Dig Them Up! The Story of Mercy Brown and the New England Vampire Panic

 

“You must dig up their bodies,” they implore.  “All must be exhumed.”

Warily, George Brown stares at them.  He refuses their requests.  “I cannot desecrate the bodies of my wife and daughters.”

“But you must,” the local villagers beg.  Even a local doctor, Harold Metcalf of nearby Wickford, Rhode Island, is among them.  “We must find out who among your wife and daughters is one of the undead.”

For weeks the pressure on George Brown has been building.  Not only is he forced to watch his son Edwin, aged twenty years old, wasting away from the pain and suffering of tuberculosis each day right before his very own eyes, but he also faces the fear and suspicion of every person in town.

Everyday his neighbors from Exeter, Rhode Island, stop by the home of local farmer Geroge Brown and they reiterate their demand.  They must dig up the bodies of his dead relatives and create an elixir from the ashes of their organs to stop the spread of the disease before it puts them all at risk.

In 1886 George’s wife Mary had died a slow and painful death from the consumption and then only two years after that, his eldest daughter Mary Olive had suffered the same fate as her mother.  And then in January of that very year, 1892, George’s youngest daughter Mercy had her life cut tragically short at the age of 19 by the very same disease: tuberculosis.

In March of 1892 George’s last surviving child, his son Edwin is coughing up a bloody phlegm and being ravaged by the same disease that took George’s wife and two other children.

Not understanding the nature of the disease of tuberculosis, or of the way in which it is transmitted from person to person, the people of Exeter Rhode Island believe that the Brown family is cursed.  Each day, since Mercy passed away in January and was interred within a crypt at the local cemetery, the townspeople have come to George with their urgent exhortations.

“You must allow us to exhume the bodies so we can see which is undead and perform our rituals,” George’s neighbors beg.  “It is the only way to save your son Edwin.”

George Brown’s resolve is beginning to waver.  He is desperate to save his son and the arguments of the townspeople seem more and more convincing each day.

New England folklore dictates that multiple deaths in the same family from the dreaded disease of tuberculosis, what at the time is called the consumption, must be caused by a member of the undead.

Without ever explicitly saying the word what the residents of Exeter Rhode Island are trying to tell George Brown is that one of the dead members of his family is a vampire.  Either Mary, Mary Olive or Mercy Brown is an undead soul that comes alive in the night and sucks the life out of the living, killing them slowly through transmission of the dreaded disease of consumption.

It is the reason, so they all say, that Edwin, a young man in the very prime of life, is right now at this moment wasting away and tortured by the painful cough and labored breathing of the dreaded consumption.

The townspeople are panicked.  In 1892, tuberculosis has an eighty percent mortality rate, and with only the most rudimentary sanitation in place and standards of hygiene not being as advanced nor anywhere near as prevalent as they are today, consumption among a single member of a local family could sweep through a town like wildfire and claim hundreds of lives.

Although a German scientist named Robert Koch had discovered the bacteria that causes tuberculosis ten years prior in 1882, germ theory as a concept of disease transmission is only slowly beginning to take hold among members of the medical community let alone the general populace.

Vampire lore, or tales of the undead, is a firmly established tradition in local New England folklore, and with fear of the consumption growing each day, the residents of Exeter Rhode Island easily fall back on the beliefs of their forefathers.

After the death of Mercy Brown from consumption in January of 1892, as winter turned to spring that year, reports of increased vampiric activity began to increase among the townspeople of Exeter.

Many now claim that they see the risen corpse of Mercy Brown walking through the local graveyard and the streets of town in the dead of night.

The only known photograph of Mercy Brown

        They want to exhume her body and create a powder by grinding up her internal organs.  Once they have made this powder they will mix it with water and then force young Edwin to drink the tonic which will, so their folklore dictates, cure Edwin of the consumption and stop the dreaded spread of the disease through their town.

At first George dismisses their demands out of hand.  He is appalled by his neighbor's idea.  In the weeks after the incident a newspaper in Providence reported that, “Mr.  Brown did not place much credence in the old-time theory at all,” but over time seeking to save his son, the will of George Brown was worn down.

Reluctantly, George Brown gave permission to his fellow citizens of Exeter Rhode Island to exhume the bodies of his dead wife and two daughters.

On March 17, 1892 Dr. Metcalf, a local newspaper reporter and several townspeople from Exeter begin digging in the frozen ground just behind the Baptist Church that contains the town’s small cemetery.

First they exhume the caskets of Mary Olive and Mary Brown which have been six feet under the earth for six and four years respectively.  When the townspeople tear open the lids on each casket, as expected, the skeletons of each woman devoid of flesh stare back at them.

However, when the townspeople of Exeter Rhode Island  turn their attention to the coffin of Mercy Brown that has been interred in a crypt for the past nine weeks they receive a horrific shock that confirms their belief in the tales of New England folklore.

When Mercy’s coffin is opened she is found to be laying in the fetal position, curled up on her side, after having been buried on her back with her arms folded across her chest as is customary.  Her face is flushed with color, there appears to be blood coursing through her veins and her corpse shows no signs of decomposition.

“She is undead!  Burn her organs!” The call goes up once the residents of Exeter see the body of Mercy Brown.

They drag the corpse out of the coffin and immediately set to work gathering firewood and building an enormous pyre in the cemetery behind the Baptist Church.

Dr. Metcalf, who has had reservations about the entire affair from the very beginning attempts in vain to use reason and science to calm the crowd.  He points out that, unlike Mary and Mary Olive, Mercy has been dead only a few months and, her body rather than being buried beneath the earth, has been interred for the past nine weeks in an above ground crypt in freezer like conditions.

The crypt in Exeter from which Mercy's corpse was removed

        But the doctor’s objections are silenced.  First the people cut the heart and liver out of Mercy’s dead body and then they  build a large bonfire from the debris they have collected.  The organs that have been cut from Mercy’s lifeless body are thrown on the fire and burnt to ashes.

These ashes are collected and mixed with water to create a tonic, that according to the stories passed down by tradition,  are the cure for the consumption.

Edwin Brown  drinks the mixture of water and the ashes of his sister’s organs believing it will cure him of the tuberculosis that is killing him.  He died two months later in May of 1892.

The exhumation and desecration of Mercy Brown on March 17, 1892 is the last and most well documented instance of the historical phenomena known as the New England Vampire Panic which lasted, more or less, for the entire nineteenth century.  Mercy Brown’s story would be reported on by newspapers across the country and receive frontpage headlines in the New York Times.  Mercy’s case may have been the last instance of a New England town digging up a suspected vampire, but it certainly was not the first.

In 1799, with the intent to make an elixir out of the ashes of her organs, the townspeople of Exeter had exhumed the body of another young woman named Sarah Tillinghast.  In total, historians believe that there may have been as many as twenty-five vampire related exhumations across New England in the one hundred years before the case of Mercy Brown.  In many of the instances people’s corpses were dug up and desecrated by their own family members who believed that disease was spreading through their household because one of their deceased relatives was a member of the undead.

What remained of Mercy Brown was reinterred in the ground of the Chestnut Hill Cemetery next to the remains of her mother and sybinglings behind the Baptist Church of Exeter Rhode Island.

The nation at large was shocked by the news coverage of the Mercy Brown exhumation, and with advancements in medical technology and widespread acceptance of the germ theory of disease transmission at the end of the nineteenth century, vampire related exhumations and the New England Vampire Panic in general ceased after the year 1892 as people began to abandon their belief in folk remedies.

Today, perhaps the case of Mercy Brown can serve as a pertinent warning to us all of what can happen to a society when we let fear of a contagious disease get the better of us all and turn to the darker sides of our nature in our quest for answers and reassurance.  The case of America’s last vampire, Mercy Brown, should remind all of us that we would be naive to think that we as a people are that far removed from the residents of Exeter, Rhode Island and their fervent belief in folk remedies and fear of the undead in the year 1892.