Mercy Brown

In 1892 tuberculosis was killing the Brown family of Exeter, Rhode Island. Neighbours persuaded George Brown that one of his dead relatives was rising to drain the living, and the bodies were exhumed. Mercy, dead two months and kept in a winter crypt, had not decomposed like the others and had blood in her heart, which was read as proof. Her heart was burned and the ashes given to her dying brother, who died anyway. It is the last well-documented vampire panic in America, and it is a story about how terrifying tuberculosis was before anyone understood it. Her grave is in Chestnut Hill Cemetery.