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Old 10-26-2015, 02:53 PM   #1086
xoxoxoBruce
The future is unwritten
 
Join Date: Oct 2002
Posts: 71,105
Yes, it's a trip which can only be planned in retrospect.

A Smithsonian article, The Great New England Vampire Panic, about people in rural New England blaming Vampires for deaths from "consumption", actually caused by savage tuberculosis outbreaks.
Quote:
While New England’s farmers may have been guided by something like reason, the spiritual climate of the day was also hospitable to vampire rumors. Contrary to their Puritanical reputation, rural New Englanders in the 1800s were a fairly heathen lot. Only about 10 percent belonged to a church. Rhode Island, originally founded as a haven for religious dissenters, was particularly lax: Christian missionaries were at various points dispatched there from more godly communities. “The missionaries come back and lament that there’s no Bible in the home, no church-going whatsoever,” says Linford Fisher, a Brown University colonial historian. “You have people out there essentially in cultural isolation.”
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