A Rhode Island Town Dug Up a Vampire to Save a Dying Boy

George Brown buried six members of his family to tuberculosis. That's the number most retellings skip past on their way to the folklore.

His wife Mary went first, in December 1883. His daughter Mary Olive the following year. Years later, his youngest daughter, Mercy, died of the same disease in January 1892.

George's only son, Edwin, was also sick and getting worse by the week. Neighbors, afraid the illness would spread to them next, decided one of the dead Brown women had become a vampire feeding on him from the grave, and pressured George to find out which one.

On March 17, 1892, a group of men opened three Brown graves, looking for a body that hadn't stayed dead. Mercy's heart and liver, unlike her mother's and sister's, hadn't fully decomposed, exactly what a vampire's body was supposed to look like. The attending physician said this was consistent with normal winter preservation, and that her lungs showed clear evidence of tuberculosis. The crowd burned her organs on a nearby rock anyway, then fed the ashes to Edwin in an attempt to save him.

Edwin died less than two months later.

The deaths didn't stop there. Mercy was the last person exhumed as a suspected vampire in New England, but not the last Brown to die. Annie Laura died in August 1895 at 25. Jennie Adeline died that October at 18. Myra Frances died in June 1899, also at 18. Tuberculosis kept moving through the family for years, indifferent to the town's verdict.

Only Hattie May, the fifth child, survived, living to 79 with four children of her own.

The Brown family tragedy wasn't the end of this story. Mercy and the Rhode Island vampire panic are believed to have inspired Bram Stoker to create Lucy Westenra for the novel Dracula.

Read the full story at Have Mercy..., October 31, 2016

Hot Take: Robert Koch identified the disease, tuberculosis, a decade before Mercy Brown's death, yet Exeter reached for folklore instead of science. Folklore made the better story, not the better outcome.