WARWICK -- Michael Bell hunts vampires in his free time.
When he's working, Bell is the folklorist for the Rhode Island Historical Preservation & Heritage Commission, telling yarns about the history and traditions of the area, as he'll do tonight at the Warwick Public Library. He'll focus his 7 p.m. talk on the history of Narragansett Bay.
His passion, however, is to prowl through New England's graveyards, reading inscriptions on long-forgotten headstones, walking over graves where bodies had been exhumed and rearranged, out of fear, over a century ago.
Rhode Island is America's vampire capital, the site of the country's most famous sightings and legends. Bell calls it "The Transylvania of America." And although it's been more than a century since the last "vampire" corpse was dug up and burned, Bell is still trying to figure out why one of the area's legacies is blood and pointed teeth.
He combs old newspapers, reads town histories and scans family genealogies for information. In 2001, he published his findings in the first book about America's vampire hotbed: Food for the Dead: On the Trail of New England's Vampires.
Bell, 60, of Cranston, was trained as an archaeologist, but where his colleagues excitedly saw mighty cities and ancient civilizations in the ruins they excavated, he was blind. "I could see bones and broken pottery," he said.
He found his niche in the study of voodoo and in researching the darker side of American history. He loves to travel, and in studying old tales from Native American and Mexican cultures, he found himself hearing the same basic tales over and over, with only the details changed. The same was true with the myths brought over by Europeans, especially the tales of the vampire, which he has studied in Rhode Island since 1980.
The bulk of the vampire tales were spawned between the late 1790s and the late 1890s. Many suspected of being vampires were actually suffering from tuberculosis, which spread widely during the Industrial Revolution, Bell said. Those stricken, with their bulging eyes and their sallow skin virtually hanging off their frames, seemed halfway between life and death.
Desperate for an explanation for the pestilence, New Englanders blamed the dead, who they believed must be rising from their graves to feed on the living, draining them of blood and life.
The townspeople fought back, digging up the graves of the recently deceased, rearranging the bones, and sometimes burning them -- or worse, eating the flesh, as in the case of the most famous of the area's vampires, Mercy Brown.
Legend has it that Brown's liver and heart were found dripping with blood when her body was exhumed from her Exeter grave in 1892. The organs were subsequently eaten by her brother Edwin, who died soon after.
Unlike the mythical European vampires, the New England vampires were commonly believed to be spirits, never bodies rising from the grave. In this, Bell believes them scarier than Bram Stoker's Count Dracula.
"They were killing people unseen," Bell said. "If you don't even see it, you're not aware it's there, how do you fight it?"
Although he'll touch on vampires in his talk at the Warwick Public Library tonight -- for better or worse, it's part of his act by now -- the primary focus will be what's under the sea, not what's buried in the ground.
He'll tell the tale of William Kidd, the 17th-century Scottish privateer turned pirate, who once visited a friend in Jamestown. Over the years, a legend has grown that Captain Kidd buried treasure on the island. But so far no map has been found, and no "X" marks any spot, in Bell's opinion.
He'll also tell the story of the spectral ship Palatine, which sank off Block Island around 1765. The legend goes that the Block Islanders put a false light on the shoals to lure it in, and then plundered and burned the ship after it ran aground.
The legend goes that every year in December, the ship can be seen in the fog, a woman who died in the fire wailing from its stern.
The Block Islanders, of course, tell a different story, one substantiated by statements taken from the Palatine's crew: in this version, the Block Islanders actually rescued the crew members after the ship ran aground.
Bell has learned that most eerie folktales are easily deflated -- "I'm probably the biggest skeptic in the world," he said, -- but some still keep him guessing.
One, in particular, tests his resolve, probably because of the source. His grandmother and father told him a tale about the time his late grandfather rose from the dead -- stomping around and making noise in his former bedroom -- to scare off a man who was threatening his family.
"I have to acknowledge that science doesn't have all the answers -- so who knows?" he said.
