The Mercy Brown Vampire Exhumation

Exeter, Rhode Island, was a shrinking town. Its population fell from 1,310 in 1880 to 964 in 1890. Consumption moved through its households, and the Brown family knew it well. Mary Eliza Brown died in December 1883. Her eldest daughter, Mary Olive, followed in June 1884, aged 20. Then Edwin, a store clerk, went to Colorado Springs for the climate. He came back ill. On 17 January 1892, his sister Mercy Lena Brown died at 19.

The neighbours went to her father, George T. Brown. One of the dead Brown women, they said, was feeding on Edwin. Destroy her, and he would be saved. The Providence Journal later summed up the belief: "So long as the heart contains blood, so long will any of the immediate family who are suffering from consumption continue to grow worse." George gave his permission but did not come to watch.

March 17, 1892. Chestnut Hill Cemetery, behind the Baptist meetinghouse on Ten Rod Road. A handful of Exeter men, four by one account, began to dig. Dr. Harold Metcalf, the district medical examiner, stood by. So did a correspondent from the Providence Journal.

Mary Eliza was dust and bone, and Mary Olive had decomposed as expected. Then Mercy, whose body had waited out the winter in an above-ground crypt. To the men around it, she looked oddly well preserved, and her hair and nails appeared to have grown. There was blood in her heart. Some tellings call it fresh, while the Journal, as later quoted, wrote of clotted and decomposed blood.

They cut out her heart and liver and burned them on a nearby rock. The ashes went into water, or into Edwin's medicine. Edwin drank them.

It did not work. Edwin died on 2 May 1892. Three more sisters died of tuberculosis between 1895 and 1899.

The press was less forgiving than the town. On 19 March the Journal ran "EXHUMED THE BODIES. Testing a Horrible Superstition in the Town of Exeter," and called the act "barbarism in such modern times." A local letter to the Pawtuxet Valley Gleaner was kinder. The proceedings, it said, "were intended without doubt to reli[e]ve the anxiety of the living." In 1896, George R. Stetson's paper in American Anthropologist carried the story to a national audience.

Metcalf had objected. The blood, he said, was "just what might be expected from a similar examination of almost any person after the same length of time from decease." About two months in an unheated crypt, in a New England winter, slows decay, and drying skin makes hair and nails seem to grow. The later tradition that Mercy had "turned in the grave" has no basis in the medical account. The killer was consumption, passing through one household.

Folklorist Michael E. Bell has documented more than 80 such rituals, from 1784 to 1892. He argues they were meant to heal the community as well as the patient, and that newspapers, not families, attached the word "vampire." In his words: "No credible account describes a corpse actually leaving the grave to suck blood."

Mercy Brown became the best known case of the New England vampire panic. Bram Stoker's Lucy Westenra in Dracula is often said to be modelled on her, though the link is speculative. H. P. Lovecraft mentioned the Exeter exhumation in "The Shunned House." Her headstone is now bolted down after thefts. Visitors leave candles, trinkets and plastic vampire teeth.