Thursday Things: Elves and Vampires Edition
3 November 2022. Vol 4 No 44 By Dan McGirt. #169
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Oh, there are elves there. No doubt. Photo by Benjamin Suter on Unsplash
Vampires of Connecticut
It’s not every day we get to combine two Thursday Things preoccupations — in this case, biotech and mythological1 creatures — in one item. But today is one of those days!
As any reader of Stephen King’s classic Salem’s Lot knows, New England is lousy with vampires. And Connecticut is apparently no exception. This article from the NIH’s National Library of Medicine describes how a team used modern DNA analysis to identify an unknown vampire of the Nutmeg State.
In 1990, an unmarked cemetery dating to the 18th–19th centuries was excavated in Griswold, Connecticut, when skeletal remains were encountered during sand and gravel operations [1]. Of the twenty-seven burials discovered, a stone-lined grave containing a middle-aged male proved to be very interesting. Brass tacks on the coffin lid spelled “JB55”, likely indicating the initials of the deceased and the age at death of 55 years. The remaining hardware included screws and copper dowel hinges, which dated the coffin to the early nineteenth century [1]. Most notably, the skull and femora of JB55 were found in a "skull and crossbones" orientation (Figure 1), indicating postmortem rearrangement of the remains.
Yep. Typical vampire burial.
A vampire belief system was circulating Griswold and its borough Jewett City during the mid-1800s. The famous Jewett City vampires were a large farming family that lost multiple male family members over nine years to tuberculosis or “consumption”. When another young son was stricken with the illness, the family became convinced they were plagued by vampires. Therefore, they disinterred the dead, burned and reburied their remains. The young boy recovered and they took this as a sign that the practice worked [5,6]. Such vampire folklore attributed the high number of deaths resulting from disease to vampires rising from the dead and feeding on living relatives. In attempts to stop the vampire “epidemic”, the body of a diseased individual was often exhumed and examined. The presence of certain characteristics (e.g., blood draining from the mouth and a bloated chest), while now known to be associated with the natural process of decomposition, were mistaken for indications of life [4,6]. In order to kill the vampire, the vital organs of the decedent were often burned, including most notably the heart. When no organs were present, a common practice involved the separation of the skull from the body [4].
This is how you do it. Those 19th century Connecticut farmers were not messing around! But who was the mysterious “JB55”? Our research team is on the case!
Samples from the remains of JB55 and other burials from the cemetery site were sent to the National Museum of Health and Medicine (NMHM) in the early 1990s for curation and future scientific investigation. At that time, a sample from the femur was sent to the Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory (AFDIL, a branch of the Armed Forces Medical Examiner System (AFMES-AFDIL)) for DNA testing. However, methods available at the time provided only limited information from historical samples, such as mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) control region sequence data. Since mtDNA is maternally inherited and does not undergo recombination, it can be used as a maternal lineage marker for DNA-assisted identification. Yet in the absence of known maternal relatives for mtDNA sequence comparison, the identification of JB55 was not possible. Today, advances in DNA technology make it possible to learn more from ancient and historic burials than ever before. Single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) can provide valuable information on individual ancestry, as can haplogrouping of haploid markers. Additionally, the analysis of short tandem repeats (STRs) in the Y-chromosome may enable surname prediction of an unknown individual [7]. The goal of the present study was to apply current DNA techniques in an attempt to reveal the identity of JB55. This report exemplifies the strength of genomic technology in settling a decades-old historical mystery, that of the Griswold, Connecticut vampire.
I won’t paste the whole article here. Click on over to the NIH and read if you’re interested in the identity of the mystery vampire and how the researchers combined cutting edge DNA techniques with old fashioned sleuthing to make that identification.
My biggest takeaway from this article is that there was a Great New England Vampire Panic that we did not cover in U.S. history class2 We might dive deeper into that in a future edition.
Elves of Iceland
I have been to Iceland and you can’t go to Iceland without hearing about the elves who supposedly inhabit the island. Every tour guide seems to have a story about how disturbing the elves led to accidents and other bad luck for a construction project or new road until the workers all walked off the job. Order was only restored once the elves were appeased in some way.
Do Icelanders really believe all this? Or are these stories, just possibly, played up for the benefit of tourists?
“Elves Live Here.” On Modern Icelandic Elflore and the Shades of Belief
In 2006 and 2007 the University of Iceland’s Department of Folkloristics entered the debate, with technical help from the university’s Social Science Institute. Their fifty questions were based on those of Erlendur in 1974, adapted for “a modern society that had been in contact with New Age thought,” according to folklore professor Terry Gunnell.
Again, 5 percent of the one thousand respondents said they had seen an elf, while more than 50 percent “entertained the possibility of their existence.” While outnumbered by the percentage who had received an omen (55 percent), dreamed a prophetic dream (40 percent), or felt the presence of the dead (40 percent), the number of elf-seers (5 percent) was still higher than those who said they had seen a UFO (2 percent).
Let’s put those numbers into context: 2 percent of the Icelandic population is about 6,600 people. In July 2016, 6,500 people went to see the 1970s-era hard-rock band Kiss perform in the Taco Bell Arena in Boise, Idaho.
The article goes on to discuss how a throwaway line in a Michael “The Big Short” Lewis article in Vanity Fair3 back in 2009 sparked an Icelandic elf frenzy. Even before that, promoters of Icelandic tourism were using elves as a selling point. They doubled down as Iceland became a trendy destination. I'm not sure elf lore is the main draw for visitors, but it doesn't hurt.
Matt Eliason, an American writing for Iceland Magazine in 2014, thinks “the Icelandic people continue to acknowledge the existence of the nonexistent elves to drum up business for their growing tourist industry.”
I’m sure they do. Nevertheless, tales of elves preceded Iceland becoming a hot tourist spot. As, no doubt, did the elves themselves. I saw no elves when I visited Iceland. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t out there.
Lighting the way for pay
Street lights are a relatively new development in the grand sweep of human history. How did people get around in the dark city streets before they were lighted by gas lamps and later by electric lights? Well, they hired link-boys:
Walking Streetlamps for Hire in Seventeenth-Century London
There was a time when cities still slept. In premodern London, despite patchy schemes here and there for street lighting, once darkness set in, it was a challenge to make one’s way through the slumbering streets. There was a solution, however: much the way we hail cabs, a medieval Londoner could hail a torch-bearer to light their way home from a night on the town.
Through the Victorian era, the city was home to a burgeoning community of these walking street-lights-for-hire, known as link-boys. Torch-waving urchins crowded around popular night spots, such theaters, taverns, and gambling halls, calling for customers. They pop up everywhere in Samuel Pepys’ famous diary, accompanying him on his nocturnal rambles.
Link-boys were like Uber for light. I imagine that, like Uber drivers and cab drivers today, they saw and heard a lot of things that their clients would rather not have widely known. Like who was going where late at night.
Now that you know what a link-boy is, you might start spotting references to them in Shakespeare and Dickens. Like many working-class figures, they never received much considered attention from the literati, but they’re often there nonetheless, hovering in the background. Poets compared link-boys to fireflies; painters portrayed them as Cupids, enabling secret assignations.
Exactly. Oh, and then there’s crime and class tensions to consider:
At the same time, the people who hired link-boys had a tendency to regard them with suspicion. There were constant anxieties that link-boys of the city were in league with bandits and might suddenly extinguish their torches to leave the hapless traveler at the mercy of a pack of thieves. Whether such concerns were based in reality or not, it’s no wonder that their well-to-do employers were dimly aware of a certain tension, as most link-boys were desperately poor children.
This article was a fascinating glimpse into what it was like moving about in times gone by. Give it a read! And be sure to tip your link-boy well — you never know what dangers in the dark his torch held back. Maybe elves. Maybe vampires. Maybe far worse…
Thank you!
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Or are they?
And that I am certain has no modern parallels of irrational manias and absurd beliefs taking hold of large segments of the population due to an outbreak of infectious disease, leading to people resorting to ineffectual measures and adopting useless totems to ward off the perceived danger. We’re so much smarter and full of Science™ now.
“Though scholars today still struggle to explain the vampire panics, a key detail unites them: The public hysteria almost invariably occurred in the midst of savage tuberculosis outbreaks.” Silly, foolish people of olden times, giving in to public hysteria during disease outbreaks!
https://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2009/04/iceland200904-2 “Wall Street on the Tundra”