Two cases of fear, folklore, and tuberculosis in early Vermont

by Timothy Page

In the early 19th century, the town of Woodstock faced a series of family tragedies that locals interpreted through the lens of folklore rather than medicine. Tuberculosis—then known as “consumption”—spread through households, leaving victims pale, wasted, and coughing blood. Without knowledge of germ theory, some communities believed the dead were rising to drain the life from the living. Two of the best-known Vermont examples of this response involve the Ransom and Corwin families.

Frederick Ransom: A documented case from 1817

Frederick Ransom was born on June 16, 1797, in South Woodstock to Richard Ransom Jr. and Elizabeth Mather. He came from a family of relative means and education. By early 1817, the 19-year-old was a student at Dartmouth College when consumption claimed him. He died on February 14, 1817.

His younger brother Daniel, only three years old at the time, later recorded the family’s response in a memoir written in 1894. The Ransoms had a known susceptibility to the disease. According to Daniel, local belief held that if the heart of a family member who died of consumption was removed and burned, the rest of the family might be spared. Their father acted on that belief. Frederick’s body was exhumed, his heart cut out, and the organ burned in Captain Pearson’s blacksmith forge.

The ritual failed. Daniel later wrote that their mother, a sister, and two brothers still died of the same disease in the years that followed. The account stands out because it comes from a family memoir rather than pure oral tradition, and because Frederick belonged to a more educated household than many other victims of New England’s vampire panics.

The Corwin Case: A later legend from around 1830

A second story emerged decades afterward. In the autumn of 1890, The Vermont Standard published an account of “Woodstock’s Vampire”, based on a tale an elderly woman claimed to have witnessed as a girl roughly fifty or sixty years earlier. According to the newspaper, a young man surnamed Corwin died of consumption in the summer of 1830 and was buried in Cushing Cemetery (at the corner of Cloudland Road and River Road). About six months later, his younger brother developed the same symptoms.

Local physicians, including Dr. Joseph Gallup and Dr. John Powers of the Vermont Medical College, reportedly concluded that the dead brother had become a vampire and was draining the living one. The body was exhumed. The heart was said to be undecayed and still containing liquid blood—taken at the time as proof of vampirism. The organ was removed, boiled in a pot until reduced to ashes, and then buried in a deep hole on the village green under a massive seven-ton block of granite. Influential local men were said to have attended the ceremony.

Unlike the Ransom case, the Corwin story lacks contemporary records. No matching burial has been confirmed in Cushing Cemetery, and the local paper of the 1830s does not appear to have reported such a public event. Historians note that some details in the 1890 article—such as the names of physicians practicing in Woodstock at the time—are accurate, which has kept the story alive as local legend even while its precise historicity remains uncertain.

Context and aftermath

Both episodes belong to the broader New England vampire panic of the late 18th and 19th centuries, a folk response to tuberculosis outbreaks. The rituals—exhumation, examination of the heart, and burning or boiling of organs—were attempts to stop what people saw as a supernatural attack when medical science offered no answers. In Woodstock, these events reportedly took place in or near the village green, the symbolic center of community life.

Today the stories survive in family memoirs, newspaper archives, and local history writing. They illustrate how fear of an invisible disease could shape public ritual in a New England town that was otherwise relatively progressive for its time. No evidence supports the existence of actual vampires; the “vampires” of Woodstock were victims of consumption, and the rituals were desperate acts by the living who hoped to protect themselves from the same fate.