Well, you can see how that worked out. I became obsessed. Shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer blew my teenaged mind. I tracked down all the vampire books I could, watched every bit of media with a hint of a vampire in it. The distinct perfume of that early obsession may have faded with time and age, but it never once let up. No, it only let me start to dig into the lore and myth behind the vampyre and the more I learned, it became quite obvious that these stories don't spring from one source.

If you are interested in the fascinating and often gruesome/violent/disturbing links between history, medicine, psychology, racism, misogyny, and fear of death to create the thing that we now call vampire, there are a few books I recommend:

• Killing the Dead: Vampire Epidemics from Mesopotamia to the New World by John Blair is one of those somewhat academic but still totally readable, world-spanning histories that sucks you in with a smart, well-researched blend of "archaeology, anthropology, and psychology with vampire lore from literature and popular culture to show how these episodes occur at traumatic moments in societies that upend all sense of security."

Another good one, but more focused in scope, is In Search Of Dracula: The History of Dracula and Vampires – The Biography of Vlad the Impaler and Bram Stoker's Diaries by Raymond T. McNally and Radu R. Florescu. It's an older title, and definitely would be outdated on the list of media based around Dracula (though useful, since those media pieces still exist!). But it has some good insights on the historical impressions and influences that were made on Stoker.

And I just learned that Aaron Manhke, host of the Lore podcast amongst others, has a book out this fall (as of this writing, 2026) called Exhumed: Unearthing the History of the American Vampire. It specifically discusses what we'll be looking closely at here: the New England vampire "epidemic" and the tragic story of a woman named Mercy Brown. I'm excited to read this one.

This is all to say that while I've done some reading and research on vampires, and certainly consumed my fair share of vampire-based media, I had only recently heard of the New England vampire panic and a woman named Mercy Brown who was at the center of it.

Hello, obsession, my old friend… we meet again.

The Beginning

The cause behind the vampire panic of New England in the late 18th and early 19th centuries could be boiled down to one word: tuberculosis. It's easy enough to say that this disease caused the deaths of many, made some of the living revert to old folk remedies, and people got a little jumpy about the whole illness and death debacle.
It's not surprising that this happened… but it's also not quite so simple.

Tuberculosis is a nasty disease. Caused by bacteria (Mycobacterium tuberculosis), it most often affects the lungs. During the time period of Mercy Brown, it was typically called "consumption", since it "consumed" victims, making them waste away. From here, you're probably already imagining it: the withering of a once-healthy individual. The tightening of skin, the receding of gums. A whole person transforming into something only vaguely human-shaped. Anyone who has seen Nosferatu (the original or the new one) probably is picturing the more horrific form of the vampire.

Today, tuberculosis is treated with antibiotics. But it's still a deadly disease, one that has killed untold numbers of people because tuberculosis is easily spread through air and water. You may have read John Green's Everything is Tuberculosis or seen one of his videos, like this one from CrashCourse. Even now, about 25% of all people in the world are carrying the TB bacteria, but only "5–10% [of carriers have a] lifetime risk of falling ill with TB". I know someone who was hospitalized with TB just a few years ago, and they were very sick. Tuberculosis is not a disease of ye olden times; it's here to stay. We have treatments for it, yes, but it still can cause real issues in communities without access to clean water or modern medical care.

But tuberculosis is also a sneaky thing. It doesn't cause widespread issues in a community. It's not COVID, where one sick person in a household needs to quarantine themselves until symptoms are gone and/or a test comes back negative. TB does some pretty wacky things, and while it is easily spread, people can get infected and show no or few signs of having an active infection.

Even more complicated is how, within a household of many family members, not all will get sick, even if they are in close quarters with each other day in and day out. At the time, it was also theorized that there was a genetic or antecedent component to the disease, and they were sort of correct, since many people can carry the bacteria and not fall ill.

I found an absolutely fascinating document called Senate Bill 0020, from 1873 Massachusetts, that included a lengthy section on consumption. In 1871, the state sent out questionnaires to doctors in the state, asking about reporting "means of preventing consumption". Many doctors sent letters back with the questionnaires. This primary document might be one of the most telling when it comes to how people, especially physicians, thought about consumption at the time.

205 out of 210 surveys indicated they (again, mostly doctors) believed consumption was "caused or promoted by hereditary influences". The state goes on to say that anyone looking to marry and have children should consider whether they carry consumption in their genetics, and "if it be considered improper and contrary to liberty, at present, to interfere with or prevent any such marriage, how-ever inevitably it may be destined to produce a consumptive, wretched progeny?"

Continuing with the state's bill, they cited some of the letters sent back with the surveys, particularly dealing with the hereditary link of consumption.

At the time, they did not understand genetics and how poverty and small homes with too many people inside could lead to consumption/TB spreading so widely within a single family.

The bill goes on to cite other fascinating scientific thoughts at the time, including admiration for the Irish and their "diet principally made up of saccharine and fatty substances" and how they "live in ill-built houses…[where] the doors are seldom closed, thereby insuring a good supply of pure air." Which contrasted with homes in Massachusetts, which were "overcrowded tenement-houses, with small rooms opening into dark passage-ways, doubtful neighbors, and other things combined, oblige them to live with closed doors, so that ventilation is next to impossible."

If you read through the rest of the section on consumption and this survey, you can see a wide variety of opinions on how consumption manifests, how to treat it, and how to prevent it from developing in children who are hereditarily disposed. Hygiene is noted many, many times, as well as diet, "change of climate", "sunlight, air, and muscular development", "the use of iron…cod-liver oil…alcoholic stimulants", wearing "three grades of flannel under-garments during the year, –very thick during the winter months, medium in spring and fall, and a thin grade during the summer, after the middle of June."

They sort of had the right ideas, sometimes. Sort of. But they also thought the children of alcoholics produced "feeble offspring" and they had "never seen a parent who drank to excess who did not have consumptive children." One doctor seemed to lean into the wild idea that those who drink to excess likely have issues around money, debt, and securing good housing and food for their children, which would lead to poor conditions. Which leads to worse health, meaning you might be more susceptible to consumption.

These are also the same doctors who thought "overstudy" at university could cause consumption, or that having certain jobs could cause it; they sort of understood that jobs in poorly ventilated buildings, like stonecutters and iron workers, might lead to weaker, sicker lungs. And that makes sense! But I'm not about to give them a ton of credit here.

Honestly, I could talk about this all day. The history of TB is long, fascinating, and confusing, since communities across the world have thought of it in many different ways, from the cause to the treatment; they told many stories about it, even romanticized it. And no one was immune from it. It killed many artists, writers, and actors. It took Edgar Allan Poe's mother from him when he was only two years old, and many of the women in his writings have that ethereal, wispy, big-eyed look that were mainstays of female TB patients. They were wasting away - literally - but were lauded for it. It was a disease that "shrank the body but enlarged the soul".

So take all that, swirl it around with the fear that anyone could get TB, no matter how wealthy or white or morally upstanding, add in some superstition and old-school European folklore, and you get a community terrorized by their own imaginations fed on the fires of an actually horrifying disease that ate away at their neighbors and loved ones.

Honestly, the history of TB is fascinating and the aforementioned John Green works are great starter points for digging in. But understanding some of the facets of this history is important to see the underpinnings of TB, New England, and religiosity. Or…sort of a lack thereof. It's complicated.

Remember, this is a time of great advancements and a lot of superstition mixed with religion and lingering folk beliefs. So to see hundreds of doctors trying to pin down the causes of TB while those regular villagers think vampires are rising from the grave… let's just say that we've not come that far in human advancement. It eerily sounds a lot like what's happening now, with people thinking vaccines cause autism and drinking raw milk will cure cancer.

Let's Talk About Vampires

Not all the superstitious and folk beliefs of New Englanders at the time were new thoughts for a new world. They still often clung to the old ways.

As Paul S. Sledzik and Nicholas Bellantoni write in The American Journal of Physical Anthropology, in an article titled "Bioarcheological and Biocultural Evidence for the New England Vampire Folk Belief":

"American vampire folk beliefs, which were particularly strong in 19th century New England, contained some European features. The New England folklore is consistent in its incorporation of tuberculosis and examination of the body of the vampire for putative signs of life. Following the death of a family member from consumption (i.e., tuberculosis), other family members began to show the signs of tuberculosis infection. According to the New England folk belief, the 'wasting away' of these family members was attributed to the recently deceased consumptive, who returned from the dead as a vampire to drain the life from the surviving relatives. The apotropaic remedy used to kill the vampire was to exhume the body of the supposed vampire and, if the body was un-decomposed, remove and burn the blood-filled heart or the entire body."

Bellantoni's name came up a few times in my research, including an article from Smithsonian Magazine from 2012 titled, "The Great New England Vampire Panic". At the time, Bellantoni was the Connecticut state archaeologist and in 1990, he was called in to examine graves some kids had found while playing. And so it goes… one kid runs home to his mom, mom thinks he's exaggerating until the kid shows her a human skull. So the police get involved and to their credit, they think the graves might be part of a serial killer case, so they rope off the entire gravesite and start working.

This is where Bellantoni gets involved, because the bones turn out to be over a century old. So roughly 1890 or so. The site winds up being a colonial-era farm cemetery; an unmarked family plot. Pretty typical stuff for rural New England of the 1700s and 1800s. A lot of the graves were of children, laid to rest in "simple wood coffins, without jewelry or even much clothing, their arms resting by their sides or crossed over their chests."

But Burial Number 4 was strange.

This site was one of only two stone crypts they found at the site, which was already odd compared to the rest of the graves, and what they uncovered made things even stranger.

"When Bellantoni lifted the first of the large, flat rocks that formed the roof, he uncovered the remains of a red-painted coffin and a pair of skeletal feet. They lay, he remembers, 'in perfect anatomical position.' But when he raised the next stone, Bellantoni saw that the rest of the individual 'had been com­pletely...rearranged.' The skeleton had been beheaded; skull and thighbones rested atop the ribs and vertebrae. 'It looked like a skull-and-crossbones motif, a Jolly Roger. I'd never seen anything like it.'"

Further study noted that the skeleton had other injuries, including rib fractures, and this along with the beheading had occurred about five years after burial. After death. "Somebody had also smashed the coffin".

And then one of Bellantoni's colleagues asked: "Ever heard of the Jewett City vampires?"

Jewett City is a town neighboring the one where the gravesite was discovered, and in 1854, villagers had exhumed several corpses suspected to be vampires. Had this stone crypt, and the male skeleton within, seen something like that, too?

Bellantoni and Rhode Island folklorist Michael Bell, who had spent many years studying the New England vampire exhumations, paired up. And Bell is a fascinating figure, someone who believes the vampire, and the myth of the vampire, is always with us despite what trends up and down in pop culture. And he's also documented about 80 exhumations, going back as far as the late 1700s and as far west as Minnesota. He also believes there are far more disturbed graves that could show a wider-spread vampire panic from the late 18th and 19th centuries.

Vampires and folk lore about man-eating beasts didn't dwindle in an age of better science and medicine, but instead got combined with religion.

As Bell writes:

"Early New Englanders accepted a variety of harmful spirits (Dorson 1973:26) and viewed illness as a result of supernatural or irrational causes, ranging from witchcraft to the predestinarian notion that "God causes sickness" (Yoder 1972:204). God and witchcraft were not mutually exclusive."

So we can't put all the blame at God's feet, but his followers certainly bear the weight of it.

And then you have to add in the very specific folk beliefs of New England at the time.

As Bellantoni and Bell would write:

"In the New England folklore, if blood is found in the heart of the exhumed vampire, the apotropaic remedy was to burn the heart, in the process ridding the family of the vampire's actions. Most historic accounts indicate that upon exhuming the vampire, the body was found undecomposed and that blood was present in the heart."

It all has to do with blood and the heart, but what if the poor soul they're digging up has decomposed to the point where there is no heart? Well, New Englanders at the time had an answer for that as well.

"We hypothesize that, in the absence of a heart to be burned, the apotropaic remedy was the place the bones in a 'skull and crossbones' arrangement. In support of this hypothesis, we note that decapitation was a common European method of dispatching a dead vampire, and that the Celts and Neolithic Egyptians were known to separate the head from the body, supposedly to prevent the dead from doing harm."

Sound familiar? Yeah, it sounds like how Bellantoni found that poor soul in Burial Number 4, with the bones and head rearranged after death.

But even this very particular way of arranging the dead, in hopes of keeping a vampire from rising, varied from place to place during this time.

The Vampire Panic

"In many cases, only family and neighbors participated. But sometimes town fathers voted on the matter, or medical doctors and clergymen gave their blessings or even pitched in. Some communities in Maine and Plymouth, Massachusetts, opted to simply flip the exhumed vampire facedown in the grave and leave it at that. In Connecticut, Rhode Island and Vermont, though, they frequently burned the dead person's heart, sometimes inhaling the smoke as a cure. (In Europe, too, exhumation protocol varied with region: Some beheaded suspected vampire corpses, while others bound their feet with thorns.)

Often these rituals were clandestine, lantern-lit affairs. But, particularly in Vermont, they could be quite public, even festive. One vampire heart was reportedly torched on the Woodstock, Vermont, town green in 1830. In Manchester, hundreds of people flocked to a 1793 heart-burning ceremony at a blacksmith's forge: 'Timothy Mead officiated at the altar in the sacrifice to the Demon Vampire who it was believed was still sucking the blood of the then living wife of Captain Burton,' an early town history says. 'It was the month of February and good sleighing.'"

Bell attributes the openness of the Vermont exhumations to colonial settlement patterns. Rhode Island has about 260 cemeteries per 100 square miles, versus Vermont's mere 20 per 100 square miles. Rhode Island's cemeteries were small and scattered among private farms, whereas Vermont's tended to be much larger, often located in the center of town. In Vermont, it was much harder to keep a vampire hunt hush-hush.

And speaking of Rhode Island…what about the case of Mercy Brown?

Mercy Lena Brown lived in Exeter Rhode Island, born in 1873. Exeter was a subsistence farming community with rocky soil that was really only good for growing corn. And by the time Mercy was born, Exeter had been ravaged by the Civil War and the lure of a better life provided by westward travel thanks to the booming railroads. "By 1892, the year [Mercy] Lena died, Exeter's population had dipped to just 961, from a high of more than 2,500 in 1820. Farms were abandoned, many of them later to be seized and burned by the government."

And in Exeter, another plague was brewing, but this one had a name: consumption.

"By the 1800s, when the scares were at their height, the disease was the leading cause of mortality throughout the Northeast, responsible for almost a quarter of all deaths. It was a terrible end, often drawn out over years: a skyrocketing fever, a hacking, bloody cough and a visible wasting away of the body. 'The emaciated figure strikes one with terror,' reads one 18th-century description, 'the forehead covered with drops of sweat; the cheeks painted with a livid crimson, the eyes sunk...the breath offensive, quick and laborious, and the cough so incessant as to scarce allow the wretched sufferer time to tell his complaints.' Indeed, Bell says, symptoms 'progressed in such a way that it seemed like something was draining the life and blood out of somebody.'"

In December 1882, the Brown home fell to the disease. Its first victim was Mercy's mother, Mary Elizabeth. The next year, her sister, Mary Olive, caught it and quickly withered away. A few years later, Mercy's brother Edwin, fell ill and traveled to Colorado, hoping the shift in climate would help. But Mercy had been just a child when her mother and sister died, and didn't fall ill until almost a decade after their deaths.

"Her tuberculosis was the 'galloping' kind, which meant that she might have been infected but remained asymptomatic for years, only to fade fast after showing the first signs of the disease. A doctor attended her in 'her last illness,' a newspaper said, and 'informed her father that further medical aid was useless.'"

By the time Mercy fell ill, vampire panic had consumed most of New England. And several acquaintances told Mercy's father, George, they suspected something supernatural as the cause, instead of bad luck or heritage. Perhaps…one of the three deceased women in the family was actually rising from the grave at night and preying on the others. Even Edwin, who had recently returned from his trip, had fallen ill again right as Mercy was dying.

If the vampire wasn't caught, Edwin might be the next victim.

George gave a group of men from the town permission to exhume the bodies, to check for fresh blood in their decaying hearts. So on the morning of March 17, 1892, they dug up the bodies, as a family doctor and local newspaper reporter stood watch. George couldn't bear to watch the spectacle himself, not that anyone could blame him.

"After nearly a decade, Lena's sister and mother were barely more than bones. Lena, though, had been dead only a few months, and it was wintertime. 'The body was in a fairly well-preserved state,' the [newspaper] correspondent later wrote. 'The heart and liver were removed, and in cutting open the heart, clotted and decomposed blood was found.' … the villagers burned her heart and liver on a nearby rock, feeding Edwin the ashes. He died less than two months later."

But something about Mercy Brown's story made news outside tiny Exeter, and soon people along the coast were talking about the young woman who had been unearthed by superstitious villagers. "Then a well-known anthropologist named George Stetson traveled to Rhode Island to probe "the barbaric superstition" in the surrounding area."

Published in the venerable American Anthropologist journal, Stetson's account of New England's vampires made waves throughout the world. Before long, even members of the foreign press were offering various explanations for the phenomenon: Perhaps the 'neurotic' modern novel was driving the New England madness, or maybe shrewd local farmers had simply been pulling Stetson's leg. A writer for the London Post declared that whatever forces drove the 'Yankee vampire,' it was an American problem and most certainly not the product of a British folk tradition (even though many families in the area could trace their lineage directly back to England). In the Boston Daily Globe, a writer went so far as to suggest that 'perhaps the frequent intermarriage of families in these back country districts may partially account for some of their characteristics.'

And yes, here we see where the story may have influenced the most famous vampire story of all time: Bram Stoker's Dracula. Among Stoker's possessions after his death was a clipping from an 1896 New York World article about the whole vampire craze in New England. Dracula was published in 1897. Was there enough time between the article and the novel's publication to see proper influence on Stoker's part? It's hard to say. Some see Mercy Brown in the character of Lucy, a teenage girl who seems to suffer with consumption-like symptoms and is turned into a vampire, then exhumed later in the novel.

In a show of spite, or God's wrath, or the sometimes inexorable ways life works, Mercy's father, George, was the only member of the immediate family to never contract tuberculosis. He died in 1922.

To end, I'll leave you with a short passage from Dracula, chapter 16, as Van Helsing opens Lucy's tomb to show all what really lay inside:

"When he again lifted the lid off Lucy's coffin we all looked, Arthur trembling like an aspen, and saw that the corpse lay there in all its death beauty. But there was no love in my own heart, nothing but loathing for the foul Thing which had taken Lucy's shape without her soul. I could see even Arthur's face grow hard as he looked. Presently he said to Van Helsing, "Is this really Lucy's body, or only a demon in her shape?"

"It is her body, and yet not it. But wait a while, and you shall see her as she was, and is."

She seemed like a nightmare of Lucy as she lay there, the pointed teeth, the blood stained, voluptuous mouth, which made one shudder to see, the whole carnal and unspirited appearance, seeming like a devilish mockery of Lucy's sweet purity."

Full Source List

• https://archives.lib.state.ma.us/entities/archivalmaterial/73f2578e-8bb0-4cc0-a9f7-9ca79ecc6fa9 
• https://www.yorku.ca/kdenning/+++2150%202007-8/sledzik%20vampire.pdf 
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuberculosis 
• https://www.who.int/health-topics/tuberculosis#tab=tab_1 
• https://www.yorku.ca/kdenning/+++2150%202007-8/BellVampiresandDeath.pdf 
• https://bookshop.org/p/books/killing-the-dead-vampire-epidemics-from-mesopotamia-to-the-new-world-john-blair/964780075176ab52?ean=9780691224794&next=t 
• https://bookshop.org/p/books/exhumed-unearthing-the-history-of-the-american-vampire-aaron-mahnke/c7e72bebb737534a?ean=9798894141817&next=t
• https://mastatelibrary.blogspot.com/2024/10/the-new-england-vampire-panic.html
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercy_Brown_vampire_incident
• https://www.utmb.edu/mdnews/podcast/episode/new-england-vampires
• https://www.sciencehistory.org/stories/distillations-pod/vampire-panic/
• https://www.nhpr.org/word-of-mouth/2012-10-10/the-great-new-england-vampire-panic
• https://history.howstuffworks.com/history-vs-myth/new-england-vampire-panic.htm
• https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-great-new-england-vampire-panic-36482878/
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_England_vampire_panic