NEW DISCOVERY - WHAT DOES IT MEAN?

Following a lead provided by someone involved in genealogical research--a person who probably spends as much time in graveyards as a folklorist or Goth freak--Michael Bell and Cyril Place recently visited the old part of a cemetery in northern Rhode Island. The researcher had advised them that there was an old, broken tombstone with an epitaph that linked consumption and vampires. Since there was no evidence that the label "vampire" was ever used by people in New England who, suffering from consumption, exhumed their dead kin, Michael and Cyril were naturally a bit skeptical.

Poking around this old, jumbled plot of tumbled-down stones in numerous small family lots seemed like a real shot in the dark. Finally, Michael, who was following Cyril as he walked slowly through the underbrush, shouted, "I found it!" The inscription on the finely ingraved slate gravestone read as follows:

In Memory of Simon Whipple youngest son of Col. Dexter Aldrich & Margery his wife who died May 6, 1841 aged 27 yearsAltho consumption's vampire grasp Had seized thy mortal frame,

....................................ing minds