A family kept dying of tuberculosis, so their neighbours dug one of them up.
Mercy Lena Brown was born in Exeter, Rhode Island in 1872 to George Thomas Brown and Mary Elizabeth Arnold. Her family called her Lena. Legend calls her Mercy Brown.
Consumption, as tuberculosis was then known, went through the household over two decades. Mary Eliza died first, on 8 December 1883. Her eldest daughter Mary Olive followed on 6 June 1884, aged 20 according to her gravestone. In 1891 both Lena and her brother Edwin contracted it.
Friends and neighbours concluded that one of the dead was responsible for Edwin's illness. They did not use the word vampire, but the reasoning came straight out of contemporary folklore, which connected multiple deaths in a single family to undead activity. In January 1892 they exhumed the bodies. It is one of the best documented exhumations of its kind, and part of the wider New England vampire panic.
The Rhode Island Historical Society, which tells her story under the title Have Mercy, records what she became afterwards: the last person exhumed as a suspected vampire in New England, a figure immortalised in H. P. Lovecraft's The Shunned House, rumoured to have inspired Lucy Westenra in Bram Stoker's Dracula, and a destination for goth kids and ghost seekers from around the world.
She is buried at Chestnut Hill Cemetery in Exeter.
What happened here was not superstition arriving from nowhere. It was a rural community watching a disease they could not see, name or treat take one household member after another, and reaching for the only explanation available to them.
Other places on the map within a couple of hours.
