The vampire is one of horrors most popular and enduring monsters.Yet there was a time when the vampire was deadly serious. In times where death seemed to stalk a community, superstitious folk looked to the recently deceased in fear, terrified that they had returned from the grave. Such was the case with Mercy Lena Brown.
In the late 1880s, near Exeter, Rhode Island, George and Mary Brown lived on a farm with their five children. A strange darkness seemed to settle over the family. Mary, the mother, died of consumption, otherwise known as tuberculosis. She was followed in death by one of the daughters six months later. One of the sons, Edwin, became gravely ill and was sent to Colorado to recover under the assumption that the high mountain climate would cure the illness. His sister, Mercy Lena, wasn’t so lucky and died at age 19 shortly after Edwin left.
Adding insult to tragedy, Mercy died in the depths of winter, a time when the ground was too frozen to dig a grave. Her body was laid to rest in an above ground crypt in a nearby cemetery.
After Mercy’s death, Edwin had returned to Exeter and his condition worsened. With so many Brown family members falling to illness, some in the small town began to suspect there was more to these tragedies than simply a contagious disease. Superstitious as they were, there were those who believed a malevolent force was cursing the family. Even the local Providence Journal speculated that one of the deceased Brown women might be a vampire who continued to prey upon Edwin.
Finally giving in to his neighbors’ fears, George Brown, the father, allowed the bodies of his deceased family members to be exhumed. His wife’s remains, along with another daughter, were dug up and, having been deceased for years, were hardly more than bones.
Mercy, however, had only been gone a few months and she had be interred in a freezing tomb. Her body showed hardly any decomposition and even still had blood in it. The townsfolk took this to mean that Mercy was the vampire harrowing the family.
Per tradition, Mercy’s heart and liver were burned. Thinking it would save him, the ashes were fed to Edwin. But this story was not meant to have a happy ending as Edwin died just a few short months later.
Today, science and a better understanding of disease and how a body decomposes can explain the tragedies in Exeter over a century ago. Yet stories of vampires exist in cultures all over the world and continue to persist, fascinate and terrify to this day.