Growing out of coffins and decaying corpses, vines was a local superstition that marked a vampire grave of those who had died of consumption. This was the case of young Annie Dennett, who was thought to feed on her ailing father.
In the shadowy folds of early 19th-century New England, where superstition clung stubbornly to the edges of even the most respectable communities, tales of vampires didn’t always come cloaked in foreign mystery. Sometimes, they arrive on your neighbor’s doorstep. Or in the family crypt. Or — as in the case of poor Annie Dennett — in the quiet graveyards of rural New Hampshire.
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While names like Mercy Brown have gained infamy for their role in America’s vampire panic, Annie Dennett’s story is a more obscure, though no less fascinating, chapter of this eerie history. For many years, the Reverend who wrote it down, called her Janey Dennit and she was for a while, quite a mystery. And what makes it particularly noteworthy is the presence of a well-respected minister who not only witnessed her exhumation but left behind a haunting record of the event.
Consumption, Fear, and Desperation
Annies family had been in New England for generations when her ancestors settled in New Hampshire in the mid 1600s. Through their trade as blacksmith, their family was at one point one of the richest in Portsmouth.
She grew up in a house filled with siblings as her parents had eight children, on the high ground in the woods. Her father, Moses, wanted to make his own way and had moved from Portsmouth to Barnstead, working as a tailor.
Like many young people of her time, Annie Dennett succumbed to tuberculosis — the dreaded “consumption” — at just 21 years old in 1807. Tuberculosis was not merely a disease back then; it was an enigma that hollowed out families and devastated entire communities, slowly claiming its victims with a wasting grip that no one could seem to stop.
Faced with its horrors, it’s no wonder that desperate families sometimes turned to folklore for answers. The prevailing belief, particularly in rural parts of New England, held that a deceased relative could, through some malevolent post-mortem influence, drain the life from the living. Rumors started to go around that she could be one of the undead. That night, she rose from her grave and returned to her family to feed on them. This was something that they believed could be the cause of the consumption illness. And when the family started to show symptoms of having it as well, it was also believed that the bodies of the undead held the cure.
And when medicine failed, spades came out.
The Vampire Hunt in Plain Sight
What makes Annie Dennett’s case especially intriguing is its documentation by a man of the cloth. Enoch Hayes Place, a Freewill Baptist minister from Vermont, happened to be in town when Annie’s family made the grim decision to exhume her body in 1810, three years after Annie was dead and buried.
Her father, Moses Dennett, was gravely ill with tuberculosis, and in the absence of a cure, the family clung to the desperate hope that digging up Annie’s remains might reveal signs of vampiric influence — a heart still full of blood, perhaps, or some unnatural preservation of flesh.
Enoch Hayes Place attended the exhumation and recorded the scene in his diary. His words capture both the grim spectacle and the uneasy blending of religious authority with old-world superstition:
“They opened the grave and it was a Solemn Sight indeed. A young Brother by the name of Adams examined the mouldy Specticle, but found nothing as they Supposed they Should…. There was but a little left except bones.”
Unlike some of the more infamous exhumations of the era, Annie Dennett’s disinterment was anticlimactic. No blood-filled heart. No unnatural preservation. Just a young woman’s decayed remains, bones already claimed by the earth. It was noted that there were vines growing in the coffin that were discussed in several of the exhumations of the believed vampiric graves.
The Vampiric Vines
One of the tell tale signs of vampirism was a body not decaying and bodily fluids like blood still found in the organs. Another sign of vampirism here was vines growing on the body.
In 1784, there was a newspaper article from Connecticut about a foreign quack doctor that said that these vines or sprouts growing on the body would also be a cure to burn and consume, often together with other organs.
This we also see with the case in Willington of two bodies in relation to a Mr. Isaac Johnson. There was also a case in Dummerston, Vermont and upstate New York.
It was also a superstition that said when a vine was growing from a coffing to the next (most often another family member), another one would die.The only way to break the curse was to break the vine and dig up the body to burn their vitals.
The ritual, meant to save her ailing father, did nothing. He would, like so many others, eventually succumb to tuberculosis.
But the very fact that the ritual occurred, and that it was recorded by a minister, speaks volumes about the cultural grip these beliefs held even in “enlightened” New England. Science and folklore shared uneasy quarters in early America, and when grief met fear, it often leaned toward the old ways.
A Forgotten Chapter in New England’s Vampire Lore
While Mercy Brown’s story would capture international attention decades later, Annie Dennett remains largely forgotten — a footnote in folklore studies, though no less telling. Her story illustrates that these rituals weren’t isolated anomalies but part of a broader, if uneasy, social custom. The fear of consumption and its deadly march through families often blurred the line between superstition and faith.
And perhaps, most chillingly, it shows how even ministers weren’t immune to the lure of old beliefs when confronted with death’s relentless hand.
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References:
Vampires – American Myths, Legends, and Tall Tales: An Encyclopedia of American Folklore
http://apps.vampiresgrasp.com/Blog/?d=01/2010
Food for the Dead: On the Trial of New England’s Vampires 2011933367, 9780819571700 – DOKUMEN.PUB
