New England is the place to live if you’re into horror. The reason is pretty simple – we have a long and strange history that revels in the terrifying. From our first white settlers we’ve have been a deeply superstitious bunch and this is pretty apparent in the case of Mercy Brown.
Mercy Brown was a young woman in Exeter Rhode Island who died at the tender age of 19 in 1892. She was the latest victim of consumption, a disease that was ravaging a good deal of her family and the surrounding community. Today we know tuberculosis is caused by a highly contagious bacterial infection of the lungs but back in Mercy’s day this wasn’t well understood and locals believed that it was the wrath of the dead – specifically that diseased corpses were raising from their graves as vampires. It was a belief born to the fact that consumption was a wasting disease that took months or sometimes years to kill a person who by the end would frequently look like a shuffling emaciated corpse coughing up blood.
The Brown family previously had lost their matriarch, Mercy’s mother, as well as her sister and herself. When the family’s only son was also hopelessly ill drastic decisions were made. After gaining permission from the community the mother and her two daughters were exhumed so their bodies could be examined for signs of vampirism. Mercy, who was likely held above ground in a local crypt for those two cold months, showed remarkably little decomposition (likely due to being frozen and/or kept in fridge-like temps.) This was seen as proof that she was the vampire responsible for the continuing deaths.
From here things got a bit gruesome. In an attempt to save her brother’s life and stop her own post-death rampage the community removed her heart and lungs, cooked them on a pyre, and when nothing but ash remained they were ground up and fed to her brother. Sadly this folk ritual had no effect and he followed his sister to the grave just a few months later.
These incidences were recorded in the newspapers at the time and were thought to have influenced horror writers of the day – mainly HP Lovecraft but also potentially Bram Stoker. There had been at least eighteen other cases of vampire exhumations in New England’s newspaper reports which suggests there were probably a lot more that went unrecorded, a fact that has been reinforced by recent archeological finds of other strange burials, some being kept down with bricks, others with their bones and skulls being made into a grim cross. However Mercy is fondly remembered here as “The Last American Vampire” for she was the most recently recorded. This ritual is still practiced in some rural regions of Romania and possibly a handful of other countries even today despite laws being made against it.
The grave where her heartless body rests has been visited by all sorts of strange folk including myself and my travel companion. She rests in the Chestnut Hill Cemetery behind the Baptist Church in Exeter Rhode Island. Her grave can be seen from the entrance to the cemetery and lies underneath an evergreen tree. It’s a small white marble stone in her family’s plot that’s hard to miss because other visitors have left pennies and other little trinkets. There’s supposed to also be a little guest book in a Tupperware tub but I didn’t see that – it might have been picked up because of Covid precautions. I was however amused by two Disney princess band-aids stuck to the stone as I left my own penny.
