Lore - Episode 1: They Made a Tonic

Episode Date: March 18, 2015

On the morning of March 17, 1892, a group of townsfolk in rural Rhode Island dug up the graves of three local women. What they did to their bodies was something that we might find shocking, yet was actually normal in their culture. What was it in their past that guided their actions? Were they merely a product of their ancestors, or innocent participants in a regional panic? ———————————————— Lore Resources:  Episode Music: lorepodcast.com/music  Episode Sources: lorepodcast.com/sources  Lore News: www.theworldoflore.com/now    Access premium content!: https://www.lorepodcast.com/support See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey there, I'm Aaron, the creator, writer, and host of the show, and you're about to go on a journey, a tour, if you will, of the dark and the unusual. But like any good tour, I need to pass along a word of warning. If you've just discovered lore and are starting here at the beginning, you're about to listen to some really old episodes. Think of it like seeing photos of your parents as awkward teenagers. It's fun, but so much has happened since then. For one, the audio quality has gotten a lot better.

It's rough for the first couple dozen episodes, but I was learning as I went, so be patient. Also the format of the show was a bit like wet cement in the first few episodes. It gets a lot more solid the deeper you go, so stick with it. That said, if you prefer to hear these stories with modern production, better narration, and a proper soundtrack, I'll slowly be adding remastered versions to the library. Check those out to hear old episodes at their fullest potential. I love this episode you're about to hear, but I also love what it became. So step through the door with me into the world of dark history, and let me take you

on a journey. And with that, let's begin. Hollywood is obsessed. Sure, we often think of obsessions like sex, violence, gigantic robots, and of course epic battles between good and evil. But another obsession of Hollywood is vampires. You have to admit, though, that there's a lot to love about vampires. Immortality, wealth, power, and superhuman abilities such as flight and strength.

Yes, they come with trade-offs such as incredibly bad sunburns, but every movie I've seen and I've seen a lot, believe me, tends to show vampires that are fairly happy with their lot in life. My exposure to the world of vampires happened in the late 1990s when I was in college. A friend of mine recommended the Anne Rice novel Interview with the Vampire. I devoured that and many of the sequels. They're fun reads, and they certainly set the tone for a decade or more of vampire-centered entertainment.

I won't touch on the vampires of the Twilight books mostly because I haven't read them, but I will say this. Those books, however lambasted they have been by critics, have shown that popular culture's love of all things vampire is as undying as the creatures themselves. I'm Aaron Mankey, and this is Lore. When most people think of vampires, they envision something that is a purely European creature, a foreign accent, Victorian-era dress, and dark manor homes and castles. It's a common visual language for most of the western world, so I don't blame bad

movies and books for portraying that image. But it's one small facet of a legend that has hundreds of expressions. The single most prominent historical figure attached to the modern notion of vampires is of course Vlad III of Wallachia, otherwise known as Vlad the Impaler. Vlad was the ruler of a small Eastern European kingdom known as Wallachia. He ruled from 1456 to 1462. He was known as Vlad the Impaler because he preferred to execute his enemies by impaling them on stakes.

The Ottomans called him Lord Impaler after entering his kingdom to find forests of impaled victims. Vlad was a violent guy, you see, rather bloodthirsty, you might say. Now he, like his father before him, belonged to something known as the Order of the Dragon, a group established to protect Christian Europe from the invading Ottoman army. Vlad's father, Vlad II, was known as Vlad Dracul, which meant Vlad the Dragon from the Order of the Dragon. When Vlad III rose to power, he took the hereditary title and was known as Vlad Draculea, the

son of the dragon. That name might sound very similar to the most famous vampire story in the world, and that's because Brahm Stoker, when creating his famous creature of the night, used Vlad III as his inspiration. Well, part of it, but we'll get to that more later. The roots of most vampire stories can be traced back to superstitions rooted in ancient cultures all across the world. Western Europe played host to countless stories of reanimated dead known as Revenants.

These were animated corpses that climbed out of the grave to torment the living. The word Revenant comes from Latin, which means to come back. And come back to do what you might ask? Well, I'm glad you did. At first it was just to terrorize the living, but as the centuries passed, the legend became more specific. Revenants were said to return from the grave to torment their living relatives and neighbors. What was key, though, was that Revenants were specific people, not anonymous zombies of

our modern horror genre. These things had a past and a purpose. Now, in Norse mythology, we can find tales of creatures known as Draugr, again walkers, who would return from the grave and wreak havoc on the living. These creatures possessed superhuman strength, they smelled of decay, and they were reported to be pretty ugly in appearance. They could enter the dreams of the living, and while they were doing that, it was said that they left tangible objects near the sleeping victims so that, when they woke up, they would

know that their dreams were more real than they feared. Let's go back earlier than the Middle Ages, though. The legends of some ancient cultures spoke of creatures that, while not immediately similar to the vampires we know today, nonetheless shared many core characteristics. First we have the Greek myth of Empusa, who was the daughter of Hecate. Empusa was said to lure young men at night and then feast on their blood before moving on to the main course, their flesh. Another Greek tale involves Lamia, a mistress of Zeus, who becomes cursed by Zeus' wife,

Hera, and is doomed to hunt children devouring them. Species of undead creatures, or creatures that feed on the blood of the living, seem nearly as common as written language itself. I mean, even on the small, isolated island of Madagascar, there are legends of a creature known as the Ramanga, which was known to attack nobles, drinking their blood, and eating their nail clippings. Yeah, I said nail clippings, deal with it. Are vampires real?

I'll let you make the final decision on that, but what is clear is that most of these stories find their genesis, and the human need to explain the unexplainable. For instance, early Europeans used the myth as a way of explaining why a corpse wasn't decomposing at the normal rate that they expected. You can see evidence of this in Bulgaria, where graves dating back over 800 years have been opened to reveal iron rods that have been driven through the chest of the skeletons. And in a time when it was very common to bury someone that was thought to be dead, only to find out that they weren't really dead, you can imagine that stories would quickly

circulate that the dead were coming back to life. As a result, taffophobia, the fear of being buried alive, swept Europe and the United States. Now of course, once medical science caught up, people got more practical. They built alert systems into graves, just in case the person woke up and, you know, wanted out. Now, I realize that being buried alive sounds like a rare occurrence, but it happened frequently enough that many people were sufficiently paranoid about it to actually spend time looking

for a solution. One of these people happened to be a medical doctor, a man named Adolf Gutsmuth. Now in 1822, and driven by the fear of being buried alive, he invented a safety coffin for his own interment, and then he tested it out himself. Tested it out? You bet. Dr. Gutsmuth allowed himself to be buried underground in his new safety coffin for several hours, during which he had meals delivered to him through a feeding tube.

He enjoyed a wonderful meal of soup, sausages, and a lovely local beer. Sounds like a great date night destination, doesn't it? Now, Dr. Timothy Smith of New Haven, Vermont was another paranoid inventor. He created a grave that can be visited still to this day if you happen to be passing by Evergreen Cemetery in Vermont. Evergreen was a crypt buried in the usual manner, but it had a cement tube positioned over the face of the body, and a glass plate was affixed to the top of the tube at ground level.

Dr. Smith died a real, natural death, and was buried in his fancy coffin with a view. He never woke up, but early visitors to his grave reported that they had a clear view of his decomposing head until condensation obscured the glass decades later. Vampires no longer scare me. Waking up inside of a small box buried six feet below the surface of the earth is what true fright looks like to me. Now, another culprit in humanity's use of the vampire label was porphyria. It was a rare blood disorder, but modern science has pretty much closed the case on that one,

saying that it's too far of a stretch to connect the two topics. Rabies, of all conditions, has also been used as an explanation for the rise of the vampire mythology. Surprisingly, there are a lot of commonalities between them, such as a sensitivity to light and garlic, as well as altered sleep patterns. But the most recent medical condition with a strong connection to vampire mythology was actually tuberculosis. Those who suffer from TB had no vampire-like symptoms, though, and that's what makes this

one a harder connection to explain. It's also, incidentally, where one of my favorite New England legends comes into the picture. Ladies and gentlemen, meet Mercy Brown. Lena Mercy Brown was a young woman who lived in the latter half of the 19th century in the rural town of Exeter, Rhode Island, and she was a major player in what is now known as the Great New England Vampire Panic. Stories like hers can be found repeated all across Rhode Island, Massachusetts, New Hampshire,

and Vermont, echoed in the lives of others in similar situations. And the results have surprising connections to both the modern idea of vampires as well as the ancient stories, as we will see. The first person to die in Exeter was Mercy's mother, Mary Eliza. That was December of 1882, and she fell victim to what was then called consumption. Consumption because as the disease of tuberculosis ravaged the body, the person would appear to waste away, consumed, if you will, by the illness. She of course was buried because, well, that's what you do with a loved one who passes away.

The next year though, Mercy's sister Mary Olive died at the young age of 20. Same illness, same symptoms, same process. I'm not sure when exactly the people of Exeter, Rhode Island started to wonder if the deaths were connected, but it might have been then, or it might have been a few years later when Mercy's brother Edwin took ill. Edwin though was smart. He packed up and moved across the country to Colorado Springs, which had a great reputation for the healing properties of its dry climate.

When he finally returned from the resorts out west some years later, he was alive but not doing so well. And in December of 1891, he took a turn for the worse. That was the month that Mercy herself became ill. Her tuberculosis moved fast. They called it the galloping kind, and it moved through her body quickly, like wildfire. By January 1892, she was dead, and the people of Exeter were more worried than ever. You see, they suspected something supernatural.

Now this was surprising considering how close Exeter is to Newport. It's the seaside city known for the summer cottages of the wealthy, folks like the Vanderbilts, the Astors, the Wideners, and the Wet Moors. It was the pinnacle of educated society. Yet just a handful of miles away, one small town that should have known better was about to do something very, very creepy. Edwin was still alive, you see, and someone got it in their mind that one of the women who died before him, either his mother or one of his sisters, was somehow draining him

of his life from beyond the grave. They were so convinced of this, you see, that they wanted to dig them all up. Yes, all of them. Once they received the Father's permission to do this horrible thing, a group of men gathered in the cemetery on the morning of March 17th and began to dig up the bodies. Now what they were looking for was any evidence at all of an unnatural state. So blood in the heart, blood around the mouth, or other similar signs. The first body of Mary Eliza, the mother, was satisfactorily decomposed, so they ruled

her out. But of course she was, you might say, I mean she had been dead and buried for a decade. Mary Olive was also in a normal state of decomposition. Again, being dead for ten years usually helps convince people that you're really dead. But when they examined Mercy's body, a body that had not been buried because she died in the middle of winter and so had been put inside of a stone building in the cemetery that was essentially a walk-in freezer, they discovered a remarkable state of preservation. Shocking, I know.

So what did they do? Well, these superstitious folk did what they learned from their ancestors. They cut out Mercy's heart and liver, within which they found red, clotted blood. They burned them on a nearby stone, which by the way is still there if you ever visit the cemetery, and then mixed the ashes with a tonic. That tonic was then given to Edwin to drink. Yeah, Edwin drank his own sister's liver and heart. Did it work?

No. Of course it didn't work. Edwin died less than two months later. What it did do, however, was set up Mercy Brown to be known as the first American vampire. As unusual as an event like this must sound, you might be surprised to learn that it happened quite frequently. In 1817, almost a century before Mercy Brown's exhumation, a Dartmouth college student named Frederick Ransom died of tuberculosis.

His father was so worried that the young man would leave the grave and attack the family that he asked that he be dug up. Ransom's heart was cut out and burned on a blacksmith's forge. Even Henry David Thoreau heard tales of these types of events, and he mentioned one in his personal journal. In September 26th, 1859, he wrote, So of course, words spread about what happened to Mercy Brown, as it usually did when a body was dug up and carved into pieces like that.

Mercy's case, though, actually made it into a newspaper called The New York World, and it made quite an impression on the people who read it. How do we know? Because a clipping from that article was found in the personal papers of a London stage manager after his death. You see, his theater company had been touring America in 1892. He evidently read the story, found it inspiring, and saved it. So much so that he sat down a few years later and wrote a book.

Who was this man? His name was Brom Stoker. In the book? Oh, I'm sure you've already guessed it by now. It was Dracula, published in 1897. Take pride in your home with the new Swiffer Power Mop. The new Swiffer Power Mop gives you a mop and bucket clean in just half the time, leaving you more time to enjoy your home with the ones you love most.

Swiffer is proud to sponsor I Heart Radio's Can't Cancel Pride 2023, an evening honoring the LGBTQ plus community and celebrating organizations creating a more inclusive and equal world. Learn more at Can't CancelPride.com This episode of Lore was researched, written, and produced by me, Aaron Mankey, with music by Chad Lawson. Lore is much more than just a podcast now. There's a book series available in bookstores and online, and two seasons of the television

show on Amazon Prime Video. Check them both out if you want more Lore in your life. I also make and executive produce a whole bunch of other podcasts, all of which I think you'd enjoy. My production company, Grim and Mild, specializes in shows that sit at the intersection of the dark and the historical. You can learn more about all of those shows and everything else going on over in one central place, grimandmild.com.

And you can also follow the show on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. Just search for Lore podcast, all one word, and then click that follow button. When you do, say hi. I like it when people say hi. And as always, thanks for listening.