Frederick Ransom was a member of the Class of 1820, though he did not reach graduation. We don't know much about him. He came from a local family in South Woodstock, Vermont, and died of tuberculosis in 1817, at the age of nineteen. The only reason we ran into his name is because of the steps his father took to prevent the disease from spreading to others in his family. Tuberculosis has a long history alongside humanity, and it remains the leading cause of death by infectious disease worldwide today. At the time that Frederick was sick, there was no effective treatment and the first successful immunization was still about a century away. It was a disease that destroyed whole families and communities, which may explain the drastic measures that were taken by Frederick's father after the young man succumbed to the disease. According to Frederick's younger brother Daniel:
"It was said that if the heart of one of the family who died of consumption was taken out and burned, others would be free from it. And Father, having some faith in the remedy, had the heart of Frederick taken out after he had been buried, and it was burned in Captain Pearson's blacksmith forge."
Frederick Ransom's story is considered part of a larger pattern now referred to as the New England Vampire Panic. In the 18th and 19th centuries, widespread outbreaks of tuberculosis in New England led to multiple instances of exhumation, burning, and sometimes even the consumption of ashes, all as folk medicine remedies for the disease. In some cases, there was an explicit fear that the dead were somehow feeding on the living, which was spreading the disease within families. We don't have enough details in Frederick's case to know if burning was prescribed as a preventative with or without the the undead concern. In any case, despite the precaution, Frederick's death was followed by the deaths of his mother, sister, and two brothers, also to tuberculosis.
We have Ransom's alumni file, but all it contains is a letter sent to the College in the 1930s with an excerpt from Daniel's unpublished diary which is quoted above. We don't know anything about him as a person or a student, and without his connection to this specific piece of folkloric history, we might not have anything but a name in our alumni catalog.
To see the little bit that we do have, ask for the alumni file for Frederick Ransom, Dartmouth Class of 1820. A copy of Daniel Ransom's unpublished diary is held by the Woodstock History Center.
