March 20, 2018 • 47 mins
In the 19th century, in isolated villages and godforsaken towns in rural New England, people began to suspect their deceased family members had become undead. Thus began everything we know today about killing vampires.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, everybody. We've already made our big tour announcement for
the year, but this is a little different because we
have added a show because Denver sold out, so we
have added a second show in Denver. Nice. Yeah, We're
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And you can go to s Y s K live
(00:21):
dot com to get info and tickets for that show
and all the rest of our shows to Chuck. That's right, Boston,
April fourth, d C April five. St. Louis and Cleveland, Ohio.
Come out and see us. Welcome to Stuff you should
Know from House Stuff Works dot com. Hey, and welcome
(00:45):
to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, Charles W. Chuck, pri
Jerry Stuff you should know. I love this one. Yeah.
Vampires December fourwelve was our our main podcast on vampires.
It was like it was a good one and I
(01:07):
don't remember touching on this at all, did we No?
I had no idea about it, that's nutty. It wasn't
until I read a great um, a great article about
vampire panics in New England that I had first heard
of it. Abigail Tucker from Ye she did an amazing
job on that one, agreed. So let's start. Let's start
(01:33):
where that article starts, because I think it's a great
place to dive into this this weirdness. Yeah. Yeah, that's
not what most people would think. You would say. In Connecticut,
I'm a freshman in college. There were there were some
kids playing at I think a gravel quarry and they
discovered some graves. It's basically the dream of every kid
(01:56):
who's ever played outside to discover some like long lost graves.
Like any kid poking around the woods. Were all really
just looking for dead bodies pretty much at the very least,
you're prepared for it at all times. Yeah, um remember
stand by Me, kid, Mean, that's what inspired it all.
That was one of like the great unnerving, disturbing dead
(02:18):
kids of all time. And you know what, Ray Brower, Um,
my friend, my best friend Brett came upon a dead
body one time playing in the woods. Yeah, and it
wasn't It was a neighbor who who had a heart
attack while like raking leaves or cleaning up in the
woods or something, So it wasn't nefarious, but he still
ran across the dead body as a kid. How why
(02:39):
was the guy cleaning up the woods? Well, I mean
I think it was the woods on the edge of
his yards or something like that. How long had he
been there for? Uh, don't think it had been that long.
He wasn't decomposed or anything. I think it was just
like lifeless body. There's Mr whatever, Mr Whipple, Right, don't
(03:02):
squeeze charm, I'm cleaning the woods. So these these kids
found graves that were very, very old. They weren't, you know,
a dead neighbor or anything like that. They were actually
it turned out to be a lost family cemetery again
in Connecticut, right, and in very short order, the Connecticut
(03:23):
state archaeologist, which is pretty cool, position, a guy named
Nick Bellantoni. He was called out and he starts excavating
the place, right, yes, I'll keep going. He finds a
bunch of graves, lots of kids, because it's New England
nineteenth century, late eighteenth century, early nineteenth centuries. When they
(03:43):
finally said, this is about when this this graveyard was
in use, and there were kids, some adults buried normally
exactly like you'd expect. How she said they were buried
Yankee style. Yeah, I didn't know what that meant. It
meant like in a very thrifty manner, very bare bones,
I feel forgiven, not like our ostentatious southern coffins. Right,
(04:05):
what about that lady who got buried in her ferrari?
Did you hear about her? I think I did. She
was great just for doing that, you know, like, I'll
see y'all in Hell. I'm taking my ferrari with that.
She was like buried sitting up behind the wheel in
an agle j in her ferrari. That's how she was buried.
That's like the Elon Musk's tesla in space, a little
(04:26):
estro not riding around it. Well, yeah, everyone knows that
that's actually the body of one of his enemies, of course,
who was alive when that rocket went off. I'm sure so. Um,
there's this one grave out of all of them that
is a little hinky, you could say. Bellentoni starts um
pulling away some of the rocks. It's entombed now like
(04:48):
the others. There's rocks around it. And he finds that
the coffin has been broken, and on the coffin, on
the coffin lid in brass tacks is J. B. I
believe hyphen five. Yeah, and this coffin is red, which
is also different I think than the others. Most of
the coffin's fine, or most of the skeletons fine. But
(05:08):
when he gets a little further up, he finds on
top of the ribs the thigh bones are crossed across
the ribs, and the skull is no longer attached the
end of the spinal column. It's on the rib cage
as well, and the rib cage has been broken. And
upon further inspection he finds the coffin has been smashed.
And Nick Bellantoni says, we'll I'll be yeah. I mean,
(05:32):
this is not what normally happens as a body decomposes.
They don't go into the shape of the Jolly rogers
pirate flag. Um. And it's funny that you picked this
because uh and this is sort of an announcement. But
the Great Aeron Mankey of Lore fame, was telling me
these stories this week in the office because uh we
(05:55):
he has partnered with us. He's gonna do some shows
with us. Now, yeah, not Lore He's like, no, no, no,
you don't get that one. But he's gonna do some
new shows with us and we're all super excited. But
he was telling me all these stories and you were
falling asleep, stroking my head gently. And uh, the next
day you sent this article or this, uh, this collection
(06:17):
of articles you put together and said, let's do one
in vampire panics. And I was like, that's weird. Man,
Like Aaron Mankey was just talking about this, and he
has like three Laura episodes, one on Mercy Brown that
I listened to, uh as part of this research, but
then two others, and it was just it all can
kind of really weirdly came together the spirits of the vampires.
And so anyway, welcome Mr Manky, Yeah, welcome, We're glad
(06:41):
to have you. And are we calling him Mr Mankey
not Aaron? No, but it was very sweet. He's an
long time all time stuff you should know listener, and uh,
he's a legit. I'm sure that he is going to
hear this and say, oh, guys, I did this so much,
so much better. I don't like you any longer. So anyway,
(07:02):
JB fifty five year right is spelled out in brass tacks. Uh.
It's a male skeleton. It's from the eighteen thirties at
the latest in there in the body is probably in
his fifties or so, and it's just very very creepy
and perplexing. Yeah, very perplexing. First blush, Bellentoni said in
that Smithsonian archicly he'd never seen anything like it before, right, right,
(07:26):
So he's he obviously, being an archaeologist, He's not like,
well that's pretty interesting. I'm going back to my sandwich now.
He wanted to get to the bottom of it, that's right.
So he started asking around and finally one colleague said, well,
maybe it was a vampire. This is Michael Bell not
yet okay, he it was apparently a colleague, I guess,
(07:48):
a fellow archaeologist who's like, there was actually such things
as vampire panics. And then Bellentoni met Michael Bell, right,
and notably Uh in eighteen fifty four. This is about
twenty years after the gentleman j B. Which is probably
his age, right, or I guess maybe Jim Brown years old,
(08:12):
let's let's just call him that. Uh, and Jewitt City, Connecticut,
there was a vampire panic that had broken out and
the corpses were exhumed that people might thought were vampires. Uh.
And then I think is when he finally gets in
touch with this Rhode Island folklorist named Michael Bell. Yeah,
and Bell is like, my friend, I'm going to tell
(08:32):
you something. Are you sitting down and Bell Andoni says yes,
and Bell goes, have you had your sandwich? Um? Bell goes,
you are sitting on the only intact physical evidence of
what was a series of vampire panics that gripped New
England in the late eighteenth to to actually late nineteenth century,
(08:57):
almost up to the twentieth century. Yeah, that's the remarkable
thing here, because if you hear this and you're like, yeah, yeah,
I know about Salem. This was a couple of hundred
years later. Yeah, this was Yeah, this is about less
than a d and fifty years ago. Yeah, Like we
we had evolved way past that by this point to
believe that vampires existed and we need to dig up
(09:18):
bodies of our relatives. Yeah, that's what's so shocking about this.
Like the Enlightenment had come and gone. Science was a thing.
It was just it was it's very weird to think
about how late this happened, but sure enough, there is
bel ATONI looked into it and talked to Michael Bell
and found out, No, there was, there was vampire panics.
A lot of people don't know about them because most
(09:40):
people don't dig into that kind of thing. But they're
actually because they happened as late as they did, they're
actually fairly well documented. The thing is is most of
the graves are lost. Um you have an actual grave
of one of the vampires that was basically a victim
of this vampire panic. Yeah, and apparently it happened. Um.
(10:00):
He documented Bell about eighty of these exhimations as far
west as Minnesota, but obviously most of these took place
in the Connecticut, Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire area, Rhode Island,
Tohode Island. Because I don't know what it is with
New England. Well, we'll get to it. We'll get to it.
(10:20):
They're weird because it's it definitely is a very weird thing,
especially considering that, like at the time, people who were alive,
We're like, what are you guys doing? How backwards can
you be? You know? Um, So they're contemporaries were even
like put off by this kind of thing. And at
(10:43):
first it was um like you had to know somebody
to know that this was going on. But eventually a
couple of them became high enough profile that, um, it
became international news that there was some weirdness going on
in New England that the locals were we're we're in
the grips of a vampire panic. Yeah. Thorrow wrote about
(11:03):
it in his journal. That's Henry David. Yeah, he wrote.
He said he was at an exhimation and he wrote
it was like wow, man. Uh And as you said,
Rhode Island, Like, this wasn't just like out in the
sticks a rural uh, New England. This happened close to Newport,
(11:24):
Rhode Island, which at the time and is still very
tony area where oh yeah, dude, beautiful that that cliff
walk or whatever, unbelievable and those houses were around back then.
These were well healed, rich people and that's where they summered, right,
murdering one another and getting away with it, drinking champagne
all the while. That's what they did. God bless him
(11:46):
as a beautiful town. Yeah, Newport Rhode Island is a
gorgeous town. Yeah. I was very taken with it and
thought I could totally live here if I had about
fifty times as much money as I have right now.
And it was nine hundred. So um, as I said, like,
this is this is it's it is very well documented
(12:07):
in some respects, but you have to be a guy
like Michael Bell who knows where to look because Gray's
like this don't pop up every day. Right. There was
this dude who documented it probably better than anybody, um,
and he didn't hear about it until I think the
late eighteen nineties. But he was an anthropologist named George Stetson.
He published like a monotype on it, on the New
(12:28):
England vampire panics and exactly what the beliefs were. So
he he established like the baseline for these beliefs and
really documented it in the late nineteenth century. Yeah, and
kind of shook up the world. Yeah. So again everybody
at the time who wasn't involved is looking in like
what are you guys doing? Um? Apparently the Boston Daily
(12:51):
Globe said that was basically inbreeding was responsible for this
weird behavior. Um, like people from the South, We're going,
what our nation? Are you guys doing it? There? Right?
There was a there was the idea that the that Stetson,
George Stetson, the anthropologists had basically been fooled, been fleeced
by you know, the slick New England city rural folk um,
(13:15):
and that they were just pulling his leg as it
was put. Um, that's not the case. This actually did happen,
and it it turns out that it is basically an
extension of a tradition that finds its roots back in Europe,
goes back many many centuries to Europe. And here is
where it gets extremely interesting to me. The vampire legend
(13:39):
that we understand today actually grew out of real superstitions.
Like everything you know about vampires is is what some
people hundreds of years ago and not that very long ago,
believed was actual reality. And this, this vampire panic was
(14:00):
an actual manifestation of those beliefs in real life. That's right, man,
The spirit of the vampires are with us, all right,
we'll be back right after this. Okay. So the vampire,
(14:43):
as we probably pronounced it like that in that episode
so many years ago, I have a one note sense
of humor. Uh, it came It's reliable. That's a nice
way to say. It came out of Europe, not the
United States. And that word for disappeared in the tenth century.
And um Bell, as far as he's concerned, says or
(15:05):
thinks at least that, um, well, we all know that
it came out of like a Germany and the Slavic
immigrants coming here. But he thinks, for his money is
that it probably wasn't just one big way. It probably
came over from different people at different times, but eventually
it made its way over to the United States through
probably Pennsylvania and then made its way north right. And um,
(15:29):
from his research he's found, the earliest he's found is
a reference to it comes from four in the Connecticut
Koran and Weekly Intelligencer. And you think the Hartford newspapers
still called the Hartford Koran, So that's an old paper, right, yeah,
and um in it in this it's a letter to
(15:50):
the editor from a guy named Moses Holmes, who is
a councilman in the town of Willington, m Connecticut. And
he's basically warning people not to listen to what he calls,
quote a certain quack doctor, a foreigner. And um, basically
this doctor was saying there there's vampires of foot and
(16:10):
you need to exume your family and kill them because
they're vampires now. And Moses Holmes was saying, don't don't
do that. This is wrong and weird. Well, yeah, and
that's the legend that came over from Europe. The Slavic
people had the upier and the Romanians had and the
upier and the stragoy would die, be buried and would
(16:32):
come back to drink the blood of their relatives. And
that was the legend and what it really was. Well,
maybe we should hold onto that little yeah, let's just yeah,
I'm sorry, I meant to cross that out on your Okay.
I was like, this came into yeah, all right, so
we'll we'll we'll tease that out for later. So you
ask yourself, like I think of Yankees as like pretty
(16:56):
solid people, salt of the earth, especially nineteen cent or
Yankees salts of the Irish people, really stable, like it
would take quite a bit to drive one of them,
just totally crazy. Right, they had to put up with
these winters, nor easters, um saleasters, sure, all that stuff, right,
and um, you know, how would how would this happen
(17:19):
outside of say, puritanical New England in the in the
nineteenth century. And it turns out I didn't realize this,
but Abigail Tucker points out that the Yankees that we
think of are not the Yankees, and I'm not talking
baseball here, are not the Yankees, who, um, we're in actuality.
(17:40):
So I sat up very late last night trying to
figure out the most convoluted way to say that sentence,
and I think of pay Yeah. I thought this was
super interesting because when I think of New England, I
think of very religious, puritanical Christian Christian. They don't do
this kind of thing you think of um And actually,
(18:02):
you know what's funny is because Mankett was here. I
had him on movie Crush. I guess what his movie was,
hold On, hold On, So I said Christian, which makes
me think of this song Sister Christian by Night Ranger,
which factored in big time into Boogie Night No. His
favorite movie is The Village, which makes total sense. I
(18:25):
watched that again within the last couple of months, and
I'm like, this movie is even better now. Yeah, I
liked it more when I saw it again, which is
weird because you know the twist at the know, because
it's the m night Sham movie. Yeah, And I think
it bugged me at the time because I and I
told him this in the show. But I think at
the time I was sort of like over M. Night
and the Twists. I was like, come on, dude, another
(18:47):
twist and now I'm looking out for it, so I
had better be really good. Yeah, but I think years
later I watched it again, I was like, you know what,
I think I kind of dig this movie. I did too,
so anyway, very fitting. But I think of those people
like these Puritans, living off, removed from society, very strict
religious people's but apparently that was not the deal. In
(19:10):
the eighteen hundreds in rural New England, only ten belonged
to a church. Shocking to me, and especially it says
that you're in this article Rhode Island and I love this.
I had no idea it was founded as a haven
for religious dissenters. So I think they just wanted to
go in party. Yeah, the seaside, they were like, let's
(19:32):
party and engage in hex magic. Gosh, they were Another
way to put it is that the New Englanders in
the nineteenth century were superstitious, but right exactly, because if
you were um hardcore Christian, superstition didn't play a part,
you wouldn't like, I mean, what are the some of
the things they did. They would um barry shoes by
(19:55):
the fireplace, to catch the devil from coming down the chimney,
like a horse shoe over your door. Yeah, that kind
of stuff. Like basically anything you think of is like
locker weird kind of Pennsylvania witchcraft, that kind of stuff.
This is like, that's what it was. It was like
country witchcraft. That's what they believed in. Because even if
(20:15):
you weren't Christian, you still believed in things like good
and evil and spirits and demons and stuff like that.
You just had to have a different way of dealing
with them. Since you weren't Christian in the way of
dealing with and wasn't like praying to God or whatever.
She had to hang up a horse shoe or barry
a shoe to keep the devil from coming down your
chimney because you were as backwards as a game. When
(20:38):
are we going to reveal the reveal? When are we
going to do our m night twist? Yet? Not yet?
All right, Well, then you gotta go because I got
nothing else. Okay, are you ready for now? Well? No,
if you've got more, if you can, were where we were?
All right, Well, here's the reveal. Because being superstitious does
(20:59):
an ex playing the vampire panic. No alone what else
does I'll let you drop the hammer. So they are
not entirely certain, but the general consensus among people who
study this kind of thing is that this was a
reaction to infectious disease outbreaks, specifically tuberculosis. Boom boom. That's
(21:22):
why superstitious New Englanders were running around in the nineteenth
century digging up family members and driving stakes through their
hearts or beheading them in their graves. I love stuff
like this when you can look back years later. I
wonder what they're gonna in a hundred years about the
Satanic panic. Oh, it wasn't some disease, obviously, this is
(21:45):
better reveal it was a panic though. Yeah. Um, it's
interesting that two of our favorite episodes probably are going
to end up being Satanic panic and vampire panics. This
one's going pretty well. So all right, so let's talk
about TV for a minute. This is obviously pre antibiotics.
There is still tuberculosis, but it's super curable now if
(22:06):
you're you know, lucky enough to live where you can
get antibiotics. But it is caused by Bacterium um, two
of which can infect humans M. Tuberculosis and M. Bovus.
And you've heard the word consumption in movies like The
Village from that time period they're dying of consumption. Consumption
(22:28):
was almost always tuberculosis. That's just what they called it
back then, right, that was the name for it, the
reason they called it consumption, and actually that that term
to describe tuberculous is actually predates the more common usage
of consumption today. It was like ingesting or eating something. Yeah,
it takes back to like I think, so it's the
original meaning was that your body was consuming itself. That
(22:50):
it was like the word for tuberculosis. Well, yeah, And
the reason they call it that is because it looked
like your life force was being sapped away from you.
The way that the disease progressed, um, it included coughing
fits where they said, like you couldn't even stop to talk.
You would be coughing so hard that's not good. Um.
(23:13):
You would lose a lot of weight, so it looked
like you were wasting away to um. But at the
same time, you were um voracious ly hungry. You wanted
to eat. It wasn't that kind of illness where you
just can't even eat. You were hungry like all the time,
but you were still wasting away. So there's this duality
between hunger, rampant hunger and the loss of a life force.
(23:39):
And this it's possible that all vampire tales and legends
and the origin of it is found in tuberculosis, because
that's what you think of with vampire is um. The
whole idea at this time was if you had tuberculosis
and you were the say, second, third, fourth member of
(24:00):
your family to come down with this with consumption, it
meant that the one of the previous family members who
had died of this disease was still alive in some way.
Their soul was in a supernatural way and was coming
at night and sucking the life from you to sustain themselves.
(24:20):
If this was the case, then there was only one
thing to do. If you were in New England at
the time, you had to dig up that family member
and take care of business. Yeah, it's funny. Emily and
I always laugh at the movie trope of the the
cough like it has almost a percent return rate. If
a character coughs in a movie, then they're going to
(24:41):
die because you just don't leave coughs in movies. That's
a sure sign. Or especially if they like cough into
a hanky. There's always blood in it, Like remember Hodgeman's
um doc Holiday. Yeah, I'll be your Hucklebert coughing up
the blood and lung tissue. Well, we just started watching
The Crown last night. You know that show on Netflix?
(25:03):
Do you watch it? Yeah? We saw the very just
the first episode last night of season one. And of
course there's Jared Harris as Queen Elizabeth's father, the King Camember,
which what his name was, King, the King of England,
and he's got he's got TV. Of course he starts
coughing in the very first scene into the hanky and
(25:24):
you're like, well, he's probably just going to be in
the bilin um. That's how she became queen. If we're
shouting out things we've seen recently, I want to give
a shout out to Wonder. Wonder what what's that the
the movie about the kid with facial differences? I've heard
this parents are Owens Wilson and Julia Roberts. So good though, Yeah,
(25:47):
all right, you know what, let's take a break. Okay,
who thought I Wonder was going to make an appearance
in the Vampire Panic and not me? Alright, we're gonna
take a break and we'll come back and talk a
little bit more about how a family might do this
right after this. Alright, so dad has gone from TV
(26:29):
or consumption, brother has, sister has, Yeah, maybe ones on
their deathbed, the other ones about to die. Um, we
should talk a little bit about consumption a little more.
At the time, there were people out there in the
world in the late nineteenth century who understood that consumption
(26:51):
was Tuberculosis was an infectious disease caused by these germs.
The people engaged in these vampire panics did not generally
think that They didn't realize that this was a contagious disease.
They thought that a relative was sapping your life force. Right.
The thing is is that tuberculousis is a very contagious
disease spread by coughing sneezing, which you do a lot
(27:14):
of when you have tuberculosis. And if you're living in
like a one two room house in rural New England
and you're a family of six, you can say that
high percentage of your family members are going to eventually
contract this disease. Yeah, whenn't it? I mean, what was
the number it was killing people over a certain period
(27:35):
that's a really big point here. The vampire panics started
in the late eighteenth century. Tuberculousis really started to gain
a foothold in New England and about the seventeen thirties,
and by the time the vampire panics hit their height
in the late eighteenth early nineteenth century, it was the
number one killer of New Englanders at the time. Again,
(27:58):
they weren't like gosh learned that tuberculosis. I caught this
infectious disease. It was one of our family members is
sapping the life out of one of our other family members,
because our family members a vampire. Still, the effect was
the same that they were. They were they they felt
totally powerless against this condition. They just had what it
(28:20):
was wrong, and because they had it wrong, they would
dig up dead bodies and do weird stuff to them.
All right, so brother dies, sister dies, maybe another sibling,
maybe one of the parents. And then if you're in
rural New England, you say, all right, it's clearly what's
going on here is that whoever the first one that died,
(28:43):
or maybe one of them, it's coming back and killing
the rest by sucking out their blood. I have a
vampire in my family, what do I do. I'm going
to dig with some help. Probably sometimes it's quiet, sometimes
in the middle of the night. Sometimes, like in the
case in Vermont, it would be like a daytime public
(29:03):
festival type of there was like a party, like a
community party. Yeah, and that's and in fact, I think
that's the one Henry David Threau attended in Woodstock, Vermont
in his journal and he was like, wtf with these people, Right,
there's a weird party. So you would dig these people up,
depending on where you are. Well, first of all, let's
talk about what they might find when they opened this coffin. Yeah,
(29:25):
because there were a couple of steps. The first step
was you had to diagnose vampireism. Because they like, let's say, uh,
they finally decided by the fourth family member being sick
um that this family was being being sapped by a vampire.
They didn't automatically know which dead family member was doing it.
(29:47):
They got to look at them all. Yeah, so you
might dig up multiple coffins. What they were looking for
was the belief. The belief was that the the you
could tell just by looking at them whither they were
a vampire. Maybe poking around a little bit too sure,
but the problem was is that so the idea of
what we what we think of as vampires is basically
(30:09):
the bram Stoker vampire, which comes later. Um, these vampires
were like the ghoules from the grave type farato looking. Yes, yeah,
so like real long fingernails and like pale and bloody
mouth from kind of slipping away from your body. The
problem is is like this idea of vampires, what we
(30:31):
understand is, or what they understood at vampires was a
tradition handed down from people who had broken up or
broken into graves before and could tell you what a
vampire looked like, which is basically a body in a
certain stage of decomposition, right, and specifically a lot of
times a body in a certain certain stage of decomposition
(30:52):
who had died from tuberculosis. Uh. So you know, you
might dig up a grave and see a bloat because
they have a built up of gas in their stomach.
That is not what they thought it was from. They
thought what they thought they were vampires full from blood.
They'd be like, look at this fat vampire. Yeah. They
(31:13):
might see uh, long finger nails and say that looks
to me like a vampire, right, But that is what
your skin receding. Your skin pulls back from the nail bed,
which makes it look like your nails have kept growing
after um after death, which is not the case. Same
with your hair too. They may see red lips, bloody
lips even possibly sure because apparently the breakdown of your
(31:35):
lung tissue from tuberculpsis um continues even after death. So
they would see blood on the lips and be like, yeah,
they've been sucking the blood out of their their loved one.
But the key to all this is the heart. Uh.
That was what they were trying to get to, to
see if there was any fresh blood near the heart. Uh.
And if they did find that one one of the
well we'll get to what they would do. But um,
(31:57):
And again, a lot of time you would see fresh,
a pure, hearing blood because of the way the body
decomposed from tuberculosis or period. So this thing, yeah, but
but tuberculous is a lot too, especially like the blood
on the lips kind of thing. Right, So this thing
was kind of self sustaining, self fulfilling when somebody died
of tuberculosis if you dug them up at a certain
(32:18):
period of time, especially if they say like died in winter,
they might seem inexplicably in a in a pristine state
because they're underground in New England's freezing in the winter. Um,
So they would fit the bill for a vampire just
by definition of being a decomposing body. But to the
people who didn't understand what decomposition was, it was just
(32:39):
plain as day that they were looking at a vampire
in the grave. Right, So they find a family member
that fits the bill of a vampire. That step one
vampire is m is being diagnosed. Next is dispatching the vampire,
dealing with the vampire. And the problem is this, the
vampire is already dead. So there are only certain things
(32:59):
you can you to a vampire to kill it. And
really what you're not trying to do is kill it.
You're trying to make it so it can't get out
of the grave and keep sapping the life force out
of these family members, hence hopefully saving the dying family member. Right. Uh.
And it was technically called epo tropaic remedy. That's a
clinical name for it. Basically, it's something that you're doing
(33:21):
to counteract this evil. So it depends on where you
were what you might do. Um, everyone had their own methods.
Um in Maine and Plymouth, Massachusetts. I love this one.
All they did was flip it over so it was
face down, and they're like, everyone knows the vampire just
very creepily rises from the waist out of their coffin.
(33:41):
What if we just slipped them over? They couldn't do that.
They went and let's go get some ice cream. Or
the steak through the heart that didn't arise because they
thought the steak had some magical powers. But they thought
they would literally just stake them into the ground so
they couldn't get up. That's another thing too. So you
know the steak through the heart with the vaan pire,
you think that that's trying to kill the vampire. That
(34:03):
is not what they were trying to do. But the
larger thought here is that our understanding of staking a
vampire through the heart comes from people who actually did
this because they were trying to battle tuberculosis. That's so
amazing to me. It's a confluence of all these weird
things really that led to this, but but in all
of it has been refined into this neat, tidy vampire legend.
(34:26):
This this is the compartment and fits in vampire legend
to those of us alive today. But it's got this
amazing history and backstory, some of which happened in real life.
This reminds me of the real life zombies too. Yeah, exactly.
Good point, like this weird religious hysteria combined with um
what they didn't understand at the time was kind of
(34:47):
medicine and science. This weird pre science era, so fascinating
to me. Y're not pre science, but I guess it
was pre real science, rudimentary science. Um. So. In the
Connecticut Rhode Island, Vermont, in that region, the go to
was to burn the heart, take the ash from the
(35:08):
heart and ingest it to give it to someone who
may be sick in the family or may even be
healthy trying to ward off sickness, and they would actually
eat that. So that was one way of dealing with it. Yeah,
that's There's a quote here from Woodstock, Vermont, when Daniel
Ransom in his journal it was said that if the
heart of one of the family who died of consumption
(35:30):
was taken out and burned, others would be free from it.
And father, having some faith in the remedy, had the
heart of Frederick taken out after he had been buried
and it was burned and Captain Pearson's blacksmith forge. Um,
here's the thing, though it did not ever save anyone
from tubercules. No, that's the thing. And I was wondering, like,
what is what was the superstition? How did the superstition
(35:53):
explain a failure to cure I don't know, you know
where they just like, we waited too long. I bet
you they did that that had to be. They would
just have some explanation that we didn't do it right.
Maybe they would try another method, not burning the heart,
like the Jolly the jb They think that the reason
(36:13):
they did that weird jolly Roger thing was because it
was so decomposed. They were just bones, so they I
guess they just improvised, like why don't we just do this?
Well that that apparently finds its root in Europe. In
some places in Europe that was the way to deal
with the vampire was to cut its head off. Other places, um,
they would stick a brick in the vampire's mouth. Some
places they would bind them with thorns. In Europe, and
(36:37):
that that's another thing that kind of fascinates me about
this whole thing chuck. Is that at some point somewhere,
maybe in Europe, maybe in Asia, maybe in Africa, somebody
came up with this idea of vampires of relatives coming
back from the grave and sucking the life out of um,
their their friends, family members, villagers. And that person had
(37:00):
this idea that spread and it made it centuries later
to New England, where it led to the desecration of
the graves family members, including one that was discovered another
couple of centuries later by some kids playing in a
gravel pit. That's led to us talking about this today.
(37:21):
If if that doesn't make history interesting, I don't know
what does. Yes, some kids running around listening to the
Pixies finds a mountain of skulls st band the Pixies
are top nuts. It's great. Um. Should we finish with
the story of Mercy Brown? All right? So Mercy Brown
lived in Exeter, Rhode Island. This was a farming, farming
(37:41):
land and by all accounts, by the time she was around,
it had the town had definitely seen its better days
thanks to the Civil War, um kind of decimating the town. Yeah,
that's a good fact to it. The town is actually
kind of metaphor for vampireism itself like it had lost
(38:02):
its own life force in a lot of ways. It
dropped by like two thirds and seven the seventy years
before Mercy Brown died. The population did it was. It
was not a good scene for this, the people who
were left behind. Plus they had tuberculosis running around town
right and certainly through her house. Um, her mother died,
(38:23):
Her sister, Mary Eliza died. Oh no, that was her mom. Sorry,
Mary Olive was her sister. It's a great name, Mary Olive, agreed. Um,
she was twenty and Mary Olive. That is a good name.
And I think some of those names are coming back,
the classic names. Yeah, little house from the prairie trend. Well,
(38:44):
I know I know one person who named their daughter
Olive recently, and I thought that was a pretty sweet name. Yeah,
you should have You should have been like Mary Olive
would have been better. I was listening to a my
favorite murder the other day and they were laughing at
funny Aimes that it's just you can't imagine a baby
being called like Barbara, and they listened out a few
(39:06):
other ones, like it comes out with like a clunky
jewelry and a cigarette, exactly, sweet little baby Barbara. Um
So anyway, Mary Olive goes Mary Eliza goes the brother. Uh.
And this is where it gets a little weird because
I saw like eight different accounts of this, and they
all had different timelines of death and sickness, whether or
(39:29):
not Mercy died and then Edwin got sick or not.
But at any rate, brother Edwin is sick. Mercy eventually
dies of TB and the town says, we gotta do
something here. Yeah, they went to the dead George Brown
and said, man, you've got a problem on your hands.
And if you think about it, so all this took
place over like a decade, which you're like, that's a
(39:51):
long time. I would think the end of the nineteenth century.
That's a pretty average mortality rate for a family. Apparently not,
but they were kids, you know, they were in their
early twenties. Well. Also he lost his wife as well.
So over the over the course of a decade, this
family of five went down to basically a family of
one in a quarter depending on whatever you want to
(40:12):
count Edwin as he's dying, right, So George Brown was like,
you're probably right, we should do something. Later on, it
was revealed that he didn't believe in this at all.
That he basically agreed to this because the neighbors wouldn't
leave him alone about it. And the neighbors aren't doing
this just out of complete selflessness. There was this idea
(40:32):
that once this vampire um finished with the family, they
would move on to another family. So if you lived
in a small village, you had a real problem with
this vampire being allowed to go on, and you would
bother your neighbor to dig up their family member until
they relented. And that's what happened with George Brown. Yeah,
I mean the writing was on the wall certainly with
Edwin as far as the neighbors are concerned. Like he said,
(40:56):
he's like, fine, do what you gotta do. He did
said I want to die her there, which is amazing
that doctors would actually preside over an exhimation. I think
that doctor was trying to be the voice of reason
throughout this process, even cutting open Mercy's chest and removing
her heart and then her dominating removing her liver. He's
(41:17):
pointing out is this Abigail Tucker article says, um, look
this is evidence of tuberculosis. Yeah, like, shut up, college boy,
give me that heart. Yeah, that's what happened. I got
a hot fire burning and that's exactly what happened. Like
you said, um, they burn this heart. They mix the
ashes into a tonic. Edwin drank it thinking that they
(41:40):
would save him. And what he lived a couple of months,
maybe not even because he had tuberculosis. Cutting open the
chest of a dead relative and burning their heart and
liver does nothing to cure tuberculosis. The sister. Yeah, this sister,
which is it's it's really sad, but at the same time,
it kind of gives you a pick. Sure, George Brown
(42:01):
he doesn't believe in like all this vampire superstition. He
apparently also is cool with the desecration of a grave.
He's not a very sentimental guy. He's the impression that
I have of him, you know, he's like, yeah, go
cut her open, that's fine, Just stop bothering me. Just
make sure that my my doctor friend Ted is there
to point out how stupid all of this is. Yeah,
(42:23):
because he they sent Edwin away, I think to try
and get well. And I don't know if George was there,
but he definitely wasn't at that the exhimation. No, there
was a guy there from Providence newspaper. Here's our other
m Night Shamalan twist. He wrote an article that basically
told the world about this, and it got picked up,
(42:43):
and it got picked up by a number of papers,
including the New York World, and in the New York
World reported on the vampire exhamation of Mercy Brown. And
a clipping of that article was found in the papers
of a certain person. How cool was it, That's right,
(43:04):
the author of Dracula. Yeah. So scholars have said this
all came too soon before Dracula was published. It he
was probably working on it already, or he was working already.
It didn't influence it at all. Some people say, no,
he definitely did. He was influenced by this vampire panic
for sure. Yeah. And Manky's Laura episode on Mercy Brown,
(43:27):
because he's just a great storyteller. He ended it just
by saying, you know, I think the last words of
the show are Bram Stoker. Oh he didn't say, you know,
maybe he did. Maybe he didn't. Okay, you ready, So
hold on, let's we're gonna do this lower style. So
chuck of newspaper clipping of Mercy Brown's exhamation was found
(43:49):
in the papers of bram Stoker. Did we have classical
music going? But I hope so. Jerry all right okay?
And he also didn't have met giggling in the background. Uh.
If you want to know more about lore, we'll go
check out that podcast and look for more good stuff
coming soon from Aaron Monkey, who's now our coworker, which
(44:11):
means we have to buy him a Christmas present and
I know um. And in the meantime, while we're figuring
out what to get Aaron Monkey, it's time for listener. Now,
I'm gonna go with this one. Venezuelan living in Chile.
(44:32):
Hey guys, a new fan of the podcast started with
the Seven Wonders, So that's super new and I was
hooked since then. Uh, and now listen to the new
ones and go back in time to two thousand nine ones.
I want to go through all that sounds like they're sandwich.
Maybe I'm from Venezuela living in Chile, And I want
to suggest one about identity. We as Venezuelans are going
(44:54):
through a difficult time as the government is not issuing passports.
As an immigrant, It's is super hard art. Basically, if
I want to travel, I can only go to the
UH more costur member countries because I could do so
with the rut r U T, which is the Chilean
I D card, and I'm I'm a lucky case since
(45:15):
I have friends that while asking for Chilean visa, the
Venezuelan passport expired, and now they don't have either Chilean
or Venezuelan documents. I feel like an orphan if my
home country does not want to give me I D documents,
and as a resident, Chile can't either only if I
apply to nationalization, and it will have to wait a
(45:37):
few years until I can do that. She sounds like
Tom Hanks in the Terminal basically, but in Chile UH
and I have no one to claim. I just want
to put the word out about our situation. The Venezuelan
government pretends that everything is okay when it's not. My
family is broken across the world that I'm incapable to
go see them and they can't come to me. It
is a painful situation. Keep up with good work, guys.
(45:59):
Thanks to you, I have new topics to discuss with
my friends. They were particularly interested in how frogs work.
Sorry for the broken English. I'm still working on my grammar.
I think you did great. Agreed. PS. I will love
to hear a shout out hearts hearts that is emmanuela
guia shout out Emmanuel hang in there. Yeah, that's really
(46:20):
sad to hear, and you're doing great with your English.
We are very sad to hear about that situation. Um.
If you want to get in touch with us and
let us know about something going on in your country
that we weren't aware of, uh, we want to hear
about it, you can tweet to us at josh um
Clark or s Y s K podcast. I also have
a website called Are You Serious Clark dot com. Chuck
(46:42):
is on Facebook at Facebook dot com slash Charles W.
Chuck Bryant. He's also at Facebook dot com slash stuff
you Should Know. You can send us an email to
Stuff podcast at how stuff Works dot com and it's
always joined us at at home on the web, Stuff
you Should Know dot com. For more on thiss and
(47:02):
thousands of other topics, visit how Stuff Works dot com.
M
Hey, everybody. We've already made our big tour announcement for
the year, but this is a little different because we
have added a show because Denver sold out, so we
have added a second show in Denver. Nice. Yeah, We're
going to be there on Wednesday. Then we added a
show the day before the same place, Gothic Theater, Englewood, Colorado.
And you can go to s Y s K live
(00:21):
dot com to get info and tickets for that show
and all the rest of our shows to Chuck. That's right, Boston,
April fourth, d C April five. St. Louis and Cleveland, Ohio.
Come out and see us. Welcome to Stuff you should
Know from House Stuff Works dot com. Hey, and welcome
(00:45):
to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, Charles W. Chuck, pri
Jerry Stuff you should know. I love this one. Yeah.
Vampires December fourwelve was our our main podcast on vampires.
It was like it was a good one and I
(01:07):
don't remember touching on this at all, did we No?
I had no idea about it, that's nutty. It wasn't
until I read a great um, a great article about
vampire panics in New England that I had first heard
of it. Abigail Tucker from Ye she did an amazing
job on that one, agreed. So let's start. Let's start
(01:33):
where that article starts, because I think it's a great
place to dive into this this weirdness. Yeah. Yeah, that's
not what most people would think. You would say. In Connecticut,
I'm a freshman in college. There were there were some
kids playing at I think a gravel quarry and they
discovered some graves. It's basically the dream of every kid
(01:56):
who's ever played outside to discover some like long lost graves.
Like any kid poking around the woods. Were all really
just looking for dead bodies pretty much at the very least,
you're prepared for it at all times. Yeah, um remember
stand by Me, kid, Mean, that's what inspired it all.
That was one of like the great unnerving, disturbing dead
(02:18):
kids of all time. And you know what, Ray Brower, Um,
my friend, my best friend Brett came upon a dead
body one time playing in the woods. Yeah, and it
wasn't It was a neighbor who who had a heart
attack while like raking leaves or cleaning up in the
woods or something, So it wasn't nefarious, but he still
ran across the dead body as a kid. How why
(02:39):
was the guy cleaning up the woods? Well, I mean
I think it was the woods on the edge of
his yards or something like that. How long had he
been there for? Uh, don't think it had been that long.
He wasn't decomposed or anything. I think it was just
like lifeless body. There's Mr whatever, Mr Whipple, Right, don't
(03:02):
squeeze charm, I'm cleaning the woods. So these these kids
found graves that were very, very old. They weren't, you know,
a dead neighbor or anything like that. They were actually
it turned out to be a lost family cemetery again
in Connecticut, right, and in very short order, the Connecticut
(03:23):
state archaeologist, which is pretty cool, position, a guy named
Nick Bellantoni. He was called out and he starts excavating
the place, right, yes, I'll keep going. He finds a
bunch of graves, lots of kids, because it's New England
nineteenth century, late eighteenth century, early nineteenth centuries. When they
(03:43):
finally said, this is about when this this graveyard was
in use, and there were kids, some adults buried normally
exactly like you'd expect. How she said they were buried
Yankee style. Yeah, I didn't know what that meant. It
meant like in a very thrifty manner, very bare bones,
I feel forgiven, not like our ostentatious southern coffins. Right,
(04:05):
what about that lady who got buried in her ferrari?
Did you hear about her? I think I did. She
was great just for doing that, you know, like, I'll
see y'all in Hell. I'm taking my ferrari with that.
She was like buried sitting up behind the wheel in
an agle j in her ferrari. That's how she was buried.
That's like the Elon Musk's tesla in space, a little
(04:26):
estro not riding around it. Well, yeah, everyone knows that
that's actually the body of one of his enemies, of course,
who was alive when that rocket went off. I'm sure so. Um,
there's this one grave out of all of them that
is a little hinky, you could say. Bellentoni starts um
pulling away some of the rocks. It's entombed now like
(04:48):
the others. There's rocks around it. And he finds that
the coffin has been broken, and on the coffin, on
the coffin lid in brass tacks is J. B. I
believe hyphen five. Yeah, and this coffin is red, which
is also different I think than the others. Most of
the coffin's fine, or most of the skeletons fine. But
(05:08):
when he gets a little further up, he finds on
top of the ribs the thigh bones are crossed across
the ribs, and the skull is no longer attached the
end of the spinal column. It's on the rib cage
as well, and the rib cage has been broken. And
upon further inspection he finds the coffin has been smashed.
And Nick Bellantoni says, we'll I'll be yeah. I mean,
(05:32):
this is not what normally happens as a body decomposes.
They don't go into the shape of the Jolly rogers
pirate flag. Um. And it's funny that you picked this
because uh and this is sort of an announcement. But
the Great Aeron Mankey of Lore fame, was telling me
these stories this week in the office because uh we
(05:55):
he has partnered with us. He's gonna do some shows
with us. Now, yeah, not Lore He's like, no, no, no,
you don't get that one. But he's gonna do some
new shows with us and we're all super excited. But
he was telling me all these stories and you were
falling asleep, stroking my head gently. And uh, the next
day you sent this article or this, uh, this collection
(06:17):
of articles you put together and said, let's do one
in vampire panics. And I was like, that's weird. Man,
Like Aaron Mankey was just talking about this, and he
has like three Laura episodes, one on Mercy Brown that
I listened to, uh as part of this research, but
then two others, and it was just it all can
kind of really weirdly came together the spirits of the vampires.
And so anyway, welcome Mr Manky, Yeah, welcome, We're glad
(06:41):
to have you. And are we calling him Mr Mankey
not Aaron? No, but it was very sweet. He's an
long time all time stuff you should know listener, and uh,
he's a legit. I'm sure that he is going to
hear this and say, oh, guys, I did this so much,
so much better. I don't like you any longer. So anyway,
(07:02):
JB fifty five year right is spelled out in brass tacks. Uh.
It's a male skeleton. It's from the eighteen thirties at
the latest in there in the body is probably in
his fifties or so, and it's just very very creepy
and perplexing. Yeah, very perplexing. First blush, Bellentoni said in
that Smithsonian archicly he'd never seen anything like it before, right, right,
(07:26):
So he's he obviously, being an archaeologist, He's not like,
well that's pretty interesting. I'm going back to my sandwich now.
He wanted to get to the bottom of it, that's right.
So he started asking around and finally one colleague said, well,
maybe it was a vampire. This is Michael Bell not
yet okay, he it was apparently a colleague, I guess,
(07:48):
a fellow archaeologist who's like, there was actually such things
as vampire panics. And then Bellentoni met Michael Bell, right,
and notably Uh in eighteen fifty four. This is about
twenty years after the gentleman j B. Which is probably
his age, right, or I guess maybe Jim Brown years old,
(08:12):
let's let's just call him that. Uh, and Jewitt City, Connecticut,
there was a vampire panic that had broken out and
the corpses were exhumed that people might thought were vampires. Uh.
And then I think is when he finally gets in
touch with this Rhode Island folklorist named Michael Bell. Yeah,
and Bell is like, my friend, I'm going to tell
(08:32):
you something. Are you sitting down and Bell Andoni says yes,
and Bell goes, have you had your sandwich? Um? Bell goes,
you are sitting on the only intact physical evidence of
what was a series of vampire panics that gripped New
England in the late eighteenth to to actually late nineteenth century,
(08:57):
almost up to the twentieth century. Yeah, that's the remarkable
thing here, because if you hear this and you're like, yeah, yeah,
I know about Salem. This was a couple of hundred
years later. Yeah, this was Yeah, this is about less
than a d and fifty years ago. Yeah, Like we
we had evolved way past that by this point to
believe that vampires existed and we need to dig up
(09:18):
bodies of our relatives. Yeah, that's what's so shocking about this.
Like the Enlightenment had come and gone. Science was a thing.
It was just it was it's very weird to think
about how late this happened, but sure enough, there is
bel ATONI looked into it and talked to Michael Bell
and found out, No, there was, there was vampire panics.
A lot of people don't know about them because most
(09:40):
people don't dig into that kind of thing. But they're
actually because they happened as late as they did, they're
actually fairly well documented. The thing is is most of
the graves are lost. Um you have an actual grave
of one of the vampires that was basically a victim
of this vampire panic. Yeah, and apparently it happened. Um.
(10:00):
He documented Bell about eighty of these exhimations as far
west as Minnesota, but obviously most of these took place
in the Connecticut, Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire area, Rhode Island,
Tohode Island. Because I don't know what it is with
New England. Well, we'll get to it. We'll get to it.
(10:20):
They're weird because it's it definitely is a very weird thing,
especially considering that, like at the time, people who were alive,
We're like, what are you guys doing? How backwards can
you be? You know? Um, So they're contemporaries were even
like put off by this kind of thing. And at
(10:43):
first it was um like you had to know somebody
to know that this was going on. But eventually a
couple of them became high enough profile that, um, it
became international news that there was some weirdness going on
in New England that the locals were we're we're in
the grips of a vampire panic. Yeah. Thorrow wrote about
(11:03):
it in his journal. That's Henry David. Yeah, he wrote.
He said he was at an exhimation and he wrote
it was like wow, man. Uh And as you said,
Rhode Island, Like, this wasn't just like out in the
sticks a rural uh, New England. This happened close to Newport,
(11:24):
Rhode Island, which at the time and is still very
tony area where oh yeah, dude, beautiful that that cliff
walk or whatever, unbelievable and those houses were around back then.
These were well healed, rich people and that's where they summered, right,
murdering one another and getting away with it, drinking champagne
all the while. That's what they did. God bless him
(11:46):
as a beautiful town. Yeah, Newport Rhode Island is a
gorgeous town. Yeah. I was very taken with it and
thought I could totally live here if I had about
fifty times as much money as I have right now.
And it was nine hundred. So um, as I said, like,
this is this is it's it is very well documented
(12:07):
in some respects, but you have to be a guy
like Michael Bell who knows where to look because Gray's
like this don't pop up every day. Right. There was
this dude who documented it probably better than anybody, um,
and he didn't hear about it until I think the
late eighteen nineties. But he was an anthropologist named George Stetson.
He published like a monotype on it, on the New
(12:28):
England vampire panics and exactly what the beliefs were. So
he he established like the baseline for these beliefs and
really documented it in the late nineteenth century. Yeah, and
kind of shook up the world. Yeah. So again everybody
at the time who wasn't involved is looking in like
what are you guys doing? Um? Apparently the Boston Daily
(12:51):
Globe said that was basically inbreeding was responsible for this
weird behavior. Um, like people from the South, We're going,
what our nation? Are you guys doing it? There? Right?
There was a there was the idea that the that Stetson,
George Stetson, the anthropologists had basically been fooled, been fleeced
by you know, the slick New England city rural folk um,
(13:15):
and that they were just pulling his leg as it
was put. Um, that's not the case. This actually did happen,
and it it turns out that it is basically an
extension of a tradition that finds its roots back in Europe,
goes back many many centuries to Europe. And here is
where it gets extremely interesting to me. The vampire legend
(13:39):
that we understand today actually grew out of real superstitions.
Like everything you know about vampires is is what some
people hundreds of years ago and not that very long ago,
believed was actual reality. And this, this vampire panic was
(14:00):
an actual manifestation of those beliefs in real life. That's right, man,
The spirit of the vampires are with us, all right,
we'll be back right after this. Okay. So the vampire,
(14:43):
as we probably pronounced it like that in that episode
so many years ago, I have a one note sense
of humor. Uh, it came It's reliable. That's a nice
way to say. It came out of Europe, not the
United States. And that word for disappeared in the tenth century.
And um Bell, as far as he's concerned, says or
(15:05):
thinks at least that, um, well, we all know that
it came out of like a Germany and the Slavic
immigrants coming here. But he thinks, for his money is
that it probably wasn't just one big way. It probably
came over from different people at different times, but eventually
it made its way over to the United States through
probably Pennsylvania and then made its way north right. And um,
(15:29):
from his research he's found, the earliest he's found is
a reference to it comes from four in the Connecticut
Koran and Weekly Intelligencer. And you think the Hartford newspapers
still called the Hartford Koran, So that's an old paper, right, yeah,
and um in it in this it's a letter to
(15:50):
the editor from a guy named Moses Holmes, who is
a councilman in the town of Willington, m Connecticut. And
he's basically warning people not to listen to what he calls,
quote a certain quack doctor, a foreigner. And um, basically
this doctor was saying there there's vampires of foot and
(16:10):
you need to exume your family and kill them because
they're vampires now. And Moses Holmes was saying, don't don't
do that. This is wrong and weird. Well, yeah, and
that's the legend that came over from Europe. The Slavic
people had the upier and the Romanians had and the
upier and the stragoy would die, be buried and would
(16:32):
come back to drink the blood of their relatives. And
that was the legend and what it really was. Well,
maybe we should hold onto that little yeah, let's just yeah,
I'm sorry, I meant to cross that out on your Okay.
I was like, this came into yeah, all right, so
we'll we'll we'll tease that out for later. So you
ask yourself, like I think of Yankees as like pretty
(16:56):
solid people, salt of the earth, especially nineteen cent or
Yankees salts of the Irish people, really stable, like it
would take quite a bit to drive one of them,
just totally crazy. Right, they had to put up with
these winters, nor easters, um saleasters, sure, all that stuff, right,
and um, you know, how would how would this happen
(17:19):
outside of say, puritanical New England in the in the
nineteenth century. And it turns out I didn't realize this,
but Abigail Tucker points out that the Yankees that we
think of are not the Yankees, and I'm not talking
baseball here, are not the Yankees, who, um, we're in actuality.
(17:40):
So I sat up very late last night trying to
figure out the most convoluted way to say that sentence,
and I think of pay Yeah. I thought this was
super interesting because when I think of New England, I
think of very religious, puritanical Christian Christian. They don't do
this kind of thing you think of um And actually,
(18:02):
you know what's funny is because Mankett was here. I
had him on movie Crush. I guess what his movie was,
hold On, hold On, So I said Christian, which makes
me think of this song Sister Christian by Night Ranger,
which factored in big time into Boogie Night No. His
favorite movie is The Village, which makes total sense. I
(18:25):
watched that again within the last couple of months, and
I'm like, this movie is even better now. Yeah, I
liked it more when I saw it again, which is
weird because you know the twist at the know, because
it's the m night Sham movie. Yeah, And I think
it bugged me at the time because I and I
told him this in the show. But I think at
the time I was sort of like over M. Night
and the Twists. I was like, come on, dude, another
(18:47):
twist and now I'm looking out for it, so I
had better be really good. Yeah, but I think years
later I watched it again, I was like, you know what,
I think I kind of dig this movie. I did too,
so anyway, very fitting. But I think of those people
like these Puritans, living off, removed from society, very strict
religious people's but apparently that was not the deal. In
(19:10):
the eighteen hundreds in rural New England, only ten belonged
to a church. Shocking to me, and especially it says
that you're in this article Rhode Island and I love this.
I had no idea it was founded as a haven
for religious dissenters. So I think they just wanted to
go in party. Yeah, the seaside, they were like, let's
(19:32):
party and engage in hex magic. Gosh, they were Another
way to put it is that the New Englanders in
the nineteenth century were superstitious, but right exactly, because if
you were um hardcore Christian, superstition didn't play a part,
you wouldn't like, I mean, what are the some of
the things they did. They would um barry shoes by
(19:55):
the fireplace, to catch the devil from coming down the chimney,
like a horse shoe over your door. Yeah, that kind
of stuff. Like basically anything you think of is like
locker weird kind of Pennsylvania witchcraft, that kind of stuff.
This is like, that's what it was. It was like
country witchcraft. That's what they believed in. Because even if
(20:15):
you weren't Christian, you still believed in things like good
and evil and spirits and demons and stuff like that.
You just had to have a different way of dealing
with them. Since you weren't Christian in the way of
dealing with and wasn't like praying to God or whatever.
She had to hang up a horse shoe or barry
a shoe to keep the devil from coming down your
chimney because you were as backwards as a game. When
(20:38):
are we going to reveal the reveal? When are we
going to do our m night twist? Yet? Not yet?
All right, Well, then you gotta go because I got
nothing else. Okay, are you ready for now? Well? No,
if you've got more, if you can, were where we were?
All right, Well, here's the reveal. Because being superstitious does
(20:59):
an ex playing the vampire panic. No alone what else
does I'll let you drop the hammer. So they are
not entirely certain, but the general consensus among people who
study this kind of thing is that this was a
reaction to infectious disease outbreaks, specifically tuberculosis. Boom boom. That's
(21:22):
why superstitious New Englanders were running around in the nineteenth
century digging up family members and driving stakes through their
hearts or beheading them in their graves. I love stuff
like this when you can look back years later. I
wonder what they're gonna in a hundred years about the
Satanic panic. Oh, it wasn't some disease, obviously, this is
(21:45):
better reveal it was a panic though. Yeah. Um, it's
interesting that two of our favorite episodes probably are going
to end up being Satanic panic and vampire panics. This
one's going pretty well. So all right, so let's talk
about TV for a minute. This is obviously pre antibiotics.
There is still tuberculosis, but it's super curable now if
(22:06):
you're you know, lucky enough to live where you can
get antibiotics. But it is caused by Bacterium um, two
of which can infect humans M. Tuberculosis and M. Bovus.
And you've heard the word consumption in movies like The
Village from that time period they're dying of consumption. Consumption
(22:28):
was almost always tuberculosis. That's just what they called it
back then, right, that was the name for it, the
reason they called it consumption, and actually that that term
to describe tuberculous is actually predates the more common usage
of consumption today. It was like ingesting or eating something. Yeah,
it takes back to like I think, so it's the
original meaning was that your body was consuming itself. That
(22:50):
it was like the word for tuberculosis. Well, yeah, And
the reason they call it that is because it looked
like your life force was being sapped away from you.
The way that the disease progressed, um, it included coughing
fits where they said, like you couldn't even stop to talk.
You would be coughing so hard that's not good. Um.
(23:13):
You would lose a lot of weight, so it looked
like you were wasting away to um. But at the
same time, you were um voracious ly hungry. You wanted
to eat. It wasn't that kind of illness where you
just can't even eat. You were hungry like all the time,
but you were still wasting away. So there's this duality
between hunger, rampant hunger and the loss of a life force.
(23:39):
And this it's possible that all vampire tales and legends
and the origin of it is found in tuberculosis, because
that's what you think of with vampire is um. The
whole idea at this time was if you had tuberculosis
and you were the say, second, third, fourth member of
(24:00):
your family to come down with this with consumption, it
meant that the one of the previous family members who
had died of this disease was still alive in some way.
Their soul was in a supernatural way and was coming
at night and sucking the life from you to sustain themselves.
(24:20):
If this was the case, then there was only one
thing to do. If you were in New England at
the time, you had to dig up that family member
and take care of business. Yeah, it's funny. Emily and
I always laugh at the movie trope of the the
cough like it has almost a percent return rate. If
a character coughs in a movie, then they're going to
(24:41):
die because you just don't leave coughs in movies. That's
a sure sign. Or especially if they like cough into
a hanky. There's always blood in it, Like remember Hodgeman's
um doc Holiday. Yeah, I'll be your Hucklebert coughing up
the blood and lung tissue. Well, we just started watching
The Crown last night. You know that show on Netflix?
(25:03):
Do you watch it? Yeah? We saw the very just
the first episode last night of season one. And of
course there's Jared Harris as Queen Elizabeth's father, the King Camember,
which what his name was, King, the King of England,
and he's got he's got TV. Of course he starts
coughing in the very first scene into the hanky and
(25:24):
you're like, well, he's probably just going to be in
the bilin um. That's how she became queen. If we're
shouting out things we've seen recently, I want to give
a shout out to Wonder. Wonder what what's that the
the movie about the kid with facial differences? I've heard
this parents are Owens Wilson and Julia Roberts. So good though, Yeah,
(25:47):
all right, you know what, let's take a break. Okay,
who thought I Wonder was going to make an appearance
in the Vampire Panic and not me? Alright, we're gonna
take a break and we'll come back and talk a
little bit more about how a family might do this
right after this. Alright, so dad has gone from TV
(26:29):
or consumption, brother has, sister has, Yeah, maybe ones on
their deathbed, the other ones about to die. Um, we
should talk a little bit about consumption a little more.
At the time, there were people out there in the
world in the late nineteenth century who understood that consumption
(26:51):
was Tuberculosis was an infectious disease caused by these germs.
The people engaged in these vampire panics did not generally
think that They didn't realize that this was a contagious disease.
They thought that a relative was sapping your life force. Right.
The thing is is that tuberculousis is a very contagious
disease spread by coughing sneezing, which you do a lot
(27:14):
of when you have tuberculosis. And if you're living in
like a one two room house in rural New England
and you're a family of six, you can say that
high percentage of your family members are going to eventually
contract this disease. Yeah, whenn't it? I mean, what was
the number it was killing people over a certain period
(27:35):
that's a really big point here. The vampire panics started
in the late eighteenth century. Tuberculousis really started to gain
a foothold in New England and about the seventeen thirties,
and by the time the vampire panics hit their height
in the late eighteenth early nineteenth century, it was the
number one killer of New Englanders at the time. Again,
(27:58):
they weren't like gosh learned that tuberculosis. I caught this
infectious disease. It was one of our family members is
sapping the life out of one of our other family members,
because our family members a vampire. Still, the effect was
the same that they were. They were they they felt
totally powerless against this condition. They just had what it
(28:20):
was wrong, and because they had it wrong, they would
dig up dead bodies and do weird stuff to them.
All right, so brother dies, sister dies, maybe another sibling,
maybe one of the parents. And then if you're in
rural New England, you say, all right, it's clearly what's
going on here is that whoever the first one that died,
(28:43):
or maybe one of them, it's coming back and killing
the rest by sucking out their blood. I have a
vampire in my family, what do I do. I'm going
to dig with some help. Probably sometimes it's quiet, sometimes
in the middle of the night. Sometimes, like in the
case in Vermont, it would be like a daytime public
(29:03):
festival type of there was like a party, like a
community party. Yeah, and that's and in fact, I think
that's the one Henry David Threau attended in Woodstock, Vermont
in his journal and he was like, wtf with these people, Right,
there's a weird party. So you would dig these people up,
depending on where you are. Well, first of all, let's
talk about what they might find when they opened this coffin. Yeah,
(29:25):
because there were a couple of steps. The first step
was you had to diagnose vampireism. Because they like, let's say, uh,
they finally decided by the fourth family member being sick
um that this family was being being sapped by a vampire.
They didn't automatically know which dead family member was doing it.
(29:47):
They got to look at them all. Yeah, so you
might dig up multiple coffins. What they were looking for
was the belief. The belief was that the the you
could tell just by looking at them whither they were
a vampire. Maybe poking around a little bit too sure,
but the problem was is that so the idea of
what we what we think of as vampires is basically
(30:09):
the bram Stoker vampire, which comes later. Um, these vampires
were like the ghoules from the grave type farato looking. Yes, yeah,
so like real long fingernails and like pale and bloody
mouth from kind of slipping away from your body. The
problem is is like this idea of vampires, what we
(30:31):
understand is, or what they understood at vampires was a
tradition handed down from people who had broken up or
broken into graves before and could tell you what a
vampire looked like, which is basically a body in a
certain stage of decomposition, right, and specifically a lot of
times a body in a certain certain stage of decomposition
(30:52):
who had died from tuberculosis. Uh. So you know, you
might dig up a grave and see a bloat because
they have a built up of gas in their stomach.
That is not what they thought it was from. They
thought what they thought they were vampires full from blood.
They'd be like, look at this fat vampire. Yeah. They
(31:13):
might see uh, long finger nails and say that looks
to me like a vampire, right, But that is what
your skin receding. Your skin pulls back from the nail bed,
which makes it look like your nails have kept growing
after um after death, which is not the case. Same
with your hair too. They may see red lips, bloody
lips even possibly sure because apparently the breakdown of your
(31:35):
lung tissue from tuberculpsis um continues even after death. So
they would see blood on the lips and be like, yeah,
they've been sucking the blood out of their their loved one.
But the key to all this is the heart. Uh.
That was what they were trying to get to, to
see if there was any fresh blood near the heart. Uh.
And if they did find that one one of the
well we'll get to what they would do. But um,
(31:57):
And again, a lot of time you would see fresh,
a pure, hearing blood because of the way the body
decomposed from tuberculosis or period. So this thing, yeah, but
but tuberculous is a lot too, especially like the blood
on the lips kind of thing. Right, So this thing
was kind of self sustaining, self fulfilling when somebody died
of tuberculosis if you dug them up at a certain
(32:18):
period of time, especially if they say like died in winter,
they might seem inexplicably in a in a pristine state
because they're underground in New England's freezing in the winter. Um,
So they would fit the bill for a vampire just
by definition of being a decomposing body. But to the
people who didn't understand what decomposition was, it was just
(32:39):
plain as day that they were looking at a vampire
in the grave. Right, So they find a family member
that fits the bill of a vampire. That step one
vampire is m is being diagnosed. Next is dispatching the vampire,
dealing with the vampire. And the problem is this, the
vampire is already dead. So there are only certain things
(32:59):
you can you to a vampire to kill it. And
really what you're not trying to do is kill it.
You're trying to make it so it can't get out
of the grave and keep sapping the life force out
of these family members, hence hopefully saving the dying family member. Right. Uh.
And it was technically called epo tropaic remedy. That's a
clinical name for it. Basically, it's something that you're doing
(33:21):
to counteract this evil. So it depends on where you
were what you might do. Um, everyone had their own methods.
Um in Maine and Plymouth, Massachusetts. I love this one.
All they did was flip it over so it was
face down, and they're like, everyone knows the vampire just
very creepily rises from the waist out of their coffin.
(33:41):
What if we just slipped them over? They couldn't do that.
They went and let's go get some ice cream. Or
the steak through the heart that didn't arise because they
thought the steak had some magical powers. But they thought
they would literally just stake them into the ground so
they couldn't get up. That's another thing too. So you
know the steak through the heart with the vaan pire,
you think that that's trying to kill the vampire. That
(34:03):
is not what they were trying to do. But the
larger thought here is that our understanding of staking a
vampire through the heart comes from people who actually did
this because they were trying to battle tuberculosis. That's so
amazing to me. It's a confluence of all these weird
things really that led to this, but but in all
of it has been refined into this neat, tidy vampire legend.
(34:26):
This this is the compartment and fits in vampire legend
to those of us alive today. But it's got this
amazing history and backstory, some of which happened in real life.
This reminds me of the real life zombies too. Yeah, exactly.
Good point, like this weird religious hysteria combined with um
what they didn't understand at the time was kind of
(34:47):
medicine and science. This weird pre science era, so fascinating
to me. Y're not pre science, but I guess it
was pre real science, rudimentary science. Um. So. In the
Connecticut Rhode Island, Vermont, in that region, the go to
was to burn the heart, take the ash from the
(35:08):
heart and ingest it to give it to someone who
may be sick in the family or may even be
healthy trying to ward off sickness, and they would actually
eat that. So that was one way of dealing with it. Yeah,
that's There's a quote here from Woodstock, Vermont, when Daniel
Ransom in his journal it was said that if the
heart of one of the family who died of consumption
(35:30):
was taken out and burned, others would be free from it.
And father, having some faith in the remedy, had the
heart of Frederick taken out after he had been buried
and it was burned and Captain Pearson's blacksmith forge. Um,
here's the thing, though it did not ever save anyone
from tubercules. No, that's the thing. And I was wondering, like,
what is what was the superstition? How did the superstition
(35:53):
explain a failure to cure I don't know, you know
where they just like, we waited too long. I bet
you they did that that had to be. They would
just have some explanation that we didn't do it right.
Maybe they would try another method, not burning the heart,
like the Jolly the jb They think that the reason
(36:13):
they did that weird jolly Roger thing was because it
was so decomposed. They were just bones, so they I
guess they just improvised, like why don't we just do this?
Well that that apparently finds its root in Europe. In
some places in Europe that was the way to deal
with the vampire was to cut its head off. Other places, um,
they would stick a brick in the vampire's mouth. Some
places they would bind them with thorns. In Europe, and
(36:37):
that that's another thing that kind of fascinates me about
this whole thing chuck. Is that at some point somewhere,
maybe in Europe, maybe in Asia, maybe in Africa, somebody
came up with this idea of vampires of relatives coming
back from the grave and sucking the life out of um,
their their friends, family members, villagers. And that person had
(37:00):
this idea that spread and it made it centuries later
to New England, where it led to the desecration of
the graves family members, including one that was discovered another
couple of centuries later by some kids playing in a
gravel pit. That's led to us talking about this today.
(37:21):
If if that doesn't make history interesting, I don't know
what does. Yes, some kids running around listening to the
Pixies finds a mountain of skulls st band the Pixies
are top nuts. It's great. Um. Should we finish with
the story of Mercy Brown? All right? So Mercy Brown
lived in Exeter, Rhode Island. This was a farming, farming
(37:41):
land and by all accounts, by the time she was around,
it had the town had definitely seen its better days
thanks to the Civil War, um kind of decimating the town. Yeah,
that's a good fact to it. The town is actually
kind of metaphor for vampireism itself like it had lost
(38:02):
its own life force in a lot of ways. It
dropped by like two thirds and seven the seventy years
before Mercy Brown died. The population did it was. It
was not a good scene for this, the people who
were left behind. Plus they had tuberculosis running around town
right and certainly through her house. Um, her mother died,
(38:23):
Her sister, Mary Eliza died. Oh no, that was her mom. Sorry,
Mary Olive was her sister. It's a great name, Mary Olive, agreed. Um,
she was twenty and Mary Olive. That is a good name.
And I think some of those names are coming back,
the classic names. Yeah, little house from the prairie trend. Well,
(38:44):
I know I know one person who named their daughter
Olive recently, and I thought that was a pretty sweet name. Yeah,
you should have You should have been like Mary Olive
would have been better. I was listening to a my
favorite murder the other day and they were laughing at
funny Aimes that it's just you can't imagine a baby
being called like Barbara, and they listened out a few
(39:06):
other ones, like it comes out with like a clunky
jewelry and a cigarette, exactly, sweet little baby Barbara. Um
So anyway, Mary Olive goes Mary Eliza goes the brother. Uh.
And this is where it gets a little weird because
I saw like eight different accounts of this, and they
all had different timelines of death and sickness, whether or
(39:29):
not Mercy died and then Edwin got sick or not.
But at any rate, brother Edwin is sick. Mercy eventually
dies of TB and the town says, we gotta do
something here. Yeah, they went to the dead George Brown
and said, man, you've got a problem on your hands.
And if you think about it, so all this took
place over like a decade, which you're like, that's a
(39:51):
long time. I would think the end of the nineteenth century.
That's a pretty average mortality rate for a family. Apparently not,
but they were kids, you know, they were in their
early twenties. Well. Also he lost his wife as well.
So over the over the course of a decade, this
family of five went down to basically a family of
one in a quarter depending on whatever you want to
(40:12):
count Edwin as he's dying, right, So George Brown was like,
you're probably right, we should do something. Later on, it
was revealed that he didn't believe in this at all.
That he basically agreed to this because the neighbors wouldn't
leave him alone about it. And the neighbors aren't doing
this just out of complete selflessness. There was this idea
(40:32):
that once this vampire um finished with the family, they
would move on to another family. So if you lived
in a small village, you had a real problem with
this vampire being allowed to go on, and you would
bother your neighbor to dig up their family member until
they relented. And that's what happened with George Brown. Yeah,
I mean the writing was on the wall certainly with
Edwin as far as the neighbors are concerned. Like he said,
(40:56):
he's like, fine, do what you gotta do. He did
said I want to die her there, which is amazing
that doctors would actually preside over an exhimation. I think
that doctor was trying to be the voice of reason
throughout this process, even cutting open Mercy's chest and removing
her heart and then her dominating removing her liver. He's
(41:17):
pointing out is this Abigail Tucker article says, um, look
this is evidence of tuberculosis. Yeah, like, shut up, college boy,
give me that heart. Yeah, that's what happened. I got
a hot fire burning and that's exactly what happened. Like
you said, um, they burn this heart. They mix the
ashes into a tonic. Edwin drank it thinking that they
(41:40):
would save him. And what he lived a couple of months,
maybe not even because he had tuberculosis. Cutting open the
chest of a dead relative and burning their heart and
liver does nothing to cure tuberculosis. The sister. Yeah, this sister,
which is it's it's really sad, but at the same time,
it kind of gives you a pick. Sure, George Brown
(42:01):
he doesn't believe in like all this vampire superstition. He
apparently also is cool with the desecration of a grave.
He's not a very sentimental guy. He's the impression that
I have of him, you know, he's like, yeah, go
cut her open, that's fine, Just stop bothering me. Just
make sure that my my doctor friend Ted is there
to point out how stupid all of this is. Yeah,
(42:23):
because he they sent Edwin away, I think to try
and get well. And I don't know if George was there,
but he definitely wasn't at that the exhimation. No, there
was a guy there from Providence newspaper. Here's our other
m Night Shamalan twist. He wrote an article that basically
told the world about this, and it got picked up,
(42:43):
and it got picked up by a number of papers,
including the New York World, and in the New York
World reported on the vampire exhamation of Mercy Brown. And
a clipping of that article was found in the papers
of a certain person. How cool was it, That's right,
(43:04):
the author of Dracula. Yeah. So scholars have said this
all came too soon before Dracula was published. It he
was probably working on it already, or he was working already.
It didn't influence it at all. Some people say, no,
he definitely did. He was influenced by this vampire panic
for sure. Yeah. And Manky's Laura episode on Mercy Brown,
(43:27):
because he's just a great storyteller. He ended it just
by saying, you know, I think the last words of
the show are Bram Stoker. Oh he didn't say, you know,
maybe he did. Maybe he didn't. Okay, you ready, So
hold on, let's we're gonna do this lower style. So
chuck of newspaper clipping of Mercy Brown's exhamation was found
(43:49):
in the papers of bram Stoker. Did we have classical
music going? But I hope so. Jerry all right okay?
And he also didn't have met giggling in the background. Uh.
If you want to know more about lore, we'll go
check out that podcast and look for more good stuff
coming soon from Aaron Monkey, who's now our coworker, which
(44:11):
means we have to buy him a Christmas present and
I know um. And in the meantime, while we're figuring
out what to get Aaron Monkey, it's time for listener. Now,
I'm gonna go with this one. Venezuelan living in Chile.
(44:32):
Hey guys, a new fan of the podcast started with
the Seven Wonders, So that's super new and I was
hooked since then. Uh, and now listen to the new
ones and go back in time to two thousand nine ones.
I want to go through all that sounds like they're sandwich.
Maybe I'm from Venezuela living in Chile, And I want
to suggest one about identity. We as Venezuelans are going
(44:54):
through a difficult time as the government is not issuing passports.
As an immigrant, It's is super hard art. Basically, if
I want to travel, I can only go to the
UH more costur member countries because I could do so
with the rut r U T, which is the Chilean
I D card, and I'm I'm a lucky case since
(45:15):
I have friends that while asking for Chilean visa, the
Venezuelan passport expired, and now they don't have either Chilean
or Venezuelan documents. I feel like an orphan if my
home country does not want to give me I D documents,
and as a resident, Chile can't either only if I
apply to nationalization, and it will have to wait a
(45:37):
few years until I can do that. She sounds like
Tom Hanks in the Terminal basically, but in Chile UH
and I have no one to claim. I just want
to put the word out about our situation. The Venezuelan
government pretends that everything is okay when it's not. My
family is broken across the world that I'm incapable to
go see them and they can't come to me. It
is a painful situation. Keep up with good work, guys.
(45:59):
Thanks to you, I have new topics to discuss with
my friends. They were particularly interested in how frogs work.
Sorry for the broken English. I'm still working on my grammar.
I think you did great. Agreed. PS. I will love
to hear a shout out hearts hearts that is emmanuela
guia shout out Emmanuel hang in there. Yeah, that's really
(46:20):
sad to hear, and you're doing great with your English.
We are very sad to hear about that situation. Um.
If you want to get in touch with us and
let us know about something going on in your country
that we weren't aware of, uh, we want to hear
about it, you can tweet to us at josh um
Clark or s Y s K podcast. I also have
a website called Are You Serious Clark dot com. Chuck
(46:42):
is on Facebook at Facebook dot com slash Charles W.
Chuck Bryant. He's also at Facebook dot com slash stuff
you Should Know. You can send us an email to
Stuff podcast at how stuff Works dot com and it's
always joined us at at home on the web, Stuff
you Should Know dot com. For more on thiss and
(47:02):
thousands of other topics, visit how Stuff Works dot com.
M
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