Vampire-hunting kit gifted to USU folklore professor
Lynne McNeill, a folklore professor at Utah State University, is giving Buffy the Vampire Slayer a run for her money.
It all began when Dee Ansbergs, a USU graduate student alumni, enrolled in McNeill’s summer workshop on vampires years ago.
Ansbergs had moved to Massachusetts, where she still lives and works as an anthropology and folklore professor. She flew to Utah knowing that McNeill, one of her favorite professors at Utah State, was teaching the class.
The idea came when Ansbergs saw a picture of a vampire-hunting kit from the 1700s on a Facebook board.
“I casually made a comment saying, ‘Oh, that would be a really cool display to take around to schools to talk about folklore.’ The next thing you know, someone’s saying, ‘You should do it,’ and people are mailing me things,” Ansbergs said.
Between frequenting antique stores in Massachusetts — Ansbergs left her wishlist and contact information with some — people began mailing her items from all over the world. The items she couldn’t find, she built with the help of her carpenter husband. Eventually, Ansbergs was able to acquire enough relics for two kits.
Ansberg said McNeill would not only find the vampire-slaying kit handy as an educational tool, but wanted to present it as a token of her appreciation.
“Dr. McNeill has had a huge impact in my life — personally and academically,” Ansbergs said. “USU is very lucky to have her.”
McNeill, uncharacteristically, was speechless when she received the gift.
“Seriously, when I opened this gift, my mind was blown. For literally a day, I just couldn’t even articulate any statements about it,” McNeill said. “I’ve had students write me thank you notes before, but this is above and beyond.”
The vampire slaying kit is a three-compartment, velvet-lined briefcase with a trove of surprises. The items inside include stakes and daggers, a non-firing cap and ball pistol, an antique billy club, blood and wax candles, crucifixes, crosses, multiple items made from silver or iron, holy water, a book of the Catechism, garlic oil, salt from the Dead Sea and holy soil from Israel.
Accompanying the kit is a two-page list compiled by Ansbergs detailing what each item is, how old it is, where it came from and how it relates to vampire folklore.
“It’s charmingly funny, the way she’s written all of these things,” McNeill said. “‘The wooden mallet and the cup are used together. Use with wooden cup to crush herbs wolfsbane and hemlock. Do not ingest. Give to vampire.'”
McNeill said she was always interested in the supernatural, and realizing her interests could be studied academically was exciting.
“I was interested in fairy tales and took my first folklore class as an undergraduate and spent the whole semester going like, ‘You can study this? This is real? This is a degree you can earn?'” McNeill said. “Then when I did my master’s degree, I started studying legends and the supernatural and it was just like, ‘Another thing that I think is so awesome that is also folklore.’ My career path was set at that point, pretty much.”
McNeill finds monster mythology interesting, in part, because of its ability to examine the humanity alongside it.
Vampire folklore has posed many questions since its origin in the 1600s, including how one controls urges, whether a person could stay entertained and engaged if they were immortal, if ultimate power corrupts ultimately and how to handle a person who is bad news — even biblically, demonically so, McNeill said.
“This is what, of course, folklore has always let us do as a society, is talk about these things in an abstract way, in a way that isn’t as emotionally charged as if we were truly dealing with it ourselves, but a way that lets us symbolically ask those questions,” McNeill said.
With the vampire-slaying kit, Ansbergs not only wants to show gratitude to McNeill, but hopes that this inspires students to get more involved in folklore and begin projects of their own.
“Without teachers who excite students… we lose a huge amount of knowledge and information that is really important in life,” Ansbergs said. “Folklore and legends and mythology are vital pieces of our survival as a species.”
— whitney.howard@aggiemail.usu.edu
@omgwhitshutup