Speaker 1: Back in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, tuberculosis was everywhere
Speaker 1: in New England, but people didn't call it that. They
Speaker 1: called it consumption, and the name kind of fit now.
Speaker 1: It looked like something was consuming you from the inside out.
Speaker 1: It started with a cough and then a fever, and
Speaker 1: then over time your body would start wasting away. Your
Speaker 1: face would get pale or maybe completely flushed, weight would drop,
Speaker 1: eyes would sink deep into the sockets, and the coughing
Speaker 1: sometimes brought up blood. Now, for the people living back
Speaker 1: in that era, it looked like someone or something was
Speaker 1: draining the life out of their loved ones. Times were different,
Speaker 1: though there wasn't much understanding of what was really happening.
Speaker 1: Germ theory, for example, didn't exist yet, and doctors couldn't
Speaker 1: explain why so many people in the same family were
Speaker 1: dying one after the other, often within just a few months.
Speaker 1: When your mother died of consumption, and then a sister followed,
Speaker 1: and now your brother was coughing blood, it kind of
Speaker 1: felt like a curse. In some towns, especially the smaller,
Speaker 1: more isolated ones, people thought that something, maybe someone will
Speaker 1: still hanging around after death, feeding on the living, because
Speaker 1: he would bury someone, and then the next family member
Speaker 1: would get sick, and then another. It just felt like
Speaker 1: the dead were not staying dead. All of these beliefs
Speaker 1: would eventually lead to an unsettling account of one person
Speaker 1: in particular, who was thought to be a vampire because
Speaker 1: when they looked at her corpse, she still appeared to
Speaker 1: be alive. This is the well documented tragedy of Mercy Brown.
Speaker 1: My name is Edwin, and here's a horror story. Because
Speaker 1: there were no real answers, especially in rural communities far
Speaker 1: from medical knowledge or resources, people turned to what they did,
Speaker 1: no folk beliefs, old stories, and rituals passed down by
Speaker 1: word of mouth. Now these weren't exactly places dominated by
Speaker 1: churches or strict doctrine. A lot of New England at
Speaker 1: the time was unchurched, with people mixing Christian ideas with
Speaker 1: folk remedies, superstition, and a little occult thinking. Tuberculosis was terrifying,
Speaker 1: and it created the perfect conditions for fear to turn
Speaker 1: into something supernatural. When science couldn't offer solutions, belief would
Speaker 1: step in and that's where the idea of vampires, or
Speaker 1: more accurately, the undead, started to take hold in New England.
Speaker 1: But I'm not talking about the legend creatures from Europe. Now.
Speaker 1: These were something quieter and more personal. A dead loved
Speaker 1: one who, for reasons no one could fully understand, hadn't
Speaker 1: found on peace, and until that connection was broken, they
Speaker 1: believed that the living would keep dying because of it.
Speaker 1: Today you might look up these cases by typing in
Speaker 1: vampire in a Google search, but people in New England
Speaker 1: didn't usually use the word vampire back then. That was
Speaker 1: more of an outside label used later by newspapers or
Speaker 1: curious writers. People from within those towns would say things
Speaker 1: like someone was not at rest, or that the dead
Speaker 1: were somehow still tied to the living. It wasn't always
Speaker 1: clear what exactly they thought was happening, but the general
Speaker 1: idea was that a deceased person, especially one that had
Speaker 1: died of consumption, might still be lingering in some in
Speaker 1: between state. If someone in the family started getting sick afterward,
Speaker 1: it meant that the connection had not been broken. What
Speaker 1: they would do in response to this belief was pretty serious.
Speaker 1: If enough people in a family died or or someone
Speaker 1: else started showing signs, especially the kind of slow, drawn
Speaker 1: out illness consumption caused neighbors would get involved. Sometimes entire
Speaker 1: communities would come together and they would dig up the
Speaker 1: bodies of the recently deceased. They would head out to
Speaker 1: the cemeteries determined to find signs that they were still alive.
Speaker 1: And no, they weren't looking for open eyes or someone
Speaker 1: climbing out of a coffin. What they were checking for
Speaker 1: were specific signs a body that hadn't decomposed the way
Speaker 1: that they expected, skin that looked fresh, or blood still
Speaker 1: present in the organs, especially in the heart. All of
Speaker 1: these things they thought pointing to someone who wasn't truly dead.
Speaker 1: Now today we know that bodies buried in the winter
Speaker 1: and cold ground can stay preserved for quite a while,
Speaker 1: but at the time, if someone who had been buried
Speaker 1: for weeks or months and still looked alive, it could
Speaker 1: be terrifying. People described things like flushed cheeks, soft skin,
Speaker 1: even what they thought was breath escaping from the nose,
Speaker 1: and that was enough to convince them that they found
Speaker 1: the cause of the sickness. What came next was a
Speaker 1: little more disturbing. If they believed that the person was
Speaker 1: feeding on their family after death, they might cut out
Speaker 1: the heart and liver, and burn them. The smoke they
Speaker 1: believed would break the connection, and in some cases the
Speaker 1: ashes were mixed with water and given to the sick
Speaker 1: relative to drink as kind of a remedy that sounds
Speaker 1: really weird and gruesome now, but it was seen as
Speaker 1: the last resort, a desperate act from people who had
Speaker 1: no other way to fight what was happening to them.
Speaker 1: These rituals were concentrated in rural parts of Rhode Island,
Speaker 1: eastern Connecticut, Vermont, and a few other corners of New England,
Speaker 1: places that were far enough away from outside influence enough
Speaker 1: that they developed their own explanations and ways of dealing
Speaker 1: with fear. Now, these were part of a larger belief
Speaker 1: system that tried to explain what science couldn't. When someone
Speaker 1: you loved was wasting away and doctors couldn't help, all
Speaker 1: the people around you believed it might be the dead
Speaker 1: causing it. It was hard not to go along with it,
Speaker 1: especially if you thought it might save someone else. That
Speaker 1: belief alone, while it might sound strange now, made sense
Speaker 1: to the people back then. But how long exactly we're
Speaker 1: talking about here? When did this happen? Now? I realized
Speaker 1: I hadn't mentioned it just yet. But we're in the
Speaker 1: late eighteen hundreds, and for now, in this part of
Speaker 1: the story, i'll tell you about the small town of Exeter.
Speaker 1: We're in Rhode Island now, where the Brown family had
Speaker 1: already lost some family members, more than most, actually. George
Speaker 1: Brown's wife Mary Elisa was the first. She died in
Speaker 1: eighteen eighty three after a long fight with consumption. Just
Speaker 1: a year later, their eldest daughter, Mary Olive, also died
Speaker 1: from it. That left George with several children still at home,
Speaker 1: including Mercy Leina Brown and his only son Edwin. He
Speaker 1: started showing signs of illness a few years later. It
Speaker 1: didn't come all at once. He had nightmares, terrible dreams
Speaker 1: of suffocating, and gradually became weaker. The coughing and weight
Speaker 1: loss followed the same pattern that had taken his mother
Speaker 1: and sister. Hoping for a cure, George sent Edwin to
Speaker 1: Colorado Springs in eighteen ninety one, the place people thought
Speaker 1: that might help with lung disease because of its dry air,
Speaker 1: but it didn't work. Edwin came home worse than before.
Speaker 1: Around the same time, Mercy Leina got sick as well.
Speaker 1: She declined rapidly, though. It was what doctors called galloping consumption,
Speaker 1: a fast moving form of tuberculosis that could kill in weeks.
Speaker 1: On January seventeenth, eighteen ninety two, Mercy died at just
Speaker 1: nineteen years old. Because the ground was frozen, her body
Speaker 1: wasn't buried right away. It was placed in the family's
Speaker 1: above ground crypt at Chestnut Hill Cemetery. By the time
Speaker 1: Edwin came back and began to get worse, the neighbors
Speaker 1: were convinced that something was wrong. People around George started talking.
Speaker 1: Too many members of his family had already died one
Speaker 1: after another. It was too much for it to be
Speaker 1: a coincidence or normal illness. They believed that one of
Speaker 1: the brown women wasn't resting peacefully and was draining Edwin's life,
Speaker 1: and I believe was strong enough that they urged George
Speaker 1: to let them do something about it. George didn't believe
Speaker 1: in the vampire theory, but he had watched nearly his
Speaker 1: entire family die and his son looked like he would
Speaker 1: be next. So, whether it was out of desperation, pressure
Speaker 1: from his neighbors, or just a desire to feel like
Speaker 1: he had tried everything, he gave his permission. The day
Speaker 1: they opened Mercy's tomb was cold and the ground was
Speaker 1: still hard from winter. Was March seventeenth, eighteen ninety two.
Speaker 1: She hadn't been buried underground like the others since January,
Speaker 1: waiting for the weather to change, and that fact, more
Speaker 1: than anything else, is probably why she looked the way
Speaker 1: that she did. But at the time none of that mattered.
Speaker 1: When they lifted the lid off the stone vault and
Speaker 1: saw her, people were shaken. Her body wasn't decayed like
Speaker 1: Mary Elisa's or Mary Olives. Her face still had color,
Speaker 1: her skin hadn't stiffened completely. And when they cut her open,
Speaker 1: yeah they actually did that. They found blood dark and clotted,
Speaker 1: but still there in her heart. For the people standing there,
Speaker 1: it was the final piece of proof Mercy was not
Speaker 1: at rest. They had I had an official medical examiner there,
Speaker 1: doctor Harold Metcalf, but he didn't believe any of it.
Speaker 1: He said the signs that they saw were exactly what
Speaker 1: he expected from a body that had been in cold conditions.
Speaker 1: But he also knew his opinion wasn't going to stop
Speaker 1: what was happening. George Brown had reluctantly agreed to the exhumation,
Speaker 1: and the rest of the group had already made up
Speaker 1: their minds. They believed that they had found a source
Speaker 1: of Edwin's illness. So they got to work, and once
Speaker 1: the organs were removed, they built a fire right there
Speaker 1: in the cemetery. Mercy's heart and liver were placed on
Speaker 1: the flames and burned until they were reduced to ash.
Speaker 1: Some accounts say that the ashes were gathered into a
Speaker 1: container mixed with water and given to Edwin that same day.
Speaker 1: And it wasn't some symbolic gesture. They genuinely believed that
Speaker 1: this mixture, what it called a bitter draft, could cure him.
Speaker 1: Edwin didn't fight it. He drank the mixture, just like
Speaker 1: people hoped that he would, but it didn't save him.
Speaker 1: He died less than two months later. The whole thing
Speaker 1: might have faded into local memory if it hadn't been
Speaker 1: for the newspapers. The Providence Journal published the story immediately,
Speaker 1: calling it testing a horrible superstition in the town of Exeter.
Speaker 1: Then a follow up editorial was even harsher, warning that
Speaker 1: this kind of thinking was dangerous to civilization itself. Other
Speaker 1: papers picked it up, and soon the story was being
Speaker 1: talked about far beyond Rhode Island. The term vampire was
Speaker 1: used more freely now, not by townspeople but by journalists
Speaker 1: trying to explain what had happened, and Mercy Brown, a
Speaker 1: quiet young woman from a small town, was suddenly being
Speaker 1: written about like she was something more than just another
Speaker 1: victim of disease. Her name, her story, the image of
Speaker 1: her heart being burned to save her brother. It all
Speaker 1: caught on in a way that no one in Exeter
Speaker 1: could have expected, and while Edwin's death confirmed that the
Speaker 1: ritual had failed, it didn't stop the story from growing.
Speaker 1: By the time Mercy Brown's story made headlines, things were
Speaker 1: already starting to change. Not overnight and not everywhere, but
Speaker 1: the old explanations were losing ground. Ten years earlier, in
Speaker 1: eighteen eighty two, a German scientist named Robert Koch had
Speaker 1: discovered the actual cause of tuberculosis. It was a turning point.
Speaker 1: German theory was slowly becoming accepted, and people were beginning
Speaker 1: to understand that disease spread through invisible micro organisms, not
Speaker 1: through the influence of the dead. But still news traveled
Speaker 1: slowly in rural parts of New England. In places like Exeter,
Speaker 1: folk beliefs didn't disappear just because a scientist across the
Speaker 1: ocean had made a discovery, And for many people, those
Speaker 1: old traditions were still more familiar and more comfort than
Speaker 1: what modern medicine had to offer. You couldn't see a bacterium,
Speaker 1: but you could look at the faces of the people
Speaker 1: you'd buried and wonder if one of them was still
Speaker 1: somehow connected to the sick among you. Mercy's case ended
Speaker 1: up symbolizing that shift where old ways met new knowledge.
Speaker 1: Newspapers and cities called it a superstition, something out of
Speaker 1: step with modern thinking. They would use words like ignorance
Speaker 1: and barbaric to them. The exhumation and exeter was left
Speaker 1: over peace of the past, a kind of medieval thinking
Speaker 1: that had no place in the modern world. And in
Speaker 1: some ways they were right, But it also missed a
Speaker 1: reality of life in those small rural towns, where families
Speaker 1: were isolated and desperate, and where science hadn't yet answered
Speaker 1: most of their urgent questions. Other things helped bring the
Speaker 1: panic to an end as well. Embalming was becoming more common,
Speaker 1: especially after the Civil War. Families wanted the bodies of
Speaker 1: the fallen soldiers brought home for burial. The chemicals used
Speaker 1: in embalming changed the way that corpse is decomposed. With
Speaker 1: blood drained from the body and organs treated or removed,
Speaker 1: there was less chance of finding signs like liquid blood
Speaker 1: or preserved tissue, things that had been once interpreted as
Speaker 1: signs of the undead. Over time, science and medicine changed
Speaker 1: the rituals around death. The body, once feared as a
Speaker 1: possible threat was now something to be preserved, clinged, displayed.
Speaker 1: Hospitals and funeral homes replaced a role that neighbors and
Speaker 1: family had once filled. That shift, combined with medical advances
Speaker 1: and new public health efforts, meant that the old fears
Speaker 1: gradually faded. People still got sick, but they didn't dig
Speaker 1: up their relatives to stop it a Mercy Brown's case
Speaker 1: was one of the last widely known incidents of this kind.
Speaker 1: After eighteen nine two, you don't see many more exhumations
Speaker 1: like hers in the records. The vampire panic, as it
Speaker 1: came to be known, started to quiet down. Mercy Brown
Speaker 1: never really disappeared to a lot of people. She became
Speaker 1: the face of an era when fear and belief pushed
Speaker 1: people to do things They never would have considered under
Speaker 1: normal circumstances. Writers actually started picking up the story not
Speaker 1: long after it happened. One of them was Bram Stoker.
Speaker 1: He never mentioned Mercy by name, but it's widely believed
Speaker 1: that he read about her case while researching for his
Speaker 1: novel Dracula, which was published in eighteen ninety seven. The
Speaker 1: character Lucy Westenra, a young woman who dies of a
Speaker 1: wasting illness and is later exhumed to destroy by her
Speaker 1: friends because they believe she's a vampire, bears a strong
Speaker 1: resemblance to Mercy, and whether or not Stoker directly based
Speaker 1: Lucy on her, the similarities are hard to ignore. P Lovecraft,
Speaker 1: another writer from Providence, referenced the incidents more openly in
Speaker 1: his story The Shunt House. He described an old house
Speaker 1: and Rhode Island haunted by a mysterious force connected to
Speaker 1: a woman who died of consumption. Lovecraft was fascinated by
Speaker 1: local legends, and Mercy's story fit right into the kind
Speaker 1: of eerie, real world horror he liked to explore. Mercy's
Speaker 1: grave still draws visitors. He's a simple headstone and Chestnut
Speaker 1: Hill Cemetery not far from where he heart was burned,
Speaker 1: people leave coins, flowers, and notes. Some just come out
Speaker 1: of curiosity, Others seem to feel a connection to the story.
Speaker 1: The mix of tragedy, fear, and something still unresolved, she's
Speaker 1: become a kind of local legend, and unlike most, it
Speaker 1: wasn't because of what she did in life, but because
Speaker 1: of what others believed about her after death. Mercy was
Speaker 1: just a teenager who got sick during an epidemic that
Speaker 1: had already taken most of her family. The decisions made
Speaker 1: after her death weren't hers. They came from a community
Speaker 1: that was scared, grieving, and desperate to stop the spread
Speaker 1: of a disease they didn't understand. What happened to her
Speaker 1: was about fear and what fear can do when people
Speaker 1: don't have answers. The story reminds us that folklore often
Speaker 1: comes from pain, from uncertainty, and from the human need
Speaker 1: to find meaning in the middle of suffering. This episode
Speaker 1: of Horror Story was researched and produced by me Edwin Kowarubias.
Speaker 1: Thanks for the ideas you've sent to my email. I've
Speaker 1: actually encouraged these for future episodes already, so just keep
Speaker 1: an eye out for those. But anyway, if you're subscribed
Speaker 1: to this podcast, I'll be back next week with another story.
Speaker 1: Thank you so much, by the way, for all your
Speaker 1: support and for our members. Huge shout out to our
Speaker 1: Scary Plus supporters. That's all for now, Thank you very
Speaker 1: much for listening. Keep it Scary everyone, See you soon.