Weird Island
2. VAMPIRE PANIC: Mercy Brown
Episode Summary
Could it be there were once Vampires in Rhode Island? 200 years after the Salem Witch trials, there was another case of public hysteria. Only this time, people hunted vampires, not witches. Hear the story of Mercy Brown, the last of the New England vampires, and the Vampire Panic that swept Rhode Island. To Visit her Grave: Chestnut Hill Cemetery; 467 Ten Rod Road, Exeter, Rhode Island, 02822 For source material, check out our Episode Web Page.
Episode Notes
Episode Source Material:
Episode Transcription
- Hi, I’m Sara. And you’re listening to Weird Island. Each week, I’ll be sharing with you some of the strangest stories I can dig up from my tiny little state of Rhode Island. Maybe you’re a history buff, looking for a story you haven’t heard yet. Or you’re a true crime fan, but you’re looking to shake things up and binge a new kind of story. Or maybe you’re big into the horror genre. Well, if you are any of those things, look no further! I’ll be bringing you unsolved mysteries, horror, weird history--and even some murder. This week, we’re going back to the 1800s to talk about the New England Vampire Panic.
- Vampires. The undead. What comes to mind? For me, I imagine bat wings and fangs. The opening of coffin lids as pale, groaning corpses breathe back to life to seek out fresh blood to consume. Some vampires are creepy, others are hauntingly beautiful, with pale skin that glitters in the caustic sunlight, although I’m embarrassed to admit this last bit might be influenced by the Twilight books, which I rabidly consumed like the flesh of the living! In high school.
- Perhaps Mercy Brown, the last known Vampire in New England, glistened in the sunlight. Maybe her sickly pale complexion lent her an air of otherworldly beauty.
- Mercy Brown, known as Lena to her family, lived in Exeter, RI and was the last of the suspected American Vampires. And I’m going to be honest, I wanted to dig up more about what Lena was like in her life. But I couldn’t find all that much. So, instead, I’m going to stick to what is known and tell you the story of her family, and the story of her death--or the months that followed it.
- In 1889, Lena’s father George Brown watched and worried as his son Edwin started losing his appetite and strength. 7 years earlier, his wife and oldest daughter had fallen ill with the same symptoms, wasting away until disease had completely drained the life from their bodies. First his wife then his daughter passed away. George couldn’t let the same thing happen to Eddie. When his wife passed, she left him with 6 children, and Eddie--his only son--was beloved in the town of Exeter, RI where the family lived and owned a farm. It worried George to see his big, husky son, who had recently married and was working in town as a store clerk, drained of color and plagued by a rattling, persistent cough. Knowing what the disease could do to Eddie, George rushed him to a doctor, who recommended sending him to Colorado Springs to recover in the arid climate.
- First Eddie headed West on his own, following in the footsteps of many other young men who filtered out of Rhode Island, seeking the promise of richer lands and opportunity. He left behind a ghost town. The previously rural but strong Exeter, RI had dwindled from 2500 to under 1000 residents as a result of the Civil War, the construction of railroads and the promise of the West. One in 5 farms sat abandoned and the town likely felt like a place left behind by a world that marched forward. And now, a mysterious disease ravaged New England, threatening to extinguish the small town that remained.
- Eddie’s wife followed him west, and the couple spent two hopeful years in the arid climate of Colorado Springs, praying that the fresh mountain air might cure the wasting disease. But when it became clear that Eddie was getting worse, not better, he returned home, sadly and gladly as the local newspaper noted, to Rhode Island. By the time he arrived, his 19 year old sister Mercy Lena Brown had also fallen ill and passed away, and was buried alongside her mother and sister. Neighbors welcomed Eddie home, but they worried as he continued to weaken, and were likely concerned for their own wellbeing as well. What if the terrible illness that feasted on Eddie spread to them? Or what if it wasn’t an illness at all, but something even more terrifying? A monster of some sort - a vampire.
- The town of Exeter buzzed with talk of the three Brown women who had already passed. Maybe one of the women wasn’t actually dead, but was preying on the family. Perhaps Eddie’s flesh and blood were being secretly feasted on by one of his sisters, or even his mother, the living tissue providing sustenance to keep the vampire alive. Neighbors pleaded with Eddie’s father, George, for permission to exhume the three bodies. Initially, he resisted the talk of vampires, but the unrelenting Exeter townsfolk wore him down.
- On a chilly day in March, 1892, a group of men dug up the bodies of the three Brown women with George’s permission, though neither he nor Eddie attended the unburial. He did, however, send a local doctor to perform an autopsy, and the doctor watched from the sidelines, standing shoulder to shoulder with another man - a writer from the Providence Journal. The two stood as witnesses, each with their own misgivings, waiting for the story to unfold.
- First, the mother, Mary Eliza was unearthed. At this point, she had been dead for 9 years, and when her body was revealed, she was little more than bones, some muscle, and mummified flesh. Satisfied that she was really dead, the men placed her back in the ground and moved on to the eldest daughter, Mary Olive. When they opened her casket, there was even less to see--just bones and a thick growth of hair. She was truly dead as well.
- So that brings us to Lena Brown’s grave. When her body was revealed, they found a fresh, well preserved body, still filled with blood. People even claimed that she had rolled over in her grave, though there’s no real evidence of that. Her heart and liver were removed from her body, and inside her heart was decomposing, clotted blood. Though the doctor argued this was a normal amount of decomposition (especially considering it was winter, and Lena had only been dead two months), the townsfolk disagreed. Clearly, it was Lena who had been feasting on Eddie all this time! The neighbors burned her heart and liver on a nearby rock, and mixed the ashes into a tonic that was later delivered to Eddie in hopes of saving his life. The vampire had been found and destroyed! But Eddie still died, two months later.
- Of course, you can make up your own mind about whether or not you believe in vampires in general, but at this point, you’re probably convinced that Lena wasn’t one. And, you’d be right. The Brown family wasn’t being preyed upon by the undead, but something that was equally as terrifying and mysterious to them at the time: Tuberculosis. Tuberculosis, or consumption as it was commonly known because it progressed in a way that seemed like someone was draining the life and blood out of somebody, became a problem in the 1730s. By the 1800s, TB was the leading cause of mortality in New England, responsible for almost a quarter of all deaths. And because it spread easily between family members, when one family member died of consumption, and others became infected and gradually lost their health, people came to believe this was caused by the dead TB sufferer draining the life from their remaining family.
- The case of Mercy Lena Brown was not an isolated incident, but the last documented case in a greater Vampire Panic that surged through New England, 200 years after the other famous NE panic: The Salem Witch Trials.
- Folklorist Michael Bell, who studies the Vampire Panic, has documented around 80 cases of vampire unburials, ranging between the 1700s and late 1800s. Cases have been discovered as far west as Minnesota, but most are concentrated in rural New England in the 1800s. There were differences in the attitude towards the vampire hunt by community. Some communities treated the vampire hunt as a private affair, like in RI where the event took place largely between a family and the direct neighbors. Other states, like VT, were more likely to make an event out of the vampire hunt. Once the vampire was identified, RI and VT were known to burn the dead person’s heart, either consuming or inhaling the smoke, while in Plymouth, MA or Maine, they may have simply flipped the vampire facedown in the grave.
- It’s tempting, when you hear a story like this one, to think, “Well, things were different then. People knew less and they were probably dumber.” But the truth is, the late 1800s in RI were a period of social progress, and the vampire panic seemed anachronistic at the time.
- Two days after the unburial, the Providence Journal ran an article titled, “Exhumed the Bodies: Testing a Horrible Superstition in the Town of Exeter.” In the article, the reporter writes, “the shocking case of exhumation in one of the border towns of this state last week is, after all, only a rather more than usually striking illustration of a truth which cannot be denied, that the amount of ignorance and superstition to be found in some corners of NE is more than surprising to one who comes into contact with it for the first time.”
- By the end of the 1800s, Providence was home to some of the world’s largest factories, manufacturing tools, files, screws, engines and silverware. It was a Golden Age, with immigrants pouring into the city looking for work and opportunity, the city was seeing unparalleled wealth and progress. There were civic improvements like new public parks and libraries. An opera house, an auditorium, a grand hotel, a new railroad terminal - all of these things were being built. Providence was flourishing. But only 20 miles away, in Exeter, people were burning and consuming the heart of a vampire.
- Even more upsetting, in 1882, the year that Mary Eliza - Lena’s mother - contracted consumption, scientist Robert Koch identified the cause of tuberculosis as bacteria. So the scientific community already knew what TB was caused by and how it was transmitted a decade before Lena was dug up. But, the truth is that rural communities like Exeter likely wouldn’t have known about the discovery of bacteria as the cause, and even if they had, there still was no treatment available until the 1940s. The 1940s! That was so recent.
- So it was still terrifying and people were just scared. And think about it this way: when you get scared, the tendency towards risk aversion becomes strong. Maybe the idea of vampires seemed ridiculous to the townspeople then, too. But it’s the question of “what if” that makes people make uncomfortable decisions. What if Eddie could be saved by digging Lena up? Wouldn’t it be worth it to try? Because it wasn't just Eddie they were worried about. By protecting the Brown family, neighbors were protecting their own families, too.
- It becomes so easy to accept weird mythology when you’re in it, and so easy to judge the minds that made those leaps when you’re removed from it. Paul Barber, in his book “Vampires, Burial and Death”, wrote, “Epidemics do not usually rage out of control, at least in industrialized countries. Moreover, we have well-established methods to control them. We are no longer obliged to mythologize them in the same way,” but in the context of 2020, it seems maybe we still do have a tendency to mythologize disease, at least when it’s unfamiliar. 2020 has been described as the Golden Age of Conspiracy Theories, and I’ve heard plenty about COVID. Isn’t a conspiracy theory just another word to describe the mythology we build out to explain what’s unfamiliar?
- The case of Lena Brown is worth remembering, and I really do feel like it’s sad that we don’t know more about who she was and what she was like during her life. We only know the mythology surrounding her, but not the girl at the center of it. But, maybe she would be excited to hear about how far her name and story have traveled. Because Lena Brown’s story became famous even at the time, and it might have even inspired the most famous Vampire story out there. Bram Stoker published Dracula in 1897, five years after Lena’s death. And, it’s been said that in his files was a newspaper clipping, of the story of Mercy Lena Brown. Lena might even have a little cameo in the book and later the films - as the character Lucy (kind of sounds like Lena + Mercy, right?) who is a teenage girl who turns into a vampire and is later exhumed.
- Today, you can visit the grave where her remains are buried, in Chestnut Hill Cemetery, a small graveyard behind a tiny, white Baptist church off of Ten Rod Road, in Exeter, RI. A path goes directly through the center of the cemetery, and about halfway down, the grave is on the left, in the Brown family plot, beneath an evergreen tree. The crypt is on the right. If you visit though, tread carefully. Modern mythology says that grass won’t grow on a vampire’s grave. But if everyone keeps walking over it, trampling the grass, we’ll never find out.
- Thanks for listening! Come back next week to hear more stories about all things weird and wonderful in the little state of Rhode Island, and if you liked what you heard, help us out by recommending it to your friends and family! And if you’re interested in a topic, let us know! Leave a rating or review, or you can email us at Weird Rhode Island @ Gmail.com. Until next time!