The Vampire Panic of New England

For nearly a century, families across rural New England dug up their dead, cut out their hearts, burned them, and fed the ashes to the living. They weren't insane. They were desperate. In this episode, we dive deep into the New England Vampire Panic — a terrifying chapter of American history driven by tuberculosis, grief, and folk beliefs that most history books conveniently leave out.

We start with the tuberculosis epidemic that killed one in four Americans and Europeans in the 1800s and explore how the natural process of decomposition mimicked the very "signs" that communities believed proved vampirism. Fr...