roots and patches
of mold in that region. These latter narratives interested me
profoundly, on account of what I had seen in my boyhood, but I felt that
most of the significance had in each case been largely obscured by
additions from the common stock of local ghost lore.

Ann White, with her Exeter superstition, had promulgated the most
extravagant and at the same time most consistent tale; alleging that
there must lie buried beneath the house one of those vampires--the dead
who retain their bodily form and live on the blood or breath of the
living--whose hideous legions send their preying shapes or spirits
abroad by night. To destroy a vampire one must, the grandmothers say,
exhume it and burn its heart, or at least drive a stake through that
organ; and Ann's dogged insistence on a search under the cellar had been
prominent in bringing about her discharge.

Her tales, however, commanded a wide audience, and were the more readily
accepted because the house indeed stood on land once used for burial
purposes. To me their interest depended less on this circumstance than
on the peculiarly appropriate way in which they dovetailed with certain
other things--the complaint of the departing servant Preserved Smith,
who had preceded Ann and never heard of her, that something "sucked his
breath" at night; the death-certificates of the fever victims of 1804,
issued by Doctor Chad Hopkins, and showing the four deceased persons all
unaccountably lacking in blood; and the obscure passages of poor Rhoby
Harris's ravings, where she complained of the sharp teeth of a
glassy-eyed, half-visible presence.

Free from unwarranted superstition though I am, these things produced in
me an odd sensation, which was intensified by a pair of widely separated
newspaper cuttings relating to deaths in the shunned house--one from the
_Providence Gazette and Country-Journal_ of April 12, 1815, and the
other from the _Daily Transcript and Chronicle_ of October 27,
1845--each of which detailed an appallingly grisly circumstance whose
duplication was remarkable. It seems that in both instances the dying
person, in 1815 a gentle old lady named Stafford and in 1845 a
schoolteacher of middle age named Eleazar Durfee, became transfigured in
a horrible way, glaring glassily and attempting to bite the throat of
the attending physician. Even more puzzling, though, was the final case
which put an end to the renting of the house--a series of anemia deaths
preced