I grew up in Newport, RI, and we used to hear about the legend of Mercy Brown. Supposedly, she was a vampire, and her body was exhumed in 1892. This caused quite a stir when it was reported in the Providence Journal. Apparently, RI at that time was a contradiction. Providence was very sophisticated and "modern", while the rural areas were as backward as any where in the world. Let's put this in perspective. I was doing a paper for school, and I chose vampires. My teacher told me that I should try to go and talk to a man who actually remembered the whole Mercy Brown incident. He'd lived in Exeter as a boy and had been about 10-12 when it occurred. Unfortunately, I never go to go see him, because he lived in Providence. I was too young at the time to take a bus to the nursing home up there. Within the lifetime of this man, he'd seen furor over vampires, the telephone come into common usage, two world wars, radio, TV, flight from its early beginnings and ultimately to the moon and SKYLAB. I don't know when he died, but I did the paper in 1978. At that point, he was in his 90s. My teacher reduced my grade from an A to a B because she thought I should have "made the effort" to go to Providence to see her X distant relative. I wish I'd been able to, but my Dad was not about to take me there, and I certainly was not going to be able to get on a RIPTA bus on my own. Still, it's startling to realize how close we are, timewise, in this country, to the age of superstiion.