Creative History

  The evening of December 22, 1909 was clear but definitely cold enough to snow as temperatures dipped well below freezing once the sun set that afternoon in Worcester, Massachusetts. Worcester at the end of the first decade of the 20th century despite being known as a statewide transportation hub, and the largest city in central Massachusetts, was still predominantly a walking city.  Some automobiles had already begun to clog the newly paved streets of the city and illuminate passersby with their headlights on the night of December 22, 1909 but as workers rushed home from factories and offices and headed out to the shops in Worcester’s busy downtown to buy last minute Christmas gifts for their kids, the majority of them still travelled by foot and the sidewalks that night were packed with pedestrians. At exactly 6:45 just as the holiday shopping crowd was at its peak on that cold winter’s night in Worcester, over a thousand of the city’s inhabitants looked up in the nightti...

  “You must dig up their bodies,” they implore.  “All must be exhumed.” Warily, George Brown stares at them.  He refuses their requests.  “I cannot desecrate the bodies of my wife and daughters.” “But you must,” the local villagers beg.  Even a local doctor, Harold Metcalf of nearby Wickford, Rhode Island, is among them.  “We must find out who among your wife and daughters is one of the undead.” For weeks the pressure on George Brown has been building.  Not only is he forced to watch his son Edwin, aged twenty years old, wasting away from the pain and suffering of tuberculosis each day right before his very own eyes, but he also faces the fear and suspicion of every person in town. Everyday his neighbors from Exeter, Rhode Island, stop by the home of local farmer Geroge Brown and they reiterate their demand.  They must dig up the bodies of his dead relatives and create an elixir from the ashes of their organs to stop the spread of the di...