Disturbing History - The Vampire Panic of New England

Episode Date: March 4, 2026

For nearly a century, families across rural New England dug up their dead, cut out their hearts, burned them, and fed the ashes to the living. They weren't insane. They were desperate. In this episode, we dive deep into the New England Vampire Panic — a terrifying chapter of American history driven by tuberculosis, grief, and folk beliefs that most history books conveniently leave out.We start with the tuberculosis epidemic that killed one in four Americans and Europeans in the 1800s and explore how the natural process of decomposition mimicked the very "signs" that communities believed proved vampirism. From there, we trace the panic through its most significant cases, beginning with the Tillinghast family of Exeter, Rhode Island in the 1790s — one of the earliest documented episodes — and moving through the remarkable 1990 archaeological discovery in Griswold, Connecticut, where a skeleton rearranged in a skull-and-crossbones pattern provided physical proof that these rituals actually took place.We cover the public heart-burning on the town green in Woodstock, Vermont involving Captain Isaac Burton's family, the story of Rachel Harris in Manchester, Vermont — a dead wife accused of feeding on her replacement from beyond the grave — and the impossible position of rural physicians caught between their training and their community's expectations. The heart of the episode is the full story of Mercy Lena Brown, the nineteen-year-old Exeter woman exhumed in March of 1892 in what became the most thoroughly documented vampire case in American history. We walk through her father George Brown's agonizing decision, the examination of three family members' remains, the burning of Mercy's heart, and the tragic death of her brother Edwin just two months later despite drinking the ash mixture. We also explore how the national press turned Exeter into a punchline, the possible connection between the Brown case and Bram Stoker's Dracula, and folklorist Michael Bell's groundbreaking research documenting over eighty cases across the region.Key figures in this episode include Stukeley Tillinghast, the Exeter farmer who lost half his fourteen children to consumption; the unidentified man known only as JB from Griswold, Connecticut, whose rearranged skeleton confirmed vampire rituals; Dr. Harold Metcalf, the physician who performed the autopsy on Mercy Brown and later stated her condition was entirely natural; and Michael Bell, author of Food for the Dead: On the Trail of New England's Vampires, whose decades of research transformed our understanding of this phenomenon. Connecticut State Archaeologist Nick Bellantoni, who led the excavation of the Griswold vampire burial, also features prominently.For those who want to go deeper, we'd recommend Michael Bell's Food for the Dead, Paul Barber's Vampires, Burial, and Death for the science behind decomposition and vampire folklore, and the Providence Journal archives for the original 1892 reporting on the Mercy Brown exhumation. Leave us a review and let us know what you thought of this episode. Follow Disturbing History on all major podcast platforms.Have a forgotten historical mystery, disturbing event, unsolved crime, or hidden conspiracy you think deserves investigation?Send your suggestions to [e-mail] History is a dark history podcast exploring unsolved mysteries, secret societies, historical conspiracies, lost civilizations, and the shadowy stories buried beneath the surface of the past.Follow the show and enable automatic downloads so you never miss a deep dive into history’s most unsettling secrets.Because sometimes the truth is darker than fiction.

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The Haunted UK podcast. Available now on all major podcast platforms. Ever wonder how dark the world can really get? Well, we dive into the twisted, the terrifying, and the true stories behind some of the world's most chilling crimes. Hi, I'm Ben. And I'm Nicole. Together we host Wicked and Grim,

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This is history they hoped you'd forget. I'm Brian, investigator, author, and your guide through the dark corners of our collective memory. Each week I'll narrate some of the most chilling and little-known tales from history that will make you question everything you thought you knew. And here's the twist. Sometimes, the history is disturbing to us. And sometimes, we have to disturb history itself just to get to the truth. If you like your facts with the side of fear, if you're not afraid to pull at threads, others leave alone.

You're in the right place. History isn't just written by the victors. Sometimes it's rewritten by the disturbed. Welcome back, everyone, to another episode of disturbing history. I'm glad you're here, and I mean that sincerely, because tonight we're diving into a story that's going to make you question everything you thought you knew about early America. We're not heading to some crumbling castle in Transylvania tonight. We're not crossing the ocean to visit foggy moors in England or dusty crypts beneath eastern European churches. No.

Tonight, we're staying right here. Right here in the United States of America. Because what I'm about to tell you happened on American soil, in quiet New England towns, among God-fearing, church-going people who read their Bibles and said their prayers, and then went out to their cemeteries in the deserts in the city. dead of night, dug up their own family members, cut out their hearts, burn them on nearby rocks, and sometimes mixed the ashes into medicine that they fed to the living. And they did it because they

believed the dead were feeding on them. This is the story of the New England vampire panic, a phenomenon that gripped communities across Rhode Island, Connecticut, Vermont, Massachusetts, and Maine for the better part of a century. We're talking about the late 1700s all the way through the 1890s. That's not the Dark Ages, folks. That's the era of the steam engine, the telegraph, the Civil War. While Darwin was publishing

on the origin of species and Edison was tinkering with the light bulb, families in rural New England were pulling corpses from the ground and performing rituals on them that would make a horror movie director blush. Now, if you've been listening to this show for any length of time, you know

that we don't do sensationalism here. We deal in facts. We deal in documented history. And I'll tell you right now, the facts of this story are stranger and more disturbing than any fiction I could dream up. We've got court records, newspaper articles, town meeting minutes, letters from physicians. We've even got archaeological evidence that's been dug up and studied in modern times. This isn't folklore passed down through whispered campfire tales.

This is American history, plain and simple, and it's a chapter that most history classes conveniently skip right over. So settle in, get comfortable. Because we're about to spend some serious time in the graveyards of New England, and I promise you, by the time we're done, you'll never look at that part of the country the same way again. To understand the vampire panic, you first got to understand the monster that caused it.

And I'm not talking about anything supernatural. I'm talking about tuberculosis. Or, as they called it back then, consumption. Now we hear the word tuberculosis today and most of us think of it as something that's been dealt with, something from the past, and in the developed world, that's largely true. But in the 18th and 19th centuries, tuberculosis was the single deadliest disease on the planet. It killed more people than smallpox, more than cholera, more than yellow fever. At its peak in the 1800s, tuberculosis was responsible for roughly one and four deaths in Europe and America.

Let that sink in. One out of every four people who died died of this disease. Entire families were wiped out. Entire communities were decimated. And nobody. Not the doctors. Not the scientists. Not the preachers.

Nobody had any real idea what caused it or how to stop it. They called it consumption because that's exactly what it looked like. The disease consumed you. It ate you alive from the inside out. A person with tuberculosis would waste away over weeks, sometimes months, sometimes years. They'd lose weight until their bones jutted out beneath their skin. They'd develop a persistent, racking cough that would eventually bring up blood, bright red blood that stained their handkerchiefs and their bed sheets and their pillowcases.

Their skin would go pale, almost translucent. Their eyes would sink into dark hollows. Their lips and cheeks paradoxically would some, sometimes flush with a feverish red that gave them an almost ethereal beauty. The romantic poets love this look. They called it the artist's disease. Keats died of it. So did the Bronte sisters.

Edgar Allan Poe's wife, Virginia, coughed blood onto her white dress while singing at a piano, and she lingered for five years before the disease finally took her. But there was nothing romantic about it. Not really. consumption was a slow, suffocating, agonizing death. Your lungs filled with fluid. You drowned in your own blood. And the worst part, the absolute worst part,

was that it didn't just take one person. It moved through families like a chain of dominoes. A father would get sick, then a mother, then a child, then another child. One by one, the members of a household would begin to cough, to waste, to bleed, to die. and there was nothing anyone could do, but watch.

See, tuberculosis is caused by a bacterium called mycobacterium tuberculosis. We know that now. Robert Koch identified it in 1882. But before Coke's discovery, nobody had any idea what caused this thing. Germ theory hadn't been established. The concept of bacteria was essentially unknown to the general public. Doctors had their theories, bad air, an imbalance of the humors, hereditary weakness, emotional distress, but none of them were right and none of their treatments worked.

They tried everything. Mercury, arsenic, cod liver oil, bloodletting, fresh air cures, sending patients to the mountains or the desert. None of it made a damn bit of difference. And so people turned to the only other explanation that made sense to them. If the doctors couldn't explain it, maybe something else could. Here's where we need to pause and talk about what people actually believed in these communities. Because I think there's a tendency when we hear stories like this to dismiss these folks as ignorant or superstitious or backward. And I want to push back against that real hard.

These were not stupid people. These were people facing an incomprehensible crisis with no scientific framework to make sense of it. They were watching their families die, one after another, and they were desperate. Desperate people reach for whatever explanation is available to them. And the explanation that was available, the one that had been handed down through generations of oral tradition, brought over from England and Scotland and Ireland and Germany, was vampirism.

Now, I want to be clear about something. When we say vampire in the context of 19th century New England, we're not talking about Dracula. Bram Stoker wouldn't publish his novel until 1897, and the suave, aristocratic, cape-wearing vampire of popular culture didn't exist yet. The vampire of New England folk belief was something much older and much more primal. It was rooted in the folk traditions of the British Isles and Northern Europe. Traditions that went back centuries, maybe millennia.

The core idea was simple and terrifying. Sometimes after a person died, their body didn't truly die. Something remained. Something hungry. and that something would reach out from the grave and feed on the living, particularly on the people it had been closest to in life. Family members, loved ones, the people who'd cared for the dying person in their final days.

Think about that from the perspective of a farming family in rural Rhode Island or Connecticut. Your wife gets sick with consumption. She wastes away. She dies. You bury her. And then, a few weeks later, your eldest daughter starts coughing. She develops the same symptoms. She begins to waste away. Then your son.

Then your youngest. One by one, the same disease that took your wife is now taking your children. You go to the doctor and he shrugs and tells you it's consumption. There's nothing to be done. You pray to God and nothing changes. And then your neighbor or your mother or the old woman down the road tells you something. She tells you that your wife, your dead wife, is coming back at night. She's feeding on your children.

She's draining the life from them. And the only way to stop it is to dig her up and check the body. You'd think they were crazy, right? You'd dismiss it out of hand. Except your children are dying. Right now. Today. And nobody else has a better answer.

This is the world we're stepping into. A world where the boundary between life and death wasn't as clear cut as we think of it today. A world where the dead could still exert influence on the life. living. A world where a corpse that hadn't decayed properly wasn't just an oddity. It was evidence of something evil. And here's the thing that made it all so convincing. Sometimes, when they dug up these bodies, what they found seemed to confirm everything they feared. Let's talk about decomposition for a minute, because this is absolutely critical to understanding how the vampire panic perpetuated itself. When a human body is buried, it doesn't just immediately turn to dust. Decompetition

The decomposition is a complex process that's influenced by dozens of factors. The temperature of the soil, the moisture content, the type of coffin used, how deep the burial was, the person's body composition, even the time of year they were buried. In the cold, rocky soil of New England, particularly during the winter months, decomposition could be dramatically slowed. A body buried in November might look remarkably well preserved when exhumed the following March or April. The cold essentially acts as a natural refrigerator, but it's not just the preservation that startled people. It's the specific things that happen to a body during decomposition

that to an untrained eye can look downright supernatural. First, there's bloating. As bacteria break down tissue internally, they produce gases, methane, hydrogen sulfide, ammonia. These gases caused the body to swell, sometimes dramatically. A thin person who wasted away from consumption could, after several weeks in the ground, appear plump and well-fed. Their cheeks might look full, their belly might be distended. To a grieving family member who'd watched this person shrink to nothing before death, this transformation would have been shocking. It would have looked like the dead person had been eating, had been feeding. Then there's the blood. During decomposition, Red blood cells break down and release hemoglobin, which can stain the tissues and fluids of the body.

A dark, reddish-brown fluid, sometimes called purge fluid, can accumulate in the chest cavity, around the heart, and in the lungs. It can seep from the nose and mouth. If you opened up the chest of a decomposing body, you might find the heart and lungs surrounded by what appeared to be liquid blood. To a 19th century farmer who'd never taken an anatomy class, this looked exactly. exactly like what you'd expect to find inside something that had been drinking blood. And then there's the hair and nails. As the skin dehydrates and retracts after death, it pulls away from the hair follicles and the nail beds,

creating the illusion that the hair and nails have continued to grow. A dead man's stubble might look longer. A dead woman's fingernails might appear to have grown. To someone already primed to look for signs of vampirism, this was further proof that the body was still somehow alive. Put all of this together. A well-preserved body. Apparent weight gain.

Blood in the organs. Growing hair and nails. And you've got a perfect storm of apparent evidence for something unnatural. Something undead. Something that needed to be stopped. And stop it they did. In the most direct way possible. The method varied somewhat from community to community,

but the basic procedure was remarkably consistent across New England. When a family suspected that a deceased relative was feeding on the living, they would organize an exhumation. Sometimes this was a small private affair involving just the immediate family. Sometimes it was a community event, attended by dozens of people, including local officials and even physicians. In some cases, town selectmen actually authorized the exhumations. This wasn't always a clandestine middle-of-the-night operation. Sometimes it was done in broad daylight, with the full, knowledge and approval of the community. They'd dig up the suspected vampire and open the

coffin. Then they'd examine the body. They were looking for specific signs, signs that the body hadn't fully died. If the corpse appeared well preserved, if it had shifted position in the coffin, if there was blood in or around the body, if the organs, particularly the heart and lungs, appeared fresh or contained liquid blood, then the verdict was clear. This This person was a vampire. This person was feeding on the living, and something had to be done.

What they did next is the part that haunts me. In some cases, they'd simply turn the body face down in the coffin, based on the belief that a vampire that was flipped over wouldn't be able to find its way out of the grave. Stay tuned for more disturbing history. We'll be back after these messages. In other cases, they'd rearrange the bones, crossing the femurs, for instance,

or placing the skull at the feet. But the most common and most dramatic remedy was far more invasive. They'd cut open the chest. They'd remove the heart. Sometimes the lungs too. And sometimes the liver. They'd examine these organs carefully, looking for signs of fresh blood. And then they'd burn them.

Right there in the cemetery, on a flat rock or an improvised fire pit, they'd burn the organs of their dead loved one until nothing remained but ash. And sometimes, and this is the part that really gets me, They'd collect those ashes, mix them with water or medicine, and give the mixture to the sick family members to drink. The idea was that by consuming the destroyed remains of the vampire, the living victims could break the supernatural connection and recover. Now before you recoil in horror, I want you to sit with the desperation behind that act. Imagine being a father who's already buried his wife and two of his children. His remaining son is sick.

He's watched the boy grow thinner and paler every day. day. He's tried everything the doctor suggested. He's prayed until his knees are raw. And someone tells him there's one more thing he can try. Would you do it? If you believed, truly believed, that it might save your child's life. I think most of us would. I think most of us, pushed to that edge, would do things we never thought ourselves capable of. And that's the real horror of this story. Not that monsters were real, but that ordinary people driven by love grief and terror, became willing to do extraordinary things. Let's talk about some of them by name. One of the earliest documented cases of the New England Vampire Panic takes us to Exeter, Rhode Island,

sometime around 1796. And if you know anything about this topic, you know that Exeter is going to come up more than once in our story tonight. This little town in Washington County, Rhode Island, was ground zero for vampire belief in America. And the tilling has to come up. family is where many historians believe the whole thing started, or at least where it first entered the written record in a way we can trace. The story goes like this. Stukley Tillinghast was a prosperous farmer in Exeter. He had a large family. Accounts vary, but most sources say he had 14 children, which wasn't unusual for the era. By all accounts, the Tillinghast were a well-respected, hardworking family. They were part of the fabric of this small rural community.

And then, sometime in the 1790s, Stucley's daughter, Honor, got sick. Consumption. She developed the telltale cough, the wasting, the bloody spute him, and she died. The family mourned, buried her, and tried to carry on. But consumption wasn't finished with the tillinghasts, not by a long shot. After Honor's death, another of Stucley's children fell ill. Same symptoms. Same terrible progression.

That child does. died two, and then another, and another. One by one, the Tillinghast children began to sicken and die, each one following the same grim pattern. The cough, the wasting, the blood, the grave. Now here's where the story takes its turn. According to the account, Stucley Tillinghast began having a recurring dream. In this dream, he saw an orchard, his orchard, and half the trees were dead and withered.

their leaves gone, their branches bear. Night after night, the same dream visited him. Half the orchard, dead. Whether this detail is historical fact or later embellishment, we can't say for certain. But what we can say is that as the death toll in his family mounted, and it eventually reached at least five or six children, Stookley reached a breaking point.

Either on his own or at the urging of his neighbors, he made the decision to exhume the bodies of his dead children. children. They went to the cemetery, dug up the graves, and examined the remains. Most of the bodies were in advanced states of decay, bones, dust, exactly what you'd expect. But one body, honors, the first to die, was different. Her body was reportedly found to be fresh, preserved, and when they opened her up, they found what appeared to be fresh blood in her heart. They knew what they had to do. They removed Honor's heart and burned it. According to some versions of the story, the ashes were prepared as a tonic for the surviving family members who were still showing symptoms.

And as for Stucley's dream about the orchard, he'd had 14 children. By the time the disease had run its course, half of them were dead. Half the orchard, withered and bare. The dream, whether real or invented, had come true. The Tillinghast case set a pattern that would repeat itself, with variations, across New England for the next hundred years. Let's move north and east to Connecticut, to the town of Griswold, which in the early 1800s was part of the community known as Jewett City. And here we've got something that the Tillinghast case doesn't give us, hard archaeological evidence. In 1990, a group of children playing near a gravel pit in Griswold, Connecticut, stumbled onto something unexpected. Bones. Human bones. Poking out of the erroneousal

hillside. The authorities were called and what they found was a forgotten cemetery dating to the late 1700s and early 1800s, 29 burials in all. And most of them were perfectly normal. Bodies laid out in standard fashion, oriented east to west, in the typical Christian burial tradition. But one burial was different, dramatically, unmistakably different. The remains later identified through analysis as belonging to a middle-aged man who'd suffered from tuberculosis, had been rearranged. His skull had been removed from its natural position and placed on top of his crossed femur bones, arranged in the classic skull and crossbones pattern. His chest cavity showed evidence that it

had been opened and the internal organs removed. And on the lid of his coffin, someone had arranged brass tacks to spell out the initials J.B., possibly the dead man's name, though his full identity has never been conclusively established. Researchers have since proposed candidates, including a man named John Barber, though this remains speculative. The state archaeologist Nick Bellantone, who excavated the site, was initially baffled. He'd never seen anything like it. But as he researched the historical context, the picture became clear. This man, whoever J.B. was, had been subjected to a vampire ritual. His body had been dug up after burial. His organs had been removed and likely burned, and his bones had been rearranged in a pattern intended to prevent him from rising.

The skull and crossbones arrangement wasn't decorative. It was prophylactic. It was meant to keep the dead man down. The Griswold discovery was a landmark moment in the study of the New England vampire panic, because it provided physical, tangible, material proof that these rituals had actually been carried out. This wasn't just a story. This wasn't just folklore. Someone had actually dug up this man's body, opened his chest, removed his organs, and rearranged his remains, and the tuberculosis that had killed him, confirmed by lesions on his bones, explained why. The archaeological team also found evidence that several other burials in the cemetery belonged to individuals who died of tuberculosis.

The disease had swept through this community, just as it had swept through so many others, and the living had responded in the only way they knew how. J.B.'s remains were eventually reburied with dignity, but his story, the story of a man who was accused of being a vampire a century and a half after his death, not by superstitious peasants in some far-off land, but by the scientific analysis of his own bones, remains one of the most haunting chapters of this entire phenomenon. Let's head north now to the Green Mountains of Vermont.

It's 1793. And we're in the town of Woodstock, a place that today is known for its covered bridges and quaint New England charm. But in the late 18th century, Woodstock was the site of one of the more dramatic vampire exhumations on record. The Burton family was being ravaged by consumption. The first to die was a young man, one of Captain Isaac Burton's relatives, though the exact family relationships are somewhat muddied by the passage of time and incomplete records. After his death, others in the family began to sicken. The pattern was by now terrifyingly familiar.

The slow wasting, the cough, the blood, the progression from one family member to the next. What makes the Woodstock case notable isn't just the exhumation itself. It's the scale of the community's involvement and the matter-of-fact way it was documented. The townspeople didn't sneak out to the cemetery under cover of darkness. This was a public event. The body of the first victim was exhumed, the chest was opened, and the heart, liver, and lungs were removed and burned in an iron pot on the town green. Not some remote hillside, not some hidden clearing in the woods, the very center of town,

where everyone could see. A correspondent from the time later wrote about the event, describing how a large crowd gathered to watch. There was no shame in it, no secrecy. This was considered a medical procedure, a necessary, intervention to save the lives of the remaining family members. The fact that it involved cutting out a dead man's heart and burning it in a pot in front of the general store didn't strike these people as macabre or outrageous. It struck them as sensible. The Vermont

cases in general are interesting because they show us that vampire belief wasn't confined to Rhode Island, which sometimes gets treated as the sole epicenter of the panic. Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Connecticut and Maine. The belief exceeds. extended across the entire region. It followed the same trade routes, the same family connections, the same patterns of migration that moved people around New England in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. And it followed tuberculosis, because tuberculosis was everywhere. Staying in Vermont for a moment, let's talk about Rachel Harris. Her case is one of the earliest on record, dating to around 1790, and it illustrates just how deeply the vampire belief was

intertwined with the institution of marriage and family. Rachel Harris was a young woman living in Manchester, Vermont. She married Captain Isaac Burton, different Captain Burton from the Woodstock case. Captain was a common title in these small communities. Actually, there's some historical confusion here, and some researchers have argued these cases may be connected or conflated. Regardless, the essential story is well documented. Rachel married and shortly afterward was diagnosed with,

consumption. She deteriorated rapidly and died. Her husband devastated, eventually remarried, and then his second wife began showing the same symptoms, the same cough, the same wasting, the same slow, terrible decline. The community's diagnosis was clear. Rachel was reaching out from the grave. She was jealous of her replacement. She was feeding on the new wife, draining her life force, pulling her down into the earth to join her. The solution was equally clear. Rachel's body was exhumed. Her organs were removed and burned. And, according to some accounts, the ashes were administered to the ailing second wife. Did it work? The accounts are mixed. Some say the second wife recovered temporarily. Others say she eventually died as well.

But the community's faith in the ritual wasn't shaken either way. If the patient recovered, the ritual had worked. If the patient died, well, the ritual had been performed too late, or the vampire's hold had been too strong. The logic was unfalsifiable, which is part of why it persisted for so long. This case also highlights something important about the gender dynamics of the vampire panic. While both men and women were accused of being vampires, there's a striking number of cases involving young women. Some scholars have speculated about the role of gender anxiety in these accusations. The idea that female sexuality, female desire, female agency, even in death, was perceived as threatening and needed to be controlled. I think there's something to that analysis,

though I'd also note that young women were particularly vulnerable to tuberculosis for a variety of biological and social reasons. So the demographics of the accusations may simply reflect the demographics of the disease. Here's something that doesn't get talked about enough when people discuss the vampire panic, the role of physicians. Because doctors weren't absent from these events. They were right there, sometimes participating, sometimes protesting, and often caught in an impossible position between their training and their community's expectations. In the 1800s, being a doctor in rural New England wasn't what we think of today. There was no American Medical Association setting standards until 1847. There were no licensing requirements in most

states. A man could call himself a doctor with minimal formal training, maybe an apprenticeship with another physician, maybe a year or two at a medical school, maybe just a shelf full of books, and a willingness to bleed people with leeches. The quality of medical care varied wildly from one community to the next, and even the best trained physicians of the era had essentially no effective treatments for tuberculosis. Think about what that meant for a doctor in a town where consumption was ravaging a family. He'd be called to the bedside. He'd examine the patient.

He'd recognized the symptoms immediately. He'd seen them dozens of times before, and he'd know, with near certainty, that the patient was going to die. But what could he say? What could he offer? He might prescribe rest, fresh air, a change of climate,

cod liver oil, maybe mercury or arsenic compounds, which were commonly used and completely useless. He might bleed the patient, which would actually make things worse. He had nothing, and the family knew it. So when the community turned to the vampire remedy, what was the doctor supposed to do? Some physicians actively participated in exhumations. We know this for a fact.

Dr. Harold Metcalfe was present at Mercy Brown's exhumation and personally performed the autopsy. Stay tuned for more disturbing history. We'll be back after these messages. Other physicians are documented at earlier exhumations in Vermont and Connecticut. They examined the bodies. They gave their professional opinions on the condition of the organs. And sometimes, even when they didn't believe in vampires, they went along with the procedure because they understood

that it gave the family something that medicine couldn't. Hope. Other doctors pushed back. There are accounts of physicians arguing against exhumations, writing letters to newspapers denouncing the practice, and attempting to educate their communities about the natural processes of decomposition. But these doctors were often fighting an uphill battle. When a family had already lost three members to consumption, and the fourth was fading fast,

the abstract arguments of a physician who couldn't save anyone carried far less weight than the concrete actions of a community willing to dig up a grave and burn a heart. And here's the uncomfortable truth that some of these doctors must have grappled with. The vampire ritual, insane as it sounds, was no less effective than anything in their medical bag. Neither mercury nor heart burning cured tuberculosis. But at least the heart burning came with a community rallying around the sick person, a shared sense of purpose, and the powerful psychological comfort of believing that something was being done. You could argue, and some historians have argued,

that the vampire ritual was, paradoxically, better medicine than what most doctors were. offering. Not because it worked, but because it addressed the emotional and social dimensions of the crisis in ways that 19th century medicine could not. This puts the entire vampire panic in a different light. It wasn't just superstition versus science. It was one failed approach to disease versus another failed approach to disease. Science would eventually win, of course, but not until Coke, and not until antibiotics, and not until decades after the last heart was burned in a New England cemetery. By the early to mid-1800s, the vampire exhumation tradition had become deeply entrenched across rural New England. And I want to emphasize that word,

rural, because one of the defining characteristics of the vampire panic is that it was overwhelmingly a phenomenon of small, isolated farming communities. The cities, Boston, Providence, Hartford, were largely untouched by it, not because they didn't have tuberculosis. They had plenty, but they also had access to medical institutions, to newspapers, to the emerging scientific consensus about disease. Rural communities, by contrast, were often decades behind the cities in terms of medical knowledge. They relied on folk tradition, on the wisdom of elders, on practices handed down through

generations. And those folk traditions included the vampire belief. It's important to understand that these exhumations weren't random, panic-driven, events. They followed a recognizable pattern, almost a protocol. First, a family member would die of consumption. Then, others in the family would begin to sicken. The community would discuss the situation, often at length. A consensus would form, or at least a strong suspicion, that the dead person was responsible. The family would either decide on their own to exhum the body or would be encouraged to do so by neighbors, community leaders, or local folk healers. The exhumation would

take place, the body would be examined, and if signs of vampirism were found, the appropriate ritual, usually the burning of the heart, would be performed. Sometimes the exhumation was conducted by the family alone. Sometimes a doctor was present. Sometimes the town selectmen authorized it. Sometimes a local minister participated or at least gave his tacit approval. The level of official involvement varied, but the procedure was remarkably standardized, which tells us that this wasn't a one-off folk belief, but a deeply rooted cultural practice with its own rules and norms. Throughout the early and mid-1800s, cases popped up across the region with disturbing regularity.

In Exeter, Rhode Island, multiple families conducted exhumations over the decades. In eastern Connecticut, particularly in the towns along the Thames River Valley, the practice was well documented. In the hill towns of Vermont and western Massachusetts, cases were reported with enough frequency to suggest that vampire belief was essentially a standard part of the folk medical toolkit. And all the while, tuberculosis kept killing. Through the 1830s, the 1840s, the 1850s, the death toll climbed. The disease didn't discreet. The disease didn't discreculous. It took the young and the old, the rich and the poor, the pious and the profane. And every death, every cluster of deaths within a single family,

was another potential trigger for the vampire belief to reassert itself. The Civil War years, 1861 to 1865, brought a brief respite from the vampire panic, if only because the entire nation was preoccupied with a different kind of horror. But they also brought something else. a massive spike in tuberculosis. The crowded camps, the filthy hospitals, the malnutrition and exhaustion of soldiers on both sides created perfect conditions for the disease to spread.

Men who'd been healthy when they marched off to war came home carrying the bacterium in their lungs. They came home to their families in small New England towns, and they brought the white death with them. The post-Civil War years saw a resurgence of tuberculosis across rural New England, and with it, a resurgence of the vampire belief. The cases from this period are among the best documented,

because by the 1870s and 1880s, local newspapers had become more widespread and more willing to report on these events, sometimes with sympathy, sometimes with mockery, but always with a kind of fascinated horror. It's during this period that we get some of the most detailed and most famous cases of the entire vampire panic. And the most famous of all, the one that's become the poster child for the entire phenomenon,

happened in a town we've already visited tonight. Exeter, Rhode Island. Again. If there's a single name that's become synonymous with the New England vampire panic, it's Mercy Lena Brown. And her story is one that I could tell you in five minutes or five hours, because every detail of it is layered with meaning and significance and heartbreak. But I'll try to find a middle ground,

because Mercy deserves to have her story told properly. The Brown family lived on a farm just outside Exeter Rhode Island. George Brown was the patriarch, a hardworking farmer with a wife, Mary Eliza, and several children. They were, by all accounts, a typical New England farming family. Decent, respectable, unremarkable. The kind of family that wouldn't normally warrant a single line in any history book. And then consumption came for them. The first to fall was Mary Eliza, George's wife.

She was diagnosed with consumption in the late 1870s and died on December 8, 1883. She was 36 years old. The family mourned, buried her in the Chestnut Hill Cemetery behind the Baptist Church, and tried to move forward. They didn't get the chance. Just a few months later, George and Mary Eliza's eldest daughter, Mary Olive, who was about 20 years old at the time, developed the same. symptoms. The cough, the wasting, the blood. She died on June 6, 1884, just six months after her mother.

She was buried beside Mary Eliza in the same cemetery. Now George Brown had a son named Edwin. Edwin was a young man, strong and apparently healthy. But sometime in 1890 or 1891, Edwin began to cough. He began to lose weight. The diagnosis was unmistakable. Edwin had consumption. George was desperate. He'd already lost his wife and his eldest daughter. He couldn't lose his son, too. Edwin's condition deteriorated to the point where, on the advice of his doctor, he traveled to Colorado Springs, Colorado, hoping that the dry mountain air would help his lungs. This was a common prescription in those days, the so-called climate cure, and for a time, it seemed to help. Edwin stabilized, but he didn't recover, and eventually he came back home to Exeter, still sick, still wasting, still dying.

And then, while Edwin was away in Colorado, another member of the family fell ill. George's younger daughter, Mercy Lena Brown, developed consumption in late 1891. And unlike her mother and sister, whose illness had progressed slowly over months, Mercy's disease was swift and savage. She was what doctors would have called a galloping consumption case. The disease moved through her with terrifying speed. By January 1892, she was dead. She was 19 years old.

Mercy Lena Brown was buried on January 18, 1892, in the Chestnut Hill Cemetery, alongside her mother and sister. And then the whispers started. The whispers were the same ones that had echoed through New England communities for a hundred years. Something unnatural was happening to the Brown family. Three women dead, and now the son. The last surviving child was dying too. The dead were feeding on the living.

One of the dead, maybe all of them, was a vampire. George Brown, to his credit, was reportedly reluctant. He was a practical man, not particularly given to superstition. But the pressure from his neighbors was intense. Edwin was getting worse by the day. The community's concern for the young man was genuine, and their belief in the vampire remedy was sincere. They urged George to exhum the bodies of his wife and daughters.

They told him it was Edwin's only chance. And so, on March 17, 1892, a cold gray Rhode Island Day, a group of men gathered at the Chestnut Hill Cemetery. Among them was George Brown, several neighbors and, critically, a local physician named Dr. Harold Metcalf. Dr. Metcalf's presence is important because he later provided a detailed account of what happened, giving us one of the most complete first-hand records of a vampire exhumation in American history. They started with Mary Eliza.

Her body had been in the ground for over eight years. When they opened the coffin, they found exactly what you'd expect. A skeleton. Bones. Nothing unusual. Nothing to suggest anything other than a normal natural decomposition. Next they moved to Mary Olive, who'd been dead for nearly eight years as well. same result bones dust a body long returned to the earth and then they came to mercy mercy had been dead for only about two months

and here's a crucial detail that sometimes gets lost in the retelling mercy hadn't been buried in the ground because she died in the middle of a new england winter when the ground was frozen solid and digging a proper grave was nearly impossible her body had been placed in an above-ground crypt in the cemetery essentially she'd been stored in a stone building and freezing temperatures for two months. When they opened the crypt and examined her body, they found it remarkably well preserved. Her skin hadn't fully decomposed. She appeared to have shifted slightly in her coffin. And when Dr. Metcalfe cut open her chest, yes, the doctor himself performed this part,

he found that her heart and lungs still contained liquid blood. Dark, clotted, but unmistakable. Blood. to the men gathered in that cemetery, this was all the proof they needed. Mercy Lena Brown was a vampire. Mercy was the one draining the life from her brother Edwin. Dr. Metcalf, it should be noted, didn't share this interpretation. He later stated clearly that the condition of Mercy's body was entirely consistent

with a recent death followed by cold storage. There was nothing supernatural about it. The preservation, the blood, the apparent freshness, all perfectly natural under the circumstances. But his medical opinion was essentially irrelevant. The community had seen what they needed to see. They removed Mercy's heart and liver. They burned them on a nearby rock.

The ashes were collected, mixed with water, and given to Edwin Brown to drink. It didn't save him. Edwin Brown died on May 2, 1892, less than two months after the exhumation. He was 24 years old. What happened next is what elevates the Mercy Brown case from a local curiosity to a national sensation. Because in 1892, unlike in 1796 or 1830, there were reporters paying attention.

The story of Mercy Brown's exhumation was picked up by local newspapers almost immediately. The Providence Journal ran an account. Other Rhode Island papers followed, and then the story jumped to the National Wire Services. Within weeks, newspapers across the country were running stories about the vampire of Exeter Rhode Island, The headlines ranged from the breathless to the contemptuous.

Big City Papers treated it as evidence of the benighted ignorance of rural New Englanders. Editorial writers clucked their tongues and wondered how such primitive superstitions could survive in a modern, enlightened age. The coverage was, to put it bluntly, merciless. No pun intended. The people of Exeter were mocked, ridiculed, held up as examples of everything backward about rural America. George Brown was portrayed as either a dupe or a lunatic. The neighbors who'd participated in the exhumation were characterized as gullible primitives. Nobody bothered to ask what it felt like to watch four members of your family die of an incurable disease.

Nobody bothered to ask what you'd be willing to try if your son were coughing up blood and wasting to nothing before your eyes. The Mercy Brown case became almost overnight the most famous vampire story in American history. and it remains so to this day. You can still visit Mercy's grave in the Chestnut Hill Cemetery, behind the Baptist Church in Exeter. It's become something of a pilgrimage site. Stay tuned for more disturbing history. We'll be back after these messages.

People leave coins on her headstone and on Halloween. The cemetery is visited by crowds of curiosity seekers and ghost hunters. There's even a local legend that Bram Stoker, who was writing Dracula around this time, was influenced by the newspaper accounts of the, the Mercy Brown case. Researchers have found a clipping about the brown exhumation in Stoker's personal papers, so there may be some truth to that claim. But here's what I find most poignant about the whole thing. In all the coverage, in all the sensation and the ridicule and the fascination,

Mercy herself, the actual person, the 19-year-old girl who died of tuberculosis and whose body was desecrated by people who believed they were saving a life, Mercy herself gets laid. lost. She becomes a character in a horror story, a footnote in the history of superstition, a tourist attraction. And she was none of those things. She was someone's daughter, someone's sister. She was a teenager who got sick and died, and then had her heart cut out and burned. That's not horror fiction. That's just horror. The great irony of the Mercy Brown case is its timing. It happened in 1892. Robert Koch had identified the tuberculosis bacteria, in 1882, a full decade earlier.

The germ theory of disease was rapidly becoming the accepted scientific paradigm. Koch himself would win the Nobel Prize in 1905 for his work on tuberculosis. The scientific answer to the question that had tormented New England for a century, what's causing this disease and how can we stop it, was already known. It just hadn't reached everyone yet. And that's a theme that runs through the entire history of the vampirms. panic. The gap between scientific knowledge and popular understanding. The lag between what the experts knew and what ordinary people in isolated communities believed. Koch published his findings in

Berlin. The news would have been reported in major medical journals and big city newspapers. But how long did it take for that information to filter down to a farming family in rural Rhode Island? Years. Decades. And even when it did arrive, it arrived in competition with generations of folk belief that had, from the community's perspective, a proven track record. Because here's the other thing. Sometimes the patients who were given the ash and water treatment after a vampire exhumation actually did recover. Not because of the ritual, obviously, but because tuberculosis is a disease with a variable course. Some people do recover on their own, at least temporarily. Their immune systems fight back. They go into remission. And when that

recovery happened to coincide with a vampire ritual, the community naturally attributed the recovery to the ritual. It was confirmation bias on a grand scale, and it was powerful enough to sustain the belief for over a hundred years. The gradual spread of germ theory, the establishment of public health infrastructure, the introduction of tuberculosis sanatoriums in the late 1800s and early 1900s, and eventually the development of effective antibiotic treatments in the mid-20th century. These were the things that finally killed the vampire. Not garlic or crosses or wooden stakes, but microscopes and antibiotics and public education campaigns. The vampire died not because anyone drove a stake through its heart,

but because science finally provided a better explanation for what was happening, and a better solution. The Mercy Brown exhumation in 1892 is generally considered the last well-documented case of the New England vampire panic, though some researchers have identified scattered reports of similar practices continuing into the early 1900s in very isolated communities. But by and large, the 1890s marked the end of the era. The vampires were put to rest, not by ritual, but by reason. Before we wrap up tonight, I want to take a few minutes to talk about some of the other cases that don't always make it into the popular accounts of the vampire panic.

Because Mercy Brown gets all the attention, and rightly so. Her case is the most thoroughly documented and the most dramatic. But she was far from alone. The landscape of 19th century New England is littered with vampire stories. Some well documented, some barely remembered, some surviving only as fragments in local histories and cemetery records. There's the case of Nellie Vaughn, also of Exeter, Rhode Island. Nellie died in 1889 at the age of 19, just a few years before Mercy Brown,

and her grave in the plain meeting house cemetery became the subject of vampire legends. For years, locals claimed that nothing would grow on Nellie's grave, that the grass refused to take root on the soil above her body. Her headstone reads, I am waiting and watching for you. A common Victorian epitaph that, taken out of context, sounds undeniably creepy. Whether Nellie was actually subjected to a vampire exhumation is debated, but her grave has become, like mercies, a destination for those drawn to the darker corners of

New England history. There's the case of Frederick Ransom of South Woodstock, Vermont, who died of consumption in 1817. Frederick was a Dartmouth college student whose father, faced with the progressive sickening of his remaining family, had Frederick's body exhumed and his heart burned on a blacksmith's forge. According to the account, the heart reportedly didn't burn easily, which was taken as further evidence of its vampiric nature. The father inhaled the smoke from the burning heart, believing it would protect him from the disease. There's the case of Lemuel Ray of Jewett City, Connecticut, who died around 1845. After his death, his family began dying of consumption one by one.

The surviving family members exhumed Lemuel's body and several others, found what they believed to be signs of vampirism, and performed the burning ritual. The case was documented by a local historian and later corroborated by the archaeological discoveries at the Griswold site we discussed earlier. There's the curious case from the town of Belchertown, Massachusetts, documented in the 1700s, involving a family that not only exhumed their dead, but reportedly reburied them with bricks placed in their mouths. A practice also documented in European vampire burials, where the brick was intended to prevent the dead from chewing through their burial shrouds. which was believed to be how they consumed the life force of the living, and there are dozens more, scores probably. For every case that made it into a newspaper or a town record, there were likely several that were never written down at all,

carried out quietly by families, in private cemeteries on private land, with no witnesses beyond those who participated. The true scope of the vampire panic may never be fully known. There's an aspect of the vampire panic that's hard to talk about, but impossible to ignore, and that's the impact on children. Because tuberculosis didn't spare the young, and neither did the vampire belief. In many of the documented cases, the suspected vampires were young people, teenagers, young adults, sometimes even children.

Mercy Brown was 19. Frederick Ransom was a college student. Honor Tillinghast was likely in her teens or early 20s, and the surviving family members who were given the ash and water treatment were often children themselves, kids who'd already endured the trauma of watching their siblings and parents die, and who were now being told that the dead were coming for them too. Try to imagine being a child in one of these families. You've watched your mother die. You've watched your older sister die. You're coughing now yourself, and you know what the cough means. And then one morning, your father and a group of men from town go out to the cemetery. You might not fully understand what

they're doing, but you know it involves your mother's grave. They come back hours later, solemn and quiet, and they give you something to drink. It's a bitter, grayish liquid, and they tell you it'll make you better. They tell you it'll stop the sickness. What was in that cup? The burned remains of your mother's heart, mixed with water. Now, I don't want to be gratuitously graphic here, but I think it's important that we sit with that reality for a moment, because it illustrates the extremity of the situation these families were in. No parent gives their child something like that unless they're truly, absolutely, completely out of options. No father exumes his daughter's body and burns her heart unless he believes, with every fiber of his being, that it's the only way

to save his son. The cruelty wasn't casual. It was born of a love so fierce and a desperation so total that it overrode every instinct of propriety, every convention of respect for the dead, every shred of squeamishness about what they were doing, and the children, the ones who survived, carried those memories for the rest of their lives. We don't have many first-person accounts from survivors of the vampire panic, but we can imagine the psychological weight of having consumed your siblings' ashes, of knowing that your family dug up your mother's grave and cut out her heart, of growing up in a community where everyone knew what had happened and nobody talked about it. The silence around these events, the shame that eventually settled over them as scientific understanding

advanced, and the old beliefs were discredited, that silence must have been its own kind of burden. There are family historians and genealogists in New England who've discovered to their surprise that their ancestors were involved in vampire exhumations. Some of them have spoken publicly about the experience of uncovering this history. The mixture of fascination, discomfort, and unexpected compassion that comes from learning that your great-great-grandfather once burned a dead woman's heart in a cemetery because he thought it would save his family. It's a lot to process, and it connects us in a very direct and personal way to a past that's not as distant as we'd like to believe. So what do we make of all this? How do we understand the vampire panic from our vantage point

here in the 21st century. I think the first thing we have to do is resist the temptation to be smug about it. It's easy to look back at these people and shake our heads and say, how could they believe something so ridiculous? But that reaction misses the point entirely. These weren't foolish people. They were people operating within a particular cultural framework, using the tools and knowledge available to them,

in response to a genuine and terrifying crisis. Think about it this way. tuberculosis was killing people at a rate that we today would find almost incomprehensible. Imagine a disease that kills one in four people. Imagine watching it move through your family, taking one person after another while everyone around you. Doctors, ministers, government officials tells you there's nothing that can be done. You'd be desperate. You'd be terrified. And you'd reach for any explanation, any solution that offered even a glimmer of hope.

The vampire belief filled a need that science at that point could not. It provided an explanation for why the disease clustered in families. The dead were feeding on the living. It provided a mechanism, the supernatural drain of life force from one person to another. And most importantly, it provided a remedy, a specific, concrete action that a family could take to try to save their loved ones. In a world where doctors could offer nothing but platitudes and useless treatments, the vampire ritual at least offered the illusion of agency.

It gave people something to do. And in the face of helplessness, the ability to act, even if the action is futile, is profoundly comforting. There's also a social dimension to the vampire panic that's worth exploring. In small, tight-knit communities

where everyone knew everyone, disease and death were communal experiences. When a family was struck by consumption, the entire community felt the impact. The vampire exhumation was in many cases a communal response to a communal crisis. It brought people together. It gave the community a shared narrative, a story about what was happening and why, and it gave them a shared ritual, a way to collectively confront the threat,

and symbolically at least defeat it. In that sense, the vampire panic has more in common with other communal responses to crisis, from plague-era flagellation processions to modern-day conspiracy theories than it does with individual superstition. It was a cultural phenomenon, not a personal delusion. And it persisted because it was embedded in the social fabric of these communities, passed down from generation to generation, reinforced by each new outbreak of disease.

I'd be remiss if I didn't talk about the deeper roots of the New England vampire belief, because it didn't spring up out of nowhere. The people who settled New England, the English, the Scots-Irish, the Germans, the Dutch, brought their folklore with them. And vampire-like beliefs are among the oldest and most widespread folk beliefs in human history. In Eastern Europe, vampire belief was so pervasive and so deeply entrenched that it prompted official government responses. In the 18th century, the Austro-Hungarian Empire dispatched military surgeons

to investigate reports of vampirism in civilization. Serbia and other Balkan territories. These investigations produced official reports, bureaucratic documents, stamped and sealed, that described in clinical detail the exhumation of suspected vampires, the condition of their bodies, and the rituals performed to neutralize them. The case of Arnold Powell, a Serbian soldier who was accused of becoming a vampire

after his death in 1726, prompted an investigation that resulted in one of the most famous documents in the history of vampirology, the Visum at Repertum, assigned report by military doctors who examined the exhumed bodies and found them to be in the characteristic state of vampiric preservation. The New England belief drew on these same deep wells of European folk tradition, filtered through the specific cultural lens of Anglo-American Protestantism. The New England vampire was less elaborate than its Eastern European counterpart. There was no garlic, no holy water, no wooden stakes. The ritual was simpler, more pragmatic, more American, if you will. Stay tuned for more disturbing history. We'll be back after these messages.

Dig up the body, check the organs, burn the heart. Practical, direct, no frills. It reflected the character of the people who practiced it. Practical, hardworking, no-nonsense Yankees who approached even their supernatural beliefs with a kind of grim efficiency. But the underlying logic was the same. The dead could harm the living, and the living had both the right and the responsibility to stop them. In recent decades, the archaeological record has added a fascinating new dimension to our understanding of the vampire panic. Beyond the Griswold discovery we discussed earlier, researchers have identified several other burial sites across New England that show evidence of anti-vampire practices.

In some cases, bodies have been found buried face down. a practice documented across many cultures as a way to prevent the dead from rising. In other cases, bodies have been found with heavy stones placed on their chests, apparently to weigh them down and keep them in their graves. In still other cases, skeletal remains show evidence of post-mortem chest incisions, consistent with the removal of organs. These discoveries are important because they expand our understanding of the geographic and temporal scope of the vampire panic.

The written record, newspaper accounts, letters, town records gives us a certain picture. But the archaeological record suggests that the practice was even more widespread than the written sources indicate. For every exhumation that was reported in a newspaper, there may have been several that left no written trace, only the physical evidence in the bones themselves. Bellantone himself has said that the Griswold discovery changed his entire understanding of early American burial practices. He'd spent years excavating colonial-era cemeteries and had never encountered anything like the J.B. burial. It forced him to reconsider how many other cemeteries across New England might contain similar evidence. Evidence that's been sitting in the ground,

undiscovered and unexamined, for 200 years. Modern forensic analysis has also helped researchers confirm that tuberculosis was almost always the underlying cause of death in vampire cases. The skeletal lesions left by chronic tuberculosis infection are distinctive and well understood, and they've been identified in remains from multiple vampire burial sites. This confirms what historians have long suspected, that the vampire panic was at its core, a folk response to tuberculosis, and that the two phenomena were inextricably linked. You can't tell this story properly without mentioning Michael Bell. If there's a single person most responsible for bringing the New England vampire panic out of obscurity

and into the light of serious historical scholarship, it's this guy. Bell is a folklorist, a Rhode Island folklorist as it happens, which gives him a kind of poetic connection to the subject. And he spent decades tracking down every case of vampire exhumation he could find in the historical record. His book, Food for the Dead, on the Trail of New England's vampires, in 2001 is the definitive work on the subject. It's a remarkable piece of research, meticulous, exhaustive, and deeply humane. Bell didn't approach his subjects with condescension or mockery. He approached them with curiosity and compassion. He tracked down

cemetery records, town meeting minutes, personal letters, newspaper clippings, and oral histories. He visited gravesites. He interviewed descendants of families involved in the exhumations. He pieced together a picture of the vampire panic that was far more complex, more widespread, and more understandable than anyone had previously realized. What Bell found was staggering. He documented at least 80 cases of vampire-related exhumations or rituals across New England, spanning roughly a century and a half, and he was the first to point out that this number almost certainly represents only a fraction of the actual total.

Since many exhumations would have taken place in private family cemetery, with no witnesses and no written record. Bell also mapped the cases geographically, showing how the vampire belief followed specific patterns of settlement and migration. Communities with strong ties to certain parts of England and Scotland were more likely to practice the ritual. The belief traveled along kinship networks. If your cousin in the next town over had performed an exhumation

and believed it worked, you were more likely to try it yourself when consumption came knocking at your door. It was a social phenomenon as much as a supernatural one, transmitted through the same channels of gossip, family connection, and community solidarity that transmitted every other piece of folk knowledge in these tightly knit rural societies. Bill's work transformed the academic understanding of the vampire panic. Before his research, most historians treated the exhumations as isolated incidents, bizarre anomalies in an otherwise rational culture. Bill showed that they were nothing of the kind. They were a systematic, widespread, deeply rooted cultural practice, with its own internal logic and its own set of rules.

They were in their own way, as organized and as rational as any other folk medical tradition. And here's the part that really stuck with me. Bill found that in many cases, the families who'd performed the rituals weren't ashamed of what they'd done. They didn't hide it. They talked about it openly within their communities.

It was only later, as scientific understanding advanced and the old beliefs were discredited, that the shame set in. That's when the stories started to be suppressed, forgotten, buried, if you'll pardon the expression, alongside the bodies themselves. Bell's work gave those stories back to the light, and in doing so, he gave us something invaluable, a window into the inner life of communities that we'd otherwise know only as names on census records and dates on headstones. The New England vampire panic is in many ways a forgotten chapter of American history.

It doesn't appear in most textbooks. It's not taught in most schools. When it does come up, it's usually treated as a curiosity, a weird, slightly embarrassing footnote to the grand narrative of American progress and enlightenment. But I think it deserves more than that. I think it deserves to be remembered, fully, honestly, and with compassion. because it tells us something important about who we are as human beings. Not who we were, who we are.

We like to think that we're rational creatures, that we make decisions based on evidence and logic, that we've moved beyond superstition and fear. But the truth is, when we're scared, truly scared, existentially scared, we're capable of believing almost anything, we're capable of doing almost anything. The parents who dug up their children's graves in 19th century, England weren't fundamentally different from us. They were us. They were parents who loved their

children and were terrified of losing them. They were spouses who couldn't bear to watch their partners die. They were communities that refused to sit idle in the face of catastrophe. And I think there's something uncomfortably familiar about the dynamics of the vampire panic when we look at our own world. The tendency to seek simple explanations for complex problems. The tendency to embrace folk remedies when mainstream medicine seems powerless. The tendency to scapegoat, to identify an enemy, even an impossible one, because fighting an enemy feels better than fighting nothing at all. The gap between scientific knowledge and popular belief. The way fear can override reason. The way love can drive us to desperate acts. These aren't relics of a primitive past. These are

permanent features of human nature. And the vampire panic reminds us. of that in the most visceral way possible. If you ever find yourself in southern Rhode Island, and I hope you do, because it's a beautiful country, take a drive out to Exeter. It's a quiet town, mostly farmland and forest, with a population that's still only a few thousand. Not much has changed, at least on the surface,

since the days of the Browns and the Tillinghasts. Drive out to the Chestnut Hill Cemetery, behind the Old Baptist Church. It's a small cemetery, up on a hill surrounded by stone walls and old trees. The headstones are weathered and tilted, some of them barely legible. It's the kind of cemetery you'd drive right past without noticing, unless you knew what you were looking for.

Mercy Brown's grave is in the back, near the far wall. It's a simple headstone, modest, unassuming, like the woman it commemorates. But you'll know it when you see it, because it's the one with coins on top. visitors leave them, pennies mostly, sometimes quarters or dimes. I'm not sure when the tradition started or what it signifies, but there's something touching about it, something that suggests that people haven't forgotten mercy, even if they don't quite know what to make of her story. Nearby you'll find the graves of Mary Eliza and Mary Olive. George Brown's grave is there too, and Edwins, the whole family, together in death as they

were in life and in suffering. Stand there for a moment if you go. Stand there and think about what happened in that place. Think about the desperation. Think about the grief. Think about the cold March day in 1892 when a group of men opened a crypt and cut out a girl's heart because they believed it was the only way to save a young man's life. Think about the fact that it didn't work. Think about the fact that they tried anyway. And then think about what you do if it were your family. if it were your child. If nobody had a better answer, I think you might surprise yourself.

I want to leave you tonight with a few thoughts, not conclusions exactly, because I don't think this story lends itself to neat conclusions. More like threads. Things I keep pulling on in my mind, long after the research is done and the books are closed. The first thought is about fear. We live in a culture that's profoundly uncomfortable with fear,

particularly with the kind of fear that doesn't have a clear, rational solution. We want to believe that every problem has a fix, that every disease has a cure, that if we just know enough, study enough, invest enough, we can protect ourselves and the people we love from anything. And most of the time that belief serves us well. It drives scientific progress. It builds hospitals and funds research. It's the engine behind some of humanity's greatest achievements.

But sometimes it fails us. Sometimes we face something that we can't fix, can't cure, can't explain. And in those moments, we're not so different from Stukley Tillinghast, standing in his orchard, watching his trees die one by one. We reach for explanations. We reach for solutions. We reach for anything.

And sometimes what we reach for looks in hindsight, a lot like burning a heart in a cemetery. Think about the early days. of the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s, when fear of the disease led to the ostracism and persecution of entire communities. Think about the anti-vaccination movement, which has its roots in the same kind of folk medical tradition that sustained the vampire panic, a distrust of official medicine, a reliance on community wisdom, a conviction that the authorities are either lying or incompetent. Think about the conspiracy theories that exploded during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The wild, desperate, sometimes dangerous attempts to explain a crisis that felt for many people, utterly incomprehensible. I'm not drawing equivalences here. I'm drawing parallels. The specific beliefs change. The underlying psychology doesn't. When people are scared, when people are suffering, when the institutions they've relied on seem unable to help, people improvise, they innovate, they reach back into the deep wells of cultural

memory and pull out whatever they can find. Sometimes what they find is useful. Sometimes it's harmless, and sometimes it involves digging up a grave. My second thought is about grief, because underneath all the sensational details, the exhumations, the burnings, the ash and water tonics. There's a river of grief running through this entire story that's almost unbearable to contemplate. Every single case of the New England vampire panic started with a death. Often multiple deaths. Parents burying children. Husbands burying wives.

Siblings burying siblings. The kind of grief that hollows you out. That makes the world feel thin and unreal. That makes you capable of things you'd never have imagined. George Brown didn't exhume his daughter's body because he was superstitious. He did it because he'd already buried three members of his family, and his son was dying and nobody. not the doctors, not the ministers, not God himself, seemed willing or able to help.

The vampire ritual wasn't an expression of ignorance. It was an expression of love. Ferocious, desperate, irrational love. The kind of love that says, I will do anything. I will cross any line. I will desecrate a grave and burn a heart and feed the ashes to my dying child if there is even the smallest chance, the most infinitesimal possibility that it might save him.

That's not ignorance. That's the most human thing in the world. And my final thought is about memory, about what we remember and what we choose to forget. The New England vampire panic has been, for most of its history, a forgotten chapter of American life. It doesn't fit the narrative we like to tell about ourselves. The narrative of progress, of enlightenment,

of a nation that left the superstitions of the old world behind and built something new and rational and modern on this side of the Atlantic. The vampire panic is an inconvenient reminder that the old beliefs traveled with us, that they lived in our soil and our bones and our blood long after we'd officially left them behind. But I think there's value in remembering. Not to mock or to judge, but to understand. To remind ourselves that the line between reason and superstition

is thinner than we'd like to believe, that the people who burned hearts in New England cemeteries were not fundamentally different from us, that given the right circumstances, the right combination of fear and grief and helplessness, we might do the same. History isn't just a record of what happened. It's a mirror,

and the reflection we see in the vampire panic isn't always comfortable, but it's honest, and I think honesty, even when it's disturbing, especially when it's disturbing, is worth pursuing. That's going to do it for tonight, folks. The New England Vampire Panic. A century of love and death and desperation and disease

played out in the quiet cemeteries of rural America, among people who were just trying to save the ones they loved. If you've made it this far, I appreciate you sticking with me through a long one. I know this was a heavy episode, but I think Mercy Brown and the Tillinghast children and J.B. from Griswold and Frederick Ransom from Woodstock and all the others. Named and unnamed. Remembered and forgotten. I think they deserve to have their stories told.

Not as horror stories. Not as curiosities. But as what they are. Human stories. Stories about what we do when we're pushed to the edge. Stories about the darkness that lives not in our graves, but in the spaces between what we know and what we fear. Until next time, everyone. Stay curious, stay skeptical. And maybe, just to be safe, stay out of the cemeteries after dark.