Since the dawn of humanity, people have both cared for those who have deceased yet also tried to keep them away, typically out of a fear of the dead. In time, that fear helped produce all kinds of legends and beliefs about the dead coming back, and one of the most persistent ones is of the vampire. While everyone has heard of vampires, few people are truly familiar with the history and folklore that have made the mythical beings so popular. Indeed, there are so many legends from so many cultures that it is difficult to come up with a hard definition, and folklore is by its very nature unscientific, but most people in the Western world think of vampires as those who come back from the grave to suck the blood or life essence from the living.

Today the Salem Witch Trials are often remembered as being a relic of a superstitious past, and Salem has transformed itself into a tourist haven and Halloween destination by capitalizing off the trials, which remain well known across America. However, most people have forgotten that New England had a “vampire” scare in the 19th century, when superstitious New Englanders looked to lore to explain tuberculosis, a devastating illness for which they had no available answers.

The last and most famous event in New England’s hunt for vampires came near the end of the 19th century after Mercy Brown died of consumption on January 19, 1892 and her body was exhumed on March 17, 1892. Suspicion fell on her as being a possible vampire, and digging her coffin up was an attempt to determine if she was, in fact, a vampire. Her mother and sister had died before her, also from consumption, and when her brother Eddie caught the disease, he had dreams about Mercy. He also had the feeling of a heavy weight sitting on his chest at night.

A common belief at the time was that victims of consumption might attack living family members, so neighbors insisted that Mercy’s father, George Brown, exhume the three bodies for examination. There were several characteristics people believed to be convincing evidence that a dead person was actually a vampire. This evidence included the presence of liquid or fresh-looking blood in the heart, lungs, or other vital organs and a body that was not as decayed as expected.
After her coffin was opened, the remains were examined, and the relatively good condition of Mercy Brown’s body indicated to her family and neighbors that she was indeed a vampire, and that she was responsible for her brother’s illness. While people who think of vampires today conjure up images of Dracula, in 19th century America, vampires were believed to be tied to tuberculosis, which killed millions of people. American beliefs about vampires connected victims who had died of consumption with living family members who came down with the disease, which was quite common because outbreaks of consumption frequently decimated whole families, striking down previously healthy brothers and sisters within a year or two.

It’s not clear how vampire folklore reached rural New England and became its own cultural phenomenon. The craze over vampires was not even a century old when Bram Stoker’s famous novel was published and movies reshaped the stereotype. Furthermore, the area in which Mercy Brown and other New Englanders lived did not experience a major influx of immigration from Central or Eastern Europe, where the belief in vampires had been around for hundreds of years. Nevertheless, the year 1892 would produce one of the most unique stories in American history.

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