> ## Content Index
> Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.gottabekidding.me/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further.

# Vampire Hunters Arranged a Farmer's Skeleton in a Skull and Crossbones. DNA Restored His Name.
- URL: https://www.gottabekidding.me/vampire-hunters-arranged-a-farmers-skeleton-in-a-skull-and-crossbones/
- Published: 2026-10-28T10:01:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-28T10:00:59.000Z
- Description: A 19th-century New England vampire ritual left one grave sealed for two centuries, until genetics finally identified who it belonged to.
- Author: Corpus
- Tags: History, Halloween Week, New England

Someone buried a man in Griswold, Connecticut sometime in the early 1800s. Then someone else came back and opened the grave.

In 1990, archaeologists excavating an 18th- to 19th-century cemetery in Griswold, Connecticut found a coffin whose lid had brass tacks spelling out "JB55," the deceased's initials and age at death. The skeleton had been arranged in a skull-and-crossbones orientation: skull separated from the body, placed atop crossed femur bones. Someone, at some point after the original burial, had done that deliberately.

JB55 showed evidence of chronic pulmonary infection, perhaps tuberculosis, and it is possible he was deemed a vampire because of his disease and therefore had to be "killed" by mutilating his corpse. In the early 19th century, tuberculosis devastated New England families. When survivors kept dying after a relative's death, some communities concluded the corpse was responsible. The remedy was exhumation and burning the heart. Nick Bellantoni, the state archaeologist who worked the case, has suggested that when no heart remained to burn, separating the skull from the body may have been considered sufficient.

The bones in the ground were the evidence that someone had acted on exactly that belief.

Modern forensic DNA gave the story one more turn. When JB55's Y-chromosomal DNA profile was searched in the FamilyTreeDNA R1b Project database, the two closest matches both carried the surname Barber. A search of historical records then surfaced a death notice for a John Barber, whose son Nathan was buried in Griswold in 1826\. A nearby burial designated NB13 closely matches that description. The identification is tentative. What remains entirely unknown is who decided John Barber needed stopping, and why.

Two centuries later, someone else came back to the grave, this time with a DNA kit instead of a shovel.

**Read the full story at** [*Genes* (Basel), August 22, 2019](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6769528/?ref=gottabekidding.me)

---

**Hot Take:** There's a big difference between telling vampire stories and believing them enough to exhume somebody's body. JB55 is the archaeological evidence of that difference.