Factory Point Cemetery

Rachel Harris married Captain Isaac Burton and was, per an acquaintance quoted in the record, 'a fine, healthy, beautiful girl' — she died of consumption around 1790 at about age twenty-one. Burton remarried, to Hulda Powel, and when Hulda fell into the same wasting illness the family's connections arrived at the era's terrible logic: the dead first wife was draining the living second. The exhumation and burning were meant as the cure.

The case survives on unusually good paper. Judge John S. Pettibone's Early History of Manchester, written around 1860, recorded the account from an eyewitness; the headstone bears Collins's signature — one of the region's most noted stonecutters; and a Vermont Folklife/Pomeroy Foundation marker dedicated August 6, 2022, now tells the story at the cemetery gate. Hulda died anyway, in September 1793.

Rachel's case was the first of Vermont's two documented entries in the New England vampire panic — the wave of consumption-era exhumations that ran through the region in the late 18th and early 19th centuries; the second came in Woodstock more than forty years later. The pattern is consistent across the panic: tuberculosis killing through a household, suspicion settling on the first to die, the ritual burning of the organs as medicine.

What the file is careful to note — and the historical record supports — is that this was community belief driving a ritual, not evidence of anything undead. The 'vampire' was the diagnosis a pre-germ-theory town reached for. Rachel haunts the file the way most such women do: as the named victim of a documented panic, not as its predator.

Rachel's exhumation belongs to a documented regional epidemic of belief: the New England vampire panic, in which families losing members to consumption — tuberculosis, not yet a germ theory's prisoner — exhumed the first to die and burned the organs as medicine. Rhode Island's Mercy Brown case (1892, Exeter) is the panic's famous entry; Vermont's file runs Rachel in Manchester and, more than forty years later, a second documented case in Woodstock. The 2022 marker dedication drew town officials, folklorists and a crowd to the cemetery gate — the same ground, 229 years later, gathered again for Rachel, this time with her name on a plaque instead of a charge sheet.

Factory Point Cemetery is a working village burial ground with a carved marble marker and a state folklore plaque — one of the few vampire-panic sites in New England where the woman, the grave, the account and the ritual are all on record. The legend drew the crowd in 1793; the record is what finally gave Rachel back her name. The cemetery itself is a village ground — Rachel's stone the only one carrying a legend, and the only one that needed a historical marker to explain what the town once did about her.