Speaker 1: Welcome to brain Stuff, a production of I Heart Radio.
Speaker 1: Hey brain Stuff Lauren Vogelbaum. Here, today's episode gets a
Speaker 1: bit graphic about nineteenth century tuberculosis, death and post burial happenings.
Speaker 1: So listener discretion is advised, because yes, it was a
Speaker 1: scene only Dracula, Lestat Nadia and their blood spottered ilk
Speaker 1: could love. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries,
Speaker 1: New Englanders were gripped by vampire panic. In desperation, they
Speaker 1: began dismembering suspected vampires and hopes of driving off the
Speaker 1: terror and death that threatened to upend their lives. So
Speaker 1: how did vampires come to invade the newly created United States.
Speaker 1: It all began in some unfortunate New England villages as tuberculosis,
Speaker 1: then called consumption, ravaged entire families and communities. This bacterial
Speaker 1: lung disease, which spreads easily among family members, gives those
Speaker 1: infected horrific symptoms, fever and ashen appearance, and some can
Speaker 1: eyes in some cases that bleed from their mouths. It
Speaker 1: was a slow, deadly course of disease, almost as if
Speaker 1: the life was gradually being drained out of the patient.
Speaker 1: It earned the name consumption for the way it caused
Speaker 1: dramatic weight loss. So severe was the epidemic that it
Speaker 1: claimed around two percent of the region's population from to
Speaker 1: eighteen hundred and eventually killed perhaps a quarter of the
Speaker 1: East Coast citizens. We spoke by an email with folklorist
Speaker 1: and author Michael Bell. He said, imagine a communicable disease
Speaker 1: a great deal slower to manifest than COVID nineteen, with
Speaker 1: symptoms even more ambiguous. One that did not explode through
Speaker 1: a population, leaving in its wake the dead and those
Speaker 1: who survived through good fortune or natural immunity, and then
Speaker 1: disappear or become latent. A disease that instead, once it grasped,
Speaker 1: person could go in and out of remission over a
Speaker 1: period of months, or years, or even decades. No one
Speaker 1: understood how diseases spread back then. All they knew was
Speaker 1: that as consumption victims perished, their surviving family members would
Speaker 1: begin to fall ill one by one. Neighbors could be
Speaker 1: afflicted too, seemingly at random. Some families would be all
Speaker 1: but wiped out, while others escaped completely intact. So frightened
Speaker 1: villagers began to believe that the first to die were
Speaker 1: perhaps vampires of sorts. At night, the rumors went those
Speaker 1: sharp toothed blood suckers would wriggle out of their graves,
Speaker 1: stock their own families, and slowly but surely suck the
Speaker 1: life out of them until they too died horrendous deaths.
Speaker 1: Terrified villagers reasoned there was only one way to halt
Speaker 1: the vampire attacks, but first they had to dig up
Speaker 1: the bodies and examine them. If the corps appeared to
Speaker 1: be less decayed than expected, that sliced the bodies open
Speaker 1: and sift through the internal organs. If those organs contained
Speaker 1: liquid blood, the person was deemed possessed. Bell said. The
Speaker 1: theory seems to have been that this corpse was being
Speaker 1: inhabited by some sort of evil spirit that was sustaining
Speaker 1: itself by draining the life or blood from the living.
Speaker 1: This spiritual possession had to be destroyed, and the evil
Speaker 1: bond between the living and dead needed to be broken,
Speaker 1: usually by burning the infected organ and sometimes feeding the
Speaker 1: ashes to those who were ill to be extra sure
Speaker 1: that the vampire would not arise again. Sometimes the corpses
Speaker 1: were beheaded, some had their bones shattered and rearranged in
Speaker 1: a skull, and crossbones symbol, but Bell reiterates that these
Speaker 1: assumed vampires were never living people, and they didn't often
Speaker 1: use the term anyway. He said, the vampires were always corpses.
Speaker 1: The people who were performing the ritual never referred to
Speaker 1: the corpses they exhumed as vampires, although some outsiders, including
Speaker 1: newspaper writers and local historians, sometimes labeled these consumption rituals
Speaker 1: as vampirism. According to Bell, desperate grave digging scenes played
Speaker 1: out at least eighty times throughout the vampire panic. Often
Speaker 1: the bodies were disinterred at night, the grizzly ceremony attended
Speaker 1: only by close relatives, but some Vermont towns took things
Speaker 1: a step further, burning organs for hundreds of witnesses to
Speaker 1: see and perhaps providing them some hope that the plague
Speaker 1: of vampires was ended. Bell said. The earliest documented consumption
Speaker 1: vampire ritual I found is from Willington, Connecticut, in seventeen
Speaker 1: eighty four. The last authentically documented case occurred in eighteen
Speaker 1: ninety two in Exeter, Rhode Island. These dates coincide with
Speaker 1: the consumption epidemic in New England, which began to rise
Speaker 1: dramatically in the late seventeen hundreds and continued to the
Speaker 1: eighteen hundreds. But in eighteen eighty two, the year that
Speaker 1: German physician Robert Coke proved the tuberculosis was caused by bacterium,
Speaker 1: the vampire rituals slowed to a halt. But before it
Speaker 1: all ended, there was a climax of sorts, one that's
Speaker 1: become known as the Mercy Brown vampire incident. The story
Speaker 1: goes like this. In two a Rhode Island farmer named
Speaker 1: George Brown watched consumption kill his wife and then two
Speaker 1: daughters in succession. Then his son Edwin became deadly ill too.
Speaker 1: Although he wanted no part of the ritual, villagers eventually
Speaker 1: persuaded Brown to let them exhume the bodies of his
Speaker 1: wife and daughters for examination. The bodies of his wife
Speaker 1: and one daughter were just bones, but Mercy, the most
Speaker 1: recent to die just two months prior, was very intact.
Speaker 1: That she died in midwinter and thus was partially preserved
Speaker 1: by the frigid temperatures did not stop the examiners from
Speaker 1: being suspicious. They also noted that her fingernails and hair
Speaker 1: had grown, which we now know as an optical illusion
Speaker 1: caused by the flesh retracting around them. But armed with
Speaker 1: this evidence, the villagers were certain that found their vampire.
Speaker 1: They cut out her heart and burned it in For
Speaker 1: good measure, they had Edwin drink the ashes and hopes
Speaker 1: that he'd recover. Not long after, consumption claimed him too.
Speaker 1: Perhaps it's not surprising, then, that Rhode Island was reportedly
Speaker 1: called the vampire capital of America. Such was the power
Speaker 1: of the Exeter vampire slayings that their stories carried across
Speaker 1: the Atlantic. According to some accounts, when Irish born writer
Speaker 1: Bram Stoker, the author of the novel Dracula, died in
Speaker 1: witnesses say they found newspaper clippings of the Mercy Brown
Speaker 1: saga in his files. Today's episode was written by Nathan
Speaker 1: Chandler and produced by Tyler Clang. For more on this
Speaker 1: lots of other creepy topics is at how stuff works
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