American Vampire Panic

This is a shocking story that saw families digging up their dead relatives, believing them to be vampires. What makes it all the more shocking, is that it was as recent as 1892. Join Anthony and Maddy to find out what was really going on in this sleepy town in New England, where the fear of what the dead might do caused local people to do barbaric things to their own family. Edited by Tim Arstall. Produced by Stuart Beckwith. Senior Producer is Freddy Chick. Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener surveyhere https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/6FFT7MK. All music from Epidemic Sounds. After Dark is a History Hit podcast. History Hit is part of Little Dot Studios, a Certified B Corp™ Voting is now open for the Listener's Choice Award at this year's Podcast Awards. Click to place your vote on the Spotify mobile app: https://open.spotify.com/s/xhg6PJa Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:04Anthony Delaney?

  History Hit, the production company behind After Dark, also makes documentaries. And I'm talking beautifully shot, fantastically told, immersive histories on screen. There's hundreds and hundreds available to watch right now, online at historyhit.com, with a new release each week.

• 0:20Speaker 00

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• 0:36Anthony Delaney?

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• 2:41Speaker 00

  It's a cold March afternoon in 1892, and a grave is torn open. Mercy Brown's coffin is dragged from the frozen earth and her corpse cut open to the shock of onlookers. Her heart and liver are ripped from her chest and thrown onto the fire. The ashes are gathered, mixed into water, and handed to her dying brother. He pauses for a moment, then drinks. This is the story of America's vampire panic.

• 3:20Speaker 00

  Behind the mutilated bodies and fears of the undead lie something painfully human, a struggle to cope with grief and a fear of disease and the desperate lengths we'll go to to survive. Welcome to After Dark.

• 4:00Speaker 00

  Hello and welcome to After Dark. I'm Maddie.

• 4:02Anthony Delaney?

  And I'm Anthony. And in today's episode, we are taking you back to the late 19th century in rural New England, America. Just as the dawn of the modern age is about to rise, this feels like the last gasp of a truly bygone era where superstitions could still dominate our relationship with death and disease. We're going to 1892. This is the American vampire panic. God, those are words you don't often hear together. Maddie, tell us where we are. Rural New England in the 19th century sounds quite idyllic to me, but actually depends who you are, whether or not it's in it.

• 4:38Speaker 00

  That is correct. Have you been to New England?

• 4:41Anthony Delaney?

  No, well, no, no, no, I haven't. No.

• 4:43Speaker 00

  Have you done much of the East Coast?

• 4:45Anthony Delaney?

  No, just New York.

• 4:46Speaker 00

  Hmm. I've been to Connecticut. That was nice.

• 4:50Anthony Delaney?

  Do you want a medal? We're going to Connecticut.

• 4:51Speaker 00

  Yes, please.

• 4:52Anthony Delaney?

  Take one.

• 4:53Speaker 00

  I turned up on the first day. There was a bear on the high street and I was like, oh.

• 4:57Anthony Delaney?

  I've come to the right place.

• 4:59Speaker 00

  This is a mistake. Okay. Yeah, okay. So we are, as you say, we're in the 1890s. And we're around 20 years since the end of the American Civil War. Across New England, which has six states in it, there are around 4.7 million people. But as I say, a lot of that is rural living. There are, as we're going to find out, still traditional folkloric beliefs that are held. You know, we think of the 19th century, and particularly the end of the 19th century, as a time of innovation, of, you know, truly, as we understand it, the modern world coming into its own. But, you know, as we found in previous episodes, I'm thinking of the Bridget Cleary case in Ireland,

• 5:41Speaker 00

  there are still residues of those beliefs hanging around still. And, you know, genuinely believed, but also manipulated for people's own gain, as I think we find in the Cleary case. In this story, we're going to see really a relationship between illness, disease, she says sniffing from a cold, consumption, and those superstitious beliefs. And the way that they intersect is quite troubling and, you know, could still have the power in the 1890s to cause real panic.

• 6:17Anthony Delaney?

  And we know that the episode's called "The American Vampire Panic", or well, that's what the briefing notes are called, so I presume the episode will be called something like that.

• 6:25Speaker 00

  It's going to be called something like "The Worst Vampire Panic, The Bloodiest".

• 6:30Anthony Delaney?

  Yeah, whatever you're going to click on, basically.

• 6:33Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 6:33Anthony Delaney?

  But it's interesting to keep those things, that folkloric belief that you're talking about in the background. And it's, you are really good on this, far better than I am, because my patients can sometimes go with this, but it shouldn't.

• 6:44Speaker 00

  You hear folklore and you're out.

• 6:46Anthony Delaney?

  Well, I do and I don't. Sometimes I do, but, but actually, this is an unusual folkloric interaction. And I'm kind of more here for this because it seems really grounded in real things.

• 6:56Speaker 00

  I think this is kind of the fundamental difference in some ways between the way that you and I approach history. You know, we were saying in a previous episode that, or a future episode, depending on when that goes up, previous to our recording today. You know, Anthony, you're very interested in power and how power manifests, how people fight for it, how it manipulates people, how people manipulate it. And that is everything that you look at throughout history, no matter what the topic is. It kind of boils down to it for you. And for me, I'm really interested in people's imaginations, in how people tell stories about themselves, about other people, how their belief in things. You're very interested in disbelief. And it's not that I think people blindly believed in things, but I think the power of belief is so fascinating.

• 7:39Anthony Delaney?

  And it's stronger.

• 7:40Speaker 00

  It's, well.

• 7:41Anthony Delaney?

  Well, yeah.

• 7:43Speaker 00

  I mean, that's an interesting debate, right? But I, but I think, I think it has, I think it's more contagious, at least to begin with.

• 7:51Anthony Delaney?

  Right. Speaking of contagious.

• 7:53Speaker 00

  Oh my God, you're welcome.

• 7:55Anthony Delaney?

  It's as if you've done this before. My next thing for you is, okay, we have the folkloric side of things happening in the background. We're going to touch on that in more detail. But there's then also the medical, and again, another area I'm really interested in. I know this is definitely where we overlap, that kind of medical history that's coming in. And so what we're starting to do with this particular history is build up those layers. We've got the folklore, we've got the post-American civil war setting. We're in New England, it's rural. Now I want to add this medical layer on top. And specifically, we want to talk about consumption. So talk us through.

• 8:27Speaker 00

  We do. So.

• 8:28Anthony Delaney?

  How that's working in terms of this.

• 8:29Speaker 00

  Consumption is a term that you'd hear throughout the 19th century. You see it on period dramas all the time. Someone starts coughing blood into a handkerchief and they're going to be dead.

• 8:39Anthony Delaney?

  You're like, that person's not making it to the end of the season.

• 8:41Speaker 00

  You don't have main character face or health. Yeah, so it's generally believed now that consumption was describing what we would understand as tuberculosis. Did you have a TB jab when you were at school?

• 8:52Anthony Delaney?

  Jesus, I thought you were going to ask me if I'd had TB. No. Where did you think I was raised?

• 8:57Speaker 00

  I started to get cancelled by the whole of Ireland.

• 9:00Anthony Delaney?

  I have, I had all the jabs going.

• 9:02Speaker 00

  You've not got a scar on your arm?

• 9:04Anthony Delaney?

  I don't know. Yeah.

• 9:05Speaker 00

  Do you not have a scar from it? That's mad.

• 9:07Anthony Delaney?

  But I definitely had every single jab that I was supposed to have. So whatever I was supposed to have, I had.

• 9:10Speaker 00

  Get vaccinated, kids. So yeah, TB was, you know, a cruel and slow killer. It spread prolifically and people didn't necessarily understand to begin with in the 18th and 19th century, how it was being spread.

• 9:24Anthony Delaney?

  Do you know, and I genuinely don't know the answer to this. Well, I can guess, I guess, but I could be wrong. Consumption, that it is consuming you. Is that where that comes from or not?

• 9:33Speaker 00

  Well, that's going to be a big part of this episode, Anthony. Well done. Yeah, this idea that it is kind of taking over your body. So it would produce a cough, you would cough up blood often. There's a sense that it's kind of, your lungs are filling up with blood, I think. But also you'd be quite emaciated, you'd lose a lot of weight. You would sort of waste away in front of people. You'd become very weak, unable to do day-to-day activities. It was, it was hugely prolific, as I say, in the early 19th century. One in five deaths was caused from consumption. So that's a disease that people, high and low, lived with, lived alongside, died from, lost loved ones to. Very famously, it's what kills most of the brontes.

• 10:16Speaker 00

  Yeah, you know, and, and over several years, it could wipe out, well, over several days, it could wipe out families, entire families, or, you know, leaving like one parent behind or one orphan or something. It's a really horrific thing, but was there hovering in the background as a real threat? To everybody in society and it could devastate your life. And as we say, it sort of caused people to waste away. And I think that was so incredibly haunting to people. And that is why, as we're going to find out, it becomes tied, certainly in the popular imagination in New England at this moment, to a much darker and more supernatural idea.

• 10:57Anthony Delaney?

  So let's turn our attention a little bit towards the supernatural now because we have that idea of it being nowadays that we say vampire and we have a shorthand that goes straight, we, we, we get it, right? We know that we have the man in the cape and he's got the thing and he's got the fangs.

• 11:15Speaker 00

  I hate the cape on Dracula. Like, I can't be doing that.

• 11:18Anthony Delaney?

  When I was a kid, Dracula was my go to.

• 11:20Speaker 00

  When you weren't being a mermaid.

• 11:22Anthony Delaney?

  When I was being a mermaid, for Halloween and.

• 11:24Speaker 00

  I just wanted to be a dog. I was a dog.

• 11:26Anthony Delaney?

  For Halloween.

• 11:27Speaker 00

  Yeah, I was, I was a dog in every context. I would just play being a dog the whole time.

• 11:31Anthony Delaney?

  Like a werewolf or just a dog?

• 11:32Speaker 00

  Just a dog. I just really wanted to be a dog. Yeah.

• 11:35Anthony Delaney?

  Okay, you weren't doing that properly, just to let you know. That's not what that's about.

• 11:41Speaker 00

  It wasn't very spooky.

• 11:42Anthony Delaney?

  No.

• 11:43Speaker 00

  I think I'd be a cat occasionally, that's a little bit better.

• 11:46Anthony Delaney?

  Like those sexy mice that people dress up with now.

• 11:48Speaker 00

  Oh my god, yeah.

• 11:49Anthony Delaney?

  You can be a sexy anything for Halloween. Sexy fireman, sexy whatever else.

• 11:53Speaker 00

  What is she in Mean Girls? Yeah, Emma Mouse, da.

• 11:55Anthony Delaney?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 11:56Speaker 00

  There's a millennial reference for you. Sorry, kids.

• 11:59Anthony Delaney?

  Sorry, kids. The vampire, though, to these people, and we're going to come into a very specific community, bear with us, we're, we're getting there, we're just giving you the context before we do. What is a vampire in 1892 to these people who may not have read Dracula, despite the fact that, you know, it turns out to be this phenomenon?

• 12:15Speaker 00

  Yeah, so there's a really interesting distinction here. So in the, the late 18th, early 19th century, and, and we, we're doing an episode on Dracula that may or may not have come out by the time you listen to this, but you know, there's a sort of, there are slightly changing ideas throughout this period of the figure of the vampire, what their power is, what they represent. In this context, it is understood not as someone who is flying around as a bat with the fangs with the cape, but as someone who is dead, who is a revenant, so they've come back from the dead, and they are feeding off the living, quite often people they were close to in life.

• 12:59Speaker 00

  And this is a really important point because what you get is people who die often of consumption, who are laid in the ground, very sad, by their family members who already have the disease as well, and who then start to show side effects.

• 13:17Anthony Delaney?

  Brontes.

• 13:18Speaker 00

  Exactly. God, if the Brontes had been in New England in this moment, they would have been dug up left, right and centre, but we're getting ahead of ourselves. And so there's this sense that the, the dead person is, is sort of literally sucking the life force out of the person who is living. But of course, it's often just people dying of the same disease. Consumption kills you in this horrible, slow way. The term vampire is actually being used, so in.

• 13:40Anthony Delaney?

  Is, is being used.

• 13:41Speaker 00

  Yeah, it absolutely is in, in terms of this, even though, like I say, it's not necessarily the figure of the vampire that we're going to get in Bramston, because Dracula, all of that.

• 13:49Anthony Delaney?

  So it's not a blood drinking thing?

• 13:51Speaker 00

  It's not necessarily blood drinking, it's more.

• 13:53Anthony Delaney?

  It's a life force taking.

• 13:54Speaker 00

  Yes, it's life force taking. Is there any, you know, penetration with fangs of the neck? Not necessarily, it's more, maybe this is a revenant that's, that's visiting you at night, maybe they are doing something physical to you, or maybe it's simply a sort of long distance draining of energy kind of thing. The parameters remain unclear. But in 1860, there was a judge called John Pettibone, and he was referring to a much older case surrounding a woman called Rachel Harris, who we are going to get on to. And this was in 1790, so he's looking back, he's writing in 1860, but he's looking back several decades into 1790. And he uses, to talk about her case, the term demon vampire, that's how he describes her.

• 14:38Speaker 00

  So, you know, this is, this idea, this kind of folkloric figure is being applied to these cases. This is, you know, by a judge of all people, like this is entering common parlance, legal parlance, the sort of, you know, the, the voices that we have from people who would be considered upstanding and reliable citizens, it is there in the written record. Now.

• 15:02Anthony Delaney?

  Go on.

• 15:03Speaker 00

  The way to stop the draining of the living by the dead.

• 15:07Anthony Delaney?

  Oh, okay. So, so this is a pre Dracula, okay, so this is not, well, I'll tell you what it's not going to be then, it's not going to be garlic, maybe not going to be a steak.

• 15:17Speaker 00

  It's not going to be a steak. So what you would need to do, and this is a long held European belief that's come across to New England and other places, is you basically need to just stop the corpse from rising up out of the grave and coming back.

• 15:32Anthony Delaney?

  Okay.

• 15:33Speaker 00

  You don't do a steak. What you do is you exhume the body of the offending person.

• 15:40Speaker 00

  You remove their organs in many cases, you burn them, you take the ashes of that destroyed body or the organs, you mix them with either medicine or in some cases, water. And this is real medical practice, even in the 19th century.

• 15:57Anthony Delaney?

  Someone's got to drink this.

• 15:58Speaker 00

  So you give them to the person whose life force is being drained. So the person who probably already has TB.

• 16:03Anthony Delaney?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 16:04Speaker 00

  You like drink the ashes of your dead relative who died quite a while ago, who we've exhumed. This will make you better.

• 16:10Anthony Delaney?

  It's giving fibre supplement.

• 16:13Anthony Delaney?

  Which I'm no stranger to, by the way.

• 16:15Speaker 00

  But would you consume the ashes of a friend and or relative?

• 16:18Anthony Delaney?

  If it had helped me poo more regularly, maybe.

• 16:21Speaker 00

  You and your chia seeds, I can't even.

• 16:23Anthony Delaney?

  Honest to God.

• 16:25Speaker 00

  My god, this episode is sponsored.

• 16:27Anthony Delaney?

  I don't know when that happened, when I turned 40.

• 16:30Speaker 00

  Wow, which.

• 16:31Anthony Delaney?

  Oh, there's a book there that says gut. It's a sign.

• 16:35Speaker 00

  It is. For, for anyone listening to this, this isn't being filmed, so people have no context about where we are.

• 16:40Anthony Delaney?

  Yeah, there's a book behind us, yeah.

• 16:42Speaker 00

  Just the one book.

• 16:42Anthony Delaney?

  Yeah, yeah, saying gut, that's it.

• 16:46Speaker 00

  Oh dear. So yeah, that's, that was a belief that was being held in the 19th century as a way to stop people from dying of what was in fact tuberculosis. There you go. Any questions?

• 16:58Anthony Delaney?

  No, thanks for listening to Tad, Tad, no, no, no. So we have the, a pretty good idea of the context now of what is happening. We, we kind of have this idea then that there's this history of vampire in literature, but for me personally, I'm so much more interested in what you just described. And that's the, that folkloric belief, actually, in what people really thought that they had to interact with these beliefs and everything, because it's one thing talking about Carmela, it's one thing talking about, you know, John Polidori, the vampire from 1819, and it's shaping those belief systems. But for me, I'm far more interested in what you just described, that real day to day, nine to five, as if they worked from nine to five, but you know. Yeah, they were like, no more vampire belief now.

• 17:42Anthony Delaney?

  But, but that's so much more interesting to me and that's, that's where I do love that kind of thing.

• 17:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly. And you know, I, I think the problem that I have often with, with things to do vampires is that we have quite a camp, what is to us now, kind of Hammer Horror camp sense of the vampire as a figure, right? We have the turned up collar on the cape, you know, all of that stuff, the sort of comedy fangs, sort of Christopher Lee leering at us with his arms in the air. And I think if you strip some of that back, the theatricality of that campness of it, the, the sort of cultural iconography that we've come to enjoy as entertainment over the centuries, then what you are left with is, you know, a deeply troubling thing. And I think this is something that, you know, a film like maybe Robert Eggers' Nosferatu recently is the closest I've seen to the capturing of, of this kind of very grim idea

• 18:30Speaker 00

  of what a vampire can be, is this kind of pervasive, contagious, disease ridden, riddled horror that spreads. Yeah, that's kind of spreads through society and that it's to do with.

• 18:44Anthony Delaney?

  And actually can become a miasma sometimes.

• 18:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's like, well, exactly, yeah, yeah. And, and you know, this idea of kind of illness, the, the sort of lack of health of the human body, the, the pollution of the body, pollution of air, pollution of blood, obviously is very important for vampires, all of this stuff is kind of encompassed in the idea of the vampire. And I think it's easy for us to go, oh, you know, vampires aren't real, this is not a history, how is this a history? We are talking about people in the 19th century who, for whom death is ever present. The threat of your family being wiped out is ever present. You watch the people you love, the people in your life who you hold most dear, your

• 19:26Speaker 00

  children, your family members, your dearest friends, literally wasting away, being drained. There is a human need, I think, to put a name to that, to tell yourself a story about it, to maybe not rationalise it, but to, to be like, I'm putting it over there, psychologically, I'm putting it in a box over there and it's become a thing.

• 19:49Anthony Delaney?

  Yeah.

• 19:49Speaker 00

  That I can access and understand in these terms because the reality is horrific.

• 19:54Anthony Delaney?

  And so unknowable at that moment in time.

• 19:55Speaker 00

  And so uncontrollable.

• 19:57Anthony Delaney?

  Now, you mentioned, we're going to get into some of those real cases now. We're, our, our main destination is the case of Mercy Brown, but you, before that, you mentioned Rachel Harris. So I want to talk about this, this is 1790s that you already said was written about in the 1860s with the demon vampire, but, but let, talk to me about that case before we go to Mercy.

• 20:17Speaker 00

  So this is a, a really big early case, as we've mentioned, so 1790, we're in Manchester in Vermont, and this is a woman called Rachel Harris, who you will not be surprised to hear dies of tuberculosis or consumption. And her husband, her widower, is a man called Captain Isaac Burton, and he is left behind only to marry Rachel's stepsister, a woman called Holder Powell. And Holder inevitably also has tuberculosis. She starts to waste away, you know, the, the community there has already lost Rachel.

• 20:55Speaker 00

  Isaac, the husband, is, you know, watching the second woman in his life to occupy the role of wife just disintegrate before him. And the community who hold this belief in this idea of the vampire, and sometimes they say vampire, sometimes they kind of attribute it more to like a spirit or a ghost, this idea of the revenant, again, not necessarily the Dracula that we, yeah, yeah, yeah, some, some kind of spectral thing that is coming and draining and draining her. And they very much believe that it is Rachel, you know, maybe she's coming back because her husband has remarried her stepsister. Maybe there's jealousy because that's all women have the capacity for, even in death.

• 21:36Anthony Delaney?

  Vengeance.

• 21:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, vengeance against other women who have taken your space.

• 21:40Anthony Delaney?

  On a, on a very practical level, you said this was Rachel's stepsister.

• 21:44Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 21:45Anthony Delaney?

  So Rachel.

• 21:46Speaker 00

  Proximity.

• 21:47Anthony Delaney?

  She's probably coming to care for her in her final weeks of life, right? Because that's something that female family members did.

• 21:54Speaker 00

  Or alternatively, Isaac himself, the husband of both these women, is a carrier and hasn't suffered from the symptoms himself. You know, there, there are so many ways this disease, you know, and also Holder is coming into presumably Isaac's house where Rachel's lived previously. So presumably items of clothing that Rachel has had have been touched, bedding that she may have slept in. This is an airborne disease, but the, the bacteria can remain on objects. Yeah, exactly. So it's no surprise that, that Holder is suffering.

• 22:24Anthony Delaney?

  But the community thinks.

• 22:26Speaker 00

  So the, the community thinks, bitches be jealous. So this is.

• 22:30Anthony Delaney?

  Well, they don't have germ theory, so fair enough. Like.

• 22:33Speaker 00

  Those are your two options.

• 22:34Anthony Delaney?

  Germ theory, women are jealous. That's one and two there.

• 22:38Speaker 00

  So exactly. So, okay, so we're in February seventeen ninety-three now.

• 22:42Anthony Delaney?

  Yeah.

• 22:43Speaker 00

  And Holder is progressively getting worse. And so a crowd of hundreds, and I think this just tells you again so much about the power of imagination, the power of belief. A crowd of hundreds digs up Rachel's body. She's been dead for quite a while. They dig her up, they remove her heart, her liver and her lungs. I mean, just the horror of that, right? This isn't being done on an anatomist's slab with a scalpel precisely.

• 23:10Anthony Delaney?

  With a fresh body.

• 23:11Speaker 00

  This is a crowd of hundreds digging up a corpse that has been in the ground for a while and ripping these organs out, these rotting organs. I mean, it's.

• 23:19Anthony Delaney?

  That's grim.

• 23:19Speaker 00

  It's really grim. It's really, really, really dark. And they take them to the blacksmith's forge, the poor blacksmith.

• 23:25Anthony Delaney?

  Of course.

• 23:25Speaker 00

  He's just busy working away overnight.

• 23:28Anthony Delaney?

  There's hundreds of people coming, blood dripping from them.

• 23:31Speaker 00

  Hi, can we put these on your fire? Sure, I guess.

• 23:34Anthony Delaney?

  Blood is there at that point.

• 23:35Speaker 00

  Yeah. Also, to be fair, he's probably in the mob as well.

• 23:37Anthony Delaney?

  He's one of the hundreds. Yeah.

• 23:38Speaker 00

  My fire's mine. Inevitably, though, the ritual does fail. Surprise, surprise. And a poor old Holder does die later that year of tuberculosis.

• 23:48Anthony Delaney?

  God, how, how did she die after they did all of that?

• 23:51Speaker 00

  Yeah, such a shocker. But, you know, it just, it says something about the, I think the, the scale of this perceived fear, right? And then, and again, this power of belief. And we have, we have a, a quote from this judge, Pettibone, who I mentioned earlier, who's writing decades later in eighteen sixty. He says, "Such was the excitement that from five hundred to one thousand people were present." And, you know, I think that might be a bit of hyperbole, talking decades later, but I think, you know, this is clearly a case that lives in the imagination in this part of the world for many decades afterwards. Because it's unusual, but also because these, these beliefs persist and there is a fear of people behaving in this irrational way. You know, it's not that everyone in the society

• 24:32Speaker 00

  believes like this. There are plenty of people practicing medicine, making discoveries, pushing the boundaries of knowledge. This isn't that everyone's living in some kind of ignorant dark age and they're all running around screaming about vampires. So when this kind of panic does rise up, it is memorable. People remember it. And people are shocked by it to find that those beliefs are still bubbling under the surface and that it can rouse hundreds of people from their homes at night to go and exhume the body of an innocent dead woman.

• 24:57Anthony Delaney?

  It's a random history, this.

• 24:59Speaker 00

  It's weird, isn't it? It's people behaving weirdly. I find it weird. There's another example in eighteen seventeen. So, you know, in a few years after Rachel Harris in the seventeen nineties, of a man called Frederick Ransom, again in Manchester in Vermont. Guys, if you're from Vermont, right? And what is going on in Vermont?

• 25:15Anthony Delaney?

  Isolated.

• 25:16Speaker 00

  Do you guys still have these beliefs? Are you digging people up? Similarly to Rachel, he dies, his family then, you know, different members start to become sick with the same illness. His body is exhumed, his heart is burned. And we know this because it's written down and recorded by his brother, Daniel. And that's how it survives in the written record. But that's two different generations in the same place doing this. What's going on?

• 25:51Speaker 05

  Terry Cottle died by suicide, but his heart lived on, transplanted into Sonny Graham. Years later, Sonny died the exact same way. Same heart, same fate. But that wasn't the strangest connection between them. Sonny also married Terry's widow. Hosted by Karen Kilgariff, this is Heart, an Apple original podcast produced by Plan B and Blanchard House. New episodes are available Mondays and Apple TV subscribers get special early access to the entire season. Follow and listen on Apple Podcasts.

• 26:31Speaker 02

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• 27:01Speaker 07

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• 28:12Anthony Delaney?

  Bring us to our actual case study for today, which is Mercy Brown. Am I saying that? Mercy Brown? Is that the person we're here to study?

• 28:19Speaker 00

  Mercy Brown.

• 28:20Anthony Delaney?

  Mercy Brown. Okay, great names. What is Mercy doing? And how does this story differ? Or how is it similar to those earlier ones that you've mentioned?

• 28:30Speaker 00

  Well, I think one of the shocking things about this is that it takes place in eighteen ninety-two. You know, we were talking previously about the, the turn of the eighteenth into the nineteenth century. And, you know, I'm always fascinated by that moment. It's sort of one of my favorite moments in history, coming out of the so-called Enlightenment. And, you know, we still have the, the kind of the darkness and the shadows created by that and people's beliefs. But by eighteen ninety-two, you know, you think, we're not that far away from, we're already decades in to photography, to filmed footage, to motor cars. Are we on motor cars in eighteen ninety-two? Sure.

• 29:06Anthony Delaney?

  They're, they're, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 29:07Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 29:08Anthony Delaney?

  Not everyone has them, obviously.

• 29:08Speaker 00

  Yeah, no, of course. But, you know, these things exist in the world. There are ocean liners. And yet people are still panning about this. So I find this completely fascinating. This is a case that survives in the record through newspaper accounts, through witness testimony of a doctor who was present throughout. So we have, you know, different kind of eyewitness testimonies. We've got also the recording of deaths of the members of this family. So we know these people really existed and that when they were buried and all of this. It takes place in Rhode Island. And we know in eighteen ninety that the, the recorded population of Rhode Island is three hundred and forty-five and a half thousand people.

• 29:48Speaker 00

  So not vast. It's quite rural still. We're in Exeter, which is mostly, again, made up of farming communities. So we've still got these kind of rural situations. And I suppose you can contrast that with some of the bigger cities that are growing up in the United States at this moment. And this kind of, you know, boom in industry and wealth is just happening on an unimaginable scale. And yet you've still got. People living like this in Rhode Island. In terms of the Brown family themselves, we have several members that have already died of TB, so far so familiar. This is a story we're hearing obviously multiple times. These members who die are buried in local churchyards. It's all considered normal, they're normal funerals.

• 30:30Speaker 00

  Yeah, there's no reason for this to be an unusual history. You know, these are people who would otherwise have just disappeared from our attention and into the historical ether. So in January 1892, Mercy herself dies. She is one of the younger members of the family. She's 19 at the time.

• 30:50Anthony Delaney?

  But is not the first one to die.

• 30:51Speaker 00

  No, so her mother and sister are already dead.

• 30:54Anthony Delaney?

  Okay.

• 30:55Speaker 00

  Mercy dies and then her brother Edwin is now seriously ill. So it's very much like a Bronte situation, you know, they're just losing people left, right and centre. Edwin, and this is part of the pattern that we've seen throughout this century in America. Edwin's becoming more and more unwell and the community starts to wonder aloud if one of the deceased members is returning to drain him of his life force.

• 31:18Anthony Delaney?

  Okay.

• 31:19Speaker 00

  And because Mercy is the most recent one to die, logic dictates it must be her.

• 31:25Anthony Delaney?

  Wait, you're not going to know the answer to this because how could you possibly? But how come nobody asked this when Mercy was dying? Or nobody asked this when the sister was dying?

• 31:32Speaker 00

  Do you know the answer to that, Anthony?

• 31:35Anthony Delaney?

  No, I don't.

• 31:36Speaker 00

  What could we guess that could be?

• 31:37Anthony Delaney?

  Well, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, this, I'm just like, why are we waiting? So now, okay, there's another one of them and I know it's tragic and I know it's sad, but nobody asked any questions.

• 31:44Speaker 00

  But a man is dying, we need answers. I mean, maybe Edwin is like the last one or something, I actually don't know.

• 31:50Anthony Delaney?

  Yeah.

• 31:51Speaker 00

  The answer to that, but.

• 31:52Anthony Delaney?

  But there is no logical answer realistically, right?

• 31:54Speaker 00

  There's no logic there at all. Yeah, no, there really isn't. But the logic at the time is of course Mercy's body needs to be destroyed. So on the 17th of March 1892, her grave is opened up by the locals, including her family. And I find this fascinating, we see this again and again. So her father, George, who has not died, clearly, is, he's initially, as one might expect, opposed to the idea of Mercy being exhumed.

• 32:23Anthony Delaney?

  Fair enough.

• 32:24Speaker 00

  But he sort of, he sort of gives in to the peer pressure of it all. He's like, do you know what? Fine, if it's going to make you all happy, I mean.

• 32:30Anthony Delaney?

  She's dead anyway.

• 32:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, she's dead, she's, she doesn't know what's happening. You know, and I find that sort of staggering, this is a man who's lost his wife and two of his daughters. And he's like, yeah, sure, dig her up. What does that tell you about him, about the power of this belief, about how strong the community is compelling him to do this? And the pressure that is coming to say, we need to dig her up. So he agrees to it. There is a doctor, interestingly, who is brought to the graveside and looks at her remains, he examines her. And I think that's the key difference here, right? Whereas before, in 1790s and in the 1810s, we're having, you know, almost like a mob, frenziedly, moving towards the grave, ripping the body out and kind of, I sort of imagine

• 33:15Speaker 00

  that I might have been slightly more civilised in this, sort of tearing the organs out and rushing to the blacksmith's forge to burn them. This time we have a doctor, Harold Metcalfe, and he's there, he looks at the remains and he finds, so she's been dead since January.

• 33:30Anthony Delaney?

  Okay, yeah, what month are we in now?

• 33:31Speaker 00

  When I'm March.

• 33:32Anthony Delaney?

  Oh, okay.

• 33:33Speaker 00

  He finds that her body has not decomposed, that there is blood still in her heart and veins, and she looks lively. She looks like somebody who has been draining the life force out of somebody still living, right?

• 33:47Anthony Delaney?

  We all know what that looks like.

• 33:48Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly. She's looking good. Now, in reality, what is the weather like?

• 33:55Anthony Delaney?

  Yeah.

• 33:56Speaker 00

  On the East Coast of America in January to March in Rhode Island, it's cold, it's hella cold. Yeah, we know that kind of cold weather, if you're putting your body in the ground, it slows decomposition. It can also account for the presence of the blood still in the veins and the heart, you know, even after two months. But the crowd, take this inevitably as evidence that Mercy's been feeding off her living brother Edwin. And so her heart is cut out, still bloody, her liver, and they are burned, the ashes then, poor Edwin, are mixed with water to create a tonic and they're given to him. Again, not great if you're already ill, stop consuming your dead relatives in this way.

• 34:37Anthony Delaney?

  Yeah, let's not do that.

• 34:38Speaker 00

  And you know, the idea is that he won't be visited anymore by her, she's not going to come, she's going to be laid in the ground. What do you think happens to Edwin, Anthony?

• 34:46Anthony Delaney?

  Dead as a doornail.

• 34:47Speaker 00

  Dead as a doornail two months later in May.

• 34:49Anthony Delaney?

  Yeah, of course.

• 34:50Speaker 00

  Dead.

• 34:50Anthony Delaney?

  Look here, is there a reaction to this? Is there anybody on the sidelines going, lads, you're absolutely insane? Please tell me there is.

• 35:00Speaker 00

  There really is now, and I think this is the big difference. Difference in two ways, you know, I think obviously we have print culture in the late 18th, early 19th century, but not on the scale that we do in the US by the end of the 19th century. And so this is big national news, basically. You know, it's certainly reported regionally and beyond. And it's, it's reported in terms of the sort of horror of it, the outlandishness of it. And it's, it's seen by the wider, by wider society, I suppose, as a strange thing to do now, right? That this is kind of the foibles of the local, oh gosh, isn't this quaint, how these, these strange folkloric beliefs preserve? So we've got lots of headlines that record, report these occurrences in terms of like,

• 35:41Speaker 00

  you know, this sort of horror of it and also the sort of, the foibles of the locals that these little quaint beliefs survive. The Providence Journal, for example, gives a headline, "Exhumed the Bodies: Testing Horrible Superstition in the Town of Exeter." And it reports, "Live flesh and blood would be found, there was horrible superstition." So you know, there's kind of, it's very much the language of the Gothic, of almost the penny dreadful kind of thing. It's very salacious and it's very like, you know, look at these, these yokels and their weird ways. We've got a clipping from the Providence Journal in March, which is pre Edwin dying, but it's around the time that Mercy, well, it's just after Mercy's body has been exhumed.

• 36:23Speaker 00

  And yeah, we've got the same thing again, we've got, interestingly, the word vampire is being used. I don't know if you want to read us the headlines here, Anthony.

• 36:32Anthony Delaney?

  So it says, in big old letters, "The vampire theory: That search for the spectral ghoul in the Exeter graves. Not a Rhode Island tradition, but settled here." Just to let you know, we're a little bit better than this, but it's come here nonetheless. "It originated in Europe," of course it did, "cremation of the heart of the sister of the consumptive brother to eat the ashes. Ugh," says the person.

• 36:54Speaker 00

  That needs an editor immediately.

• 36:56Anthony Delaney?

  Yeah, yeah. And then it goes, says, "Ugh," says the person of refinement. "Horrible," ejaculates even the reader of the horrible daily papers. "But those who believe it express themselves, thus it may be true, you may find one there." Okay.

• 37:16Speaker 00

  So.

• 37:16Anthony Delaney?

  But it's salacious.

• 37:17Speaker 00

  It's salacious and I love this idea, and you know, we see this in the Dracula stories of Bram Stoker as well, this idea of a European threat, a European tradition, in this case, settling in Rhode Island. And you know, in terms of Bram Stoker's Dracula, it's a monster coming from Eastern Europe, sort of invading and polluting good English stock with his terror and his corruption of their blood. So this idea of kind of something else coming in from the old countries and, you know, tied to sort of immigration and mistrust of foreigners. And certainly, you know, in terms of American history here, it's very much like, even in the sort of decades immediately following the American Revolution, you get lots of

• 38:02Speaker 00

  stories like this and also stories of, you know, how sort of foolish British people are, they've been, they've been hoodwinked and hoaxed and all sorts of things like that. So there's a sense here of like, of course this has come from Europe where, like, you know, eye roll, they're so superstitious, like, we don't, just to be clear, we don't believe in this, it's just some, some people who've just taken this belief too far.

• 39:33Speaker 00

  Are you surprised by this history?

• 39:37Anthony Delaney?

  I'm disappointed, but I'm not angry, I'm just disappointed.

• 39:40Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 39:41Anthony Delaney?

  Um, I just expect more of people in 1892. I don't know.

• 39:46Speaker 00

  I think that's the shocking element of it, right? It's like, what are you doing, lads?

• 39:49Anthony Delaney?

  Yeah. I just think I wouldn't like them very much. Do you know what I mean?

• 39:53Speaker 00

  I think.

• 39:54Anthony Delaney?

  If you're gonna default to digging people up and consuming their organs, maybe we will get on.

• 39:59Speaker 00

  Do it for a good reason.

• 40:01Anthony Delaney?

  I, I, I don't know. It's, it, it also just, I'll be honest, and I, this is no factual basis for me to say any of what I'm about to say. Has it ever stopped me before?

• 40:12Speaker 00

  Always a good pretext for speaking.

• 40:15Anthony Delaney?

  I'm not, there's stuff about this I don't buy, about the, the narrative logic that I'm just like, it just couldn't have unfolded like that. It just.

• 40:25Speaker 00

  I suspect in each one of these cases, there are very specific local relationships, tensions, desires going on that we are not part of two and never will be, because we don't have that record.

• 40:41Anthony Delaney?

  Because think about all the, you can't just go to a graveyard and dig up a body.

• 40:46Speaker 00

  Certainly not by so, by 1892.

• 40:48Anthony Delaney?

  No. And, and so, especially if you're not trying to hide it, and they're not trying to hide it, they're, it seems, it's in the papers, so people know.

• 40:56Speaker 00

  And nobody's punished.

• 40:58Anthony Delaney?

  And nobody's punished. So it's like, you're gonna have to get the permission of the priest or the sexton or whatever. Again, 1892, are you gonna be granted that? Oh, here, Father Jim, we think that Edwin's being consumed by his dead sister.

• 41:12Speaker 00

  Do you mind if we just pop in at 3pm and just?

• 41:14Anthony Delaney?

  The usual stuff, taking out the innards and just cooking them down for him to drink. You know yourself, I'll see you at three.

• 41:21Speaker 00

  I mean, that, okay, this is the other problem that I have with this history is how complicit or not the other family members are, right? And I suppose you've got to remember that they would have been desperate in that, you know, if you're the father of this family, everyone's died or is dying. If you're the last one standing in Edward, Edward's case here, you might wanna try anything at this point. But are you realistically going to consume the, the watery, pasted up ashes of your deceased sister in order to try and save yourself? I suppose if you have consumption in this moment, the likelihood is you'll die at the death sentence you know about in advance, you are well aware of, you know it's coming.

• 42:03Speaker 00

  You know you're probably not gonna survive it. I mean, we've mentioned the Brontes, you know, we, we know they are all staring down the barrel of death. And certainly we're aware of that, and that there is something sort of unfathomable, I think, to many of us, if we're lucky enough in that. But does that mean they're prepared to do this? This feels particularly, and is this really a story about vampires or is it about eating the dead?

• 42:27Anthony Delaney?

  I even question, because some of the questions that I have is, where's the body? Where's this extraction taking place? For me, one of the key figures to investigate further would be the doctor. Like, what's he doing? How quackery is going on here? Like, is this just some, I, I, like, I don't know, and I don't know the answer to this, and this is what I mean by this is not based on any factual thing, it's just something is.

• 42:48Speaker 00

  What's his motivation to be involved in this? Instead of treating his patient for consumption?

• 42:54Anthony Delaney?

  And maybe he, you know, even he might know, oh, I know there's no treatment for this, but I might be able to extract a few things if I say I'm just gonna ground up some, oh, when we went in and we, we dug up your sister and then we, but like, there's just too many missing pieces.

• 43:07Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 43:07Anthony Delaney?

  It just doesn't really add up for me. I, I don't know why, but it's, it does, it does tell us a lot about what is selling newspapers, though.

• 43:15Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 43:16Anthony Delaney?

  And that this, this would look very similar in many ways now if it were to appear in a newspaper. We'd be like, what?

• 43:23Speaker 00

  But I think that's the thing, right? I think, yeah, but I think that's, that's the thing of, it's this idea of it being so modern feeling. That, I think that's why it's so strange to me that it's 1892, the newspapers don't look that dissimilar from how they do today. This is a recognizable world that, obviously there are huge differences and, you know, we wouldn't necessarily want to travel back to this moment and occupy the lives of the people in 1892, but we probably could survive it potentially. But it is different enough that this has actually happened.

• 43:55Anthony Delaney?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Something's, something's happened that's being reported upon, right? Like, yeah.

• 44:02Speaker 00

  In conclusion, something's happened that's being reported on.

• 44:05Anthony Delaney?

  And that, my friend, is history 101. Just, that's everything from the past.

• 44:09Speaker 00

  Stuff that keeps on happening.

• 44:11Anthony Delaney?

  Oogie spooky, but we're at the height of our powers, Maddy Pelling, isn't it a great old month really to be, be undead?

• 44:17Speaker 00

  Yeah. Would you bother coming back and draining the life out of people if you could?

• 44:22Anthony Delaney?

  What do you think?

• 44:24Speaker 00

  You've let them sleeping, leave me alone.

• 44:25Anthony Delaney?

  Minimum effort. I'm not going anywhere.

• 44:28Speaker 00

  You'd make Shane go and do it for you, but Shane, can you go and?

• 44:31Anthony Delaney?

  Shane is gonna be dead before me.

• 44:33Speaker 00

  Oh.

• 44:33Anthony Delaney?

  Yeah.

• 44:34Speaker 00

  Is that because you've planned to kill him or?

• 44:36Anthony Delaney?

  No, no, I can imagine.

• 44:37Speaker 00

  Or you've ground him down so much.

• 44:39Anthony Delaney?

  That one. This is going to be used in a court of evidence when Shane mysteriously dies.

• 44:44Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 44:45Anthony Delaney?

  Now, listen, what I'm gonna do on a practical level after that, who knows?

• 44:49Speaker 00

  Oh, you're fucked. You are absolutely fucked.

• 44:51Anthony Delaney?

  I have an idea, and the idea is likelihood, my sister's, she listens to this podcast, so this will be her hearing this for the first time. My sister's partner's probably gonna die before her, because the gender.

• 45:02Speaker 00

  Michelle, he's also killing off your partner. Great.

• 45:05Anthony Delaney?

  And the gender thing, you know, women tend to outlive their male partners if they have them. And then Shane, although he's younger than me, just, I don't know. He's, he's got an odd constitution, so he'll be gone.

• 45:20Speaker 00

  I'm assuming Shane does not listen to this podcast.

• 45:22Anthony Delaney?

  Oh, no, he doesn't listen to this, no. And then I think maybe, and remember I said in another episode that I wanted to die in Ireland?

• 45:29Speaker 00

  Yeah, so you'll have to go home to die.

• 45:31Anthony Delaney?

  Michelle, sorry, Michelle, just to let you know, but she also has two sons, and obviously I'm childless, so somebody's gotta do to bury me. So they'll be around and then everything's done.

• 45:41Speaker 00

  If they get sick, they'll be like, Uncle Anthony's draining the life force out of us. We better dig him up.

• 45:46Anthony Delaney?

  They'll, they'll, they know I wouldn't have the energy to be bothered. So that's my death plan.

• 45:52Speaker 00

  Okay, this has escalated. Um, write in with your death plan. No, please don't. We don't have the capacity for that. If you want to hear more New England stories?

• 46:02Anthony Delaney?

  Oh, yeah, New England stories is good. I, I love New England stories, yeah.

• 46:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, no, I actually do. It's, it's a very oogie spooky place.

• 46:10Anthony Delaney?

  Have we done Salem on this podcast? Yes.

• 46:12Speaker 00

  Oh, my God.

• 46:13Anthony Delaney?

  Have we?

• 46:14Speaker 00

  Multiple.

• 46:15Anthony Delaney?

  Have we done multiple Salem's?

• 46:16Speaker 00

  Your memory is bloody awful.

• 46:18Anthony Delaney?

  Multiple.

• 46:19Speaker 00

  Multiple Salem's.

• 46:20Anthony Delaney?

  What did we do? It doesn't matter. How am I expecting you to remember? But yeah, we did stuff, okay?

• 46:26Speaker 00

  We did, we did several.

• 46:28Anthony Delaney?

  It's been three years, though, to be fair.

• 46:29Speaker 00

  There are other histories other than Salem.

• 46:32Anthony Delaney?

  There are, it's true. That's categorically correct. And sometimes we cover them on this podcast. That's gonna be the quote.

• 46:40Speaker 00

  Look, write, write in and request stuff, okay?

• 46:42Anthony Delaney?

  By the way, we're recording this at the end of a long day of recording, so I think we're, we're both ready to.

• 46:48Speaker 00

  Leave us a five star review. I don't think we deserve it for this.

• 46:51Anthony Delaney?

  Oh, my God, you are self sabotaging your five stars that you so, so want from these people.

• 46:58Speaker 00

  Please.

• 46:58Anthony Delaney?

  Um, but do, do let us know if there's any other weird, let us know if there's any local stuff to you that happened.

• 47:04Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 47:05Anthony Delaney?

  Like this, where you're like, the whole village went mad for an hour and a half.

• 47:09Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 47:10Anthony Delaney?

  Let us know about those, because those are interesting.

• 47:12Speaker 00

  That's really good.

• 47:13Anthony Delaney?

  So do.

• 47:14Speaker 00

  Mass delusion.

• 47:15Anthony Delaney?

  Afterdarkhistory.com.

• 47:16Speaker 00

  Mass hysteria.

• 47:17Anthony Delaney?

  Yeah. And the more local, the more weird, the better, right?

• 47:20Speaker 00

  Yes, please.

• 47:21Anthony Delaney?

  Do you know what? And I'm gonna, just gonna be really honest here. I'm so tired that it feels like it's too much effort to end this.

• 47:28Speaker 00

  I know, we're just gonna keep talking forever until one of us falls asleep. Love you, bye.

• 47:33Anthony Delaney?

  Bye, bye, bye.

• 47:44Speaker 07

  This is the story of the one. As a shipping manager, he's running the dock, stocking supplies and making sure every order goes out on time. And Granger helps him stay prepared. From shipping supplies to PPE to hand tools, he counts on Granger to keep products moving and trucks rolling. So his operation runs smoothly, no matter the shift. Call 1-800-GRANGER, click Granger.com or just stop by. Granger, for the ones who get it done.

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