Speaker 1: Hey, everybody. We've already made our big tour announcement for
Speaker 1: the year, but this is a little different because we
Speaker 1: have added a show because Denver sold out, so we
Speaker 1: have added a second show in Denver. Nice. Yeah, We're
Speaker 1: going to be there on Wednesday. Then we added a
Speaker 1: show the day before the same place, Gothic Theater, Englewood, Colorado.
Speaker 1: And you can go to s Y s K live
Speaker 1: dot com to get info and tickets for that show
Speaker 1: and all the rest of our shows to Chuck. That's right, Boston,
Speaker 1: April fourth, d C April five. St. Louis and Cleveland, Ohio.
Speaker 1: Come out and see us. Welcome to Stuff you should
Speaker 1: Know from House Stuff Works dot com. Hey, and welcome
Speaker 1: to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, Charles W. Chuck, pri
Speaker 1: Jerry Stuff you should know. I love this one. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Vampires December fourwelve was our our main podcast on vampires.
Speaker 1: It was like it was a good one and I
Speaker 1: don't remember touching on this at all, did we No?
Speaker 1: I had no idea about it, that's nutty. It wasn't
Speaker 1: until I read a great um, a great article about
Speaker 1: vampire panics in New England that I had first heard
Speaker 1: of it. Abigail Tucker from Ye she did an amazing
Speaker 1: job on that one, agreed. So let's start. Let's start
Speaker 1: where that article starts, because I think it's a great
Speaker 1: place to dive into this this weirdness. Yeah. Yeah, that's
Speaker 1: not what most people would think. You would say. In Connecticut,
Speaker 1: I'm a freshman in college. There were there were some
Speaker 1: kids playing at I think a gravel quarry and they
Speaker 1: discovered some graves. It's basically the dream of every kid
Speaker 1: who's ever played outside to discover some like long lost graves.
Speaker 1: Like any kid poking around the woods. Were all really
Speaker 1: just looking for dead bodies pretty much at the very least,
Speaker 1: you're prepared for it at all times. Yeah, um remember
Speaker 1: stand by Me, kid, Mean, that's what inspired it all.
Speaker 1: That was one of like the great unnerving, disturbing dead
Speaker 1: kids of all time. And you know what, Ray Brower, Um,
Speaker 1: my friend, my best friend Brett came upon a dead
Speaker 1: body one time playing in the woods. Yeah, and it
Speaker 1: wasn't It was a neighbor who who had a heart
Speaker 1: attack while like raking leaves or cleaning up in the
Speaker 1: woods or something, So it wasn't nefarious, but he still
Speaker 1: ran across the dead body as a kid. How why
Speaker 1: was the guy cleaning up the woods? Well, I mean
Speaker 1: I think it was the woods on the edge of
Speaker 1: his yards or something like that. How long had he
Speaker 1: been there for? Uh, don't think it had been that long.
Speaker 1: He wasn't decomposed or anything. I think it was just
Speaker 1: like lifeless body. There's Mr whatever, Mr Whipple, Right, don't
Speaker 1: squeeze charm, I'm cleaning the woods. So these these kids
Speaker 1: found graves that were very, very old. They weren't, you know,
Speaker 1: a dead neighbor or anything like that. They were actually
Speaker 1: it turned out to be a lost family cemetery again
Speaker 1: in Connecticut, right, and in very short order, the Connecticut
Speaker 1: state archaeologist, which is pretty cool, position, a guy named
Speaker 1: Nick Bellantoni. He was called out and he starts excavating
Speaker 1: the place, right, yes, I'll keep going. He finds a
Speaker 1: bunch of graves, lots of kids, because it's New England
Speaker 1: nineteenth century, late eighteenth century, early nineteenth centuries. When they
Speaker 1: finally said, this is about when this this graveyard was
Speaker 1: in use, and there were kids, some adults buried normally
Speaker 1: exactly like you'd expect. How she said they were buried
Speaker 1: Yankee style. Yeah, I didn't know what that meant. It
Speaker 1: meant like in a very thrifty manner, very bare bones,
Speaker 1: I feel forgiven, not like our ostentatious southern coffins. Right,
Speaker 1: what about that lady who got buried in her ferrari?
Speaker 1: Did you hear about her? I think I did. She
Speaker 1: was great just for doing that, you know, like, I'll
Speaker 1: see y'all in Hell. I'm taking my ferrari with that.
Speaker 1: She was like buried sitting up behind the wheel in
Speaker 1: an agle j in her ferrari. That's how she was buried.
Speaker 1: That's like the Elon Musk's tesla in space, a little
Speaker 1: estro not riding around it. Well, yeah, everyone knows that
Speaker 1: that's actually the body of one of his enemies, of course,
Speaker 1: who was alive when that rocket went off. I'm sure so. Um,
Speaker 1: there's this one grave out of all of them that
Speaker 1: is a little hinky, you could say. Bellentoni starts um
Speaker 1: pulling away some of the rocks. It's entombed now like
Speaker 1: the others. There's rocks around it. And he finds that
Speaker 1: the coffin has been broken, and on the coffin, on
Speaker 1: the coffin lid in brass tacks is J. B. I
Speaker 1: believe hyphen five. Yeah, and this coffin is red, which
Speaker 1: is also different I think than the others. Most of
Speaker 1: the coffin's fine, or most of the skeletons fine. But
Speaker 1: when he gets a little further up, he finds on
Speaker 1: top of the ribs the thigh bones are crossed across
Speaker 1: the ribs, and the skull is no longer attached the
Speaker 1: end of the spinal column. It's on the rib cage
Speaker 1: as well, and the rib cage has been broken. And
Speaker 1: upon further inspection he finds the coffin has been smashed.
Speaker 1: And Nick Bellantoni says, we'll I'll be yeah. I mean,
Speaker 1: this is not what normally happens as a body decomposes.
Speaker 1: They don't go into the shape of the Jolly rogers
Speaker 1: pirate flag. Um. And it's funny that you picked this
Speaker 1: because uh and this is sort of an announcement. But
Speaker 1: the Great Aeron Mankey of Lore fame, was telling me
Speaker 1: these stories this week in the office because uh we
Speaker 1: he has partnered with us. He's gonna do some shows
Speaker 1: with us. Now, yeah, not Lore He's like, no, no, no,
Speaker 1: you don't get that one. But he's gonna do some
Speaker 1: new shows with us and we're all super excited. But
Speaker 1: he was telling me all these stories and you were
Speaker 1: falling asleep, stroking my head gently. And uh, the next
Speaker 1: day you sent this article or this, uh, this collection
Speaker 1: of articles you put together and said, let's do one
Speaker 1: in vampire panics. And I was like, that's weird. Man,
Speaker 1: Like Aaron Mankey was just talking about this, and he
Speaker 1: has like three Laura episodes, one on Mercy Brown that
Speaker 1: I listened to, uh as part of this research, but
Speaker 1: then two others, and it was just it all can
Speaker 1: kind of really weirdly came together the spirits of the vampires.
Speaker 1: And so anyway, welcome Mr Manky, Yeah, welcome, We're glad
Speaker 1: to have you. And are we calling him Mr Mankey
Speaker 1: not Aaron? No, but it was very sweet. He's an
Speaker 1: long time all time stuff you should know listener, and uh,
Speaker 1: he's a legit. I'm sure that he is going to
Speaker 1: hear this and say, oh, guys, I did this so much,
Speaker 1: so much better. I don't like you any longer. So anyway,
Speaker 1: JB fifty five year right is spelled out in brass tacks. Uh.
Speaker 1: It's a male skeleton. It's from the eighteen thirties at
Speaker 1: the latest in there in the body is probably in
Speaker 1: his fifties or so, and it's just very very creepy
Speaker 1: and perplexing. Yeah, very perplexing. First blush, Bellentoni said in
Speaker 1: that Smithsonian archicly he'd never seen anything like it before, right, right,
Speaker 1: So he's he obviously, being an archaeologist, He's not like,
Speaker 1: well that's pretty interesting. I'm going back to my sandwich now.
Speaker 1: He wanted to get to the bottom of it, that's right.
Speaker 1: So he started asking around and finally one colleague said, well,
Speaker 1: maybe it was a vampire. This is Michael Bell not
Speaker 1: yet okay, he it was apparently a colleague, I guess,
Speaker 1: a fellow archaeologist who's like, there was actually such things
Speaker 1: as vampire panics. And then Bellentoni met Michael Bell, right,
Speaker 1: and notably Uh in eighteen fifty four. This is about
Speaker 1: twenty years after the gentleman j B. Which is probably
Speaker 1: his age, right, or I guess maybe Jim Brown years old,
Speaker 1: let's let's just call him that. Uh, and Jewitt City, Connecticut,
Speaker 1: there was a vampire panic that had broken out and
Speaker 1: the corpses were exhumed that people might thought were vampires. Uh.
Speaker 1: And then I think is when he finally gets in
Speaker 1: touch with this Rhode Island folklorist named Michael Bell. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and Bell is like, my friend, I'm going to tell
Speaker 1: you something. Are you sitting down and Bell Andoni says yes,
Speaker 1: and Bell goes, have you had your sandwich? Um? Bell goes,
Speaker 1: you are sitting on the only intact physical evidence of
Speaker 1: what was a series of vampire panics that gripped New
Speaker 1: England in the late eighteenth to to actually late nineteenth century,
Speaker 1: almost up to the twentieth century. Yeah, that's the remarkable
Speaker 1: thing here, because if you hear this and you're like, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I know about Salem. This was a couple of hundred
Speaker 1: years later. Yeah, this was Yeah, this is about less
Speaker 1: than a d and fifty years ago. Yeah, Like we
Speaker 1: we had evolved way past that by this point to
Speaker 1: believe that vampires existed and we need to dig up
Speaker 1: bodies of our relatives. Yeah, that's what's so shocking about this.
Speaker 1: Like the Enlightenment had come and gone. Science was a thing.
Speaker 1: It was just it was it's very weird to think
Speaker 1: about how late this happened, but sure enough, there is
Speaker 1: bel ATONI looked into it and talked to Michael Bell
Speaker 1: and found out, No, there was, there was vampire panics.
Speaker 1: A lot of people don't know about them because most
Speaker 1: people don't dig into that kind of thing. But they're
Speaker 1: actually because they happened as late as they did, they're
Speaker 1: actually fairly well documented. The thing is is most of
Speaker 1: the graves are lost. Um you have an actual grave
Speaker 1: of one of the vampires that was basically a victim
Speaker 1: of this vampire panic. Yeah, and apparently it happened. Um.
Speaker 1: He documented Bell about eighty of these exhimations as far
Speaker 1: west as Minnesota, but obviously most of these took place
Speaker 1: in the Connecticut, Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire area, Rhode Island,
Speaker 1: Tohode Island. Because I don't know what it is with
Speaker 1: New England. Well, we'll get to it. We'll get to it.
Speaker 1: They're weird because it's it definitely is a very weird thing,
Speaker 1: especially considering that, like at the time, people who were alive,
Speaker 1: We're like, what are you guys doing? How backwards can
Speaker 1: you be? You know? Um, So they're contemporaries were even
Speaker 1: like put off by this kind of thing. And at
Speaker 1: first it was um like you had to know somebody
Speaker 1: to know that this was going on. But eventually a
Speaker 1: couple of them became high enough profile that, um, it
Speaker 1: became international news that there was some weirdness going on
Speaker 1: in New England that the locals were we're we're in
Speaker 1: the grips of a vampire panic. Yeah. Thorrow wrote about
Speaker 1: it in his journal. That's Henry David. Yeah, he wrote.
Speaker 1: He said he was at an exhimation and he wrote
Speaker 1: it was like wow, man. Uh And as you said,
Speaker 1: Rhode Island, Like, this wasn't just like out in the
Speaker 1: sticks a rural uh, New England. This happened close to Newport,
Speaker 1: Rhode Island, which at the time and is still very
Speaker 1: tony area where oh yeah, dude, beautiful that that cliff
Speaker 1: walk or whatever, unbelievable and those houses were around back then.
Speaker 1: These were well healed, rich people and that's where they summered, right,
Speaker 1: murdering one another and getting away with it, drinking champagne
Speaker 1: all the while. That's what they did. God bless him
Speaker 1: as a beautiful town. Yeah, Newport Rhode Island is a
Speaker 1: gorgeous town. Yeah. I was very taken with it and
Speaker 1: thought I could totally live here if I had about
Speaker 1: fifty times as much money as I have right now.
Speaker 1: And it was nine hundred. So um, as I said, like,
Speaker 1: this is this is it's it is very well documented
Speaker 1: in some respects, but you have to be a guy
Speaker 1: like Michael Bell who knows where to look because Gray's
Speaker 1: like this don't pop up every day. Right. There was
Speaker 1: this dude who documented it probably better than anybody, um,
Speaker 1: and he didn't hear about it until I think the
Speaker 1: late eighteen nineties. But he was an anthropologist named George Stetson.
Speaker 1: He published like a monotype on it, on the New
Speaker 1: England vampire panics and exactly what the beliefs were. So
Speaker 1: he he established like the baseline for these beliefs and
Speaker 1: really documented it in the late nineteenth century. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: kind of shook up the world. Yeah. So again everybody
Speaker 1: at the time who wasn't involved is looking in like
Speaker 1: what are you guys doing? Um? Apparently the Boston Daily
Speaker 1: Globe said that was basically inbreeding was responsible for this
Speaker 1: weird behavior. Um, like people from the South, We're going,
Speaker 1: what our nation? Are you guys doing it? There? Right?
Speaker 1: There was a there was the idea that the that Stetson,
Speaker 1: George Stetson, the anthropologists had basically been fooled, been fleeced
Speaker 1: by you know, the slick New England city rural folk um,
Speaker 1: and that they were just pulling his leg as it
Speaker 1: was put. Um, that's not the case. This actually did happen,
Speaker 1: and it it turns out that it is basically an
Speaker 1: extension of a tradition that finds its roots back in Europe,
Speaker 1: goes back many many centuries to Europe. And here is
Speaker 1: where it gets extremely interesting to me. The vampire legend
Speaker 1: that we understand today actually grew out of real superstitions.
Speaker 1: Like everything you know about vampires is is what some
Speaker 1: people hundreds of years ago and not that very long ago,
Speaker 1: believed was actual reality. And this, this vampire panic was
Speaker 1: an actual manifestation of those beliefs in real life. That's right, man,
Speaker 1: The spirit of the vampires are with us, all right,
Speaker 1: we'll be back right after this. Okay. So the vampire,
Speaker 1: as we probably pronounced it like that in that episode
Speaker 1: so many years ago, I have a one note sense
Speaker 1: of humor. Uh, it came It's reliable. That's a nice
Speaker 1: way to say. It came out of Europe, not the
Speaker 1: United States. And that word for disappeared in the tenth century.
Speaker 1: And um Bell, as far as he's concerned, says or
Speaker 1: thinks at least that, um, well, we all know that
Speaker 1: it came out of like a Germany and the Slavic
Speaker 1: immigrants coming here. But he thinks, for his money is
Speaker 1: that it probably wasn't just one big way. It probably
Speaker 1: came over from different people at different times, but eventually
Speaker 1: it made its way over to the United States through
Speaker 1: probably Pennsylvania and then made its way north right. And um,
Speaker 1: from his research he's found, the earliest he's found is
Speaker 1: a reference to it comes from four in the Connecticut
Speaker 1: Koran and Weekly Intelligencer. And you think the Hartford newspapers
Speaker 1: still called the Hartford Koran, So that's an old paper, right, yeah,
Speaker 1: and um in it in this it's a letter to
Speaker 1: the editor from a guy named Moses Holmes, who is
Speaker 1: a councilman in the town of Willington, m Connecticut. And
Speaker 1: he's basically warning people not to listen to what he calls,
Speaker 1: quote a certain quack doctor, a foreigner. And um, basically
Speaker 1: this doctor was saying there there's vampires of foot and
Speaker 1: you need to exume your family and kill them because
Speaker 1: they're vampires now. And Moses Holmes was saying, don't don't
Speaker 1: do that. This is wrong and weird. Well, yeah, and
Speaker 1: that's the legend that came over from Europe. The Slavic
Speaker 1: people had the upier and the Romanians had and the
Speaker 1: upier and the stragoy would die, be buried and would
Speaker 1: come back to drink the blood of their relatives. And
Speaker 1: that was the legend and what it really was. Well,
Speaker 1: maybe we should hold onto that little yeah, let's just yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm sorry, I meant to cross that out on your Okay.
Speaker 1: I was like, this came into yeah, all right, so
Speaker 1: we'll we'll we'll tease that out for later. So you
Speaker 1: ask yourself, like I think of Yankees as like pretty
Speaker 1: solid people, salt of the earth, especially nineteen cent or
Speaker 1: Yankees salts of the Irish people, really stable, like it
Speaker 1: would take quite a bit to drive one of them,
Speaker 1: just totally crazy. Right, they had to put up with
Speaker 1: these winters, nor easters, um saleasters, sure, all that stuff, right,
Speaker 1: and um, you know, how would how would this happen
Speaker 1: outside of say, puritanical New England in the in the
Speaker 1: nineteenth century. And it turns out I didn't realize this,
Speaker 1: but Abigail Tucker points out that the Yankees that we
Speaker 1: think of are not the Yankees, and I'm not talking
Speaker 1: baseball here, are not the Yankees, who, um, we're in actuality.
Speaker 1: So I sat up very late last night trying to
Speaker 1: figure out the most convoluted way to say that sentence,
Speaker 1: and I think of pay Yeah. I thought this was
Speaker 1: super interesting because when I think of New England, I
Speaker 1: think of very religious, puritanical Christian Christian. They don't do
Speaker 1: this kind of thing you think of um And actually,
Speaker 1: you know what's funny is because Mankett was here. I
Speaker 1: had him on movie Crush. I guess what his movie was,
Speaker 1: hold On, hold On, So I said Christian, which makes
Speaker 1: me think of this song Sister Christian by Night Ranger,
Speaker 1: which factored in big time into Boogie Night No. His
Speaker 1: favorite movie is The Village, which makes total sense. I
Speaker 1: watched that again within the last couple of months, and
Speaker 1: I'm like, this movie is even better now. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: liked it more when I saw it again, which is
Speaker 1: weird because you know the twist at the know, because
Speaker 1: it's the m night Sham movie. Yeah, And I think
Speaker 1: it bugged me at the time because I and I
Speaker 1: told him this in the show. But I think at
Speaker 1: the time I was sort of like over M. Night
Speaker 1: and the Twists. I was like, come on, dude, another
Speaker 1: twist and now I'm looking out for it, so I
Speaker 1: had better be really good. Yeah, but I think years
Speaker 1: later I watched it again, I was like, you know what,
Speaker 1: I think I kind of dig this movie. I did too,
Speaker 1: so anyway, very fitting. But I think of those people
Speaker 1: like these Puritans, living off, removed from society, very strict
Speaker 1: religious people's but apparently that was not the deal. In
Speaker 1: the eighteen hundreds in rural New England, only ten belonged
Speaker 1: to a church. Shocking to me, and especially it says
Speaker 1: that you're in this article Rhode Island and I love this.
Speaker 1: I had no idea it was founded as a haven
Speaker 1: for religious dissenters. So I think they just wanted to
Speaker 1: go in party. Yeah, the seaside, they were like, let's
Speaker 1: party and engage in hex magic. Gosh, they were Another
Speaker 1: way to put it is that the New Englanders in
Speaker 1: the nineteenth century were superstitious, but right exactly, because if
Speaker 1: you were um hardcore Christian, superstition didn't play a part,
Speaker 1: you wouldn't like, I mean, what are the some of
Speaker 1: the things they did. They would um barry shoes by
Speaker 1: the fireplace, to catch the devil from coming down the chimney,
Speaker 1: like a horse shoe over your door. Yeah, that kind
Speaker 1: of stuff. Like basically anything you think of is like
Speaker 1: locker weird kind of Pennsylvania witchcraft, that kind of stuff.
Speaker 1: This is like, that's what it was. It was like
Speaker 1: country witchcraft. That's what they believed in. Because even if
Speaker 1: you weren't Christian, you still believed in things like good
Speaker 1: and evil and spirits and demons and stuff like that.
Speaker 1: You just had to have a different way of dealing
Speaker 1: with them. Since you weren't Christian in the way of
Speaker 1: dealing with and wasn't like praying to God or whatever.
Speaker 1: She had to hang up a horse shoe or barry
Speaker 1: a shoe to keep the devil from coming down your
Speaker 1: chimney because you were as backwards as a game. When
Speaker 1: are we going to reveal the reveal? When are we
Speaker 1: going to do our m night twist? Yet? Not yet?
Speaker 1: All right, Well, then you gotta go because I got
Speaker 1: nothing else. Okay, are you ready for now? Well? No,
Speaker 1: if you've got more, if you can, were where we were?
Speaker 1: All right, Well, here's the reveal. Because being superstitious does
Speaker 1: an ex playing the vampire panic. No alone what else
Speaker 1: does I'll let you drop the hammer. So they are
Speaker 1: not entirely certain, but the general consensus among people who
Speaker 1: study this kind of thing is that this was a
Speaker 1: reaction to infectious disease outbreaks, specifically tuberculosis. Boom boom. That's
Speaker 1: why superstitious New Englanders were running around in the nineteenth
Speaker 1: century digging up family members and driving stakes through their
Speaker 1: hearts or beheading them in their graves. I love stuff
Speaker 1: like this when you can look back years later. I
Speaker 1: wonder what they're gonna in a hundred years about the
Speaker 1: Satanic panic. Oh, it wasn't some disease, obviously, this is
Speaker 1: better reveal it was a panic though. Yeah. Um, it's
Speaker 1: interesting that two of our favorite episodes probably are going
Speaker 1: to end up being Satanic panic and vampire panics. This
Speaker 1: one's going pretty well. So all right, so let's talk
Speaker 1: about TV for a minute. This is obviously pre antibiotics.
Speaker 1: There is still tuberculosis, but it's super curable now if
Speaker 1: you're you know, lucky enough to live where you can
Speaker 1: get antibiotics. But it is caused by Bacterium um, two
Speaker 1: of which can infect humans M. Tuberculosis and M. Bovus.
Speaker 1: And you've heard the word consumption in movies like The
Speaker 1: Village from that time period they're dying of consumption. Consumption
Speaker 1: was almost always tuberculosis. That's just what they called it
Speaker 1: back then, right, that was the name for it, the
Speaker 1: reason they called it consumption, and actually that that term
Speaker 1: to describe tuberculous is actually predates the more common usage
Speaker 1: of consumption today. It was like ingesting or eating something. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it takes back to like I think, so it's the
Speaker 1: original meaning was that your body was consuming itself. That
Speaker 1: it was like the word for tuberculosis. Well, yeah, And
Speaker 1: the reason they call it that is because it looked
Speaker 1: like your life force was being sapped away from you.
Speaker 1: The way that the disease progressed, um, it included coughing
Speaker 1: fits where they said, like you couldn't even stop to talk.
Speaker 1: You would be coughing so hard that's not good. Um.
Speaker 1: You would lose a lot of weight, so it looked
Speaker 1: like you were wasting away to um. But at the
Speaker 1: same time, you were um voracious ly hungry. You wanted
Speaker 1: to eat. It wasn't that kind of illness where you
Speaker 1: just can't even eat. You were hungry like all the time,
Speaker 1: but you were still wasting away. So there's this duality
Speaker 1: between hunger, rampant hunger and the loss of a life force.
Speaker 1: And this it's possible that all vampire tales and legends
Speaker 1: and the origin of it is found in tuberculosis, because
Speaker 1: that's what you think of with vampire is um. The
Speaker 1: whole idea at this time was if you had tuberculosis
Speaker 1: and you were the say, second, third, fourth member of
Speaker 1: your family to come down with this with consumption, it
Speaker 1: meant that the one of the previous family members who
Speaker 1: had died of this disease was still alive in some way.
Speaker 1: Their soul was in a supernatural way and was coming
Speaker 1: at night and sucking the life from you to sustain themselves.
Speaker 1: If this was the case, then there was only one
Speaker 1: thing to do. If you were in New England at
Speaker 1: the time, you had to dig up that family member
Speaker 1: and take care of business. Yeah, it's funny. Emily and
Speaker 1: I always laugh at the movie trope of the the
Speaker 1: cough like it has almost a percent return rate. If
Speaker 1: a character coughs in a movie, then they're going to
Speaker 1: die because you just don't leave coughs in movies. That's
Speaker 1: a sure sign. Or especially if they like cough into
Speaker 1: a hanky. There's always blood in it, Like remember Hodgeman's
Speaker 1: um doc Holiday. Yeah, I'll be your Hucklebert coughing up
Speaker 1: the blood and lung tissue. Well, we just started watching
Speaker 1: The Crown last night. You know that show on Netflix?
Speaker 1: Do you watch it? Yeah? We saw the very just
Speaker 1: the first episode last night of season one. And of
Speaker 1: course there's Jared Harris as Queen Elizabeth's father, the King Camember,
Speaker 1: which what his name was, King, the King of England,
Speaker 1: and he's got he's got TV. Of course he starts
Speaker 1: coughing in the very first scene into the hanky and
Speaker 1: you're like, well, he's probably just going to be in
Speaker 1: the bilin um. That's how she became queen. If we're
Speaker 1: shouting out things we've seen recently, I want to give
Speaker 1: a shout out to Wonder. Wonder what what's that the
Speaker 1: the movie about the kid with facial differences? I've heard
Speaker 1: this parents are Owens Wilson and Julia Roberts. So good though, Yeah,
Speaker 1: all right, you know what, let's take a break. Okay,
Speaker 1: who thought I Wonder was going to make an appearance
Speaker 1: in the Vampire Panic and not me? Alright, we're gonna
Speaker 1: take a break and we'll come back and talk a
Speaker 1: little bit more about how a family might do this
Speaker 1: right after this. Alright, so dad has gone from TV
Speaker 1: or consumption, brother has, sister has, Yeah, maybe ones on
Speaker 1: their deathbed, the other ones about to die. Um, we
Speaker 1: should talk a little bit about consumption a little more.
Speaker 1: At the time, there were people out there in the
Speaker 1: world in the late nineteenth century who understood that consumption
Speaker 1: was Tuberculosis was an infectious disease caused by these germs.
Speaker 1: The people engaged in these vampire panics did not generally
Speaker 1: think that They didn't realize that this was a contagious disease.
Speaker 1: They thought that a relative was sapping your life force. Right.
Speaker 1: The thing is is that tuberculousis is a very contagious
Speaker 1: disease spread by coughing sneezing, which you do a lot
Speaker 1: of when you have tuberculosis. And if you're living in
Speaker 1: like a one two room house in rural New England
Speaker 1: and you're a family of six, you can say that
Speaker 1: high percentage of your family members are going to eventually
Speaker 1: contract this disease. Yeah, whenn't it? I mean, what was
Speaker 1: the number it was killing people over a certain period
Speaker 1: that's a really big point here. The vampire panics started
Speaker 1: in the late eighteenth century. Tuberculousis really started to gain
Speaker 1: a foothold in New England and about the seventeen thirties,
Speaker 1: and by the time the vampire panics hit their height
Speaker 1: in the late eighteenth early nineteenth century, it was the
Speaker 1: number one killer of New Englanders at the time. Again,
Speaker 1: they weren't like gosh learned that tuberculosis. I caught this
Speaker 1: infectious disease. It was one of our family members is
Speaker 1: sapping the life out of one of our other family members,
Speaker 1: because our family members a vampire. Still, the effect was
Speaker 1: the same that they were. They were they they felt
Speaker 1: totally powerless against this condition. They just had what it
Speaker 1: was wrong, and because they had it wrong, they would
Speaker 1: dig up dead bodies and do weird stuff to them.
Speaker 1: All right, so brother dies, sister dies, maybe another sibling,
Speaker 1: maybe one of the parents. And then if you're in
Speaker 1: rural New England, you say, all right, it's clearly what's
Speaker 1: going on here is that whoever the first one that died,
Speaker 1: or maybe one of them, it's coming back and killing
Speaker 1: the rest by sucking out their blood. I have a
Speaker 1: vampire in my family, what do I do. I'm going
Speaker 1: to dig with some help. Probably sometimes it's quiet, sometimes
Speaker 1: in the middle of the night. Sometimes, like in the
Speaker 1: case in Vermont, it would be like a daytime public
Speaker 1: festival type of there was like a party, like a
Speaker 1: community party. Yeah, and that's and in fact, I think
Speaker 1: that's the one Henry David Threau attended in Woodstock, Vermont
Speaker 1: in his journal and he was like, wtf with these people, Right,
Speaker 1: there's a weird party. So you would dig these people up,
Speaker 1: depending on where you are. Well, first of all, let's
Speaker 1: talk about what they might find when they opened this coffin. Yeah,
Speaker 1: because there were a couple of steps. The first step
Speaker 1: was you had to diagnose vampireism. Because they like, let's say, uh,
Speaker 1: they finally decided by the fourth family member being sick
Speaker 1: um that this family was being being sapped by a vampire.
Speaker 1: They didn't automatically know which dead family member was doing it.
Speaker 1: They got to look at them all. Yeah, so you
Speaker 1: might dig up multiple coffins. What they were looking for
Speaker 1: was the belief. The belief was that the the you
Speaker 1: could tell just by looking at them whither they were
Speaker 1: a vampire. Maybe poking around a little bit too sure,
Speaker 1: but the problem was is that so the idea of
Speaker 1: what we what we think of as vampires is basically
Speaker 1: the bram Stoker vampire, which comes later. Um, these vampires
Speaker 1: were like the ghoules from the grave type farato looking. Yes, yeah,
Speaker 1: so like real long fingernails and like pale and bloody
Speaker 1: mouth from kind of slipping away from your body. The
Speaker 1: problem is is like this idea of vampires, what we
Speaker 1: understand is, or what they understood at vampires was a
Speaker 1: tradition handed down from people who had broken up or
Speaker 1: broken into graves before and could tell you what a
Speaker 1: vampire looked like, which is basically a body in a
Speaker 1: certain stage of decomposition, right, and specifically a lot of
Speaker 1: times a body in a certain certain stage of decomposition
Speaker 1: who had died from tuberculosis. Uh. So you know, you
Speaker 1: might dig up a grave and see a bloat because
Speaker 1: they have a built up of gas in their stomach.
Speaker 1: That is not what they thought it was from. They
Speaker 1: thought what they thought they were vampires full from blood.
Speaker 1: They'd be like, look at this fat vampire. Yeah. They
Speaker 1: might see uh, long finger nails and say that looks
Speaker 1: to me like a vampire, right, But that is what
Speaker 1: your skin receding. Your skin pulls back from the nail bed,
Speaker 1: which makes it look like your nails have kept growing
Speaker 1: after um after death, which is not the case. Same
Speaker 1: with your hair too. They may see red lips, bloody
Speaker 1: lips even possibly sure because apparently the breakdown of your
Speaker 1: lung tissue from tuberculpsis um continues even after death. So
Speaker 1: they would see blood on the lips and be like, yeah,
Speaker 1: they've been sucking the blood out of their their loved one.
Speaker 1: But the key to all this is the heart. Uh.
Speaker 1: That was what they were trying to get to, to
Speaker 1: see if there was any fresh blood near the heart. Uh.
Speaker 1: And if they did find that one one of the
Speaker 1: well we'll get to what they would do. But um,
Speaker 1: And again, a lot of time you would see fresh,
Speaker 1: a pure, hearing blood because of the way the body
Speaker 1: decomposed from tuberculosis or period. So this thing, yeah, but
Speaker 1: but tuberculous is a lot too, especially like the blood
Speaker 1: on the lips kind of thing. Right, So this thing
Speaker 1: was kind of self sustaining, self fulfilling when somebody died
Speaker 1: of tuberculosis if you dug them up at a certain
Speaker 1: period of time, especially if they say like died in winter,
Speaker 1: they might seem inexplicably in a in a pristine state
Speaker 1: because they're underground in New England's freezing in the winter. Um,
Speaker 1: So they would fit the bill for a vampire just
Speaker 1: by definition of being a decomposing body. But to the
Speaker 1: people who didn't understand what decomposition was, it was just
Speaker 1: plain as day that they were looking at a vampire
Speaker 1: in the grave. Right, So they find a family member
Speaker 1: that fits the bill of a vampire. That step one
Speaker 1: vampire is m is being diagnosed. Next is dispatching the vampire,
Speaker 1: dealing with the vampire. And the problem is this, the
Speaker 1: vampire is already dead. So there are only certain things
Speaker 1: you can you to a vampire to kill it. And
Speaker 1: really what you're not trying to do is kill it.
Speaker 1: You're trying to make it so it can't get out
Speaker 1: of the grave and keep sapping the life force out
Speaker 1: of these family members, hence hopefully saving the dying family member. Right. Uh.
Speaker 1: And it was technically called epo tropaic remedy. That's a
Speaker 1: clinical name for it. Basically, it's something that you're doing
Speaker 1: to counteract this evil. So it depends on where you
Speaker 1: were what you might do. Um, everyone had their own methods.
Speaker 1: Um in Maine and Plymouth, Massachusetts. I love this one.
Speaker 1: All they did was flip it over so it was
Speaker 1: face down, and they're like, everyone knows the vampire just
Speaker 1: very creepily rises from the waist out of their coffin.
Speaker 1: What if we just slipped them over? They couldn't do that.
Speaker 1: They went and let's go get some ice cream. Or
Speaker 1: the steak through the heart that didn't arise because they
Speaker 1: thought the steak had some magical powers. But they thought
Speaker 1: they would literally just stake them into the ground so
Speaker 1: they couldn't get up. That's another thing too. So you
Speaker 1: know the steak through the heart with the vaan pire,
Speaker 1: you think that that's trying to kill the vampire. That
Speaker 1: is not what they were trying to do. But the
Speaker 1: larger thought here is that our understanding of staking a
Speaker 1: vampire through the heart comes from people who actually did
Speaker 1: this because they were trying to battle tuberculosis. That's so
Speaker 1: amazing to me. It's a confluence of all these weird
Speaker 1: things really that led to this, but but in all
Speaker 1: of it has been refined into this neat, tidy vampire legend.
Speaker 1: This this is the compartment and fits in vampire legend
Speaker 1: to those of us alive today. But it's got this
Speaker 1: amazing history and backstory, some of which happened in real life.
Speaker 1: This reminds me of the real life zombies too. Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1: Good point, like this weird religious hysteria combined with um
Speaker 1: what they didn't understand at the time was kind of
Speaker 1: medicine and science. This weird pre science era, so fascinating
Speaker 1: to me. Y're not pre science, but I guess it
Speaker 1: was pre real science, rudimentary science. Um. So. In the
Speaker 1: Connecticut Rhode Island, Vermont, in that region, the go to
Speaker 1: was to burn the heart, take the ash from the
Speaker 1: heart and ingest it to give it to someone who
Speaker 1: may be sick in the family or may even be
Speaker 1: healthy trying to ward off sickness, and they would actually
Speaker 1: eat that. So that was one way of dealing with it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's There's a quote here from Woodstock, Vermont, when Daniel
Speaker 1: Ransom in his journal it was said that if the
Speaker 1: heart of one of the family who died of consumption
Speaker 1: was taken out and burned, others would be free from it.
Speaker 1: And father, having some faith in the remedy, had the
Speaker 1: heart of Frederick taken out after he had been buried
Speaker 1: and it was burned and Captain Pearson's blacksmith forge. Um,
Speaker 1: here's the thing, though it did not ever save anyone
Speaker 1: from tubercules. No, that's the thing. And I was wondering, like,
Speaker 1: what is what was the superstition? How did the superstition
Speaker 1: explain a failure to cure I don't know, you know
Speaker 1: where they just like, we waited too long. I bet
Speaker 1: you they did that that had to be. They would
Speaker 1: just have some explanation that we didn't do it right.
Speaker 1: Maybe they would try another method, not burning the heart,
Speaker 1: like the Jolly the jb They think that the reason
Speaker 1: they did that weird jolly Roger thing was because it
Speaker 1: was so decomposed. They were just bones, so they I
Speaker 1: guess they just improvised, like why don't we just do this?
Speaker 1: Well that that apparently finds its root in Europe. In
Speaker 1: some places in Europe that was the way to deal
Speaker 1: with the vampire was to cut its head off. Other places, um,
Speaker 1: they would stick a brick in the vampire's mouth. Some
Speaker 1: places they would bind them with thorns. In Europe, and
Speaker 1: that that's another thing that kind of fascinates me about
Speaker 1: this whole thing chuck. Is that at some point somewhere,
Speaker 1: maybe in Europe, maybe in Asia, maybe in Africa, somebody
Speaker 1: came up with this idea of vampires of relatives coming
Speaker 1: back from the grave and sucking the life out of um,
Speaker 1: their their friends, family members, villagers. And that person had
Speaker 1: this idea that spread and it made it centuries later
Speaker 1: to New England, where it led to the desecration of
Speaker 1: the graves family members, including one that was discovered another
Speaker 1: couple of centuries later by some kids playing in a
Speaker 1: gravel pit. That's led to us talking about this today.
Speaker 1: If if that doesn't make history interesting, I don't know
Speaker 1: what does. Yes, some kids running around listening to the
Speaker 1: Pixies finds a mountain of skulls st band the Pixies
Speaker 1: are top nuts. It's great. Um. Should we finish with
Speaker 1: the story of Mercy Brown? All right? So Mercy Brown
Speaker 1: lived in Exeter, Rhode Island. This was a farming, farming
Speaker 1: land and by all accounts, by the time she was around,
Speaker 1: it had the town had definitely seen its better days
Speaker 1: thanks to the Civil War, um kind of decimating the town. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's a good fact to it. The town is actually
Speaker 1: kind of metaphor for vampireism itself like it had lost
Speaker 1: its own life force in a lot of ways. It
Speaker 1: dropped by like two thirds and seven the seventy years
Speaker 1: before Mercy Brown died. The population did it was. It
Speaker 1: was not a good scene for this, the people who
Speaker 1: were left behind. Plus they had tuberculosis running around town
Speaker 1: right and certainly through her house. Um, her mother died,
Speaker 1: Her sister, Mary Eliza died. Oh no, that was her mom. Sorry,
Speaker 1: Mary Olive was her sister. It's a great name, Mary Olive, agreed. Um,
Speaker 1: she was twenty and Mary Olive. That is a good name.
Speaker 1: And I think some of those names are coming back,
Speaker 1: the classic names. Yeah, little house from the prairie trend. Well,
Speaker 1: I know I know one person who named their daughter
Speaker 1: Olive recently, and I thought that was a pretty sweet name. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you should have You should have been like Mary Olive
Speaker 1: would have been better. I was listening to a my
Speaker 1: favorite murder the other day and they were laughing at
Speaker 1: funny Aimes that it's just you can't imagine a baby
Speaker 1: being called like Barbara, and they listened out a few
Speaker 1: other ones, like it comes out with like a clunky
Speaker 1: jewelry and a cigarette, exactly, sweet little baby Barbara. Um
Speaker 1: So anyway, Mary Olive goes Mary Eliza goes the brother. Uh.
Speaker 1: And this is where it gets a little weird because
Speaker 1: I saw like eight different accounts of this, and they
Speaker 1: all had different timelines of death and sickness, whether or
Speaker 1: not Mercy died and then Edwin got sick or not.
Speaker 1: But at any rate, brother Edwin is sick. Mercy eventually
Speaker 1: dies of TB and the town says, we gotta do
Speaker 1: something here. Yeah, they went to the dead George Brown
Speaker 1: and said, man, you've got a problem on your hands.
Speaker 1: And if you think about it, so all this took
Speaker 1: place over like a decade, which you're like, that's a
Speaker 1: long time. I would think the end of the nineteenth century.
Speaker 1: That's a pretty average mortality rate for a family. Apparently not,
Speaker 1: but they were kids, you know, they were in their
Speaker 1: early twenties. Well. Also he lost his wife as well.
Speaker 1: So over the over the course of a decade, this
Speaker 1: family of five went down to basically a family of
Speaker 1: one in a quarter depending on whatever you want to
Speaker 1: count Edwin as he's dying, right, So George Brown was like,
Speaker 1: you're probably right, we should do something. Later on, it
Speaker 1: was revealed that he didn't believe in this at all.
Speaker 1: That he basically agreed to this because the neighbors wouldn't
Speaker 1: leave him alone about it. And the neighbors aren't doing
Speaker 1: this just out of complete selflessness. There was this idea
Speaker 1: that once this vampire um finished with the family, they
Speaker 1: would move on to another family. So if you lived
Speaker 1: in a small village, you had a real problem with
Speaker 1: this vampire being allowed to go on, and you would
Speaker 1: bother your neighbor to dig up their family member until
Speaker 1: they relented. And that's what happened with George Brown. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean the writing was on the wall certainly with
Speaker 1: Edwin as far as the neighbors are concerned. Like he said,
Speaker 1: he's like, fine, do what you gotta do. He did
Speaker 1: said I want to die her there, which is amazing
Speaker 1: that doctors would actually preside over an exhimation. I think
Speaker 1: that doctor was trying to be the voice of reason
Speaker 1: throughout this process, even cutting open Mercy's chest and removing
Speaker 1: her heart and then her dominating removing her liver. He's
Speaker 1: pointing out is this Abigail Tucker article says, um, look
Speaker 1: this is evidence of tuberculosis. Yeah, like, shut up, college boy,
Speaker 1: give me that heart. Yeah, that's what happened. I got
Speaker 1: a hot fire burning and that's exactly what happened. Like
Speaker 1: you said, um, they burn this heart. They mix the
Speaker 1: ashes into a tonic. Edwin drank it thinking that they
Speaker 1: would save him. And what he lived a couple of months,
Speaker 1: maybe not even because he had tuberculosis. Cutting open the
Speaker 1: chest of a dead relative and burning their heart and
Speaker 1: liver does nothing to cure tuberculosis. The sister. Yeah, this sister,
Speaker 1: which is it's it's really sad, but at the same time,
Speaker 1: it kind of gives you a pick. Sure, George Brown
Speaker 1: he doesn't believe in like all this vampire superstition. He
Speaker 1: apparently also is cool with the desecration of a grave.
Speaker 1: He's not a very sentimental guy. He's the impression that
Speaker 1: I have of him, you know, he's like, yeah, go
Speaker 1: cut her open, that's fine, Just stop bothering me. Just
Speaker 1: make sure that my my doctor friend Ted is there
Speaker 1: to point out how stupid all of this is. Yeah,
Speaker 1: because he they sent Edwin away, I think to try
Speaker 1: and get well. And I don't know if George was there,
Speaker 1: but he definitely wasn't at that the exhimation. No, there
Speaker 1: was a guy there from Providence newspaper. Here's our other
Speaker 1: m Night Shamalan twist. He wrote an article that basically
Speaker 1: told the world about this, and it got picked up,
Speaker 1: and it got picked up by a number of papers,
Speaker 1: including the New York World, and in the New York
Speaker 1: World reported on the vampire exhamation of Mercy Brown. And
Speaker 1: a clipping of that article was found in the papers
Speaker 1: of a certain person. How cool was it, That's right,
Speaker 1: the author of Dracula. Yeah. So scholars have said this
Speaker 1: all came too soon before Dracula was published. It he
Speaker 1: was probably working on it already, or he was working already.
Speaker 1: It didn't influence it at all. Some people say, no,
Speaker 1: he definitely did. He was influenced by this vampire panic
Speaker 1: for sure. Yeah. And Manky's Laura episode on Mercy Brown,
Speaker 1: because he's just a great storyteller. He ended it just
Speaker 1: by saying, you know, I think the last words of
Speaker 1: the show are Bram Stoker. Oh he didn't say, you know,
Speaker 1: maybe he did. Maybe he didn't. Okay, you ready, So
Speaker 1: hold on, let's we're gonna do this lower style. So
Speaker 1: chuck of newspaper clipping of Mercy Brown's exhamation was found
Speaker 1: in the papers of bram Stoker. Did we have classical
Speaker 1: music going? But I hope so. Jerry all right okay?
Speaker 1: And he also didn't have met giggling in the background. Uh.
Speaker 1: If you want to know more about lore, we'll go
Speaker 1: check out that podcast and look for more good stuff
Speaker 1: coming soon from Aaron Monkey, who's now our coworker, which
Speaker 1: means we have to buy him a Christmas present and
Speaker 1: I know um. And in the meantime, while we're figuring
Speaker 1: out what to get Aaron Monkey, it's time for listener. Now,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna go with this one. Venezuelan living in Chile.
Speaker 1: Hey guys, a new fan of the podcast started with
Speaker 1: the Seven Wonders, So that's super new and I was
Speaker 1: hooked since then. Uh, and now listen to the new
Speaker 1: ones and go back in time to two thousand nine ones.
Speaker 1: I want to go through all that sounds like they're sandwich.
Speaker 1: Maybe I'm from Venezuela living in Chile, And I want
Speaker 1: to suggest one about identity. We as Venezuelans are going
Speaker 1: through a difficult time as the government is not issuing passports.
Speaker 1: As an immigrant, It's is super hard art. Basically, if
Speaker 1: I want to travel, I can only go to the
Speaker 1: UH more costur member countries because I could do so
Speaker 1: with the rut r U T, which is the Chilean
Speaker 1: I D card, and I'm I'm a lucky case since
Speaker 1: I have friends that while asking for Chilean visa, the
Speaker 1: Venezuelan passport expired, and now they don't have either Chilean
Speaker 1: or Venezuelan documents. I feel like an orphan if my
Speaker 1: home country does not want to give me I D documents,
Speaker 1: and as a resident, Chile can't either only if I
Speaker 1: apply to nationalization, and it will have to wait a
Speaker 1: few years until I can do that. She sounds like
Speaker 1: Tom Hanks in the Terminal basically, but in Chile UH
Speaker 1: and I have no one to claim. I just want
Speaker 1: to put the word out about our situation. The Venezuelan
Speaker 1: government pretends that everything is okay when it's not. My
Speaker 1: family is broken across the world that I'm incapable to
Speaker 1: go see them and they can't come to me. It
Speaker 1: is a painful situation. Keep up with good work, guys.
Speaker 1: Thanks to you, I have new topics to discuss with
Speaker 1: my friends. They were particularly interested in how frogs work.
Speaker 1: Sorry for the broken English. I'm still working on my grammar.
Speaker 1: I think you did great. Agreed. PS. I will love
Speaker 1: to hear a shout out hearts hearts that is emmanuela
Speaker 1: guia shout out Emmanuel hang in there. Yeah, that's really
Speaker 1: sad to hear, and you're doing great with your English.
Speaker 1: We are very sad to hear about that situation. Um.
Speaker 1: If you want to get in touch with us and
Speaker 1: let us know about something going on in your country
Speaker 1: that we weren't aware of, uh, we want to hear
Speaker 1: about it, you can tweet to us at josh um
Speaker 1: Clark or s Y s K podcast. I also have
Speaker 1: a website called Are You Serious Clark dot com. Chuck
Speaker 1: is on Facebook at Facebook dot com slash Charles W.
Speaker 1: Chuck Bryant. He's also at Facebook dot com slash stuff
Speaker 1: you Should Know. You can send us an email to
Speaker 1: Stuff podcast at how stuff Works dot com and it's
Speaker 1: always joined us at at home on the web, Stuff
Speaker 1: you Should Know dot com. For more on thiss and
Speaker 1: thousands of other topics, visit how Stuff Works dot com.
Speaker 1: M