Vampires in New England, Daniel Day-Lewis as Lincoln, and algae

Kerri recommends The Great New England Vampire Panic from Smithsonian.

Here's the open. See if you can resist reading the rest:

Children playing near a hillside gravel mine found the first graves. One ran home to tell his mother, who was skeptical at first--until the boy produced a skull.

Because this was Griswold, Connecticut, in 1990, police initially thought the burials might be the work of a local serial killer named Michael Ross, and they taped off the area as a crime scene. But the brown, decaying bones turned out to be more than a century old. The Connecticut state archaeologist, Nick Bellantoni, soon determined that the hillside contained a colonial-era farm cemetery. New England is full of such unmarked family plots, and the 29 burials were typical of the 1700s and early 1800s: The dead, many of them children, were laid to rest in thrifty Yankee style, in simple wood coffins, without jewelry or even much clothing, their arms resting by their sides or crossed over their chests.

Except, that is, for Burial Number 4.

Tom Weber is impressed with Daniel Day-Lewis as Lincoln:

Plus, how will they rid the Lincoln Memorial of algae?

--Stephanie Curtis, social media host

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