The Vampire of Exeter
Roxie Zwicker’s The New Hampshire Book of the Dead outlines the ghostly histories of the Granite State’s towns and their cemeteries. Antrim, where I live, appears only once. Meetinghouse Cemetery, east of the intersection of Meetinghouse Hill, Clinton, and Miltimore Roads, is said to be haunted. Many of its gravestones bear the date 1800, the year of an outbreak of dysentery. The first death came on July 23. Nineteen funerals were held during one week in August. By September 23, 69 people had died. Many families lost all their children.
Zwicker states that the cemetery is believed to be haunted by the ghosts of the children who died in the 1800 epidemic: that those who experienced odd incidents there talk of feeling small, invisible hands tug at their clothing or grasp their hands. Local paranormal groups report seeing child-like apparitions wandering the cemetery at night. Regrettably, Zwicker names none of the persons or groups that have experienced these things.
Early in his short story, “The Shunned House,” H.P. Lovecraft wrote, “As lately as 1892 an Exeter community exhumed a dead body and ceremoniously burnt its heart in order to prevent certain alleged visitations injurious to the public health and safety.”
The short story was fiction. The statement is factual.
Mercy Brown, of Exeter, Rhode Island, died in January 1892. She was 19 and the third member of her family to die from a debilitating, “wasting” disease. Her mother had died of tuberculosis in 1882, her older sister the following year. There’s no further diagnosis in the records. Mercy was buried in her family’s plot behind the Chestnut Hill Baptist Church, now Historical Cemetery 22 on Route 102 in Exeter. Shortly thereafter, Edwin Brown, one of her surviving siblings, became ill with the same symptoms. He was sent to Colorado Springs in the belief that the fresh mountain air and the spring water would cure him.
Townsfolk began to talk.
They talked of a vampire.
The American folk vampire belief is different from the vision of the vampire drawn from the novel Dracula and its cinematic progeny. The Americans didn’t believe in a corpse rising from a coffin to bite and suck blood from the living.
Their belief stemmed from the symptoms of tuberculosis, then commonly called consumption. The disease is highly infectious, frequently transmitted through airborne bacteria. Tuberculosis in the lungs may have symptoms such as a bad cough or coughing up blood. When one member of a family died from the disease, other family members might catch the disease through bacteria from the earlier victim’s coughing. They’d begin showing the same symptoms, slowly losing their health. It was a hard way to die, with lung-wracking coughs, terrible fevers, and the body wasting away.
The German scientist Robert Koch had isolated the bacterium in 1882. No one had yet identified a treatment.
Before the Industrial Revolution, Anglo-American folklore often associated tuberculosis with vampires. The wasting away of the living was believed to stem from a recently deceased relative, who was somehow draining life from the surviving relatives as a vampire.
The remedy to vampirism was an apotropaic, a magical action through ritual technology to ward off evil. It used material culture to interact with the powers of the unseen world. The New England practice was to exhume the body of the suspected vampire. If the corpse was un-decomposed and “fresh blood” found in its heart, it had clearly become a vampire. The heart must be removed and burned. Some vampire-killers favored burning the entire body, just to be sure.
Exeter, Rhode Island was then a small, poor village, its soil barely arable, isolated from the world in a way that we now might find incomprehensible. The automobile was still a rich person’s plaything and hadn’t yet compelled the construction of paved roads. The nearest railroad was 10 miles away as the crow flies. Most residents were ill-educated at best. Often, they were illiterate. Television and radio hadn’t yet been invented. There were no local newspapers. The only mass media was the Providence Journal, a daily published in the state capital 27 miles away.
The gossip that Mercy Brown in death had become a vampire spread through the town with astonishing speed. Exeter had few, if any, telephones. But by the power of continuous repetition, serving as its own reinforcement, people began to believe it. The town fathers became frightened, too, although it’s unclear whether they feared the undead or the panicky living, only the male contingent of which could vote at elections.
Some of the Browns’ neighbors approached Mercy’s father, George Brown. They feared for themselves and their families. They believed one of the dead women was secretly feasting “on the living tissue and blood of Edwin,” as the Providence Journal later summarized. If the offending corpse—the Journal uses the term “vampire” in some stories, but the locals seemed not to—was destroyed, Edwin would recover. Brown was somehow persuaded to authorize the exhumation of his late wife and two daughters. Some villagers did the digging. The family doctor and a correspondent from the Providence Journal looked on.
The mother and older sister, dead for a decade, were skeletal. But Mercy, dead for less than two months, buried amidst the frosts of a New England winter, was intact, without any sign of physical corruption. Worse, she’d somehow moved within her coffin.
The parties carved her up, removing her heart and liver. The physician examined them. He found what the reporter described as “clotted and decomposed blood.” The physician told the others present that Mercy’s lungs were diffused with tuberculosis, suggesting he didn’t share their belief that she was undead.
But as far as the villagers went, the case was closed. The blood in Mercy’s heart was proof enough: she was a vampire. They burned her heart and liver on a nearby rock. Then they mixed the ashes with water to create a homeopathic remedy.
Devised by Samuel Heinemann, a German physician, in 1796, homeopathy is considered alternative medicine, based on the premise that a substance that causes symptoms of a disease in healthy people can cure similar symptoms in sick people. Homeopaths call this doctrine similia similibus curentur, or "like is cured by like."
Edwin Brown drank the potion derived from the ashes of his sister’s heart as a cure. Nonetheless, he died two months later.
Although the potion didn’t save Edwin, otherwise it seemed to have worked: no more vampires were reported in Exeter.
Mercy’s grave has become Exeter’s leading tourist attraction, with flowers, candles, and coins left on her tombstone.
Five years after Mercy’s exhumation, in 1897, Bram Stoker, the Irish-born business manager of the great British actor-manager Sir Henry Irving, published a novel that would never die, or, at any rate, never go out of print: Dracula. Stoker had read some of the newspaper coverage of the Mercy Brown incident: a clipping is among his papers.
He also knew of Prince Vlad III of Wallachia, who was nicknamed Dracula—Son of the Dragon—from his father’s knighthood in the Order of the Dragon, bestowed on him by Sigismund, the Holy Roman Emperor.
Vlad was also called Țepeș, a word best translated as “the Impaler.” This referred to his preferred form of execution. A victim would be thrust upon a sharp, oiled stake which was then placed erect on the ground. Gradually, his weight forced the stake upwards, slowly splitting him in two until, after several hours, he died.
Yet the sadist prince, still regarded as a national hero and freedom fighter in Romania, was a brave warrior and brilliant commander. In 1462, his forces outnumbered by the Ottomans, he slowly retreated into Transylvania. However, the Turks withdrew after approaching Vlad’s capital at Târgoviște. There they found 20,000 Turkish captives, whom Vlad had impaled on what Turkish dispatches described as “a forest” of stakes. This was too much even for the Sultan, and his troops withdrew. In 1477, while leading a night raid behind enemy lines, Vlad died in battle. He was entombed in a monastery at Snagov.
In 1931, archeologists opened Vlad’s tomb. It was empty.