Who was the “Rhode Island accused vampire”?
In 1896 an article appeared in the respected academic journal
The American Anthropologist entitled “The Animistic Vampire in New England”. Its author was the folklorist George R Stetson. After a long account of vampires in history, he introduced the revelation that such beliefs were alive and well in the villages and towns of Rhode Island. It had endured there, he said, by some “mysterious survival” or “occult transmission”.
The area had been ravaged by consumption (tuberculosis), and numerous people had died in a cadaverous-looking state. Locals did not talk of vampires terrorising their neighbourhoods, but the press had a field day with the idea. One of the most widely reported cases was that of 19-year-old Mercy Brown, who died of consumption in January 1892.
In March, Mercy’s father, George T Brown, was advised by friends and neighbours to have her body – and those of other family members who died of consumption – exhumed. According to local folk belief, as long as the heart in the corpse contained blood, the rest of the family would continue to suffer. Mercy’s heart was found to have decaying clotted blood, and so it, and her liver, were removed and burned in the cemetery to break the deadly link with the living.
Was Mercy Brown considered a vampire? We can’t say for sure. She certainly became a legendary figure in the development of vampire fiction over the following century. In fact, it’s been suggested that her case influenced Bram Stoker’s classic 1897 gothic horror novel, Dracula.