So Supernatural - HAUNTED: The New England Vampire Girl

Episode Date: December 30, 2020

In 1892, Lena Brown died at just 19 years old, joining her mother and sister in an early grave. Then her brother, Eddie, got sick too. The working theory? His health was being syphoned by a vampire. When townspeople exhumed Lena’s body, their theory started looking a lot more plausible… 

Legends of hideous creatures draining the life and blood of the living have been around for thousands of years, like since ancient Mesopotamia. From Ghana to China to Germany, the list is basically endless. Some have hooks instead of limbs. Some can remove their heads. Others drink with their toes. But in New England, vampires were more than just legends you heard about. Some can remove their heads. Others drink with their toes. But in New England, vampires were more than just legends you heard about. They were family. This is Supernatural. I'm your host, Ashley Flowers.

This week, we're discussing vampires in New England. Just over 100 years ago, residents of a small Rhode Island town suspected one or many vampires were wreaking havoc on its population. Of course, you and I know that monsters exist only in our minds. So there has to be a perfectly reasonable explanation for a young 19th century girl buried without her heart, right? All that and more is coming up. Stay with us. Today's story takes place just 20 miles down the road from the famous mansions of Newport, Rhode Island, in a struggling rural farm town called Exeter. Deserted Exeter, if you're local. A ghost town if you're just driving through. In January 1892, Exeter's population is less than a thousand, down from more than 2,500 a few decades earlier. While the Vanderbilts are putting their finishing touches on their marble mansion

20 miles away, in Exeter there are so many abandoned farms that the United States government is preparing to seize them and burn them to the ground. And the town's residents might want a few fires at this point. See, it's a bitterly cold winter when one Exeter family of self-proclaimed swamp Yankees is watching their youngest daughter die. Her name's Mercy Lena Brown, but she goes by Lena, and her body is being ravaged by disease. A few weeks earlier, she was absolutely fine, but her sickness is what one doctor calls the galloping kind, as in it's in a hurry to end her life. And tonight, her father George is listening to that same doctor, Dr. Harold Metcalf, tell him that there's nothing he can do for Lena. The doc says, listen, the hard reality is she's going to ride this cough,

fever, and chill and night sweat to an early grave, and that's that. As far as anyone can tell, this Metcalf guy doesn't even give Lena medication to soothe the pain in her lungs. He just leaves. Not long after, in January 1892, Lena passes away at just 19 years old. Her obituary in the Providence Journal reads, quote, Miss Lena Brown died Sunday morning, end quote. And that's basically it. Her body doesn't even get buried. The soil has frozen over so nobody can dig a grave. The Browns just place her in a coffin, hammer the top on with some nails, and lock her in a stone crypt located on the family cemetery. They know they'll come back in the springtime when it's warm

and give her a proper burial in the family cemetery, right next to her recently deceased mother and sister. You see, tragedy wasn't a new experience for the Brown family. In 1883, nine years earlier, the same sickness that took Lena's life claimed her mother, Mary Eliza Brown. Mary didn't have the galloping kind like Lena had, so her death was more drawn out. But her symptoms were all the same, the cough, the fever, the chills, the night sweats, the agonizing pain. Less than one year after Lena's mother passed, Lena's older sister, Mary Olive, died as well after fighting a long bout of the same disease. Her obituary read, quote, the last few hours she lived was of great suffering,

yet her faith was firm and she was ready for the change, end quote. Exeter held a funeral for Mary Olive. All the townsfolk sang a hymn that Mary selected on her deathbed called One Sweetly Solemn Thought. The lyrics are about someone begging God to be nearby as they slip over the brink of death into whatever comes next. But there's a reason that Lena, just a decade later, receives so much less fanfare than her sister. A reason why the townsfolk weren't so keen to be in close quarters with the Browns. One death is sad, two is tragic, but after three,

people start thinking that this family is infected, like cursed or something. They were once a family of five and now they're down to two, just George and his 24-year-old son Edwin. And Eddie? Well, now he's sick too. He's actually been sick for a while when Lena dies. He spent something like two years in Colorado nursing his health, hoping the Western air might do him some good, but it didn't. He returned to Rhode Island shortly after Lena took her last breath. By the end of February 1892, he's counting down his final days on earth, trying to make them as comfortable as possible. But Eddie's well-liked around town, so he's not short on people willing to lend a hand. Before hospice and hospitals, attending to the dying was considered a position

of honor in New England society. They even had a name for it, Watchers. In addition to doling out medicine and taking care of basic needs, Watchers made sure that when somebody passed, they weren't alone. Someone they loved was sitting by their side, easing them through. Families, even entire villages, would take shifts. But Eddie makes a controversial decision. He doesn't choose his father to be his watcher. He stays with his in-laws. Why? Well, it turns out Eddie might want to stay far, far away from the Brown family farm. One winter night, a group of well-intentioned townsfolk arrive on George's doorstep with a wild theory. They think the disease plaguing George's family is caused by one of three things. Two are buried underground

and one is in a crypt. They're basically like, what if your wife and daughters aren't dead or aren't always dead? What if they're undead and feeding on the living tissue and blood of your son? Now, they don't use the word vampire in conversation, but they do suggest that George exhume his wife and two daughters to see if there's any fresh blood in their hearts. If there is, they'll know for sure that Eddie's health is being siphoned by a loved one from beyond the grave. As you can imagine, this all sounds like three shades too ridiculous to George. He's surely a God-fearing man and disturbing the dead probably feels like it's breaking all kinds of commandments. But at the end of the day, he doesn't have another option. Medicine has failed. Prayers have failed. And he has a town of people scared about what will happen if the disease

isn't contained. So after talking it over with Eddie, George actually says yes to exhuming his family under one condition. He doesn't want to be there. He refuses to bear witness. So on March 17, 1892, George stays behind as four neighbors, Dr. Metcalf and possibly a correspondent from the Providence Journal, head over to the Brown family cemetery. The good doctor more or less thinks this trip is a joke, and the supernatural beliefs being flaunted are laughable. He even says as much, but goes along with it, if only to say I told you so afterward when there's no vampire.

First, they unearth Mary Eliza. She's been dead for nine years or so, and naturally, she's not much more than a skeleton. I mean, there's some mummified flesh here and there, but certainly no blood. So the men are like, oops, sorry for disturbing the peace, and they put her back in the ground. Next, they dig up Mary Olive. She has a little more hair on her skull than they expected, but there's no flesh, no blood. Like her mother, if she's feasting on the living to keep herself clinging to life, she's not doing a great job of

it. After reburying Mary Olive, the men head over to the crypt where Mercy Lena Brown's coffin is They pry the coffin open and after two months, Lena's body barely shows any signs of decomposition. She doesn't look like a rotting corpse. She very much looks alive. Like sure, her fingernails and hair have grown in a little, alive or dead, that is to be expected. But when they cut her open, the men find blood in her heart and by some accounts in her mouth. And we're not talking like crusty blood either, like actual liquid blood. The discovery is strange enough that even the skeptical Dr. Metcalf doesn't have a satisfactory explanation for it. According to Brown family oral tradition, that wasn't the only surprise.

Lena was apparently laying on her stomach upside down as if she'd been like tossing and turning in her grave. Or as if she crawled back into her coffin after a night of feasting on her brother's soul. Either way, for Dr. Metcalf and the neighbors, this is evidence enough that Lena is a vampire. But finding the vampire is only step one in their plan to rid Exeter of disease. Step two, the afflicted must consume her organs. Up next, vampires move to the center of town. Now let's get back to the story. On March 17, 1892, residents of Exeter, Rhode Island found the vampire that was attacking their town, Mercy Lena Brown, who had died two months earlier. After exhuming Lena's body, her heart and liver

were ripped out and burned on a nearby rock. The ashes were then collected and mixed with water to be given to her brother Eddie as a medicinal tonic, which he was instructed to drink. And he most likely did. Now, whether or not he was told what was in the tonic is an entirely different story. It all sounds a little barbaric, right? Just a little over a century ago, Americans weren't making movies about vampires.

They were literally digging them out of the ground and feeding their organs to their sick relatives. I mean, it's a little easier to wrap your head around if it's just, like, a one-time thing. One town, one tonic, one vampire. Exeter was just an unlucky drop in the bucket. Except that's not true at all. Mercy Lena Brown wasn't New England's first vampire. By all accounts, she was the last. For nearly a century before her, the forests of New England were littered with them. Seriously, more than 80 different exhumations have been tied to vampirism in America,

and the earliest ever recorded happened not long after the country's founding. In 1784, a local politician wrote a letter in a weekly newspaper about some doctor who was going around telling people to dig up and burn their dead relatives. In 1859, Henry David Thoreau wrote in his journal about a Vermont family who burned the lungs and heart and liver of their dead relative to prevent the spread of disease. Now, you might be like, but, you know, I didn't hear any mention of vampire in either of those. And you're right, you didn't. You heard burning dead relatives. And that's because these documents were written from the perspective of high society craning its necks to peek through the trees at their backwoods neighbors and their satanic

rituals. You see, respected gentlemen wouldn't be caught dead using the word monster, but experts now know that these semi-ritualized burnings were almost explicitly tied to vampires. Now, to avoid the rabbit hole of who was using what label when, when I say vampire, I mean a monster or spirit siphoning off the souls of the living. And it's worth mentioning, at the time, blood was thought by many to be the vessel for the soul. People would know if their town might have a vampire because residents would suddenly and inexplicably start coughing up blood and mucus. One day they're fine, and then the next they're pale, weak, and bedridden, as if all the energy drained from them overnight. Once people start dropping like flies, it's time to visit the local cemetery to do a little digging. For the most part, these vampire exhumations were conducted

exactly how you'd imagine, under the cover of darkness, lit by flickering lanterns, and you can find a similar scene in any run-of-the-mill vampire feature. But not all of them were so clandestine. In Vermont, hearts of suspected vampires were sometimes burned on blacksmith forges in the center of town with hundreds of spectators gathering to watch. Members of the clergy presided. Local doctors, the ones with the most medical expertise, would assist the cremations. The afflicted either inhaled the fumes of the burnt remains or were instructed to drink the ashes. But in the areas of Maine and Massachusetts, they had a different way of neutralizing the evil.

The vampires' bodies were simply turned over in their coffins. And that's how Mercy Lena Brown's body was supposedly found when the men first opened her coffin that March, face down in her crypt, resting on her stomach. Maybe someone had already suspected Lena and had gone to her crypt to flip her over before those men burnt her heart and liver. Maybe there were more than a few vampire hunters in town with wildly different techniques, but probably not. George was so reticent to disturb his family's eternal rest that he most likely only let it happen once, and Lena probably didn't try out a new resting position one night. See, New England's version of vampires weren't springing from the ground and walking

on earth like Dracula. They were arguably much more terrifying. They were these invisible spirits that came at night and sat on the chest of the dying as they drained their life forces. They could be in the room without anyone knowing, other than the person being preyed upon, of course. In other words, if Lena really was a vampire, according to New England folklore, that still wouldn't explain why her body moved in the crypt, which leaves us with two possible alternative explanations. One, the family legend was mistaken. Or two, she wasn't actually dead when they hammered in the nails. It sounds wild to us today, but at the time, being buried alive was actually common enough that multiple patents existed for devices that would alert the living if their loved ones woke up six

feet under. If Lena was buried alive, it only strengthens the argument that she became a vampire. After dying alone in a crypt, she'd have plenty of reason to exact vengeance on the ones who put her there in the first place without a watcher, without a funeral, and without a chance. Now, the story of Lena being found face down in her coffin comes from a 1981 interview that professional folklorist Michael Bell had with a descendant of the Brown family named Everett Peck. Like his ancestors before him, Everett still lived in Exeter and worked as a farmer. A middle-aged Everett also told Belle another story about Mercy Lena Brown. This one about an experience he personally had with Lena

many decades after her death, but back when he was a teenager. You see, Everett and his brother were driving on an errand when they saw this bright ball of fire hovering about maybe a table's height off the grass. The flame was about the size of a football and burns so hot that it's blue. Of course, the boys are spooked. They have no interest in investigating any further, so they hightail it down the road to their cousin's farm. When they arrive, they tell their cousins all about what they witnessed, only to find out that their cousins are not shocked. You see, the cousins are like, oh, you must have been up by Mercy Lena Brown's grave, right? Yeah, you're not the only one to see that thing. Everett never saw the flame again, and it was his only taste of the supernatural in his lifetime. But he stood by his story. And why would he make up a story about a

flying ball of fire when he didn't even believe that Mercy Lena Brown was a vampire, or that vampires were real at all? As a middle-aged man living near the turn of the 21st century, of course he knew better than to believe in monsters. But that's the strangest part of the vampire panic that swept New England and reached as far as Minnesota. Everyone should have known better. The Salem Witch Trials, which were suspect even in its day, ended nearly a century before Americans started exhuming vampires. The anachronisms are wild. That same year that Thoreau wrote about burning vampires in Vermont, Charles Darwin published his book On the Origin of Species.

One year later, America elected Abraham Lincoln as president of the United States. By the time Mercy Lena Brown came along, secret exhumations were usually conducted by medical students wanting to further science, not vampire hunters. years surrounding all that progress, there was an American named Timothy Meade who made a sacrifice to a demon vampire who was supposedly sucking the blood of the living. There were the Ransoms, the Corwins, and the Roses who all sliced open their dead children and burned their organs. George Brown made the decision to dig up his wife's nearly decade-old corpse, and Edwin Brown drank his 19-year-old sister's heart. Something real must have been happening. I mean, after drinking Lena's ashes, Edwin's illness still could have gotten better, at least for a second.

But then it definitely got much worse. Up next, it takes more than fire to kill vampires. Let's get back to the story. Two days after the Brown women's exhumations, the Providence Journal printed an article about the little posthumous family reunion. In it, the author ridiculed anyone who believed in vampires, calling it a horrible superstition. And that's the thing.

Almost nobody alive at the time believed in vampires. Even as George Brown was telling his son to drink his dead sister's heart, he thought the suggestion of vampires was completely outlandish. And also so did Edwin, who by the way, died less than two months after drinking Lena's heart from tuberculosis, or as it was called back then, consumption. Nowadays, we know a lot about tuberculosis. In the 18th century, its contagion rates were high enough to be considered an epidemic. By 1800, 25% of all deaths in the country were from TB, which isn't to say that people back then knew nothing about the disease. Ten years before Lena's exhumation, a microbiologist

identified the bacterium that causes TB. But the question is, what did the people of Exeter know? And the answer? Probably not much. Back then, there was no CDC, no standard compilation of knowledge. Medicine was mostly just opinions, and a lot of them from disreputable sources. According to Bell, for the average physician, formal training was practically non-existent. Around 1840, a surgeon wrote about how he believed Americans were more likely to survive if they ignored the advice of their local physician. So when one treatment didn't work, it was only natural for people to try another option, even if it wasn't their cup of tea, so to speak. And say what you will about folk medicine, healing can be found in feeling agency over the forces in life that are out of your control. Even if it can't save

the dying, it can unite the people that love them in powerful ways. Call it faith, call it a placebo effect. In George Brown's case, when he ran out of options, belief or doubt or reason were beside the point. The only thing that mattered was his entire family was dying and nothing else was working. I mean, really, take a second to imagine yourself in George Brown's shoes, the heartbreak that he experienced. What would you do to save the last person on earth that you loved? Burning a vampire starts to sound a little less out there, right? So was Mercy Lena Brown a vampire? Two months after she died, she looked pretty alive and she did have

liquid blood in her heart. But in addition to tuberculosis, science has taught us more about Lena's miraculous preservation as well. Here are the facts. She died in January and New England winters are cold. I mean, she didn't even receive a burial because the soil was frozen. The icy temperatures inside the crypt almost certainly slowed the natural process of decay. The blood found in her heart may have been recognizably liquid, but it was also clotted and decomposed blood. As the Providence Journal wrote at the time, this was expected at Lena's stage of decomposition. As for the rumored blood in her mouth, three to five days after a person dies, their body usually

bloats and their mouth fills with foamy blood. In the final stages of tuberculosis, the infected lungs start to get ulcers and cavities. Patients often cough up blood. With all of this information, there doesn't seem to be much supernatural about Mercy Lena Brown. That said, this small, dead teenage girl from the 19th century has definitely informed your understanding of vampires. In 1896, an up-and-coming London stage manager named Bram Stoker is traveling with some theater production. While out on tour, he picks up a copy of The New York World, and inside is a story about Mercy Lena Brown, the vampire of Exeter, Rhode Island. The following year, he publishes a novel, Dracula. Dracula pulls the trigger on a vampire craze that still exists today.

And it's likely not a coincidence that Lucy, the young girl exhumed in one of the book's most famous scenes, sounds like a mashup of Lena and Mercy. At a glance, their characters and stories are eerily similar. Since Dracula, with the exception of maybe the Twilight Saga, there haven't been many notable updates to the vampire image, and glittering skin isn't exactly an innovative hot take. Most of the legend we know today is still based on the story of Mercy Lena Brown. Love it or hate it, vampires never go out of style. You could say that the modern residents of Exeter err on the side of hate. The mostly blue-collar community isn't exactly thrilled when leathered-up teenagers

show up out of the blue with crosses asking for directions to the Chestnut Hill Cemetery. Today, Lena's buried right between her father, George, and her brother, Edwin. Legend trips to visit Lena's grave are pretty popular, especially after dark and especially on Halloween. In addition to leaving knickknacks like fake vampire teeth, people scratch their names into her headstone or chip off pieces of it to take home with them as a souvenir. And in 1996, the headstone disappeared entirely. But don't worry, the culprit handed it back eventually. Sure, folklore aside, it's pretty easy to say Mercy Lena Brown was just a girl who died from tuberculosis. But tell that to the people who've heard her crying whispers.

They're said to fill the Chestnut Hill Cemetery at night and have allegedly been caught on tape. Tell it to the people who have smelled freshly cut roses filling the air while walking past Lena's headstone. Tell it to the ball of fire that Everett Peck, a firm non-believer, saw hovering above her grave. If all you do is walk away from this episode thinking, wow, I can't believe the kind of stuff people believed in 1892, here's another story for you. In 2005, six Romanian men were sent to jail for exhuming a dead body, burning its heart, and drinking it with water. They pled self-defense because they said the guy was a well-known vampire. Thanks for listening. I'll be back next week with another episode. To hear more stories hosted by me, check out Crime Junkie and all AudioChuck Originals.