery on a moonlit night in Cumberland looking for a vampire. Yeah, that's what we're doing, Ray. And she's close. Like, right at our feet close. Well, now I'm freaked out. Are you ready to go back in time and try to meet her? Well, I'm ready as I'll ever be, Jeff. It's February of 1796 here in Cumberland, Rhode Island, and we've just walked into a town council meeting.

Order! Order! Order! That's when Mr. Stephen Staples approaches the council with a request unlike anything they've ever heard before. I pray that I might have liberty granted unto me to dig up the body of my daughter, Abigail Staples, late of Cumberland. She was a single woman, now deceased. I wish to try an experiment on my other daughter.

Lavinia Chase, wife of Stephen Chase. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. He wants to dig up his daughter for an experiment? Yeah. What kind of horrible thing is happening here? Well, to figure that out, we're going to have to head over and see Lavinia Chase. At the home of Lavinia and Stephen Chase, something dark hangs in the air. Cough, cough, cough, cough.

Lavinia is sick. It's consumption, also known as the wasting disease, and more formally known as tuberculosis. Now, the thing about consumption is it comes in several varieties. The bacteria gets into your lungs and slowly starts eating away at a person from the inside. There's galloping consumption, and that could kill you in a matter of weeks. In other cases, the illness could take months or even years to kill you. And, of course, some people just kind of live with it for the rest of their lives.

But Lavinia is getting worse. No matter what the doctors try, no matter what remedies her family gives her, nothing seems to be helping. Her family is getting desperate. And in their desperation, they start thinking back to when the illness started for Lavinia. Then it hits them. Lavinia got sick shortly after her sister Abigail died, also of consumption.

Now, at first, it seems like this is just a coincidence. But then they realize there have been signs, strange signs. Stephen Staples explains. Ever since Abigail's death, the life seems to be slowly draining from Lavinia's body, leaving her more frail by the day. She's been having the strangest visions in her fever dreams ever.

It's as if she's being tormented and smothered each night by a shadowy figure that perches upon her chest, almost crushing her, as if the creature is feeding upon her very breath.

Abigail!

Pretty soon, some friends and neighbors start whispering about a vampire. Now, this is a time when medical science is making great discoveries. I mean, almost daily. Newspaper reports are filled with stories of new developments in vaccines and other treatments for the sick and dying. Doctors even have some understanding of contagions. You know, how an illness can spread from one person to another.

But that doesn't mean the information is filtered out to us regular folks yet. Plus, even when you explain science to a person, sometimes belief proves even more powerful. And right now, someone believes Lavinia may be the victim of a vampire. And that vampire may just be her dead sister Abigail. Lavinia's father is desperate. He's already lost one daughter, and now he fears he's on the verge of losing another.

Let's head back to Cumberland's town council meeting and see what they have to say. It looks like Stephen Staple's request is causing quite a commotion. Well, it's an odd request. They're deliberating and arguing over witchery and sorcery. But many of these councilmen are parents. And some part of them knows if there was one chance in a thousand to save their own dying child, I mean, come on, they'd take it.

Oh, hey, I think they've reached a decision. Being duly considered, it is voted and resolved that the said Stephen Staples have liberty to dig up the body of the said Abigail, deceased, and after the experiment, as aforesaid, that he bury the body of the said Abigail in a decent manner. Oh, thank you, Councilman. Thank you all. And that brings us back to today. ♪

Wait, wait, wait. What experiments? What happened after he dug up Abigail? What happened to Lavinia? You want the truth? I do. I always do. You think you can handle it? I can. All right. The truth is...

We don't know what happened. What we do know is that this ruling on the strange request of Stephen Staples is in the town records for Cumberland. And we know this Rhode Island Historic Cemetery number 17 is still here in Cumberland. Right. And we know because of the meticulous records kept by the Rhode Island Historical Cemetery Commission that there are eight burials here in the Staples family plot. Eight? All right. Well, a couple of the headstones are obvious and easy to read, but

But there must be 20 or more field stones on this little hillside. Yeah, you're right. There's well more than eight. And some are really small. Others are larger. And I can make out just a couple of letters on this one over here, but I couldn't tell you what it says. Well, it's kind of sad to think we're never going to know who most of these bodies are, Jeff. The earliest burial is 1769, and the latest is 1840. And we only know four of the first names on these stones. And none of those are Abigail or Lavinia.

All right, but it's safe to assume Abigail is, or at least was, buried here somewhere because she died before she was married. Right. So it would make sense she's in the family plot, which we know existed at least as early as 1769. Yeah, that completely makes sense.

Since Lavinia Staples Chase was married, it's possible she's buried somewhere else, possibly with the Chase family. Sure. But we found no record of her death or burial plot either. So we don't know when she died. So in short, we don't know if Stephen Staples ultimately went through with the exhumation. If he did, did he go through with those, quote, experiments? And if he did that, did they have any effect at all on Lavinia? Yeah.

But I read online how Stephen Chase went mad after Abigail's coffin was opened. I read somewhere else that there were scratch marks inside Abigail's coffin, meaning she was trying to get out. Yeah, yeah. I read that too, but it's just speculation. We really have no idea if it happened.

I mean, a lot of this story sounds so strangely familiar. Yeah, I'm sure it does. Well, I believe this makes the third vampire story we've investigated and the second in Rhode Island. Right. Way back in podcast episode 84, we explored the story of Mercy Brown, the Rhode Island vampire. Now, we should point out that Mercy Brown was from the southern Rhode Island town of Exeter. And we're here in Cumberland.

right on the Massachusetts border in the north. And the Mercy Brown event took place in 1892, almost a century after Abigail Staples. All right, as a quick refresher, Mercy Brown died in January of 1892, and her body was stored in the cemetery keep for winter because the ground is frozen.

Three months later, her body was pulled out of the keep. They determined the body was moved. There was liquid blood in her heart, so the local doctor removed the organ so her family could burn Mercy's heart on a nearby rock and fed the ashes to her sick brother, Edwin, in an effort to break the vampire spell. Remember? I do. And sadly, of course, Edwin died anyway. Right. But consumption, or tuberculosis, is the culprit in both of these stories. Vampires, before the days of Bram Stoker's Dracula...

I wonder if Mercy's father, George Brown, heard stories of the vampire Abigail Staples a century earlier, and maybe that pushed him to try his own, um,

unconventional medicine? You know, it's totally possible. And no matter what, it's easy for us to look back now and see this stuff as desperate, even insane acts. Well, that's what happens when there's a plague around. We get desperate. We lose our minds. Yeah, sure. The news quickly spreads that the infected person is now within our own borders of our town, and we start looking at each other wondering if somewhere inside that person there's a germ that could kill us if we get too close. Yeah.

Yeah, plagues have happened before, and they will happen again. If medical science can't give us answers, well, legend and lore can. And suddenly, we're on the lookout for a monster.

Yeah, it's amazing that a story from more than two centuries ago can feel like it's taken from today's headlines. And here we are, talking about a plague yet again. If you'd like to see some pictures of this little cemetery in Cumberland, head over to our website at OurNewEnglandLegends.com and just click on episode 129. We also love when you share these episodes. Yeah, we do. Please tell a friend or two about us. It goes a long way in helping the cause. We'd like to thank Jim Harreld of the Paranormal Podcast for lending his voice acting talents this week.

And thanks to my wife, Megan Belanger, for also getting roped in. And of course, our theme music is by John Judd. Hey, New England legends. This is drummer Fitch Proctor from We're Going Streaking and the Pub Kings. And if I may say, I'm a bit of a New England legend myself in my own weird little mind. Anyway, remember, the bizarre is closer than you think. Grab your garlic. We'll break it down right after a word from our sponsor. This is it.

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Why? I don't know. Like, now I'm stuck. It's a thing, isn't it? It is a thing. Okay. But we don't hear about garlic in crosses much in the stories that we tell, do we? Crosses, sure, I can explain that one. And stakes through the heart, no, that one. But I don't remember the origin of the garlic thing. Right. But when we talk about vampires, it's not lore in real life, is it?

Well, okay. What do you mean vampire? Do you mean like... Like all the vampire... We talk about consumption and vampires. Yeah, that would be more like our... We've done like 30 stories on vampires. I know, I know, I know. That's like... Zombie would be more akin to what... Like our modern notion of a zombie. Yeah. This thing that's just coming for you. Right. And it's sort of... Won't stop. Not dead, not alive. Yeah. Undead. Undead.

that would be our notion. Whereas vampires are these immortal things that, you know,

Now, but back then, yeah. Sexy. Sexy, yeah, they were not sexy. Yeah, this was not a... It's a different kind of vampire. Abigail Staples was not sexy, right? She was a rotting corpse that was draining the vitality of possibly her sister. But it's a cool story. This cemetery is right off the side of the road. You'll miss it unless you have some sense of where it is because it's literally like houses, some woods,

And then this thing is the size of, I mean, like an infield of a baseball diamond. Yeah. I mean, it's just that small, you know, and there's a little sign that says, you know, historic cemetery. You can park a car on the side of the road and just walk into it. And it's mostly field stones where there's no marking at all, but someone's buried there. Abigail's one of them. Yeah. We don't know which one.

And then there's a couple that do have names on them, also Staples family members. So it's right there to be seen. But someone asked the town, well, her dad asked the town to exhume this body to perform an experiment to try to save the life of his other daughter. Yikes. That's a movie.

It could be. That's a plot of a movie, I think. Right. Horror movie? Drama? Period piece, maybe? Almost like old-timey, like, you know, Frankenstein, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. It's alive, right? Right. Something like that. I don't think you can use that line, though. No, but you're... You'd have to write something else. Right. It's animate. Not the same. Not the same. No, it's not. Doesn't ring the same at all. We'll work on it. Yeah, yeah. We'll work on it. But that's the idea, that this thing was basically...

But yeah, that's not bad. I got you thinking. No, because you're right. The only little legends presents. The horror movie. Because what made Frankenstein so powerful is that there's nothing more unnatural than dealing with pieces of corpses. Oh, sure. They belong in the ground undisturbed. Yes. And you're chopping them up and stitching them together and you're going to try to reanimate. You're going to try to play God. Like every part of it is unnatural, which is why I think that worked so well for so long.

And yeah, that's why some of these stories, I think they resonate because they tap into something that's just really primal. Like the dead are supposed to stay dead. They're not supposed to have power over the living. But we know they do. I mean, they're...

How many times has your dad's voice echoed in your head? Right? Sure. I mean, yeah. I mean, everyone out there. You heard your grandma say something. Oh, don't eat that. It's full of cholesterol. My grandmother was the cholesterol police, right? She was the, that's got too much fat in it, too much sugar. Yeah, when people die, they don't go away.

No, of course, because you don't go away. Right. You keep living. And this is just a connection to that. But yes, we did do a lot of vampire stories, which we just got on a major kick when COVID hit. That's true. That is true. Yeah. Because we're like, this is what happened last time. Right. Right. There was consumption going around, tuberculosis and

Now it's COVID. Yeah. I think we made out though. I don't recall any zombies or vampires in the news. No. But then I wonder if we could go back and tell the Staples family, like, did you even try to hoard toilet paper? Like, did you even give that a whirl? You know what I mean? Before you dug up a body? Yeah. Like maybe that would have worked. Yeah. Uh,

I don't think so. I'm not a scientist, though. I can't stress that enough. No, it probably would have been helpful. Yeah. If we had a bunch of toilet papers, like garlic. I don't know where that comes from. Someone right now is looking it up and we're going to get an email any minute. And thank you for that.

Maybe, I don't know. I like garlic. I do too. If I was a vampire, I'd be like, yes, bring that. I've seen a few movies, though, where the vampire will say, that doesn't work on us. That's just from the movies. And the cross thing, the Christian cross, the whole idea is that your faith will protect you. What if the vampire's not Christian? Right, but it'll burn a movie vampire if it touches the skin. Oh, right, right, right. The soda sunlight, obviously. But I've seen...

You know, a cross right in the forehead and it burns. Power of faith. And then there's the stake through the heart. That I get. Well, anything through the heart I get. We'll do it. You could probably go through the liver and still we'll have the same result. But the point was to nail a vampire down into the ground so he can't get up. Oh, so it was through the heart into the ground? Anywhere in the chest would have been fine. But you were nailing them down. So some old skulls have been found with bricks in the mouth.

And folklorists know like, well, someone suspected this person of being a vampire. You disrupt the body in some way. You might cut the head off or you might turn the body upside down, cut the legs off. Yeah, anything that disrupts it so it can't get up and walk. Okay. It was something that was used on the dead. What kind of ground though? You pin a vampire to the ground, right? And then you get your stake. It's got to be pretty lengthy, right? I would think. Sure, a couple of feet. Sharp. You go right through to soft ground and...

You're getting up. You're a vampire. You're able to pull that right out of the soft ground. So you have to strategically pin them down in the right time of the year, too, when the ground's a little bit more solid. Ray, I'm not sure I have the time or the crayons to explain this to you. Sorry.

Just thinking out loud here. No, you're right. You're right. Why would it ever work, right? If they're undead, then making them more dead doesn't do anything. Well, you get them through the heart, though. That's supposed to kill them. Right. But then just the ground thing, I don't understand. Well, I'll sit on it.

We'll bring it back. We'll bring it back next week. Growing a tree over the grave. They did that with witches. Oh, yeah. Where you would plant a big tree right over the grave so the tree's roots would hold the witch down. Yeah. But then the flip side of that is the tree becomes possessed by...

crashes through your window, steals your kid. I've seen that movie. In New Haven, on the New Haven Green, New Haven, Connecticut, we know that used to be burial grounds and we know there's bodies there still. There was a large tree that was uprooted in a storm years back, maybe 10, 15 years ago.

And when the tree fell over, there were human bones that were revealed. And everybody got buzzing, like, could this have been someone, a suspected witch, and the tree was intentionally planted on top of them? Or could it just be that the body, the grave was that old, and the tree just grew, and it just happened to be over a body? It's pretty neat, though. Yeah, it is neat, the way we fear the dead, because we're going to become one one day. Yeah.

I think that's so much a part of what we chase, right? What's a ghost but a dead person that still has influence? Will you have influence in the afterlife? I hope so. I have a list of people that I would like to haunt for a long time. Yeah. As long as I can. Did you ever tell somebody that? Oh, yeah. I'm going to haunt you when I die. My daughter. Every day. I'm just like, you know, your dad's in a ghost. He's going to...

He's going to haunt you. Yeah. You know people. Well, that's the thing. You've dedicated your life to this. So I would think you'd be welcomed in the afterlife and you would have your choice of haunts. Be like, where would you like to go? I'm like, oh, Queen Mary, been done. White House, sure. I mean, you know, historic. How about my daughter's bedroom? Yeah. I'd like to follow her around for a while and just mess up her life now that I'm gone.

That'd be great. That's a movie too. Yeah. Dead dad, you call it. Well, that's kind of morbid. Oh, it's a comedy. No, dead dad. Dead dad. Eddie Murphy? Like who do you cast for that? Eddie Murphy because he did Haunted Mansion. Yes. Like I picture it being sort of a zany comedy. It's like, it's like, um, uh,

What was the one with? Well, actually, they made Ghost Dad with Bill Cosby. Oh. Never mind. No. And you can't even mention his name, and I did. So I regret even bringing this up. We just got canceled. Yeah, Dead Dad. Dead Dad. Ghost Dad. We have so many movies we've got to write. We'll get on this. All right. This will be great. All right. Hey, so Vampire of Cumberland, one of the many we've covered, but relevant because, you know, it's a lesson we have yet to learn for sure.

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