There is no passion so contagious as that of fear. Michel de Montaigne
It’s 1891. Mists creep between the grave markers in the cemetery in Exeter, Rhode Island. Men, grimly determined, dig up the resting place of Mercy Brown. Her coffin is lifted and set onto the ground beside the open wound in the earth. The lid is slowly pried open, and people clutch each other as their worst fears are confirmed: the girl hasn’t decomposed. When her heart is pierced, blood seeps out. She is a vampire!
As the light wanes, her telltale heart and liver are cut out and burned. The ashes are mixed with water and given to her ill brother, Edwin, to drink so that he may avoid falling victim to his sister’s undead appetites.
This bizarre ritual actually took place. The entire story made news around the world. It’s believed to have been an inspiration for Bram Stoker, and that he based the character of Lucy Westenra in his novel Dracula on Mercy.
The late 1800s in New England appeared to spread a plague of vampirism through the villages. Whole families were sickening and dying from a mysterious illness that seemed to suck the life out of them. Unearthly pallor. Wracking, bloody coughs. A feverish glow. Wasting away while lying helpless in bed. These were the signs.
Among many others, George and Mary Brown’s family suffered a series of attacks. Mary Eliza, the mother, passed away first, in 1883, followed by the eldest daughter, Mary Olive, six months later. Several years passed, then son Edwin became ill next, and was sent away to Colorado Springs to get better. While he was in absentia, one of his sisters, Mercy Lena, began to show symptoms, and passed away. Edwin returned home for the service.
He began to sicken again. In the midst of his burning fever, he had strange dreams during which he would cry out things like “she was here”, “she haunts me”, and “she wants me to come with her”. When the townspeople heard that, they began to pressure George to exhume the bodies of all of his deceased female family members and find out which one was stealing Edwin’s life. Eventually he gave in.
In those times, after life-sucking perpetrators were identified, there were a number of methods to stop the attacks.
- Sometimes the body was simply turned over in its grave. I suppose the theory was that it could then no longer find its way out of the earth.
- Families might decide to burn the undecomposed organs and then rebury the body.
- Going further, afflicted living family members might also inhale smoke from the burned organs or possibly consume the ashes.
- In extreme cases, the body would be decapitated – imagine that scene.
With a little research, I found that it is quite possible for some bodies to decay at a significantly slower rate. In oxygen-poor environments, a rather creepy substance called corpse wax can form, from the decomposition of body fat. Anaerobic bacteria, found in soil with a high moisture content, break down the fatty tissue into a waxy substance that will actually protect the body in a form called a ‘soap mummy’. People with higher amounts of body fat, including women and children, are more prone to this strange kind of preservation, which is believed to have fed the old vampire legends.
According to a newspaper report at the time, the examining physician, Dr. Metcalf of Wickford, stated that all of the bodies of the Brown family were in a perfectly natural state of decomposition. When he removed Mercy’s organs, some blood seeped out of her heart, which he also said was quite normal.
However, George wrote in a letter:
this morning [July 21] opened the grave of my daughter [Martha]… who had died—the last of my three daughters—almost six years ago … On opening the body, the lungs were not dissolved, but had blood in them, though not fresh, but clotted. The lungs did not appear as we would suppose they would in a body just dead, but far nearer a state of soundness than could be expected. The liver, I am told, was as sound as the lungs. We put the lungs and liver in a separate box, and buried it in the same grave, ten inches or a foot, above the coffin.
None of it worked. Edwin and all of George’s remaining children also succumbed.
New Englanders had no idea what they were dealing with, unfortunately.
The threat of the “White Death” was a dark cloud that hung over every family in the 1700-1800s, and long before. Consumption, now known as tuberculosis, has been around since ancient times, and is highly contagious, passed easily between those in close proximity. By the 1800s, it had certainly had lived up to its name, consuming one in seven of all people who’d ever lived, and was such a pervasive terror that parents would train their children on how to live in someone else’s home should they some day become orphaned.
People who contracted the mysterious condition would become extremely pale, with prominent cheekbones, large eyes and a feverish glow, which in Europe weirdly became a fashion statement. The illness was thought to enhance a woman’s beauty, making her seem more tragic and alluring, while for men it provided a gaunt, intellectual, ‘poetic’ image.
So many famous creators died of it, such as Elizabeth Barrett Browning, that consumption became desirable as a way to enhance their artistic skills. It was a dicey game to play.
In America, towns ravaged by the disease weren’t so amenable to contracting it. Numerous vampire-prevention cases were recorded. For example, in 1817, Frederick Ransom of Vermont, was exhumed by his father and had his heart burned in a blacksmith’s forge so that he wouldn’t attack his family. In Ohio in the winter of 1816-17, there was a newspaper report with the headline “A STRANGE SUPERSTITION”. It stated that the family of Philip Salladay dug up one of their family members, removed his entrails and had them burned in a fire in front of the surviving members and a large number of other spectators.
Mercy Brown’s exhumation was covered by international newspapers. Scholars have suggested that Bram Stoker knew about the Mercy Brown case through newspaper articles and based the character Lucy Westenra upon her in his novel Dracula. It is also referred to in H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Shunned House”.
Ironically, George Brown was one of very few people never to contract tuberculosis – he lived long enough to see the discovery of the bacterium that causes the disease in 1882, and then the vaccine for it.
The legend of vampirism is a powerful one, based on how much it continues to hold all of us in thrall even in the age of our ‘enlightenment’. Vampires continue to be popular in novels, and producers make countless movies and television shows about them. On a visit to New Orleans several years ago, we went on a Ghost, Voodoo and Vampire walk.
My introduction to vampires came through the original Dark Shadows supernatural soap opera. Since then, I’ve been delighted by the phenomenon in various media. So, I was very excited to recently learned that one of my favourite movies, The Lost Boys (1987), is being turned into a Broadway musical. And before you think that’s ridiculous, watch this promo clip of one of the new songs written for it, featuring the actual vampire performers. Personally, I’m impressed already and am hoping it will hop the border and come up to Canada. Here’s the description in the email I received from New York Comic Con, in case you’re not familiar with the story:
“We’re Inviting You In.
Welcome to Santa Carla. Perfect weather. Beautiful beaches. And a charming boardwalk…as long as you ignore all the “Missing” posters.
When a mother and her two teenage sons move to town in desperate need of a fresh start, they soon uncover the darker side of this sunny coastal community. While Lucy tries to piece her family’s life back together, Michael keeps pulling away in search of belonging. As he finds connection with a local rock band and its charismatic leader, his younger brother Sam comes face-to-face with a terrifying reality: When night falls, Michael’s new friends are even more dangerous than they first appeared.
Based on the cult-classic Warner Bros. film, The Lost Boys: A New Musical arrives on Broadway this spring, directed by Tony Award® winner Michael Arden (Maybe Happy Ending, Parade) and featuring music and lyrics by The Rescues, a book by David Hornsby and Chris Hoch, choreography by Lauren Yalango-Grant and Christopher Cree Grant (The Queen of Versailles), and music supervision by Tony nominee Ethan Popp (Tina: The Tina Turner Musical). The Lost Boys is produced by James Carpinello, Marcus Chait, and Patrick Wilson.
GET A LITTLE TASTE…”
Why do we, over hundreds of years, continually want to believe that there’s a certain kind of life after death? Perhaps it’s just that simple: the possibility.