The Story of Mercy Brown : The Last American Vampire

 

Exhumed

By: Aaron Mahnke

 

Like the Satanic Panic of the 1980’s, New England witnessed almost 100 years before a “Vampire Panic”. In the year 1892, 19-year-old Mercy Brown died. Shortly after her death, her brother began to get ill and slowly waste away.  The town immediately thought that Mercy was reaching beyond the grave to slowly drain away his life.  Since she died during winter it was nigh impossible to dig up the earth to inter her, so she interred about ground in a crypt.  During family illness and the fear of vampires the father had his daughter’s body dug up.  She was remarkably well preserved, in fact too well preserved. So, the towns’ people elected to burn their heart and liver to ashes.

This was a case of folklore outweighing science. Even the doctors who examined the corpse said that everything was normal. Still the will of the town persisted. How on Earth could superstition outweigh science? The year was 1892, not that long ago.

Many beliefs about vampires were brought over from the New World. Poignant is the belief about blood. Back in old times when someone was sick, they would practice something called “bloodletting” or have leeches such out the infected blood. This was believed to cause the infection to be drained out. Another thing coming in vogue was transfusions. Back then in George Washington’s time it was something new and just beginning. The belief was that if you injected animal blood into a human it would help revitalize the individual. George Washington’s doctor wanted to try it. They did not end up doing it. In some instances, it appeared to work but later experiments did not yield the desired results.

There were also beliefs about the role of electricity being able to revive a corpse. In 1800 Luigi Galvani, applied Alessandro Volta’s battery to a frog and noticed its muscles twitch. In 1803 Giovanni Aldini applied electricity to executed criminal George Foster in London.  The electric current from the battery made the dead criminal’s muscle and jaws twitch. This would be the inspiration behind Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein”

The body parts of the dead, especially those who died young and violently, were sought after for medical cures. Rubbing a dead person’s hand on a wart or other sickness would cause the illness to deteriorate along with the hand. A dead man’s fat could be rubbed on an ailing part of the body as a supposed cure. Epileptics would drink a dead man’s blood in hopes of remedy.

Revenant in which vampires are a species there are corpses that refuse to totally die and often return to plague surviving family members. They would often bring disease and plague in their wake.

Excellent book that filled with well researched information. The book is easy to ready and very enjoyable.