HauntBound archive · catalog record
Reported phenomena, as catalogued
Woodstock's village green and Cushing Cemetery, tied to New England's 1800s vampire-panic exhumations
The Green, Woodstock, VT 05091
Research updated September 2026
Age
All Ages
Cost
Free
Free to visit the village green and public cemetery grounds; the Woodstock Inn ghost tour is a separate paid program
Access
Wheelchair OK
Village green and surrounding sidewalks; older cemetery grounds with uneven footing
Equipment
Photos OK
New England vampire panic in Vermont · Early-1800s tuberculosis ('consumption') outbreaks · Documented Frederick Ransom (1817) and Corwin (1834) cases
In the early nineteenth century, before tuberculosis was understood as a contagious bacterial disease, families across rural New England sometimes blamed a wasting illness on the dead. When several members of one household died one after another of 'consumption,' some communities concluded that a deceased relative was draining the life from the living and took the drastic step of exhuming the body and burning the heart. Historians call this episode the New England vampire panic.
Woodstock is among the documented Vermont settings. Frederick Ransom, a Dartmouth College student, died of consumption on February 14, 1817, at the age of about twenty. According to the accounts, his body was disinterred and his heart burned at a blacksmith's forge on the village green by a family hoping to spare its surviving members. The effort failed; his mother and several siblings died of the same disease over the following years.
A second case, dated to 1834 and associated with the Corwin family and the village's Cushing Cemetery, follows the same pattern: a young man dead of a mysterious wasting illness, a frightened family, and a heart burned with the ashes said to have been buried in an iron container near the green. The episodes are recorded in Vermont folklore and regional histories as real expressions of fear and grief during deadly outbreaks rather than as anything supernatural.
Sources
The legend as it is told today centers on the green and on Cushing Cemetery. Versions of the Corwin story describe townspeople opening a grave, finding what they took for fresh blood in the heart, and burning the organ on the green, then sealing the ashes in an iron pot buried beneath it so the supposed vampire could not return. The Ransom case adds the earlier 1817 burning at the blacksmith's forge.
These stories survive as folklore layered over real tragedy: families watching relatives die of tuberculosis and reaching for the only defense their fear could devise. The Woodstock Inn's ghost tour gathers on the green to recount the 'buried vampire heart,' and regional history writers retell the cases each autumn. There are no credible modern apparition reports tied to the site; its power comes from the documented desperation of the events themselves and from standing on the ground where they are said to have happened.
Notable Entities
Walk Woodstock's village green and the historic Cushing Cemetery, the ground tied to early-1800s New England vampire-panic exhumations carried out by frightened families during tuberculosis outbreaks.
The Woodstock Inn & Resort runs a family-friendly ghost tour of the village that gathers on the green and tells the 'buried vampire heart' story alongside other local hauntings. Offered on scheduled evenings during the season.
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