Postcards After Dark Episode 2: The Rhode Island Teenage Vampire

Postmarked & Tipsy: If you drive through Exeter, Rhode Island today, you're not going to find a Transylvanian castle rising out of the fog. You're going to find woods, old roads, stone walls, houses, cemeteries, basically the exact kind of New England landscape that looks perfectly normal at noon, and like something is absolutely following you after sunset. And in the 1890s one Exeter family became the center of a story that helped earn Rhode Island a wonderfully unhinged nickname The Vampire Capital of America The family was the Browns. In 1883 George Brown's wife, Mary, died after an illness. About six months later, their daughter Mary Olive also died. Years later another daughter, Mercy Lena Brown, became ill and died at only nineteen. George's son Edwin was sick as well. Today, the pattern is painfully recognizable. The illness was consumption, tuberculosis, an infectious disease that could move through families and communities. But people living through these deaths did not have antibiotics, modern germ therapy in everyday practice, or much power to stop what was happening. Across parts of nineteenth century New England, there was a folk belief that That a dead relative might somehow be consuming the life of surviving family members. They did not necessarily use vampire the way we do now. No capes, no elegant count, no sparkling, but the idea was close enough. Perhaps one of the dead was not entirely at rest. In March 1892 people went to Chestnut Hill Cemetery in Exeter and exhumed the bodies of George Brown's wife and two daughters. Mary and Mary Olive had been dead long enough that their remains showed expected decomposition. Mercy was different. She had died only a couple of months earlier, during a Rhode Island winter. Her body had been kept in cold conditions, and when the coffin was opened, She appeared unusually well preserved. Accounts describe blood in her heart and body. To people already looking for an explanation, that was enough. Mercy's heart was removed and burned. The ashes were reportedly mixed into a remedy and given to her sick brother Edwin, in the hope that it would break whatever supernatural hold was killing him. It did not. Edwin died less than two months later. when a modern perspective, there are ordinary explanations for what the people of Exeter saw. Mercy had been dead for a relatively short period. It was winter. Cold slows decomposition. Tuberculosis, not a teenage girl rising from the grave, was moving through the Brown family. But I think the story gets more interesting and sadder. When we stop treating the people involved as simply stupid or superstitious. Imagine watching one member of your family after another waste away. Imagine knowing the word consumption, but having no treatment that can reliably save the next person. Then imagine someone telling you that there is one last thing left to try. Desperation can make very strange ideas very practical, and poor Mercy became the body in which that desperation was acted out. The story traveled, newspapers covered it. The case became one of the best known examples of New England's so called vampire panic. Reports about Mercy Brown were even found among Bram Stoker's papers after his death. Although that does not mean Mercy simply inspired Dracula. In the tidy way the internet sometimes claims. And because this is Postmarked & Tipsy of course I went looking for an old postcard of Exeter. Do you know what kept coming up? An Indian restaurant. I'm not kidding. I went searching for spooky nineteenth century Exeter, and the postcard gods basically said, Best we can do is dinner, which frankly is probably healthier than exhuming your relatives. But I also kind of love that, because a postcard does not have to depict Mercy's grave. To bring us into the story. Old postcards of tiny New England towns preserve the landscape around stories like hers. Roads, churches, fields, cemeteries, ordinary places for people who are trying to make sense of disease and death. If I were standing in those Exeter woods in 1892, would I have believed Mercy Brown was a vampire? I would like to say absolutely not. I would like to believe I would have been the enlightened woman yelling, guys, maybe do not dig up the 19 year old. But fear is powerful, grief is powerful, and hindsight makes all of us much smarter than people who had to live through the uncertainty in real time. Today Mercy's grave has become a destination for people interested in folklore, paranormal history, and the strange corners of New England. But underneath the vampire label is a very human story. A family devastated by tuberculosis, a community desperate for an explanation, and a young woman whose death became something much larger than her life. So if you see me wandering through the Rhode Island woods in a black Victorian dress this October, no, I've not finally snapped. probably. I'm just thinking about Mercy Brown, and the thin line between history, folklore, medicine, and fear. This is Postcards After Dark From Postmarked & Tipsy Every postcard has a story. Some should probably be read after dark.