Physical and digital books, media, journals, archives, and databases.
Results include
  1. Food for the dead : on the trail of New England's vampires

    Bell, Michael Edward, 1943-
    Wesleyan pbk. ed. - Middletown, Conn. : Wesleyan Univ Pr, ©2011.

    "Close your eyes and imagine a vampire: Your mind's eye may conjure up Count Dracula with bared teeth and a shiny tuxedo. But, another kind of vampire was believed to live in rural New England long ago. Author and folklorist Michael E. Bell has spent twenty years pursuing this forgotten vampire tradition. His discoveries will surprise and enthrall skeptics, believers, and all readers of this engaging book." "Bell's odyssey began in 1981 when Rhode Islander Everett Peck told him a family story passed down for generations. In 1892, months after young Mercy Brown succumbed to tuberculosis, her body was exhumed from a local graveyard. Relatives cut out her heart, burned it on a nearby rock, and fed the ashes to her dying brother, hoping to cure him of the wasting disease. They feared that Mercy had become a vampire, sapping her sibling's vitality to provide sustenance for her own spectral existence. Or, had she become a scapegoat, blamed for the baffling affliction ravaging her family?"--JacketFor nineteenth-century New Englanders, "vampires" lurked behind tuberculosis. To try to rid their houses and communities from the scourge of the wasting disease, families sometimes relied on folk practices, including exhuming and consuming the bodies of the deceased. Author and folklorist Michael E. Bell spent twenty years pursuing stories of the vampire in New England. While writers like H. P. Lovecraft, Henry David Thoreau, and Amy Lowell drew on portions of these stories in their writings, Bell brings the actual practices to light for the first time. He shows that the belief in vampires was widespread, and, for some families, lasted well into the twentieth century. With humor, insight, and sympathy, he uncovers story upon story of dying men, women, and children who believed they were food for the dead. This Wesleyan paperback edition includes an extensive preface by the author unveiling some of the new cases he's learned about since Food for the Dead was first published in 2001.

    Online EBSCO Academic Comprehensive Collection

Guides

Course- and topic-based guides to collections, tools, and services.
No guide results found... Try a different search

Library website

Library info; guides & content by subject specialists
No website results found... Try a different search

Exhibits

Digital showcases for research and teaching.
No exhibits results found... Try a different search

EarthWorks

Geospatial content, including GIS datasets, digitized maps, and census data.
No earthworks results found... Try a different search

More search tools

Tools to help you discover resources at Stanford and beyond.