The Mistaken Vampire

One of the most famous Rhode Island vampires was never exhumed and exorcised as an alleged creature of the night, although she was taken from the family burial lot and reburied in a public cemetery on October 26, 1889, when the family sold their farm. Other than that, she would have remained anonymous; that is, until a group of legend-trippers stumbled upon her grave in the 1960s. 

Nellie Louise Vaughn died on March 31, 1889, at the age of nineteen, presumably of pneumonia. She was first buried in a lot on the family farm. Small, private family plots were very common in Rhode Island and, in some cases, are still in use to this day.

As the story goes, a Coventry, Rhode Island high school teacher told a class of students about a vampire grave, just off Route 102 in South County, of a nineteen-year-old girl who died in the late 1800s. The teacher never gave a name or exact location. It can be assumed that this particular teacher was referring to Mercy Brown, the most famous case during New England vampire scare of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Being close to Halloween, a group of classmates gathered together one night to find the grave of the vampire. How they came upon the historical cemetery remains a matter of mystery, but their travels landed them in front of an old burial yard behind an abandoned meeting house.

It did not take long for the seekers of the unknown to find what convinced them that their search was over. Just inside the cemetery sat Nellie’s stone with the now-famous inscription, “I am waiting and watching for you.” This ominous epitaph, along with Nellie’s age at the time of death and the date of her death closely matched the teacher’s description, and another Rhode Island vampire was born.

Since then, countless people have paid a visit to the graveyard looking for the grave where, as legend states, no moss, lichen or grass will grow. It was also related that the grave continues to sink into the earth. There is no stone marking her plot, as it has been removed and stored away in an undisclosed location for preservation. Nellie’s burial plot remains unmarked, but there are a few areas in the burial yard where people claim she is buried, and all of them for the most part, have plenty of vegetation on them. Unfortunately, the cemetery has been subject to much vandalism—so much so that there is a neighborhood watch, as well as police patrols on a regular basis.

Another aspect of the Nellie Vaughn saga involves the alleged sighting of a young woman in the graveyard and an ethereal voice emanating from nowhere saying, “I am perfectly pleasant.” In the book New England Ghost Files, Charles T. Robinson states that people have heard the words echo through the air while in the cemetery and have spotted the visage of a young woman near the alleged grave site of Nellie Vaughn.

Acclaimed author and paranormal investigator Christopher Balzano once stated that we have a tendency to immediately blame a haunting on the most famous person in the area. Unfortunately, there is no indubitable evidence on the paranormal side that even if there is a voice calling out to the visitors, it is actually Nellie’s. We already know she was never accused of being one of the spectral visitors blamed for sucking the life from family members in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. If anything, there is an old beautiful historical cemetery and meetinghouse that should be left alone and respected. There is no need to waste your time traveling miles up a winding road to see, well, nothing.