Show Notes
In March of 1892, a group of men entered a cemetery in rural Rhode Island and opened the coffin of nineteen-year-old Mercy Brown.
Then they cut out her heart.
Her family had been dying from tuberculosis, one after another, and some of Mercy's neighbors believed they knew why. Something inside one of the graves was still feeding on the living.
So they burned Mercy's heart and liver beside a rock in the cemetery and prepared the ashes as a cure for her dying brother.
And Mercy Brown wasn't the only one.
For generations, families across New England had been digging up their dead, examining their bodies, burning their organs, and sometimes consuming the ashes in a desperate attempt to stop tuberculosis from moving through their homes.
They rarely called them vampires.
But that's what everyone else would eventually call them.
Tonight, we're digging into the New England vampire panic, the real story of Mercy Brown, a bizarre grave discovered in Connecticut, and how a nineteenth-century medical superstition became part of America's Halloween mythology.
Welcome to Day Six of 31 Days of Halloween
More from Haunted American History
In February 1927, William Fuld fell to his death from the roof of his factory in Baltimore.
In the winter of 1590, an elderly Scottish healer named Agnes Sampson was brought before King James VI of Scotland.
In 1967, the RMS Queen Mary arrived in Long Beach, California, after more than three decades crossing the Atlantic.
In Savannah, Georgia, ghost stories are everywhere.
On November 13, 1974, a young man ran into a bar in Amityville, New York, shouting that his parents had been shot.