Mercy Brown

America’s last documented vampire panic, 1892, driven by tuberculosis

Exeter, Rhode Island, was a hard-scrabble farming town in the late 19th century, "rocks, rocks and more rocks," as its historical association president puts it, and it was emptying out. The Civil War had taken its men, the railroads and richer land to the west lured more away, and by 1892 the population had dropped to 961 from more than 2,500 in 1820. Tuberculosis, called consumption, was taking many of those who stayed. Robert Koch had identified the bacterium in 1882, but the news had not reached the back country, and there would be no drugs for it until the 1940s.

It came to the family of George and Mary Eliza Brown, on a stony homestead at the eastern edge of town. Mary Eliza died in December 1883, and their daughter Mary Olive, a 20-year-old dressmaker, followed in June 1884. Their son Edwin, a store clerk, sickened too and went to Colorado Springs hoping the climate would save him, and nearly a decade after the first deaths the disease reached their daughter Mercy Lena, whom the family called Lena. Hers was the galloping kind. She died in January 1892 at 19, and her remains were likely placed in the stone crypt at Chestnut Hill Cemetery before burial. Edwin had come home in a dying condition.

Neighbours, frightened for their own health, came to George with another explanation. Perhaps one of the dead women was not really dead, and was feeding on Edwin's living tissue and blood. They did not use the word vampire; the Providence Journal did. If the right corpse were found and destroyed, Edwin would recover. George gave permission, and on the morning of 17 March 1892 a party of men exhumed the bodies while the family doctor and a Journal correspondent looked on. The mother and sister were little more than bones. Lena, dead only a few months in the cold, was fairly well preserved, and when her heart was cut open there was clotted blood inside. The doctor pointed out that her lungs were full of tuberculosis. The villagers burned her heart and liver on a nearby rock, and the ashes were mixed into a tonic for Edwin. He died less than two months later.

It was one of the last vampire exhumations in New England. The anthropologist George Stetson carried the story to the world in the American Anthropologist, an 1896 New York World clipping turned up among Bram Stoker's papers, and some scholars see Lena in Dracula's Lucy. Visitors still leave offerings at her grave in Chestnut Hill Cemetery.