John Barber, Vampire - A Tale Of Tuberculosis
John Barber, Vampire - A Tale Of Tuberculosis
By: a.d. elliott | Take the Back Roads - Art and Other Odd Adventures
Did you know there were vampires in New England?
Not the romantic kind. Not the cloaked, immortal figures of fiction. These were ordinary people, neighbors, family members, caught in a moment when illness moved faster than understanding.
In 1990, a coffin was uncovered at a gravel quarry in Griswold, Connecticut. Its lid was marked with brass tacks forming the initials JB and the number 55. Inside, archaeologists found bones that had been deliberately rearranged years after burial, skull and femurs positioned into the shape of a Jolly Roger.
That arrangement stopped everyone cold.
Local archaeologists began to dig, literally and historically, into the mystery. Through records and DNA testing, they were eventually able to identify the remains as belonging to a man named John Barber.
John Barber was not a vampire. He had tuberculosis.
At the time of his death, tuberculosis was known as consumption, a name drawn from the way it wasted the body: pale skin, bloody coughs, foul breath, steady decline. It was devastatingly contagious, and families often watched multiple members fall ill one after another, with no clear understanding of why.
In rural New England, where scientific explanations were scarce and fear was abundant, an alternate logic took hold. If sickness continued after death, then perhaps the dead were not truly gone. Perhaps they were returning, consuming the living.
To protect themselves, families sometimes exhumed their dead. Internal organs were removed and burned; ashes were occasionally mixed into medicinal brews. Bodies were rearranged in their graves to prevent them from rising again.
What happened to John Barber was not an anomaly. It was a folk response to an invisible enemy.
The most famous of these so-called New England vampires was Mercy Brown. Two months after her burial, her body was exhumed. Her heart was burned, mixed with water, and given to her brother to drink as a cure.
He died two months later, from tuberculosis.
Reading stories like these, I am struck by how fortunate I am to live in an age of antibiotics, clean water, and germ theory. It is easy, from this distance, to recoil at these practices, to label them primitive or grotesque.
But on this particular back road, fear drove the map.
When people have no tools but belief, belief becomes medicine. It is not a road I would want to travel, but it is one humanity has walked before.
And honestly?
The whole thing still sounds deeply, profoundly icky.
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She shares her journeys at Take the Back Roads, explores new reads at Rite of Fancy, and highlights U.S. military biographies at Everyday Patriot.
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