One of the most famous tragedies from colonial New England was the Salem Witch Trial's. These trials took place about a century earlier than the New England Vampire Panic, and yet the Vampire Panic is much less well known. Let's talk about the history of the New England Vampire Panic.
When Tuberculosis came to South Eastern Connecticut and Rhode Island in the 1730s, it wasn’t immediately clear what was happening. By the 1800s when the Vampire Panic was in full swing, Tuberculosis was the number one cause of death throughout New England. The disease was responsible for about 25% of all deaths in the region at the time. Tuberculosis symptoms manifested differently across different people. In some people the disease lay dormant for a very long time before symptoms set in, years even.
The New England Vampire Panic started to take shape, as a response to the lack of understanding about disease and decomposition of human bodies.
After losing his wife and two daughters to sickness, George Brown’s son Edwin continued to be ill. The Brown family lived in Exeter Rhode Island, a border town often referred to at the time as “deserted Exeter.” It was a farming community that was founded on land without much fertile soil. A story of many early European settlements in the United States. Much of the local population here was lost during the Civil War.
Pre-existing superstition in the area had laid the groundwork for attributing so many deaths in one family to the undead. Though the term Vampire wasn’t used here, friends and neighbors started to suspect that one of the deceased Brown family members was in essence a Vampire.
Brown agreed to let the bodies of his deceased family be exhumed. It was discovered that the body of Mercy Brown, though she had been dead for almost a decade less than her mother and sister, seemed to be perfectly preserved and blood was found in her heart.
It was decided that Mercy was a vampire, responsible in her undead state, for causing the illness of her brother. In an effort to save Edwin’s life, Mercy’s liver and heart would need to be removed from her body and burned.
Mercy Brown and the entire Brown family is buried in Exeter, Rhode Island. But this wasn't the only or the first family that experienced a similar situation. The exhumation of loved ones to check for signs of vampirism, and destroy organs spread across New England.
In most states this ritual was secretive, often done at night. With the exception of many exhumations in Vermont, which were sometimes turned into a reason to celebrate. There is documentation of a suspected Vampire heart being burned on the town green in Woodstock, Vermont in 1830. And even earlier in the late 1700s hundreds of people attended a heart-burning at a Black smith’s forge in Manchester.
The story of the New England Vampire Panic starts in Vermont in 1790, with the death of Rachel Harris. Harris died of Tuberculosis in 1790 and a year later, her widowed husband, Captain Issac Burton, married her stepsister, Hulda. It didn’t take long for Hulda to start to demonstrate similar symptoms to her late sister. It was assumed that Rachel was causing Hulda’s illness from beyond the grave.
In 1854 the locals living in Jewett City, Connecticut had exhumed a number of corpses because they were suspicious that the deceased were actually vampires. And as vampires, they were believed to rise from their graves and kill those still alive in the community. When these gravesites were revisited in modern times, researchers found that bodies had been put back into graves, post organ removal, with broken ribs from the ordeal. And in strange patterns. One described that one grave of remains had been organized like a skull and crossbone.
Though these stories seem outdated to us now, and historic, we do have to acknowledge that the 1800s are far more recent than the Salem Witch Trials of 1690. And especially in today’s political climate, it’s a good reminder that we don’t know everything about how the world works. And sometimes it’s better to try and force ourselves to look at something in a new way.
For more on the story of Mercy Brown and the New England Vampire Panic, listen to episode 145 of the Lunatics Radio Hour Podcast.
Sources
Smithsonian Magazine Article by Abigail Tucker: The Great New England Vampire Panic
A NewEngland.com article by Joe Bills: New England’s Vampire History | Legends and Hysteria
A NewEngland.com Article: Vampire Mercy Brown | When Rhode Island Was “The Vampire Capital of America”
A History.com article on Vampire History
How the Rise of Vampire Fiction Coincided with The Real Life New England Vampire Panic by Nat Brehmer on bloodydisgusting.com
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