Stuff You Should Know - How the New England Vampire Panics Worked

Episode Date: March 20, 2018

In the 19th century, in isolated villages and godforsaken towns in rural New England, people began to suspect their deceased family members had become undead. Thus began everything we know today about killing vampires. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

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Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Hey everybody, we've already made our big tour announcement for the year, but this is a little different because we have added a show because Denver sold out. So we've added a second show in Denver. Nice, yeah, we're going to be there on Wednesday the 27th.

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from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey and welcome to the podcast, I'm Josh Clark, Charles W. Chuck Price, with Jerry. This is Stuff You Should Know. I love this one. Yeah, Vampires December 4th, 2012, was our main podcast on vampires. That was a good one.

And I don't remember touching on this at all, did we? No, I had no idea about it. That's nutty. It wasn't until I read a great article on Smithsonian about vampire panics in New England that I had first heard of it. Abigail Tucker from 2012. Yep, she did an amazing job on that one.

Agreed. So, let's start where that article starts. Because I think it's a great place to dive into this weirdness. 1990. That's not what most people would think you would say. In Connecticut. I'm a freshman in college.

There were some kids playing at I think a gravel quarry and they discovered some graves. It's basically the dream of every kid who's ever played outside. To discover some like long lost graves. Like any kid poking around the woods we're all really just looking for dead bodies. Pretty much.

At the very least you're prepared for it at all times, right? Yeah. Members stand by me. Kid me, that's what inspired it all. That was one of the great unnerving, disturbing dead kids of all time. And you know what? Ray Brower.

My friend, my best friend Brett, came upon a dead body one time playing in the woods. No. Yeah, and it wasn't, it was a neighbor who had a heart attack while raking leaves or cleaning up in the woods or something. So it wasn't nefarious,

but he still ran across a dead body as a kid. How, why was the guy cleaning up the woods? Well, I mean, I think it was the woods on the edge of his yard or something like that. How long have they been there for? I see, clean them up. Don't think it had been that long. He wasn't decomposed or anything.

Okay. I think it was just like, oh wow. Lifeless body. There's Mr, whatever. Mr. Whipple. Don't squeeze the charm in. I'm cleaning the woods. So these kids found graves that were very, very old.

They weren't a dead neighbor or anything like that. They were, actually it turned out to be a lost family cemetery, again in Connecticut, right? And in very short order, the Connecticut state archeologist, which is a pretty cool position, a guy named Nick Bellentoni, he was called out and he starts excavating the place, right?

Yes. I'll keep going. He finds a bunch of graves, lots of kids, because it's New England 19th century, late 18th century, early 19th centuries, when they finally said, this is about when this graveyard was in use. And there were kids, some adults,

buried normally, exactly like you'd expect. Yeah, I love how she said they were buried Yankee style. Yeah. I didn't know what that meant. It meant like, in a very thrifty manner, very bare bones if you'll forgive the pun. Not like our ostentatious Southern coffins. Right.

What about that lady who got buried in her Ferrari? Did you hear about her? I think I did. She was great, just for doing that, you know? Like, I'll see y'all in hell. I'm taking my Ferrari with me. No one's gonna get this. She was like buried sitting up behind the wheel

in a negligee in her Ferrari. That's how she was buried. That's like the Elon Musk's Tesla in space. The Starman, yeah. With the little astronaut riding around in it. Well, yeah. Everyone knows that that's actually the body of one of his enemies.

Oh, of course. Who was alive when that rocket went off, I'm sure. So there's this one grave out of all of them that is a little hinky, you could say. Bell and Tony starts pulling away some of the rocks. It's entombed, not like the others. There's rocks around it. And he finds that the coffin has been broken.

And on the coffin, on the coffin lid in brass tacks is JB, I believe, hyphen, 5-5. Yeah, and this coffin is red, which is also different, I think, than the others. Right. Most of the coffin's fine, or most of the skeleton's fine. But when he gets a little further up, he finds, on top of the ribs, the thigh bones

are crossed across the ribs. And the skull is no longer attached to the end of the spinal column. It's on the rib cage as well. And the rib cage has been broken. And upon further inspection, he finds the coffin has been smashed. And Nick Bell and Tony says, well, I'll be.

Yeah, I mean, this is not what normally happens as a body decomposes. They don't go into the shape of the Jolly Rogers pirate flag. Right. And it's funny that you picked this because, and this is sort of an announcement, but the great Aaron Mankey of lore, fame, was telling me these stories this week in the office

because we, he is partnering with us. He's going to do some shows with us now. Doo, doo, doo, doo. Yeah, not lore. He's like, no, no, no. You don't get that one. But he's going to do some new shows with us. And we're all super excited.

But he was telling me all these stories. As you were falling asleep. He had stroking my head gently. And the next day, you sent this article or this collection of articles you put together and said, let's do one in vampire panics. Doo, doo, doo, doo. And I was like, that's weird, man.

Aaron Mankey was just talking about this. That is weird. And he has three lore episodes, one on Mercy Brown that I listened to as part of this research, but then two others. And it was just, it all kind of really, weirdly came together. The spirits of the vampires are with us.

So anyway, welcome, Mr. Mankey. Yeah, welcome. We're glad to have you. Are we calling him Mr. Mankey, not Aaron? No, but it was very sweet. He's a long time, all time stuff you should know, listener. And he's legit. I'm sure that he is going to hear this and say, oh, guys.

I did this so much better. I did this so much better. I don't like you any longer. So anyway, JB55, you're right, is spelled out in brass tacks. It's a male skeleton. It's from the 1830s. At the latest. And the body is probably in his 50s or so.

Yeah. And it's just very, very creepy. And perplexing. Yeah, very perplexing at first blush. Bell and Tony said in that Smithsonian article, he'd never seen anything like it before. Right. Right, so he's obviously being an archaeologist.

He's not like, well, that's pretty interesting. I'm going back to my sandwich now. He wanted to get to the bottom of it. That's right. So he started asking around. And finally, one colleague said, well, maybe it was a vampire. This is Michael Bell? Not yet.

Oh, OK. It was apparently a colleague, I guess, a fellow archaeologist who's like, there was actually such things as vampire panics. And then Bell and Tony met Michael Bell. Right, and notably in 1854, this is about 20 years after the gentleman, JB55, which is probably his age, right? Or?

I guess. Maybe? Yeah. Jim Brown, 55 years old. Let's just call him that. In Jewett City, Connecticut, there was a vampire panic that had broken out. And the corpses were exhumed, that people might

thought were vampires. And then I think is when he finally gets in touch with this Rhode Island folklorist named Michael Bell. Yeah, and Bell is like, my friend, I'm going to tell you something. Are you sitting down? And Bell and Tony says, yes. And Bell goes, have you had your sandwich?

He goes, no. Bell goes, you are sitting on the only intact physical evidence of what was a series of vampire panics that gripped New England in the late 18th to actually late 19th century, almost up to the 20th century. Yeah, that's the remarkable thing here. Because if you hear this, you're like, yeah, yeah, I know about Salem.

Sure. This was a couple of hundred years later, roughly. Yeah, this is about less than 150 years ago. Yeah, like we had evolved way past that by this point to believe that vampires existed and we need to dig up bodies of our relatives. Yeah. That's what's so shocking about this.

Like the enlightenment had come and gone. Science was a thing. It's very weird to think about how late this happened. It is. But sure enough, as Bell and Tony looked into it and talked to Michael Bell and found out, no, there was vampire panics. A lot of people don't know about them,

because most people don't dig into that kind of thing. But they're actually, because they happened as late as they did, they're actually fairly well documented. The thing is, as most of the graves are lost, you have an actual grave of one of the vampires that was basically a victim of this vampire panic. Yeah, and apparently it happened.

He documented Bell about 80 of these exhumations as far west as Minnesota. But obviously, most of these took place in the Connecticut, Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire area. Rhode Island, too. Rhode Island. Big time. Because I don't know what it is with New England.

Well, we'll get to it. We'll get to it. They're weird. Because it definitely is a very weird thing, especially considering that at the time, people who were alive were like, what are you guys doing? How backwards can you be? You know?

So their contemporaries were even put off by this kind of thing. And at first, it was like you had to know somebody to know that this was going on. But eventually, a couple of them became high enough profile that it became international news, that there was some weirdness going on in New England, that the locals were in the grips of a vampire panic. Yeah, Thoreau wrote about it.

In his journal. That's Henry David. Yeah, he was at an exhumation. And he wrote, it was like, wow, man. And as you said, Rhode Island, this wasn't just out in the sticks of rural New England. This happened close to Newport, Rhode Island, which at the time, and is still a very Tony area where, oh yeah,

dude, that cliff walk or whatever, unbelievable. And those houses were around back then. These were well-heeled, rich people. And that's where they've summered. Right, murdering one another and getting away with it, drinking champagne all the while. That's what they did. God bless them.

That is a beautiful town. Newport, Rhode Island is a gorgeous town. Yeah, I was very taken with it and thought, I could totally live here if I had about 50 times as much money as I have right now. And it was 1900. So as I said, it is very well documented in some respects, but you have to be a guy like Michael Bell

who knows where to look because graves like this don't pop up every day, right? Correct. There was this dude who documented it probably better than anybody. And he didn't hear about it until, I think, the late 1890s. But he was an anthropologist named George Stetson. He published a monotype on it on the New England vampire

panics and exactly what the beliefs were. So he established the baseline for these beliefs and really documented it in the late 19th century. Yeah, and kind of shook up the world with his findings. Yeah, so again, everybody at the time who wasn't involved is looking in like what are you guys doing? Apparently, the Boston Daily Globe said that was basically inbreeding

was responsible for this weird behavior. Like people from the South were going, what intarnation are you guys doing up there? Right. There was the idea that Stetson, George Stetson, the anthropologist, had basically been fooled, been fleeced by the slick New England rural folk and that they were just pulling his leg as it was put.

Interesting. That's not the case. This actually did happen. And it turns out that it is basically an extension of a tradition that finds its roots back in Europe. It goes back many, many centuries to Europe. And here is where it gets extremely interesting to me. The vampire legend that we understand today

actually grew out of real superstitions. Like everything you know about vampires is what some people hundreds of years ago, and not that very long ago, believed was actual reality. And this vampire panic was an actual manifestation of those beliefs in real life. That's right. You want me to take a break?

Oh, man. The spirit of the vampires are with us. All right, we'll be back right after this. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it.

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Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s, called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. OK, I see what you're doing.

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OK, so the vampire, as we, I probably pronounced it like that in that episode so many years ago, I have a one note sense of humor, it came. It's reliable. That's a nice way to say it. Came out of Europe, not the United States. And that word first appeared in the 10th century, and Bell, as far as he's concerned, says, or thinks

at least, that, well, we all know that it came out of like a Germany and a Slavic immigrants coming here. But he thinks, for his money, is that it probably wasn't just one big wave. It probably came over from different people at different times. But eventually, it made its way over to the United States through probably Pennsylvania, and then made its way north.

Right. And from his research, he's found, the earliest he's found is a reference to it, comes from 1784 in the Connecticut Courant and Weekly Intelligencer. And I think the Hartford newspaper is still called the Hartford Courant. So that's an old paper, right?

Yeah. And in it, it's a letter to the editor from a guy named Moses Holmes, who is a councilman in the town of Willington, Connecticut. And he's basically warning people not to listen to what he calls, quote, a certain quack doctor, a foreigner. And basically, this doctor was saying,

there's vampires afoot, and you need to exhume your family and kill them because they're vampires now. And Moses Holmes was saying, don't do that. This is wrong and weird. Well, yeah, and that's the legend that came over from Europe. The Slavic people had the upir, and the Romanians had the stragoi.

And the upir and the stragoi would die, be buried, and would come back to drink the blood of their relatives. And that was the legend. And what it really was, well, maybe we should hold on to that little tidbit. Yeah, I'm sorry. I meant to cross that out on yours. OK.

I was like, this came in too early. Yeah. All right. So we'll tease that out for later. So you ask yourself, I think of Yankees as pretty solid people, salt of the earth, especially 19th century Yankees. Salt of the earth's people, really stable.

Like, it would take quite a bit to drive one of them just totally crazy, right? They had to put up with these winters, nor'easters. Sour'easters? Sure. All that stuff, right? And how would this happen outside of, say, Puritanical New England in the 19th century?

And it turns out, I didn't realize this, but Abigail Tucker points out that the Yankees that we think of are not the Yankees, and I'm not talking baseball here, are not the Yankees who were in actuality. So I sat up very late last night trying to figure out the most convoluted way to say that sentence, and I think it paid off.

Yeah, I thought this was super interesting, because when I think of New England, I think of very religious Puritanical Christian. They don't do this kind of thing. No, you think of, and actually, what's funny is because Manki was here, I had him on movie crush. Guess what his movie was? Hold on, hold on.

So I said Christian, which makes me think of the song Sister Christian by Night Ranger, which factored in big time into Boogie Nights. No, his favorite movie is The Village, which makes total sense. I watched that, again, within the last couple months, and I'm like, this movie's even better now. Yeah, I liked it more when I saw it again, for sure.

Which is weird, because you know the twist at the end. I know. Because it's an M. Night Shyamalan movie. Yeah, and I think it bugged me at the time, because I told him this in the show, but I think at the time, I was sort of like, over M. Night and the twists. I was like, come on, dude, another twist,

and now I'm looking out for it. Right, so it better be really good. Yeah, but I think years later, I watched it again. I was like, you know what, I think I kind of dig this movie now. I did, too. So anyway, very fitting, but I think of those people, like these Puritans living off, removed from society, very strict religious peoples.

But apparently, that was not the deal in the 1800s in rural New England. Only 10% belong to a church. Shocking to me, and especially it says that you're in this article, Rhode Island. And I love this. I had no idea. It was founded as a haven for religious dissenters.

Sure. I think they just wanted to go and party by the seaside. They were like, let's party and engage in hex magic. Gosh. Another way to put it is that the New Englanders in the 19th century were a superstitious bunch. Right, exactly. Because if you were hardcore Christian,

superstition didn't play a part. You wouldn't like, I mean, what are some of the things they did? They would bury shoes by the fireplace to catch the devil from coming down the chimney. Or like a horseshoe over your door. Yeah. That kind of stuff. Basically, anything you think of as like locker, weird kind

of Pennsylvania witchcraft, that kind of stuff. That's what it was. It was like country witchcraft. That's what they believed in. Because even if you weren't Christian, you still believed in things like good and evil and spirits and demons and stuff like that. You just had to have a different way of dealing with them

since you weren't Christian. And the way of dealing with them wasn't like praying to God or whatever. She had to hang up a horseshoe or bury a shoe to keep the devil from coming down your chimney. Because you were as backwards as it gets. When are we going to reveal the reveal? When are we going to do our M night twist?

We're working toward it. Still not yet? Not yet. All right, well, then you got to go because I got nothing else. Oh, OK. Are you ready for it now? Well, no. If you've got more, if you can hold out longer.

I don't. I just lost track of where we were. Lost track of where we were. All right, well, here's the reveal because being superstitious doesn't explain the vampire panic alone. Right. What else does? I'll let you drop the hammer.

So they are not entirely certain, but the general consensus among people who study this kind of thing is that this was a reaction to infectious disease outbreaks specifically tuberculosis. Boom. Boom. That's why superstitious New Englanders were running around in the 19th century

digging up family members and driving stakes through their hearts or beheading them in their graves. I love stuff like this. I do, too. When you can look back years later, I wonder what they're going to, in 100 years, about the Satanic Panic. Oh, yeah.

It wasn't some disease, obviously. No, but it was a panic, though. Yeah. It's interesting that two of our favorite episodes probably are going to end up being Satanic Panic and Vampire Panic. Sure. This one's going pretty well so far. All right, so let's talk about TB for a minute.

And this is obviously pre-antibiotics. There is still tuberculosis, but it's super curable now if you're lucky enough to live where you can get antibiotics. But it is caused by bacterium, two of which can infect humans, M tuberculosis and M bovis. And you've heard the word consumption in movies like The Village from that time period. They're dying of consumption.

Consumption was almost always tuberculosis. That's just what they called it back then. Right, that was the name for it. The reason they called it consumption, and actually that term to describe tuberculosis actually predates the more common usage of consumption today. Oh, really? Like ingesting or eating something.

Yeah, it dates back to like the 1300s, I think. So the original meaning was that your body was consuming itself? It was like the word for tuberculosis back then. Yeah, and the reason they called it is because it looked like your life force was being sapped away from you, the way that the disease progressed. It included coughing fits where they

said you couldn't even stop to talk. You'd be coughing so hard. Coughing up blood. That's not good. No. You would lose a lot of weight, so it looked like you were wasting away too. But at the same time, you were voraciously hungry.

You wanted to eat. It wasn't that kind of illness where you just can't even eat. You were hungry like all the time, but you were still wasting away. So there's this duality between hunger, rampant hunger, and the loss of a life force. And it's possible that all vampire tales and legends and the origin of it is found in tuberculosis,

because that's what you think of with vampirism. The whole idea at this time was, if you had tuberculosis and you were the, say, second, third, fourth member of your family to come down with this, with consumption, it meant that one of the previous family members who had died of this disease was still alive in some way. Their soul was.

In a supernatural way, and was coming at night and sucking the life from you to sustain themselves. If this was the case, then there was only one thing to do. If you were in New England at the time, you had to dig up that family member and take care of business. Yeah, it's funny, Emily and I always laugh at the movie trope of the cough.

It has almost 100% return rate. If a character coughs in a movie, then they're going to die, because you just don't leave coughs in movies. That's a sure sign. Or especially if they cough into a hanky, there's always blood in it. Like, remember Hodgman's Doc Holiday? Yeah.

I'll be your huckleberry, coughing up blood and lung tissue. Well, we just started watching The Crown last night. You know that show on Netflix? Do you watch it? No, I'm familiar, though. Yeah, we saw the very, just the first episode last night of season one. And of course, there's Jared Harris as Queen Elizabeth's

father, the king, I can't remember what his name was. King so-and-so. King, the king of England. And he's got TV. Of course, he starts coughing in the very first scene into the hanky. And you're like, oh, well, he's probably just going to be in the pilot.

He's gone. That's how she became Queen. If we're shouting out things we've seen recently, I want to give a shout out to Wonder. Wonder. What's that? The movie about the kid with facial differences. I've heard this.

His parents are Owen Wilson and Julia Roberts. So good, though. Is it good? Yeah. All right, you know what, let's take a break. OK. Who thought Wonder was going to make an appearance in the vampire panic episode?

Not me. All right, we're going to take a break and we'll come back and talk a little bit more about how a family might do this right after this. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the co-classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slipdresses and choker necklaces.

We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and nonstop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster?

Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts

flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in, as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to, Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted

Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. OK, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place,

because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, god. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS, because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so will my husband, Michael.

Hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general, can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now.

If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. All right, so dad has gone from TB or consumption. Yeah, we brother has. Sister has.

Yeah, maybe one's on their deathbed. The other one's about to die. Maybe. And we should talk a little bit about consumption a little more. At the time, there were people out there in the world in the late 19th century who understood that consumption was tuberculosis,

was an infectious disease caused by these germs. The people engaged in these vampire panics did not generally think that. They didn't realize that this was a contagious disease. They thought that a relative was sapping your life force. The thing is, tuberculosis is a very contagious disease spread by coughing, sneezing, which you do a lot of when you have tuberculosis.

And if you're living in like a one, two room house in rural New England, and you're a family of six, you can say that a high percentage of your family members are going to eventually contract this disease. Yeah, what was the number? It was killing like 25% of people over a certain period. That's a really big point here. The vampire panics started in the late 18th century.

Tuberculosis really started to gain a foothold in New England in about the 1730s. And by the time the vampire panics hit their height in the late 18th, early 19th century, it was the number one killer of New Englanders at the time. But again, they weren't like, gosh darn that, tuberculosis, I caught this infectious disease. One of our family members is sapping the life

out of one of our other family members because our family member is a vampire. Still, the effect was the same, that they felt totally powerless against this condition. They just had what it was wrong. And because they had it wrong, they would dig up dead bodies and do weird stuff to them. All right, so brother dies, sister dies, maybe another

sibling, maybe one of the parents. And then if you're in rural New England, you say, all right, clearly what's going on here is that whoever the first one that died, or maybe one of them, is coming back and killing the rest by sucking out their blood. I have a vampire in my family. What do I do?

I'm going to dig with some help, probably. Sometimes it's quiet, sometimes in the middle of the night, sometimes, like in the case in Vermont, it would be like a daytime public festival type of thing. It was like a party, like a community party. Yeah, and in fact, I think that's the one Henry David Thoreau attended, in Woodstock, Vermont, in his journal.

And he was like, WTF with these people? Well, this is a weird party. So you would dig these people up, depending on where you are. Well, first of all, let's talk about what they might find when they open this coffin. Yeah, because there were a couple of steps. The first step was you had to diagnose vampirism.

Because let's say they finally decided by the fourth family member being sick, that this family was being sapped by a vampire. They didn't automatically know which dead family member was doing it. They got to look at them all. Yeah, so you might dig up multiple coffins. What they were looking for was the belief,

the belief was that you could tell just by looking at them whether they were a vampire. Maybe poking around a little bit, too. Sure, but the problem was is that, so the idea of what we think of as vampires is basically the Bram Stoker vampire, which comes later. These vampires were like the ghouls from the grave type. Like Nosferatu looking.

Yes. So like real long fingernails and like pale and bloody mouth. Their skin kind of slipping away from their body. The problem is, is like this idea of vampires, what we understand is or what they understood at vampires was a tradition handed down from people who had broken up or broken into graves before and could tell you what a vampire looked like.

Right. Which is basically a body in a certain stage of decomposition. Right, and specifically a lot of times a body in a certain stage of decomposition who had died from tuberculosis. Sure. So, you know, you might dig up a grave and see a bloat because they have a buildup of gas in their stomach.

That is not what they thought it was from. They thought, what? Well, they thought they were vampires full from blood. They'd be like, look at this fat vampire. Yeah, they might see long fingernails and say, that looks to me like a vampire. Right, but that is what? Your skin receding.

Your skin pulls back from the nail bed, which makes it look like your nails have kept growing after death, which is not the case. Same with your hair, too. They may see red lips. Bloody lips, even, possibly. Sure. Because apparently the breakdown of your lung tissue

from tuberculosis continues even after death. So they would see blood on the lips and be like, yep, they've been sucking the blood out of their loved one. But the key to all this is the heart. That was what they were trying to get to, to see if there was any fresh blood near the heart. And if they did find that, one of them, well, we'll get to what they would do.

And again, a lot of time you would see fresh appearing blood because of the way the body decomposed from tuberculosis, or period. So this thing, yeah, but tuberculosis a lot, too, especially like the blood on the lips kind of thing, right? So this thing was kind of self-sustaining, self-fulfilling. When somebody died of tuberculosis, if you dug them up at a certain period of time,

especially if they say, like, died in winter, they might seem inexplicably in a pristine state. Yeah, because they're underground in New England. Right. It's freezing. In the winter. So they would fit the bill for a vampire just by definition of being a decomposing body.

Yeah. But to the people who didn't understand what decomposition was, it was just plain as day that they were looking at a vampire in the grave, right? So they find a family member that fits the bill of a vampire. That's step one. Vampirism has been diagnosed. Next is dispatching the vampire, dealing with the vampire.

And the problem is this. The vampire is already dead, so there are only certain things you can do to a vampire to kill it. And really, what you're not trying to do is kill it. You're trying to make it so it can't get out of the grave and keep sapping the life force out of these family members, hence, hopefully, saving the dying family member. Right.

And it was technically called apotropaic remedy. That's a clinical name for it. Basically, it's something that you're doing to counteract this evil. So it depends on where you were, what you might do. Everyone had their own methods. In Maine and Plymouth, Massachusetts, I love this one. All they did was flip it over so it was face down.

And they're like, everyone knows a vampire just very creepily rises from the waist out of their coffin. What if we just flipped them over? They couldn't do that. They went, done and done. Let's go get some ice cream. Or the stake through the heart. That didn't arise because they thought

the stake had some magical powers, but they thought they would literally just stake them into the ground so they couldn't get up. That's another thing, too. So the stake through the heart with the vampire, you think that that's trying to kill the vampire. That is not what they were trying to do. But the larger thought here is that our understanding

of staking a vampire through the heart comes from people who actually did this because they were trying to battle tuberculosis. That's so amazing to me. It's a confluence of all these weird things, really, that led to this. But all of it has been refined into this neat, tidy vampire legend.

This is the compartment it fits in, vampire legend, to those of us alive today. But it's got this amazing history and backstory, some of which happened in real life. This reminds me of the real life zombies, too. Yeah, yes. Kind of similar. Exactly.

Good point. It's like this weird religious hysteria combined with what they didn't understand at the time was kind of medicine and science. This weird pre-science era is so fascinating to me. They're not pre-science, but I guess it was pre-real science, rudimentary science. So in the Connecticut, Rhode Island, Vermont, in that region,

the go-to was to burn the heart, take the ash from the heart, and ingest it to give it to someone who may be sick in the family or may even be healthy trying to ward off sickness. And they would actually eat that. So that was one way of dealing with it. Yeah, there's a quote here from Woodstock, Vermont, one Daniel Ransom in his journal.

It was said that if the heart of one of the family who died of consumption was taken out and burned, others would be free from it. And father, having some faith in the remedy, had the heart of Frederick taken out after he had been buried. And it was burned in Captain Pearson's blacksmith forge. And here's the thing, though, it did not ever save anyone

from tuberculosis. No, that's the thing. And I was wondering, what was the superstition? How did the superstition explain a failure to cure? I don't know. You know, were they just like, we waited too long? I bet you they did that. That had to be.

They would just have some explanation that we didn't do it right. Maybe they would try another method, not burning the heart. Like the JB55, they think that the reason they did that weird Jolly Roger thing was because it was so decomposed, there were just bones. So I guess they just improvised. Right.

Like, hey, why don't we just do this? Well, that apparently finds its root in Europe. In some places in Europe, that was the way to deal with the vampire was to cut its head off. Other places, they would stick a brick in the vampire's mouth. Some places, they would bind them with thorns in Europe. And that's another thing that kind of fascinates me about this whole thing, Chuck, is that at some point,

somewhere, maybe in Europe, maybe in Asia, maybe in Africa, somebody came up with this idea of vampires, of relatives coming back from the grave and sucking the life out of their friends, family members, villagers. And that person had this idea that spread. And it made it centuries later to New England, where it led to the desecration of graves.

Of family members. Right. Including one that was discovered another couple centuries later by some kids playing in a gravel pit that's led to us talking about this today. If that doesn't make history interesting, I don't know what does. Yes, some kids running around listening to the Pixies.

Finds a mountain of skulls. This new band, the Pixies are top notch. It's great. Should we finish with the story of Mercy Brown? We should. All right, so Mercy Brown lived in Exeter Road Island. This was a farming land, and by all accounts, by the time she was around, the town had definitely

seen its better days, thanks to the Civil War, kind of decimating the town by exactly 10%. That's a good fact, Toit. The town is actually kind of a metaphor for vampirism itself, like it had lost its own life force in a lot of ways. It dropped by like 2 thirds in the 70 years before Mercy Brown died, the population did. It was not a good scene for the people who were left behind.

Plus, they had tuberculosis running around town. Right, and certainly through her house, her mother died, her sister, Mary Eliza died. Oh, no, that was her mom. Sorry, Mary Olive was her sister. It's a great name. Mary Olive? Sure.

Great. She was 20, and Mary Olive, that is a good name. And I think some of those names are coming back, the classic names. Oh, yeah? Yeah. Little House on the Prairie trend? Well, I know one person who named their daughter Olive

recently, and I thought that was a pretty sweet name. You should have been like Mary Olive would have been better. I was listening to my favorite murder the other day, and they were laughing at funny names that you can't imagine a baby being called Barbara, and they listed out a few other ones. Like, it comes out with clunky jewelry and a cigarette and then around?

Exactly. Sweet little baby Barbara. So anyway, Mary Olive goes, Mary Eliza goes, the brother. And this is where it gets a little weird, because I saw eight different accounts of this, and they all had different timelines of death and sickness, whether or not Mercy died, and then Edwin got sick or not. But at any rate, brother Edwin is sick.

Mercy eventually dies of TB, and the town says, we got to do something here. Yeah, they went to the dad, George Brown, and said, man, you got a problem on your hands. And if you think about it, so all this took place over a decade, but you're like, that's a long time. I would think that into the 19th century, that's a pretty average mortality rate for a family.

Apparently not. But they were kids. They were in their early 20s. Well, also, he lost his wife as well. So over the course of a decade, this family of five went down to basically a family of one and a quarter, depending on whatever you want to count Edwin as he's dying, right?

So George Brown was like, you're probably right, we should do something. Later on, it was revealed that he didn't believe in this at all, that he basically agreed to this because the neighbors wouldn't leave him alone about it. And the neighbors aren't doing this just out of complete selflessness. There was this idea that once this vampire finished

with the family, they would move on to another family. So if you lived in a small village, you had a real problem with this vampire being allowed to go on. And you would bother your neighbor to dig up their family member until they relented. And that's what happened with George Brown. Yeah, I mean, the writing was on the wall,

certainly with Edwin, as far as the neighbors are concerned. Like you said, he's like, fine, do what you gotta do. He did say, I want a doctor there, which is amazing that doctors would actually preside over an exhumation. I think the doctor was trying to be the voice of reason throughout this process, even as he's cutting open Mercy's chest

and removing her heart and then her abdomen and removing her liver. He's pointing out, as this Abigail Tucker article says, look, this is evidence of tuberculosis. They're like, shut up, college boy. Yeah, give me that heart. Yeah, and that's what happened. They got a hot fire burning.

And that's exactly what happened. Like you said, they burned this heart. They mixed the ashes into a tonic. Edwin drank it, thinking that they would save him. And what he lived a couple of months, maybe not even. Because he had tuberculosis. Yeah, cutting open the chest of a dead relative and burning their heart and liver

does nothing to cure tuberculosis. The sister. Yeah, the sister, which is, it's really sad, but at the same time, it kind of gives you a picture of George Brown. He doesn't believe in all this vampire superstition. He apparently also is cool with the desecration of a grave. He's not a very sentimental guy.

It's with the impression that I have of him, you know? He's like, yeah, go cut her open, that's fine. Just stop bothering me. Just make sure that my doctor friend Ted is there to point out how stupid all of this is. Yeah, because they sent Edwin away, I think, to try and get well. And I don't know if George was there,

but he definitely wasn't at the exhumation. No, there was a guy there from Providence newspaper. Here's our other M Night Shyamalan twist. That's right. He wrote an article that basically told the world about this and it got picked up. And it got picked up by a number of papers, including the New York world.

And in 1896, the New York world reported on the vampire exhumation of Mercy Brown and a clipping of that article was found in the papers of a certain person. Chuck, who was it? Brahm Stoker. That's right. The author of Dracula.

Yeah. So scholars have said this all came too soon before Dracula was published. He was probably working on it already, or he was working already. It didn't influence it at all. Some people say, no, he definitely did. He was influenced by this vampire panic, for sure.

Yeah, in Manki's lore episode on Mercy Brown, because he's just a great storyteller, he ended it just by saying, you know, I think the last words of the show are Brahm Stoker. Oh, oh. He didn't say, you know, maybe he did, maybe he didn't. Okay, you ready? Yeah.

So hold on, let's try this again. We're gonna do this lore style. So Chuck, of newspaper clipping of Mercy Brown's exhumation was found in the papers of... Brahm Stoker, did we have classical music going? I hope so, Jerry. All right, okay. And he also didn't have me giggling in the background.

If you want to know more about lore, well, go check out that podcast and look for more good stuff coming soon from Aaron Manki, who's now our co-worker, which means we have to buy him a Christmas present. I know. And in the meantime, while we're figuring out what to get Aaron Manki,

it's time for Listener Mail. I'm gonna go with this one, Venezuelan living in Chile. Okay. Hey guys, new fan of the podcast, started with the Seven Wonders. So that's super new. And I was hooked since then.

And now listen to the new ones and go back in time to 2009 ones, I want to go through all. That sounds like they're sandwiching. Maybe. I'm from Venezuela living in Chile and I want to suggest one about identity. We as Venezuelans are going through a difficult time as the government is not issuing passports.

As an immigrant, it's super hard. Basically, if I want to travel, I can only go to the more costura member countries because I could do so with the RUT, R-U-T, which is the Chilean ID card. And I'm a lucky case since I have friends that while asking for Chilean visa, the Venezuelan passport expired

and now they don't have either Chilean or Venezuelan documents. Man. I feel like an orphan if my home country does not want to give me ID documents and as a resident, Chile can't either. Only if I apply to nationalization and it will have to wait a few years until I can do that.

She sounds like Tom Hanks in the terminal, basically, but in Chile. And I have no one to claim. I just want to put the word out about our situation. The Venezuelan government pretends that everything is okay when it's not. My family is broken across the world and I'm incapable to go see them

and they can't come to me. It is a painful situation. Keep up with good work, guys. Thanks to you. I have new topics to discuss with my friends. They were particularly interested in how frogs work. Sorry for the broken English. I'm still working on my grammar.

I think you did great. Agreed. PS, I will love to hear a shout out. Hearts, hearts. That is Emanuella Guia. Shout out Emanuella. Hang in there. Yeah, that's really sad to hear

and you're doing great with your English. We are very sad to hear about that situation. Yeah. If you want to get in touch with us and let us know about something going on in your country that we weren't aware of, we want to hear about it. You can tweet to us at joshumclark or at syskpodcast. I also have a website called rucerysclark.com.

Chuck is on Facebook at facebook.com slash Charles W. Chuck Bryant. He's also at facebook.com slash stuff you should know. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast at howstuffworks.com. And as always, join us at our home on the web, stuffyoushouldknow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation?

If you do, you've come to the right place, because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart

radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.