Rhode Island's Favorite Vampire

A contributor to Memorable Moments shares a story about Mercy L. Brown, Rhode Island's favorite vampire. This weird and unusual tale has been circulating throughout the years, and in celebration of the 31 Days of Weird, we hope we've added some fun and fright to your day!

"George T. Brown had a problem - members of his family kept dropping dead. George and his wife, Mary, and their five children lived on a small farm in Exeter. As was the case for many families in those days of high mortality rates, George's family seemed to have more than its share of illness. George's wife fell ill first, succumbing to consumption on December 8, 1883, at age of 36. Mary Olive, 20, his eldest daughter, followed less than six months later.

For seven years death seemed to take a holiday, but then George's only son, Edwin, a healthy 24-yr-old who worked as a store clerk, contracted the disease. Hoping he might find a cure in the mineral waters of Colorado Springs, Edwin packed up and headed West. While Edwin was gone, his sister Mercy Lena also became sick. On January 18, 1892, she died. She was only 19. Because it was winter and the ground was frozen, her body was placed inside a crypt near the rest of the her relations at the Chestnut Hill Cemetery, also known today as Cemetery #22.

After Mercy's death George's neighbors began insisting he do something. Local superstition suggested that perhaps one of the deceased family members was rising from the grave to consume the life of the living. George was a pragmatic man, not given to such flights of fancy, but he did have two more daughters to think about. So, if only to set the minds of his neighbors at ease, he arranged for a doctor from Wickford to accompany a small group of friends and neighbors to the cemetery. They went to exhume the corpses of the Brown women.

Once uncovered, the bodies were found to be in a state of advanced decay, which was only to be expected since they had been dead almost ten years. But when the men entered the crypt to examine Mercy, they found that her corpse had shifted from its original position inside her coffin. What's more, her body was still fresh, for when the doctor cut out her heart, it dripped blood. The doctor drained her organs of fluid and the men buried her heart on a nearby stone wall. The balance of Mercy's remains were presumably given a proper burial later in the spring.

Some of the ashes were given to Edwin when he returned from Colorado, to drink as a sort of talismanic potion. Despite such desperate measures, Edwin died less than two months afterward. After that the deaths ceased. George survived well into the 20th century, finally dying at the ripe old age of 80. What happened to the other two unnamed daughters is still unknown.

Mercy's was the last of five alleged Rhode Island vampire cases, dating back to 1796. After the Mercy Brown exhumation in 1892, nobody in Rhode Island ever dug up the body of a suspected vampire again, probably because in 1882, it was discovered that tuberculosis (or "consumption") was spread by bacteria. In addition, the practice of embalming had begun to reach rural areas, making it implausible to imagine that thirsty fiends were rising from the grave to search for blood."