Fear of the Dark

The Night Doctors in Folk Belief and Historical Reality

For generations an ominous warning had been used to instill fear and obedience in African-American communities: “The Night Doctors will get you.” It was a means of social control that combined elements of folklore and historical experience; a scare tactic used at various times by slave masters, white vigilantes and overly-protective parents alike. The night doctors were terrifying figures, the boogeymen of their day, and the stories surrounding them are rooted in a uniquely American folk tradition – a tradition shaped by the legacy of racial violence and subjugation from the not-so-distant past.

There are a number of regional variations to the night-doctor belief. The standard version begins with an unsuspecting individual traveling alone after dark. From out of the shadows a group of ghastly figures emerge, their faces concealed by crudely-stitched masks. To the unsuspecting victim they appear as ghosts, witches, devils or disfigured monsters. Some wear white lab coats. Consciousness is soon lost, the result of a hypodermic needle or chloroform-soaked rag. From here the true horror unfolds.

The victim is transported in a hearse-like wagon, drawn by horses fitted with rubber shoe-pads to muffle the sounds of their movement. They are taken to a dimly-lit basement laboratory where faceless observers gather around an operating table to witness unspeakable acts of human experimentation, dissection and blood harvesting. A prolonged and tortured death is the individual's ultimate fate, after which their mangled remains are either kept as macabre trophies or else disposed of as common medical waste. As far as scare stories go, it's downright terrifying. Particularly due to the very real history that surrounds it.

The Great Dying

New England's Coastal Plague, 1616-1619

“[How] strangely they have decreased by the Hand of God... and it hath generally been observed that where the English come to settle, a Divine Hand makes way for them.” – Daniel Denton, early American colonist

The popular Pilgrim myth involves a persecuted group of Christian reformers who fled England in order to worship freely in the New World. In a narrative that finds parallels with the Israelite exodus from Egypt, these chosen people were guided by the hand of God in a perilous journey across the Atlantic in search of what would later be described by Puritan leader John Winthrop as “a beacon of religious light, a model of spiritual promise, a city upon a hill."¹ Through heroic struggle and an unshakable commitment to their faith, they were able to conquer the vast New England wilderness, tame the hostile natives and expand the glory and dominion of the Christian God in these new lands.²

In reality, the promised land wasn't exactly a Canaan that needed to be conquered. The area that would become Plymouth Colony was essentially a ghost town by the time that the Pilgrims stepped foot off the Mayflower. Deserted villages and untended fields dotted the landscape, with caches of crops, tools and other supplies hastily left behind... along with the skeletal remains of the former inhabitants. A few years prior, the entire coastal region had been ravaged by a mysterious disease that wiped out most of the native Wampanoag and neighboring Massachusetts, Pennacook, Nauset, Permaquid and Abenaki populations.

For the English settlers, this was all part of a divine plan. Providence had taken the form of a "miraculous pestilence" that had swept the land clean so a new Christian society could be established. Thomas Morton, an early colonial merchant, praised the epidemic that had recently depopulated the land, leaving it “much the more fit for the English Nation to inhabit in, and erect in it Temples to the glory of God.”³

Corpse Medicine in the Age of Empire

The Cannibalisic Healing Practices of the Civilized World


As British colonial expansion brought explorers, naturalists, traders, whalers and missionaries to the South Pacific, gruesome tales of cannibalism among the natives began to trickle back to a horrified public at home. To civilized sensibilities, the thought of aboriginal warriors consuming the flesh of their slain enemies was considered to be an immoral abomination that represented the extremities of godless barbarity.  

“Few consider what a savage man [is] in his original state. […] This custom of eating their enemies slain in battle has undoubtedly been handed down to them from the earliest times," wrote the famed explorer (and eventual main course at a Hawaiian warriors' banquet) Captain James Cook. "It is not an easy matter to break a nation of its ancient customs [that] let them be so inhuman and savage, especially if that nation is void of all religious principles."¹

It was a deep-seeded belief that clouded the perceptions of even the most secular-minded observers. Upon encountering the Yahgan people of Tierra del Fuego, South America, the celebrated naturalist Charles Darwin erroneously claimed them to be cannibals. "Viewing such men," he remarked, "one can hardly make one's self  believe that they are fellow-creatures, and inhabitant of the same world."² Prejudicial assumptions in turn reinforced imperial ambitions as the shock and repulsion generated by these alleged cannibalistic practices justified the subjugation of native inhabitants on the basis of racial, cultural, and moral superiority over such “primeval savagery.” Colonial endeavors were promoted as not simply expanding commercial interests; but rather as advancing civilization to the darkest corners of the world.

The great irony in all this 'Age of Empire' ethnochauvinism is that a popular culture of cannibalism existed simultaneously among the British, as it did in other civilized European countries at the time. They drank human blood, ate human flesh, made ointments from human fat, and manufactured drugs from powdered human skulls. Nearly every part of the human body was used to treat the ailments and afflictions of the day: hair, brain, heart, skin, liver, urine, menstrual blood, placenta, earwax, saliva, and feces.³

For hundreds of years, Europeans – rich and poor, educated and illiterate – routinely participated in acts of cannibalism. When acknowledged at all, corpse medicine is thought of as a few bizarre, but isolated, folk remedies relegated to the ancient and medieval periods. But in reality these cannibalistic practices were widely used and the peak in their popularity coincided with the social and scientific revolutions of the Early Modern Era... and across the British Isles they remained popular right up through the Victorian Age.