Mercy Brown vampire incident

Mercy Brown's gravestone in the cemetery of the Baptist Church in Exeter

The Mercy Brown Vampire Incident, which occurred in 1892, is one of the best documented cases of the exhumation of a corpse in order to perform rituals to banish an undead manifestation.

In Exeter, Rhode Island, the family of George and Mary Brown suffered a sequence of tuberculosis infections in the final two decades of the 19th century. Tuberculosis was called "consumption" at the time and was a devastating and much-feared disease.

The mother, Mary, was the first to die of the disease, followed in 1888 by their eldest daughter, Mary Olive. Two years later, in 1890, their son Edwin also became sick.

In 1891, another daughter, Mercy, contracted the disease and died in January 1892. She was buried in the cemetery of the Baptist Church in Exeter.

Friends and neighbors of the family believed that one of the dead family members was a vampire (although they did not use that name) and caused Edwin's illness. This was in accordance with threads of contemporary folklore linking multiple deaths in one family to undead activity. Consumption was a poorly understood condition at the time and the subject of much superstition.

George Brown was persuaded to exhume the bodies, which he did with the help of several villagers on March 17, 1892. While the bodies of both Mary and Mary Olive had undergone significant decomposition over the intervening years, the more recently buried body of Mercy was still relatively unchanged and had blood in the heart. This was taken as a sign that the young woman was undead and the agent of young Edwin's condition. The cold New England weather made the soil virtually impenetrable, essentially guaranteeing that Mercy's body was kept in freezer-like conditions in an above-ground crypt during the 2 months following her death.

Mercy's heart was removed from her body, burnt, and the remnants mixed with water and given to the sick Edwin to drink. He died two months later.

Literature

The Mercy Brown incident was the inspiration for Caitlín R. Kiernan's short story, "So Runs the World Away," which makes explicit reference to the affair. It is also referred to in H. P. Lovecraft's "The Shunned House".^[1] The story of Mercy also inspired Bram Stoker to write Dracula in which the character Lucy Westenra is based on Mercy.^{[citation needed]} Mercy Brown's story was the inspiration for a young adult novel, "Mercy: The Last New England Vampire" by Sarah L. Thomson.

References

1. ^ Spiers, Richard (2004). "Mercy Brown: A Real Rhode Island Vampire". Underworld Tales Magazine. http://www.underworldtales.com/submissions/mercy.htm. Retrieved 18 June 2011. "As Lovecraft's Mercy Dexter character allows the plot to flow, he cagily reveals, "[don't] hire anyone from the Nooseneck Hill country … seat of uncomfortable superstitions. As lately as 1892, an Exeter community exhumed a dead body and ceremoniously burnt its heart in order to prevent certain alleged visitations."" 

• Bell, Michael E. (2001). Food for the Dead - On the Trail of New England's Vampires. New York: Carrol & Graf Publishers. 338 pages. ISBN 0-7867-089909. 
• Connecticut Public Television (1996). Vampires in New England (TV Documentary). 

External links

• O.T.I.S.(Odd Things I’ve Seen): A Firsthand Account of Mercy Brown’s Grave
• Mercy Brown at Find a Grave

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Name	Brown, Mercy, Vampire Incident
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Date of death	1892
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