In 1892, in Exeter, Rhode Island, a grieving family exhumed the body of nineteen-year-old Mercy Brown in a desperate attempt to save her dying brother. This episode follows the real story behind one of America’s most famous vampire legends: tuberculosis, winter graves, folk belief, and the New England vampire panic that turned a family tragedy into a permanent piece of American folklore.

We trace Mercy Brown’s death, the exhumation in March 1892, the medical reality of consumption, and the wider fear that the dead could drain life from the living. It’s a story of grief, disease, and superstition in nineteenth-century New England—and why Mercy Brown still haunts American dark history more than a century later.

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Sources:

Auerbach, Nina. Our Vampires, Ourselves. University of Chicago Press, 1995.

Bell, Michael E. Food for the Dead: On the Trail of New England’s Vampires. Carroll & Graf, 2001.

Bell, Michael E. “Vampires and Death in New England, 1784 to 1892.” Anthropology and Humanism, vol. 31, no. 2, 2006, pp. 124–140.

Brown, Mercy Lena. Obituary notice. Providence Journal, 20 Jan. 1892.

Brown, Edwin Atwood. Obituary notice. Providence Journal, 7 May 1892.

“Exhumation of the Brown Family.” Providence Journal, 19 Mar. 1892.

Rhode Island Historical Society. “Have Mercy…” 31 Oct. 2016.

Stetson, George R. “The Animistic Vampire in New England.” American Anthropologist, vol. 9, no. 1, 1896, pp. 1–18.

Tucker, Abigail. “The Great New England Vampire Panic.” Smithsonian Magazine, Oct. 2012.