Vampire hunts were not only a thing of Balkan villages in the 1700s. In the farm towns of New England, families were opening graves to stop the dead from feeding on the living until the end of the 19th century. The last famous case happened in 1892, five years before Dracula was published, in a small town in Rhode Island.
A family dying of consumption
The Brown family of Exeter, Rhode Island, was struck again and again by consumption, the old name for tuberculosis. Mary Eliza Brown, the mother, died in December 1883. Her eldest daughter, Mary Olive, died in June 1884, aged 20. In 1891 the son, Edwin, fell ill too, and in January 1892 his 19-year-old sister Mercy Lena Brown died of the same disease. Her body was probably placed in the stone crypt of Exeter's Chestnut Hill Cemetery until it could be buried.
Tuberculosis killed slowly. The sick grew pale and thin and coughed blood, and the disease passed from one family member to the next. To neighbours who knew nothing of germs, it could look as if something was draining the family's life, and the old belief offered an explanation: one of the dead was feeding on the living.
The exhumation of 17 March 1892
On 17 March 1892, villagers opened the family graves while the family doctor, Harold Metcalf, and a correspondent of the Providence Journal looked on. After almost a decade, Mary Eliza and Mary Olive were barely more than bones. Mercy had been dead only two months, in winter, and the reporter found her body in a fairly well-preserved state, with clotted blood still in her heart. To the villagers that was the sign they had been looking for.
They cut out her heart and liver and burned them on a nearby rock. The ashes were mixed with water and given to Edwin to drink as a cure. He died less than two months later.
A panic that lasted a century
Mercy Brown was not an isolated case. Exhumations like hers took place in Rhode Island, eastern Connecticut, southern Massachusetts and Vermont through the late 18th and 19th centuries. In 1817 the father of Frederick Ransom, a 20-year-old who had died of tuberculosis, had his son's heart burned on a blacksmith's forge. Families sometimes breathed in the smoke of the burning organs or swallowed the ashes, and others turned bodies face down in their graves or cut off the head. The folklorist Michael Bell, who has studied the panic for decades, has documented about 80 such exhumations and believes many more were never recorded.
The skeleton in the gravel pit
In 1990 children playing in a gravel pit in Griswold, Connecticut, found an old family burial ground. One skeleton, a man of about 50 from the 1830s, had been dug up about five years after his death and rearranged: his skull and thigh bones had been placed on his ribs and spine. Archaeologists recognised the same belief behind it. DNA research later suggested he was a farmer named John Barber.
Did Mercy Brown inspire Dracula?
Possibly, in a small way. A clipping from the New York World of 1896 about the New England vampire beliefs was found among Bram Stoker's papers, and his theatre company was touring the United States that year. Some scholars have linked Mercy to Lucy Westenra, the young woman in Dracula who sickens, dies and rises again. Others point out that the novel came out in 1897, which leaves little time for the clipping to have shaped it. You can follow the rest of the literary story in Before Dracula.
Why it matters
The New England panic shows how the vampire really worked in folk belief: not as a romantic stranger, but as an explanation for illness and grief inside a family. It is the same pattern as in the Serbian villages of the 1720s, described in Vampire Folklore, carried across an ocean and kept alive by a disease nobody could yet explain.
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