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The Great New England Vampire Panic

virginsuicide photography via Flickr Creative Commons

New England's gruesome brush with supernatural hysteria did not end with the Salem witch trials in the 17th century.  Almost two centuries later came the great New England vampire panic.  Wait… what?  Abigail Tucker is a staff writer for Smithosonian magazine – she wrote about historians who are documenting cases when rural residents set aside their Yankee piety and feverishly exhumed graves and mutilated the corpses of suspected blood-suckers.  The panic is largely forgotten by history  – but with Halloween creeping up, and our Edgar Allen Poe special airing tomorrow, we thought it was a perfect time to dig it up. 

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