Every October somebody drags out the Dracula costume, but here in New England we've got a vampire story that actually happened. The Mercy Brown vampire incident is the true tale of a farm family in Exeter, Rhode Island, a deadly disease nobody understood, and a whole town that marched into a graveyard in 1892 to dig up a 19-year-old girl. It's one of the best-documented vampire exhumations in American history, and it went down about a half hour from Providence.
So grab a coffee milk, keep the lights on, and settle in. This one's part of our New England Myths & Legends series, and fair warning: it's a little sadder and a lot weirder than any movie. If you're proud to be from the Ocean State (even the creepy corners of it), the Rhode Island Retro Area Code T-Shirt is the 401 pride shirt you want on for the telling.
Who Was Mercy Brown?
Mercy Lena Brown was a farmer's daughter from Exeter, a quiet, wooded town in western Washington County. Her father, George Brown, worked the family farm. Mercy was born in 1873 and died in January 1892, at just 19 years old. What killed her was real and very much not supernatural: tuberculosis, which back then everybody called "consumption." It was the leading killer of the era, and it tore through families one person at a time.
A Family Wasting Away
The Browns got hit hard. Mercy's mother, Mary Eliza, died of consumption in December 1883. Her older sister, Mary Olive, followed in June 1884, at age 20. Then in 1891 the disease came back around. Mercy got sick, and so did her only brother, Edwin, a young guy who'd reportedly gone out West to Colorado Springs hoping the dry air would save him. Mercy went fast. Edwin came home getting worse by the week. To the neighbors, it looked like something was feeding on that family.
Why Exeter Thought It Was a Vampire
Nobody in Exeter was running around yelling "vampire," and they didn't picture a guy in a cape. The folk belief, which historians call the New England vampire panic, went like this: when consumption kept picking off members of the same family, one of the dead might be "feeding" on the living from the grave. The fix was to dig up the suspects and look for the one that hadn't decayed the way a corpse should. Germ theory was still brand new, and the tuberculosis bacterium had only been identified about a decade earlier, so in rural New England the old explanation still had a grip.
The Exhumation: March 17, 1892
George Brown didn't buy it, by most accounts, but neighbors pushed and he finally agreed. On March 17, 1892 (yes, St. Patrick's Day), a group of men, the district medical examiner Dr. Harold Metcalf, and a newspaper reporter headed to the cemetery behind the Chestnut Hill Baptist Church. They dug up Mary Eliza and Mary Olive first. Both were pretty much what you'd expect after eight years in the ground. Then they opened Mercy's coffin, which had been sitting in an above-ground vault, since the ground in Rhode Island in January isn't exactly soft.
What They Found (and What the Doctor Said)
Here's where the legend and the record split. The story that spread says Mercy looked "fresh," that she'd shifted in her coffin, and that there was liquid blood in her heart. Dr. Metcalf saw it differently. He reported her body was in a normal state for about two months after death, especially after a cold winter in a vault, and that the blood was what you'd expect. The townspeople weren't interested in a second opinion. To them, blood in the heart was the proof.
The Burning Rock and the "Cure"
So they did what the old superstition called for. Mercy's heart and liver were cut out and burned on a nearby rock. The ashes were mixed with water into a tonic, and Edwin drank it, hoping it would break the spell and save his life. It didn't. Edwin died about two months later. George Brown, who never caught the disease himself, lived until 1922. Mercy's remains were put back in the ground in the same churchyard, where she rests today.
Dracula, Lovecraft and Rhode Island's Claim to Fame
The newspapers ate this story up, and it traveled. Some scholars think Bram Stoker knew about the Mercy Brown case and that it helped inspire the character Lucy Westenra in Dracula, which came out in 1897. That one's a theory, not a sure thing. What's definitely true is that Providence's own H.P. Lovecraft worked it into his short story "The Shunned House," with a line about an Exeter community that dug up a body in 1892 and burned its heart. Leave it to Rhode Island to supply horror material to the two biggest names in the business.
She Wasn't the Only One
Mercy is the most famous case, but she's far from the only one. Folklorist Michael Bell, who spent decades tracking these stories for his book Food for the Dead, documented dozens of similar exhumations across New England through the 1800s. Connecticut, Vermont and Rhode Island all have their own versions. Vermont even has the vampires of Woodstock, which we covered in our Myths & Legends post on Woodstock. That's what makes the Mercy Brown story stick: it's the best-documented example of something that happened a lot more than any of us were taught in school.
Visiting Mercy Brown's Grave Today
Mercy's grave is in the historic cemetery behind Chestnut Hill Baptist Church on Route 102 in Exeter. Her headstone has been chipped and swiped by souvenir hunters over the years, so it's now anchored to the ground with an iron strap. People still leave little offerings: coins, flowers, notes, even plastic vampire teeth. If you go, be a decent human about it. It's a real churchyard with real families, so no digging, no rubbings, no nonsense, and daylight only. Mercy's been through enough.
Spooky Season, Townie Style
So the next time somebody tells you nothing interesting ever happens in Rhode Island, tell 'em about the time Exeter dug up a vampire. A sad story about a family, a disease and a whole lot of fear, wrapped in the best ghost story the Ocean State's got. Not bad for the smallest state in the country.
Throwing a Halloween party or just getting into the spirit? The Dreadful Dancing Monsters T-Shirt keeps the monsters a lot friendlier than the ones in this story.
Stay wicked,
Ryan and the Chowdaheadz crew