July 30, 2025 • 40 mins
In 1892, in the sleepy town of Exeter, Rhode Island, a teenage girl named Mercy Brown died of tuberculosis. Two months later, her body was pulled from its crypt, her heart cut out and burned, and the ashes fed to her dying brother as a medical treatment. Why? Because the townspeople believed she was a vampire.
In this episode, we dig deep into one of the strangest, most tragically hilarious moments in American medical history: the Mercy Brown vampire panic. It’s a true story of grief, fear, community hysteria, and just the tiniest bit of 19th-century grave-robbing ritual cannibalism.
You’ll meet the Browns: a family ravaged by tuberculosis, known back then as “consumption”. You’ll attend the now-legendary Exeter town hall meeting, where a group of very confident but very underqualified citizens voted to desecrate Mercy’s body based on local folklore, zero science, and one woman’s dream. We’re talking backwoods epidemiology, complete with shovels, torches, and a clay bowl full of teen heart ashes.
But the story doesn’t end there. Because Mercy Brown didn’t just die, she became a symbol. A cautionary tale. And maybe even the inspiration for Dracula. This episode explores how magical thinking, medical ignorance, and the irresistible pull of a good monster story shaped not just one New England town, but a whole national tradition of getting history spectacularly wrong.
So if you like your true stories with a side of social critique, a dash of cryptid energy, and a whole lot of “Are you kidding me?”, this one’s for you.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
SPEAKER_03 (00:00):
Coming to you from cyberspace and beyond, this is
the Internet Explorers Podcast.
I'm Jimmy, your guide throughthe endless maze of the World
Wide Web.
Every episode we'll journey fromcorner to corner, diving into
fascinating, obscure, andsometimes downright bizarre
(00:20):
topics to uncover surpriseshidden just a mouse click away.
Now, it's time for the show.
If you were unfortunate enoughto be alive in 1892 in rural
Rhode Island, congratulations.
You were probably cold, poorlynourished, vaguely Presbyterian,
(00:45):
and surrounded by death.
This was a time beforepenicillin, before germ theory
had gotten through to thegeneral public, before TikTok,
but with all the samemisinformation vibes.
Just delivered by a man with noteeth holding a go in front of
(01:06):
you instead of on your phone.
And lurking at the top of themost feared ways to die list was
something called consumption.
It was the old-timey term forwhat we now call tuberculosis,
but it might as well have been adeath sentence written out in
slow motion.
(01:27):
Consumption didn't kill youovernight.
It took its time.
Weeks, months, even years ofcoughing up blood, running
fevers, and shrinking down intoa little Victorian skeleton.
It made you pale, weak,hollow-eyed, and essentially
(01:48):
turned you into a spooky littleTim Burton character long before
that was cool.
Your body would waste away whileyour mind stayed alert, which
meant you got to be fullyconscious as your lungs turned
into wet confetti.
Now, don't take what I'm aboutto say as an attack on the local
(02:11):
public, because globallyspeaking, nobody knew how it
spread.
They had theories, sure, butthey were all the worst kind of
theories in that they werewrong, but they were wrong with
confidence.
Doctors believed it came frombad air, which was termed
(02:32):
miasma, or through inheritedmelancholy, or from reading too
many novels where boys and girlswere acting sinfully scandalous
by wait for it, holding hands.
Yes, that is totally real.
Other people thought it was dueto imbalances in your humors.
(02:55):
No, no, no, not like yourlikelihood to laugh at my dumb
jokes, but your bodily humours,which is a collective term for
blood, bile, phlegm, and thatthing where your uncle coughs
into the soup and then goes,it's just allergies.
Yeah, sure.
In Exeter, Rhode Island, a lotof folks took a look at their
(03:18):
friends dying one by one,wasting away like candle wax,
and decided the most logicalexplanation was vampires.
Not cape wearing fangybellalagosi vampires.
These were closer to old schoolEuropean folklore vamps.
(03:39):
Usually your dead cousin or momor neighbor crawling back from
the grave in spectral form tosuck the life out of their
surviving family members.
Because, I mean, that's kind ofwhat family does.
They feed on your energy untilyou die and then haunt you like
property taxes.
(04:00):
By the 1800s, vampire panicswere already baked into parts of
rural New England.
In Connecticut, Vermont, evensome parts of Massachusetts,
which is ironic considering itwas also home to Harvard Medical
School.
It's like a microcosm of Americaitself.
(04:20):
Groundbreaking scientificresearch in one town, and in the
next town over, some guyyelling, Digger up, I seen her
blink.
And this wasn't a Halloweenone-off vampire thing.
We have dozens of documentedcases of communities digging up
dead family members to performmakeshift vampire rituals on
(04:43):
them.
These ranged from the mildlydisturbing, where they flipped
the body to face downward, tothe aggressively unhinged, where
they would cut out the heart,burn it while inhaling the
smoke, and then throw some bonesat the moon.
The logic, such as it was, wentlike this.
(05:05):
Someone dies of tuberculosis,then another family member
starts showing the samesymptoms, and clearly that means
the dead person isn't reallydead, they're feeding on the
living from beyond the grave.
And the solution to that is todig up the body, look for signs
of freshness, and if the bodylooks too well preserved for
(05:28):
your liking, then it's time tobreak out the firewood and turn
that corpse into a publicservice announcement.
If all of this soundsridiculous, good.
It was.
But to the people of Exeter in1892, it was a hell of a lot
more comforting than the truth.
Because the truth, which is wedon't know what's killing us and
(05:52):
we can't stop it, was toofucking beyond their grasp to
formulate in their little peabrains or admit.
Because, again, pea brains,especially in a town where
people had more guns than books,and nobody knew what bacteria
was, but everyone could quotescripture about demons entering
(06:15):
you through the mouth.
Which brings us to the stars oftoday's tale, the Brown family.
Now, let's be clear, theseweren't mystics or occultists or
weirdos, they were just a normalfarming family doing normal
19th-century things like growingcorn, praying, not questioning
(06:38):
authority, and dying at analarming rate.
George Brown, the patriarch, hadalready lost his wife Mary and
their daughter, Mary Olive, toconsumption.
Then his younger daughter, MercyLena Brown, fell ill.
She died in January of 1892 atthe age of 19.
(07:00):
They placed her in a stone cryptwhile the ground was too frozen
to dig her a grave.
And then the last survivingBrown child, Edwin, who's
George's only son, started towaste away too.
The community had seen enough.
They smelled undead nonsense.
(07:22):
And in the absence of anydoctors with actual microscopes,
the neighbors startedwhispering.
Then the whispering turned intotalking.
Then the talking turned into theinfamous town hall comedian.
Now it's important to rememberthat this was not a town flush
(07:43):
with doctors.
Exeter did not have a hospital.
It barely had a library.
But what it did have was asurplus of hand-me-down Bibles,
aggressively undereducatedfarmers, and enough communal
paranoia to make Salem look likea rational group of people.
The occasion for this particulargathering was, of course,
(08:07):
strictly limited to the ongoingmisery of George Brown and his
children.
To George's neighbors, thiswasn't a slow-moving respiratory
plague.
No, sir.
This was something darker,something folkloric, something
that explained things.
Because tuberculosis was toovague, and science was too new,
(08:32):
and feelings, well, feelingsalways win.
So naturally, the townsfolk didwhat any irresponsible, barely
literate community might do.
They gathered up every rumor,every nightmare, and every
third-hand superstition theycould find, and marched them
(08:53):
into the old Grange Hall like itwas a courtroom for the
paranormal.
The meeting was held in thetown's main civic building,
which doubled as a church onSundays, a pig auction every
second Thursday, and a socialhall if no one was currently
vomiting in.
The floors were uneven, thewalls were splintered pine,
(09:13):
there was a small stove in themiddle of the room giving off
just enough heat to ensurenobody would freeze to death
lest they become a corpsethemselves.
At the center of it all satEbenezer Tuggins, who had
somehow become the chair ofExeter's unofficial town health
committee by virtue of havingowned a pencil since 1873.
(09:34):
Tuggins was a retired cranberryinspector, or possibly a failed
cobbler.
That wasn't really clearaccording to some of the
accounts that I read.
But what he lacked incredentials, he made up for in
volume.
When he stood up and cleared histhroat, it sounded like someone
choking on a pigeon.
(09:55):
He slapped the desk with an openhand.
SPEAKER_01 (09:57):
Alright then, he declared.
SPEAKER_03 (10:15):
Mrs.
Winifred Cole.
A woman so committed torighteousness, she once
petitioned to have dancinglegally renamed to Public
FootSend.
She had eyes like a hawk and avoice like the first few seconds
of a boiling kettle.
SPEAKER_02 (10:32):
I seen her! I seen her in my dreams! Mercy Brown!
She was sitting on Edwin's chestlike a demon with ringlets.
I tell you plain, he won't lasta month.
SPEAKER_03 (10:45):
There was an approving grunt from the back of
the room.
Jedediah Groom, the townblacksmith, who believed deeply
in three things fire, metal, andthe supernatural revenge of
unquiet teenage girls.
He spat into a tin bucket andnodded solemnly.
SPEAKER_01 (11:04):
Mercy's the one.
Earl told me Millie told him theUndertaker's cousin said her
chinks still had color.
Pink.
Like she'd just come back from asleigh ride.
SPEAKER_03 (11:16):
Mrs.
Cole crossed herself.
SPEAKER_02 (11:18):
Pink cheeks in March unholy!
SPEAKER_03 (11:21):
Another voice joined in.
Thaddeus Wainwright, the nominalmayor of Exeter.
Thaddeus was born a man to wearsuspenders and avoid
responsibility.
His gift, if you could call itthat, was the ability to look
like he was thinking deeplyabout something while actively
deciding nothing.
SPEAKER_00 (11:41):
Now now, people, let's not rush to conclusions.
Could be her body was juststored unusually.
Wasn't she buried above theground?
SPEAKER_03 (11:55):
That detail caught the crowd's attention a little.
There was some light murmuring.
Mercy, after all, hadn't beenburied in the ground.
Remember, her body had beenplaced in the stone crypt, which
was really more of a holdingvault because the ground was too
frozen when she died, which,from a public health standpoint,
(12:16):
was standard practice.
But to the people of Exeter,that was vampire-like behavior.
She wasn't buried in the dirt,barked Jedediah.
The good book says ashes toashes, dirt to dirt.
Someone else, Walter Tink, theinnkeeper, raised his hand, then
(12:37):
immediately began talkingwithout even waiting for
permission.
I'm just saying, Walter began,with the tone of a man who
always had a story, usuallyinvolving something he heard
from a stranger after a couplehard siders.
SPEAKER_02 (12:50):
I'm just saying a fresh looking corpse in an
above-ground box in the middleof a consumption plague is the
exact sort of thing my uncleHero warned us about.
He said they feed on the livingthrough the nather, like
spirits, or smoke, or humidity.
SPEAKER_03 (13:06):
There was a pause as people tried to imagine evil
humidity.
It didn't take long to convincethem, and at this point the
preacher, Deacon EzekielFletcher, weighed in.
Ezekiel was a stern man with abeard shaped like a Bible verse
in the kind of voice that madekids hide their playing cards.
(13:27):
He hadn't said much yet, whichmade what he said now sound all
the more serious.
SPEAKER_00 (13:33):
I have prayed, and the answer came to me in a
dream.
The heart is the seat of thesoul.
If that girl's heart is stillred, still full of blood, it
means she ain't at rest.
The devil keeps her warm.
(13:54):
Several people gasped.
SPEAKER_03 (13:56):
Winifred clutched her shawl.
Jedediah slammed a hand on thebench like a man who had just
had his worst instinctsconfirmed by someone with
authority.
Then louder.
And that was it.
(14:16):
The switch had flipped.
The next 15 minutes were acyclone of folklore, half
memories, apocalyptic dreams,and anecdotes that always
started with, well I heard, butnever ended with anything
resembling evidence.
Someone suggested using a mirrorto check for her reflection.
(14:37):
Someone else asked if Mercy hadever refused to eat garlic.
A man near the back, who may ormay not have been drunk proposed
sprinkling salt in a circle tosee if a toad appears.
At no point, though, did anyonesuggest asking a doctor, mostly
because there wasn't onepresent, and also because the
(14:59):
last time anyone in Exeter hadseen a real physician, he'd been
laughed out of town for owning athermometer.
Eventually, Ebenezer stood backup and slammed his palm again.
Enough!
SPEAKER_01 (15:11):
We're wasting time.
Let's write down a plan.
SPEAKER_03 (15:15):
The room hushed like school children sensing a quiz.
SPEAKER_01 (15:18):
Step one, we dig her up.
SPEAKER_03 (15:20):
Heads nodded.
SPEAKER_01 (15:22):
Step two, we check her heart.
SPEAKER_03 (15:24):
Murmurs of agreement.
SPEAKER_01 (15:26):
Step three, if it's full of blood, we burn it.
SPEAKER_03 (15:29):
A few people clapped.
It was unclear whether this wasout of joy or anxiety.
Step four, added Winifredhelpfully.
SPEAKER_02 (15:38):
We mix the ashes in with water and feed them to
Edwin.
SPEAKER_03 (15:42):
Now that got a reaction.
Some gasps, some uncomfortableshifting, but no real
objections.
SPEAKER_02 (15:50):
You wanna save that boy or don't ya?
SPEAKER_03 (15:53):
Jedediah stood up and cleared his throat.
I'll bring the shovels.
And just like that, a town withno pathologist, no microscope,
no idea how lungs work voted toexhume a teenage girl's body and
perform backwoods necromancybecause a woman had a weird
dream and a blacksmith heard arumor.
(16:16):
There were no dissenting voices,no objections, no, hey, wait a
minute, maybe it's a germ.
Because if there's one thingAmerica has always been good at,
it's trading experience for theloudest voice.
They would meet the nextmorning, tools in hand,
bloodlust on their mind, and adying boy waiting for the kind
(16:39):
of medicinal intervention thatcame from a burned organ mixed
with water in a coffee mug.
Because once you live in a townwhere the only medical journal
is a hymn book and the pharmacyis a bonfire, then there's only
one prescription that you need: ashes and faith. (16:52):
undefined
With the vote settled, themeeting turned from should we do
this?
to the more pressing and logicalquestion of how exactly does one
execute a vampire eliminationprotocol in the year of our Lord
1892 without getting blood ontheir suspenders.
(17:15):
And in case you already forgot,the plan was not just to dig her
up, they were going to examineher heart for signs of blood,
and if it looked too alive tothem, they were gonna set it on
fire, and then because everyhorror show needs a third act
twist, they were gonna take theashes, mix them with water, and
feed the potion to her dyingbrother Edwin.
(17:38):
That's when Thaddeus Wainwright,the mayor, or at least the man
who once owned the largest barnand thus declared himself the
mayor, tapped the podium with awooden spoon he'd apparently
brought from home.
SPEAKER_00 (17:52):
Right.
So now we got the gist.
Now let's iron out the details.
We're not savages.
We need a process.
SPEAKER_03 (18:02):
There was a pause as the room transitioned from
emotional pitchforking tobureaucratic brain fog, because
nothing slows momentum thanthrowing in the word process.
Ebenezer Tuggen stood up again,slightly out of breath from that
effort.
Now, this man had not walkedquickly since the Garfield
(18:23):
administration, but he hadstamina, and more importantly,
he had the ability to write,which meant he was about to take
minutes for what was essentiallya supernatural project plan.
SPEAKER_01 (18:34):
I'll write down the steps.
If this goes well, maybe we'lluse the method again.
SPEAKER_03 (18:40):
This wasn't said as a joke.
The first to weigh in was WalterTink, the innkeeper with too
much enthusiasm and not enoughfilter.
Walter was the kind of man whoalways had this cousin in Maine,
who had tried something justlike this one time and usually
involved chickens and ended withregret.
SPEAKER_02 (19:02):
Well, step one's easy!
SPEAKER_01 (19:04):
We go to the crypt!
SPEAKER_03 (19:06):
Right, said Ebenezer, scribbling that down.
SPEAKER_01 (19:08):
Visit crypt, what time?
SPEAKER_03 (19:11):
Jedediah Groom, the blacksmith, and the unofficial
town enforcer grunted from theback.
SPEAKER_01 (19:17):
Don! Cold enough to keep things still, light enough
to see what's what.
SPEAKER_03 (19:22):
Winifred Cole chimed in again, wringing her hands
like she was choking aninvisible devil.
SPEAKER_02 (19:27):
We should pray first before the desecration.
SPEAKER_00 (19:31):
And a brief prayer to the top, Deacon Fletcher said
solemnly.
SPEAKER_03 (19:40):
Ebenezer nodded.
SPEAKER_01 (19:42):
Prayer and shovels.
SPEAKER_03 (19:43):
A silence followed as people considered the grim
nature of what they wereactually planning to do.
This wasn't some quaint ritual.
They were going to open ateenage girl's tomb, inspect her
body like it was a bad ham, andthen destroy her organs in front
of her father and neighbors, allto save a boy who was already
(20:06):
halfway to the afterlife.
But the thing about collectiveinsanity is that once you've got
enough people nodding at thesame time, it stops feeling
insane.
And so the plan grew.
Once we open the coffin, we needto check for signs.
Signs?
asked Thaddeus, whose workingdefinition of science was
(20:27):
anything that came in a tin.
SPEAKER_01 (20:29):
Blood in the heart, freshness of the skin, length of
the fingernails, and the cheekcolor, Jedediah said, as if he
was describing a fresh applepie.
SPEAKER_02 (20:40):
Also hair!
SPEAKER_03 (20:41):
Winifred added.
Someone in the back said, Whatif she smiles?
And was immediately told to shutup.
More notes were taken.
Step three, cut open the heart,said Deacon Fletcher in a calm,
matter-of-fact tone, just likehe was giving communion
(21:02):
instructions.
We need to know if it's full.
If it's dry, she's clean.
But and if it bleeds, he didn'teven need to finish his
sentence.
Burn it, said Jedediah in thesame way that some men say amen.
SPEAKER_01 (21:18):
Step four
SPEAKER_03 (21:21):
Ebenezer scratched it down.
SPEAKER_02 (21:23):
I got a square pyre box behind my chip, Walter said.
Use it for a pasta look.
SPEAKER_03 (21:29):
There was a moment of polite but unspoken confusion
about what a pybasket was,followed by a collective
decision not to ask Walter anyfurther questions.
SPEAKER_02 (21:40):
What's bird?
We collect the ashes.
And then we make the boy drinkthem.
SPEAKER_03 (21:46):
That hung in the air like a 19th-century poverty ass
ripper fart.
The idea that this frail, sickyoung man, already weak, already
dying, would be handed a mugfull of his sister's cremated
insides and told, bottoms up,should have given them pause.
(22:07):
But instead, it was greeted witha kind of grim satisfaction,
like they were doing something,putting this plan into motion,
setting the wheels into action,doing something like medicine.
A hand went up.
It belonged to Tobias Alkins, aquiet man who rarely spoke at
(22:28):
meetings, but when he did, itwas usually to ask about grain
prices or comment on the beautyof someone's horse.
SPEAKER_00 (22:36):
I just have a thought.
What if it doesn't work?
There was a pause.
What if we burn her heart, beatit to Edwin, and he still dies?
SPEAKER_03 (22:48):
Now nobody had considered this outcome because
they were all too busy tryingnot to be the first person to
suggest they should do nothing.
But now that Tobias had said itout loud, a few people squirmed.
Even Deacon Fletcher blinkedtwice, as if noticing daylight
for the first time in hours.
Jedediah was the one who brokethe silence.
(23:10):
If and it don't work, at leastwe know we did everything we
could.
And that truly is the thesisstatement of this whole affair.
Let's do something so horrifyingso we can sleep at night.
Even if it helps no one, even ifit traumatizes everyone, even if
it's an act of desecration thatwould make the devil himself ask
(23:33):
for a seat in the back.
They weren't scientists, theyweren't doctors, they were
desperate, and that's what madethem dangerous.
Thaddeus cleared his throat,trying to inject a note of
optimism.
Well then, who's got the knives?
And just like that, it was asgood as done.
(23:53):
All of it decided in oneafternoon in one building by
people whose entireunderstanding of disease control
could be boiled down to the bodywas too pink.
They had written the plan down,they had assigned tools and
roles.
They had even, in an accidentalmoment of irony, scheduled the
(24:15):
whole thing to begin just aftera prayer circle.
What came next would put Exeteron the map.
Not for progress, not forenlightenment, but for one of
the last and best documentedcases of vampire hysteria in
American history.
The men arrived with shovels,the women arrived with prayer
(24:37):
books, a few children came too,even though they'd been told not
to, because nothing in thisworld is more magnetic than the
desecration of a corpse dressedup as a community event.
Mercy Brown's exhumation hadofficially become Exeter's most
anticipated attraction sincesomeone claimed to see a goose
(24:58):
lay an egg the size of agrapefruit.
George Brown, the father, wasthere, but not in the way others
were.
He didn't carry tools, he didn'tspeak, he just stood a little
off to the side in the crispMarch air, staring at the crypt
like it might open on its ownand release not a vampire, but
the memory of who his daughterhad been.
(25:21):
And maybe, underneath that, theghost of who he'd been before,
this town convinced him to helptear his family apart one organ
at a time.
That practical choice, made ingrief with love, was now being
reinterpreted as proof of darkmagic.
(25:42):
With a few coordinated gruntsand an unsettling lack of
ceremony, they pried open thestone lid.
The air that rushed out wascold, stale, and vaguely
metallic.
A few people coughed, notbecause of the disease, but
because of guilt, or the shapeof guilt when it's pretending to
(26:03):
be curiosity.
Inside lay Mercy.
Nineteen years old at the timeof death, barely two months in
her crypt, preserved not bywitchcraft nor demonic
willpower, but by New England'snatural refrigerator setting,
winter.
Her features were unsurprisinglyintact.
(26:26):
Too intact, if you ask thepeople gathered that morning.
Her skin had color, flesh tone,not the gray of decay.
Her hair seemed thicker, hernails appeared longer.
At that point, Jedediah Groom,the blacksmith who'd never met a
piece of metal he didn't want tocut, produced a blade.
(26:47):
Maybe it was ceremonial, maybeit was just sharpened nearby.
Either way, he cut open herchest, removed her heart and
liver for inspection.
Her heart was found to stillcontain blood.
Of course it did.
That's what cold does.
It slows decomposition, itpreserves.
(27:08):
It doesn't mean something'salive any more than a ham
sandwich in the fridge ispreparing its comeback to her.
But none of them saw it thatway.
To the townspeople of Exeter,this wasn't a preserved corpse.
It was a caught creature.
They nodded, they whisperedprayers.
Some crossed themselves, othersspit.
(27:32):
One woman fainted, but no onesaid stop.
Not one voice in that crowd, notGeorge Brown's, not the
deacon's, not the supposed voiceof reason from Mayor Thaddeus or
any other warm body with accessto a thought, stood up and said,
Hey, maybe this is insane andwe're violating a young woman's
(27:52):
body because we're scared ofwearing cloth masks.
Instead, Mercy's heart and liverwere placed, again without
irony, into a cooking pan.
The fire had already been lit.
Walter Tink had brought woodsoaked in oil as if there were
just another weekend chore, likesearing barn lice or boiling
fence grease.
(28:13):
The organs hissed when they hitthe flame.
There's no elegant way to saythis.
They sizzled.
The smell was what you'd expect.
Somewhere between overcookedmeat and the worst kind of
incense.
It hung in the air like apunishment, and they were cooked
until nothing remained but ash.
(28:34):
The ashes were collected in adish, a clay bowl, if local
accounts are to be believed, andsomeone brought in some spring
water.
Maybe it was sanctified, maybeit was just wet, and the mixture
was stirred together.
And then, as casually as achurch elder handing out
communion, they carried thatbowl to Edwin Brown, sick, weak,
(28:55):
barely clinging to his life, andtold him to drink it.
Now there are no survivingrecords of what Edwin said in
that moment.
No quotes, no letters, nooutraged diary entry that said,
Today my neighbors turned mysister into a smoothie and
handed it to me like it was anormal Sunday.
But what we do know is thatEdwin drank it.
(29:18):
He drank his sister's heart andliver in slurry form.
I mean, what choice did he have?
He was dying, and in 1892 inExeter, Rhode Island, you didn't
challenge the village consensusunless you wanted to be the next
person they dissected.
The belief was that it wouldcure him.
(29:40):
That ingesting the ashes of theundead would break the bond
between Mercy and Edwin, cuttingoff whatever spectral blood
siphon was draining him onewheeze at a time.
But of course, it didn't.
Edwin died less than two monthslater.
There was no resurrection.
(30:00):
No miraculous turnaround.
No evidence that any of this hadaccomplished anything other than
the irreversible desecration ofa young woman's body and the
ritual humiliation of a dyingboy.
And still, still, no one in thattown recanted.
Because that's the thing aboutmagical thinking.
(30:22):
It's a fortress.
You can pour logic on it allday.
You can throw evidence at itlike rocks.
You can even point out that thepatient died anyway, and the
response you get will still besomething like this.
Well, imagine how much faster hewould have died if we hadn't
done that.
That's the real horror rightthere.
(30:44):
Not the burning, not thedrinking, not the silence of a
winter grave cracked open forsuperstition.
The real horror is how easilypeople can convince themselves
that they did the right thing,even when the result is more
death, more grief, and theabsolute absence of a cogent
thought.
To be clear, none of this wasunique.
(31:05):
There had been dozens of similarincidents across New England's
in the 1800s.
Families whose graves wereopened, hearts burned, ashes
consumed, vampires blamed, everyone of them a desperate attempt
to explain tuberculosis beforegerm theory reached rural
America.
But in the Mercy Brown case,this one got attention, partly
(31:27):
because it was one of the lastof its kind, partly because it
happened so late.
I mean, 1892 was well into theage of railroads and telegrams
and actual scientists, andpartly because Mercy, through no
action of her own, had becomefolklore, a symbol, a legend of
(31:47):
sorts.
Her story would be retold,folded into vampire mythos and
horror novels and obscureacademic journals about epidemic
folklore.
Bram Stroker, the author ofDracula, is believed to have
clipped newspaper articles abouther.
He was researching vampirelegends at the time, and five
years after Mercy's heart wasturned into hot ashy tea, his
(32:11):
book was published.
And whether or not sheinfluenced the final draft,
Mercy Brown, the girl in thecrypt, the girl with the pink
cheeks, the girl who was nevergiven peace, was now part of the
global undead pantheon.
She didn't volunteer to becomeNew England's vampire queen, she
just died, like her mother, likeher sister, like her brother.
(32:35):
But because her town couldn'tunderstand illness, and because
America has always preferredmythology to medicine, her body
became a scapegoat, and herheart became the offering.
If the story of Mercy Brown werejust a creepy footnote in New
England folklore and abandonedas a weird rural fluke from the
(32:55):
dusty corner of America's attic,it might be easy to laugh and
move on.
But it's not.
Because what happened in Exeterin 1892 wasn't just the product
of its time, it wasunfortunately a preview of what
America was to become.
Let's take stock.
A girl dies of tuberculosis, sodoes her sister, then her
(33:17):
mother, then her brother getssick, and instead of blaming,
say, a contagious bacterialinfection and poor acceptance of
the public health education, thetownspeople blame the one person
who can't talk back, the teenagegirl in the crypt.
They dig her up, burn her heart,feed the ashes to her brother
like it's powdered hope, andthen when he dies anyway, nobody
(33:41):
learns anything.
It would be funny if it weren'tstill happening, because what
Exeter revealed in grim littledetails is the kind of American
impulse that we've never reallyoutgrown.
When things go wrong, like whensomeone gets sick or systems
fail or reality gets toouncomfortable, we reach not for
(34:02):
knowledge, but for narrative.
We don't want the boring answer.
We want the one that pits usagainst our already concluded
enemy.
That's the heartbeat ofAmerica's cultural idiocy.
It's about the willful rejectionof experts while escaping into
the comfortable embrace ofideological motivated ignorance.
(34:24):
See, scientific truth is cold.
It's impartial.
It doesn't care about yourfeelings, it won't hold your
hand or tell you who to blame.
But a good superstition, a niceclean conspiracy theory?
Now that's got a villain.
That's got a cure.
That's got a plan that might behorrifying, but at least makes
(34:44):
sense in a way that lets you dosomething.
So you burn the heart, you blamethe outsider, you elect the guy
who promises to put the stakethrough the problem, whatever it
is this year, and you never stopto ask, what if we're just
wrong?
What happened in Exeter is justa particularly medieval version
of a very modern story.
(35:05):
In fact, let's rewrite theevents of 1892 using the
language of the 2020s.
A deadly disease startsspreading through a community.
Instead of trusting experts,people invent supernatural
explanations based on gutfeelings and grainy local
gossip.
A treatment is proposed that hasno basis in science and is
(35:26):
actively harmful.
The treatment is administered,the patient dies, and the
community decides it still didthe right thing.
That sound familiar?
This is the same country wherepeople proposed injecting bleach
straight into your veins duringa pandemic, where anti-vax
crusaders insisted mRNA vaccineswere mind controlled, where
(35:49):
politicians stood on camera andsaid COVID was over because they
felt like it should be.
Exeter didn't die, it evolved,it got Twitter, it became QAnon.
The Mercy Brown case isn't justfolklore, it's the American
feedback loop.
Fear, then fiction, then ritual,then failure, then amnesia, then
(36:12):
fear, and so on and so on.
And that loop has fucking range,buddy.
Oh fucking hell does it ever.
In 1892, the ritual was fire.
In 2020, it was ivermectin.
In both cases, someone got sick,someone died, and someone
somewhere said, at least wetried something.
(36:33):
That's not science, that'sscience cosplay.
Just enough structure to looklike a cure, but powered
entirely by bad actorinfluencers, local gossip, and
people who think shouting loudermakes them right.
And look, it's easy to point andlaugh at the people of Exeter,
but the truth is they were justworking with what they had.
(36:53):
And what they had was a Bible, ashovel, and an absolutely
deranged willingness to set ateenage girl on fire and feed
her brother like it was a viabletreatment plan.
What saddens me about this storyis that Dr.
Jon Snow had already cracked thecode on cholera back in the
1850s.
The man literally took thehandle off a contaminated water
(37:15):
pump and ended a whole assepidemic with nothing but data
and a scientific mind.
He proved disease could spreadinvisibly through contaminated
water, not curses, not miasma,and thus established the germ
theory of disease as part of themainstream public health
consciousness.
But do you think it mattered toExeter?
(37:37):
Fuck no.
Nobody in that town had readLouis Pasteur's papers, nobody
had heard of Robert Cook, theguy who identified Mycobacterium
tuberculosis as the cause ofconsumption, and even if they
had, it wouldn't have mattered.
Science doesn't beatsuperstition in a fight where
the judges are dreams inDeuteronomy.
(37:59):
So yeah, they did what they feltwas right.
Because the idea that invisiblebacteria could float out of
someone's lungs and sneak intoyours was ridiculous.
But a dead teenage girl comingback from the grave to drain her
brother's life force from beyondthe veil wasn't.
And why?
Because the vampire was visible,the devil was the enemy, and it
(38:22):
was narratively satisfying.
So in the end, the real tragedyisn't just that they burned
Mercy Brown's heart, it's thatthey never stood a chance not
to.
Because when you live in a worldwithout facts, without science,
without trust, when your fear islouder than knowledge, of course
you're gonna dig up yourdaughter.
Of course you're gonna light heron fire and call it medicine.
(38:45):
And the worst part, we're stilldoing it.
We've just traded the shovel fora smartphone and the holy water
for a YouTube rabbit hole.
The rituals change, but theheart stays burning.
Alright, and that's gonna do itfor this episode of the Internet
Explorers Podcast, the show thatbravely asks the questions no
(39:09):
one else will.
Like, what if your public healthpolicy was just grave robbing
with extra paperwork?
Hey, I just want to say thankyou for all the support you've
given me over the past fewmonths.
Doing this show has meant agreat deal to me and has been a
terrific creative outlet.
However, this will be the lastepisode of season one.
(39:33):
With starting a new role, buyinga new house, trying to spend
some more time doing dad stuff,I'm gonna take a between seasons
production break.
Keep following so when I doresume, you'll be the first to
know.
Until then, I'm Jimmy, remindingyou that if someone ever hands
(39:53):
you a steaming cup of organ ashand calls it medicine, it might
be time to get the fuck out ofthere.
Alright, we'll see you in seasontwo.
The words and thoughts presentedtoday are that of the speakers
only.
Do not try any of this at home,and please don't take any advice
from this podcast.
(40:13):
It's for entertainment purposesonly.
All rights reserved.
Coming to you from cyberspace and beyond, this is
the Internet Explorers Podcast.
I'm Jimmy, your guide throughthe endless maze of the World
Wide Web.
Every episode we'll journey fromcorner to corner, diving into
fascinating, obscure, andsometimes downright bizarre
(00:20):
topics to uncover surpriseshidden just a mouse click away.
Now, it's time for the show.
If you were unfortunate enoughto be alive in 1892 in rural
Rhode Island, congratulations.
You were probably cold, poorlynourished, vaguely Presbyterian,
(00:45):
and surrounded by death.
This was a time beforepenicillin, before germ theory
had gotten through to thegeneral public, before TikTok,
but with all the samemisinformation vibes.
Just delivered by a man with noteeth holding a go in front of
(01:06):
you instead of on your phone.
And lurking at the top of themost feared ways to die list was
something called consumption.
It was the old-timey term forwhat we now call tuberculosis,
but it might as well have been adeath sentence written out in
slow motion.
(01:27):
Consumption didn't kill youovernight.
It took its time.
Weeks, months, even years ofcoughing up blood, running
fevers, and shrinking down intoa little Victorian skeleton.
It made you pale, weak,hollow-eyed, and essentially
(01:48):
turned you into a spooky littleTim Burton character long before
that was cool.
Your body would waste away whileyour mind stayed alert, which
meant you got to be fullyconscious as your lungs turned
into wet confetti.
Now, don't take what I'm aboutto say as an attack on the local
(02:11):
public, because globallyspeaking, nobody knew how it
spread.
They had theories, sure, butthey were all the worst kind of
theories in that they werewrong, but they were wrong with
confidence.
Doctors believed it came frombad air, which was termed
(02:32):
miasma, or through inheritedmelancholy, or from reading too
many novels where boys and girlswere acting sinfully scandalous
by wait for it, holding hands.
Yes, that is totally real.
Other people thought it was dueto imbalances in your humors.
(02:55):
No, no, no, not like yourlikelihood to laugh at my dumb
jokes, but your bodily humours,which is a collective term for
blood, bile, phlegm, and thatthing where your uncle coughs
into the soup and then goes,it's just allergies.
Yeah, sure.
In Exeter, Rhode Island, a lotof folks took a look at their
(03:18):
friends dying one by one,wasting away like candle wax,
and decided the most logicalexplanation was vampires.
Not cape wearing fangybellalagosi vampires.
These were closer to old schoolEuropean folklore vamps.
(03:39):
Usually your dead cousin or momor neighbor crawling back from
the grave in spectral form tosuck the life out of their
surviving family members.
Because, I mean, that's kind ofwhat family does.
They feed on your energy untilyou die and then haunt you like
property taxes.
(04:00):
By the 1800s, vampire panicswere already baked into parts of
rural New England.
In Connecticut, Vermont, evensome parts of Massachusetts,
which is ironic considering itwas also home to Harvard Medical
School.
It's like a microcosm of Americaitself.
(04:20):
Groundbreaking scientificresearch in one town, and in the
next town over, some guyyelling, Digger up, I seen her
blink.
And this wasn't a Halloweenone-off vampire thing.
We have dozens of documentedcases of communities digging up
dead family members to performmakeshift vampire rituals on
(04:43):
them.
These ranged from the mildlydisturbing, where they flipped
the body to face downward, tothe aggressively unhinged, where
they would cut out the heart,burn it while inhaling the
smoke, and then throw some bonesat the moon.
The logic, such as it was, wentlike this.
(05:05):
Someone dies of tuberculosis,then another family member
starts showing the samesymptoms, and clearly that means
the dead person isn't reallydead, they're feeding on the
living from beyond the grave.
And the solution to that is todig up the body, look for signs
of freshness, and if the bodylooks too well preserved for
(05:28):
your liking, then it's time tobreak out the firewood and turn
that corpse into a publicservice announcement.
If all of this soundsridiculous, good.
It was.
But to the people of Exeter in1892, it was a hell of a lot
more comforting than the truth.
Because the truth, which is wedon't know what's killing us and
(05:52):
we can't stop it, was toofucking beyond their grasp to
formulate in their little peabrains or admit.
Because, again, pea brains,especially in a town where
people had more guns than books,and nobody knew what bacteria
was, but everyone could quotescripture about demons entering
(06:15):
you through the mouth.
Which brings us to the stars oftoday's tale, the Brown family.
Now, let's be clear, theseweren't mystics or occultists or
weirdos, they were just a normalfarming family doing normal
19th-century things like growingcorn, praying, not questioning
(06:38):
authority, and dying at analarming rate.
George Brown, the patriarch, hadalready lost his wife Mary and
their daughter, Mary Olive, toconsumption.
Then his younger daughter, MercyLena Brown, fell ill.
She died in January of 1892 atthe age of 19.
(07:00):
They placed her in a stone cryptwhile the ground was too frozen
to dig her a grave.
And then the last survivingBrown child, Edwin, who's
George's only son, started towaste away too.
The community had seen enough.
They smelled undead nonsense.
(07:22):
And in the absence of anydoctors with actual microscopes,
the neighbors startedwhispering.
Then the whispering turned intotalking.
Then the talking turned into theinfamous town hall comedian.
Now it's important to rememberthat this was not a town flush
(07:43):
with doctors.
Exeter did not have a hospital.
It barely had a library.
But what it did have was asurplus of hand-me-down Bibles,
aggressively undereducatedfarmers, and enough communal
paranoia to make Salem look likea rational group of people.
The occasion for this particulargathering was, of course,
(08:07):
strictly limited to the ongoingmisery of George Brown and his
children.
To George's neighbors, thiswasn't a slow-moving respiratory
plague.
No, sir.
This was something darker,something folkloric, something
that explained things.
Because tuberculosis was toovague, and science was too new,
(08:32):
and feelings, well, feelingsalways win.
So naturally, the townsfolk didwhat any irresponsible, barely
literate community might do.
They gathered up every rumor,every nightmare, and every
third-hand superstition theycould find, and marched them
(08:53):
into the old Grange Hall like itwas a courtroom for the
paranormal.
The meeting was held in thetown's main civic building,
which doubled as a church onSundays, a pig auction every
second Thursday, and a socialhall if no one was currently
vomiting in.
The floors were uneven, thewalls were splintered pine,
(09:13):
there was a small stove in themiddle of the room giving off
just enough heat to ensurenobody would freeze to death
lest they become a corpsethemselves.
At the center of it all satEbenezer Tuggins, who had
somehow become the chair ofExeter's unofficial town health
committee by virtue of havingowned a pencil since 1873.
(09:34):
Tuggins was a retired cranberryinspector, or possibly a failed
cobbler.
That wasn't really clearaccording to some of the
accounts that I read.
But what he lacked incredentials, he made up for in
volume.
When he stood up and cleared histhroat, it sounded like someone
choking on a pigeon.
(09:55):
He slapped the desk with an openhand.
SPEAKER_01 (09:57):
Alright then, he declared.
SPEAKER_03 (10:15):
Mrs.
Winifred Cole.
A woman so committed torighteousness, she once
petitioned to have dancinglegally renamed to Public
FootSend.
She had eyes like a hawk and avoice like the first few seconds
of a boiling kettle.
SPEAKER_02 (10:32):
I seen her! I seen her in my dreams! Mercy Brown!
She was sitting on Edwin's chestlike a demon with ringlets.
I tell you plain, he won't lasta month.
SPEAKER_03 (10:45):
There was an approving grunt from the back of
the room.
Jedediah Groom, the townblacksmith, who believed deeply
in three things fire, metal, andthe supernatural revenge of
unquiet teenage girls.
He spat into a tin bucket andnodded solemnly.
SPEAKER_01 (11:04):
Mercy's the one.
Earl told me Millie told him theUndertaker's cousin said her
chinks still had color.
Pink.
Like she'd just come back from asleigh ride.
SPEAKER_03 (11:16):
Mrs.
Cole crossed herself.
SPEAKER_02 (11:18):
Pink cheeks in March unholy!
SPEAKER_03 (11:21):
Another voice joined in.
Thaddeus Wainwright, the nominalmayor of Exeter.
Thaddeus was born a man to wearsuspenders and avoid
responsibility.
His gift, if you could call itthat, was the ability to look
like he was thinking deeplyabout something while actively
deciding nothing.
SPEAKER_00 (11:41):
Now now, people, let's not rush to conclusions.
Could be her body was juststored unusually.
Wasn't she buried above theground?
SPEAKER_03 (11:55):
That detail caught the crowd's attention a little.
There was some light murmuring.
Mercy, after all, hadn't beenburied in the ground.
Remember, her body had beenplaced in the stone crypt, which
was really more of a holdingvault because the ground was too
frozen when she died, which,from a public health standpoint,
(12:16):
was standard practice.
But to the people of Exeter,that was vampire-like behavior.
She wasn't buried in the dirt,barked Jedediah.
The good book says ashes toashes, dirt to dirt.
Someone else, Walter Tink, theinnkeeper, raised his hand, then
(12:37):
immediately began talkingwithout even waiting for
permission.
I'm just saying, Walter began,with the tone of a man who
always had a story, usuallyinvolving something he heard
from a stranger after a couplehard siders.
SPEAKER_02 (12:50):
I'm just saying a fresh looking corpse in an
above-ground box in the middleof a consumption plague is the
exact sort of thing my uncleHero warned us about.
He said they feed on the livingthrough the nather, like
spirits, or smoke, or humidity.
SPEAKER_03 (13:06):
There was a pause as people tried to imagine evil
humidity.
It didn't take long to convincethem, and at this point the
preacher, Deacon EzekielFletcher, weighed in.
Ezekiel was a stern man with abeard shaped like a Bible verse
in the kind of voice that madekids hide their playing cards.
(13:27):
He hadn't said much yet, whichmade what he said now sound all
the more serious.
SPEAKER_00 (13:33):
I have prayed, and the answer came to me in a
dream.
The heart is the seat of thesoul.
If that girl's heart is stillred, still full of blood, it
means she ain't at rest.
The devil keeps her warm.
(13:54):
Several people gasped.
SPEAKER_03 (13:56):
Winifred clutched her shawl.
Jedediah slammed a hand on thebench like a man who had just
had his worst instinctsconfirmed by someone with
authority.
Then louder.
And that was it.
(14:16):
The switch had flipped.
The next 15 minutes were acyclone of folklore, half
memories, apocalyptic dreams,and anecdotes that always
started with, well I heard, butnever ended with anything
resembling evidence.
Someone suggested using a mirrorto check for her reflection.
(14:37):
Someone else asked if Mercy hadever refused to eat garlic.
A man near the back, who may ormay not have been drunk proposed
sprinkling salt in a circle tosee if a toad appears.
At no point, though, did anyonesuggest asking a doctor, mostly
because there wasn't onepresent, and also because the
(14:59):
last time anyone in Exeter hadseen a real physician, he'd been
laughed out of town for owning athermometer.
Eventually, Ebenezer stood backup and slammed his palm again.
Enough!
SPEAKER_01 (15:11):
We're wasting time.
Let's write down a plan.
SPEAKER_03 (15:15):
The room hushed like school children sensing a quiz.
SPEAKER_01 (15:18):
Step one, we dig her up.
SPEAKER_03 (15:20):
Heads nodded.
SPEAKER_01 (15:22):
Step two, we check her heart.
SPEAKER_03 (15:24):
Murmurs of agreement.
SPEAKER_01 (15:26):
Step three, if it's full of blood, we burn it.
SPEAKER_03 (15:29):
A few people clapped.
It was unclear whether this wasout of joy or anxiety.
Step four, added Winifredhelpfully.
SPEAKER_02 (15:38):
We mix the ashes in with water and feed them to
Edwin.
SPEAKER_03 (15:42):
Now that got a reaction.
Some gasps, some uncomfortableshifting, but no real
objections.
SPEAKER_02 (15:50):
You wanna save that boy or don't ya?
SPEAKER_03 (15:53):
Jedediah stood up and cleared his throat.
I'll bring the shovels.
And just like that, a town withno pathologist, no microscope,
no idea how lungs work voted toexhume a teenage girl's body and
perform backwoods necromancybecause a woman had a weird
dream and a blacksmith heard arumor.
(16:16):
There were no dissenting voices,no objections, no, hey, wait a
minute, maybe it's a germ.
Because if there's one thingAmerica has always been good at,
it's trading experience for theloudest voice.
They would meet the nextmorning, tools in hand,
bloodlust on their mind, and adying boy waiting for the kind
(16:39):
of medicinal intervention thatcame from a burned organ mixed
with water in a coffee mug.
Because once you live in a townwhere the only medical journal
is a hymn book and the pharmacyis a bonfire, then there's only
one prescription that you need: ashes and faith. (16:52):
undefined
With the vote settled, themeeting turned from should we do
this?
to the more pressing and logicalquestion of how exactly does one
execute a vampire eliminationprotocol in the year of our Lord
1892 without getting blood ontheir suspenders.
(17:15):
And in case you already forgot,the plan was not just to dig her
up, they were going to examineher heart for signs of blood,
and if it looked too alive tothem, they were gonna set it on
fire, and then because everyhorror show needs a third act
twist, they were gonna take theashes, mix them with water, and
feed the potion to her dyingbrother Edwin.
(17:38):
That's when Thaddeus Wainwright,the mayor, or at least the man
who once owned the largest barnand thus declared himself the
mayor, tapped the podium with awooden spoon he'd apparently
brought from home.
SPEAKER_00 (17:52):
Right.
So now we got the gist.
Now let's iron out the details.
We're not savages.
We need a process.
SPEAKER_03 (18:02):
There was a pause as the room transitioned from
emotional pitchforking tobureaucratic brain fog, because
nothing slows momentum thanthrowing in the word process.
Ebenezer Tuggen stood up again,slightly out of breath from that
effort.
Now, this man had not walkedquickly since the Garfield
(18:23):
administration, but he hadstamina, and more importantly,
he had the ability to write,which meant he was about to take
minutes for what was essentiallya supernatural project plan.
SPEAKER_01 (18:34):
I'll write down the steps.
If this goes well, maybe we'lluse the method again.
SPEAKER_03 (18:40):
This wasn't said as a joke.
The first to weigh in was WalterTink, the innkeeper with too
much enthusiasm and not enoughfilter.
Walter was the kind of man whoalways had this cousin in Maine,
who had tried something justlike this one time and usually
involved chickens and ended withregret.
SPEAKER_02 (19:02):
Well, step one's easy!
SPEAKER_01 (19:04):
We go to the crypt!
SPEAKER_03 (19:06):
Right, said Ebenezer, scribbling that down.
SPEAKER_01 (19:08):
Visit crypt, what time?
SPEAKER_03 (19:11):
Jedediah Groom, the blacksmith, and the unofficial
town enforcer grunted from theback.
SPEAKER_01 (19:17):
Don! Cold enough to keep things still, light enough
to see what's what.
SPEAKER_03 (19:22):
Winifred Cole chimed in again, wringing her hands
like she was choking aninvisible devil.
SPEAKER_02 (19:27):
We should pray first before the desecration.
SPEAKER_00 (19:31):
And a brief prayer to the top, Deacon Fletcher said
solemnly.
SPEAKER_03 (19:40):
Ebenezer nodded.
SPEAKER_01 (19:42):
Prayer and shovels.
SPEAKER_03 (19:43):
A silence followed as people considered the grim
nature of what they wereactually planning to do.
This wasn't some quaint ritual.
They were going to open ateenage girl's tomb, inspect her
body like it was a bad ham, andthen destroy her organs in front
of her father and neighbors, allto save a boy who was already
(20:06):
halfway to the afterlife.
But the thing about collectiveinsanity is that once you've got
enough people nodding at thesame time, it stops feeling
insane.
And so the plan grew.
Once we open the coffin, we needto check for signs.
Signs?
asked Thaddeus, whose workingdefinition of science was
(20:27):
anything that came in a tin.
SPEAKER_01 (20:29):
Blood in the heart, freshness of the skin, length of
the fingernails, and the cheekcolor, Jedediah said, as if he
was describing a fresh applepie.
SPEAKER_02 (20:40):
Also hair!
SPEAKER_03 (20:41):
Winifred added.
Someone in the back said, Whatif she smiles?
And was immediately told to shutup.
More notes were taken.
Step three, cut open the heart,said Deacon Fletcher in a calm,
matter-of-fact tone, just likehe was giving communion
(21:02):
instructions.
We need to know if it's full.
If it's dry, she's clean.
But and if it bleeds, he didn'teven need to finish his
sentence.
Burn it, said Jedediah in thesame way that some men say amen.
SPEAKER_01 (21:18):
Step four
SPEAKER_03 (21:21):
Ebenezer scratched it down.
SPEAKER_02 (21:23):
I got a square pyre box behind my chip, Walter said.
Use it for a pasta look.
SPEAKER_03 (21:29):
There was a moment of polite but unspoken confusion
about what a pybasket was,followed by a collective
decision not to ask Walter anyfurther questions.
SPEAKER_02 (21:40):
What's bird?
We collect the ashes.
And then we make the boy drinkthem.
SPEAKER_03 (21:46):
That hung in the air like a 19th-century poverty ass
ripper fart.
The idea that this frail, sickyoung man, already weak, already
dying, would be handed a mugfull of his sister's cremated
insides and told, bottoms up,should have given them pause.
(22:07):
But instead, it was greeted witha kind of grim satisfaction,
like they were doing something,putting this plan into motion,
setting the wheels into action,doing something like medicine.
A hand went up.
It belonged to Tobias Alkins, aquiet man who rarely spoke at
(22:28):
meetings, but when he did, itwas usually to ask about grain
prices or comment on the beautyof someone's horse.
SPEAKER_00 (22:36):
I just have a thought.
What if it doesn't work?
There was a pause.
What if we burn her heart, beatit to Edwin, and he still dies?
SPEAKER_03 (22:48):
Now nobody had considered this outcome because
they were all too busy tryingnot to be the first person to
suggest they should do nothing.
But now that Tobias had said itout loud, a few people squirmed.
Even Deacon Fletcher blinkedtwice, as if noticing daylight
for the first time in hours.
Jedediah was the one who brokethe silence.
(23:10):
If and it don't work, at leastwe know we did everything we
could.
And that truly is the thesisstatement of this whole affair.
Let's do something so horrifyingso we can sleep at night.
Even if it helps no one, even ifit traumatizes everyone, even if
it's an act of desecration thatwould make the devil himself ask
(23:33):
for a seat in the back.
They weren't scientists, theyweren't doctors, they were
desperate, and that's what madethem dangerous.
Thaddeus cleared his throat,trying to inject a note of
optimism.
Well then, who's got the knives?
And just like that, it was asgood as done.
(23:53):
All of it decided in oneafternoon in one building by
people whose entireunderstanding of disease control
could be boiled down to the bodywas too pink.
They had written the plan down,they had assigned tools and
roles.
They had even, in an accidentalmoment of irony, scheduled the
(24:15):
whole thing to begin just aftera prayer circle.
What came next would put Exeteron the map.
Not for progress, not forenlightenment, but for one of
the last and best documentedcases of vampire hysteria in
American history.
The men arrived with shovels,the women arrived with prayer
(24:37):
books, a few children came too,even though they'd been told not
to, because nothing in thisworld is more magnetic than the
desecration of a corpse dressedup as a community event.
Mercy Brown's exhumation hadofficially become Exeter's most
anticipated attraction sincesomeone claimed to see a goose
(24:58):
lay an egg the size of agrapefruit.
George Brown, the father, wasthere, but not in the way others
were.
He didn't carry tools, he didn'tspeak, he just stood a little
off to the side in the crispMarch air, staring at the crypt
like it might open on its ownand release not a vampire, but
the memory of who his daughterhad been.
(25:21):
And maybe, underneath that, theghost of who he'd been before,
this town convinced him to helptear his family apart one organ
at a time.
That practical choice, made ingrief with love, was now being
reinterpreted as proof of darkmagic.
(25:42):
With a few coordinated gruntsand an unsettling lack of
ceremony, they pried open thestone lid.
The air that rushed out wascold, stale, and vaguely
metallic.
A few people coughed, notbecause of the disease, but
because of guilt, or the shapeof guilt when it's pretending to
(26:03):
be curiosity.
Inside lay Mercy.
Nineteen years old at the timeof death, barely two months in
her crypt, preserved not bywitchcraft nor demonic
willpower, but by New England'snatural refrigerator setting,
winter.
Her features were unsurprisinglyintact.
(26:26):
Too intact, if you ask thepeople gathered that morning.
Her skin had color, flesh tone,not the gray of decay.
Her hair seemed thicker, hernails appeared longer.
At that point, Jedediah Groom,the blacksmith who'd never met a
piece of metal he didn't want tocut, produced a blade.
(26:47):
Maybe it was ceremonial, maybeit was just sharpened nearby.
Either way, he cut open herchest, removed her heart and
liver for inspection.
Her heart was found to stillcontain blood.
Of course it did.
That's what cold does.
It slows decomposition, itpreserves.
(27:08):
It doesn't mean something'salive any more than a ham
sandwich in the fridge ispreparing its comeback to her.
But none of them saw it thatway.
To the townspeople of Exeter,this wasn't a preserved corpse.
It was a caught creature.
They nodded, they whisperedprayers.
Some crossed themselves, othersspit.
(27:32):
One woman fainted, but no onesaid stop.
Not one voice in that crowd, notGeorge Brown's, not the
deacon's, not the supposed voiceof reason from Mayor Thaddeus or
any other warm body with accessto a thought, stood up and said,
Hey, maybe this is insane andwe're violating a young woman's
(27:52):
body because we're scared ofwearing cloth masks.
Instead, Mercy's heart and liverwere placed, again without
irony, into a cooking pan.
The fire had already been lit.
Walter Tink had brought woodsoaked in oil as if there were
just another weekend chore, likesearing barn lice or boiling
fence grease.
(28:13):
The organs hissed when they hitthe flame.
There's no elegant way to saythis.
They sizzled.
The smell was what you'd expect.
Somewhere between overcookedmeat and the worst kind of
incense.
It hung in the air like apunishment, and they were cooked
until nothing remained but ash.
(28:34):
The ashes were collected in adish, a clay bowl, if local
accounts are to be believed, andsomeone brought in some spring
water.
Maybe it was sanctified, maybeit was just wet, and the mixture
was stirred together.
And then, as casually as achurch elder handing out
communion, they carried thatbowl to Edwin Brown, sick, weak,
(28:55):
barely clinging to his life, andtold him to drink it.
Now there are no survivingrecords of what Edwin said in
that moment.
No quotes, no letters, nooutraged diary entry that said,
Today my neighbors turned mysister into a smoothie and
handed it to me like it was anormal Sunday.
But what we do know is thatEdwin drank it.
(29:18):
He drank his sister's heart andliver in slurry form.
I mean, what choice did he have?
He was dying, and in 1892 inExeter, Rhode Island, you didn't
challenge the village consensusunless you wanted to be the next
person they dissected.
The belief was that it wouldcure him.
(29:40):
That ingesting the ashes of theundead would break the bond
between Mercy and Edwin, cuttingoff whatever spectral blood
siphon was draining him onewheeze at a time.
But of course, it didn't.
Edwin died less than two monthslater.
There was no resurrection.
(30:00):
No miraculous turnaround.
No evidence that any of this hadaccomplished anything other than
the irreversible desecration ofa young woman's body and the
ritual humiliation of a dyingboy.
And still, still, no one in thattown recanted.
Because that's the thing aboutmagical thinking.
(30:22):
It's a fortress.
You can pour logic on it allday.
You can throw evidence at itlike rocks.
You can even point out that thepatient died anyway, and the
response you get will still besomething like this.
Well, imagine how much faster hewould have died if we hadn't
done that.
That's the real horror rightthere.
(30:44):
Not the burning, not thedrinking, not the silence of a
winter grave cracked open forsuperstition.
The real horror is how easilypeople can convince themselves
that they did the right thing,even when the result is more
death, more grief, and theabsolute absence of a cogent
thought.
To be clear, none of this wasunique.
(31:05):
There had been dozens of similarincidents across New England's
in the 1800s.
Families whose graves wereopened, hearts burned, ashes
consumed, vampires blamed, everyone of them a desperate attempt
to explain tuberculosis beforegerm theory reached rural
America.
But in the Mercy Brown case,this one got attention, partly
(31:27):
because it was one of the lastof its kind, partly because it
happened so late.
I mean, 1892 was well into theage of railroads and telegrams
and actual scientists, andpartly because Mercy, through no
action of her own, had becomefolklore, a symbol, a legend of
(31:47):
sorts.
Her story would be retold,folded into vampire mythos and
horror novels and obscureacademic journals about epidemic
folklore.
Bram Stroker, the author ofDracula, is believed to have
clipped newspaper articles abouther.
He was researching vampirelegends at the time, and five
years after Mercy's heart wasturned into hot ashy tea, his
(32:11):
book was published.
And whether or not sheinfluenced the final draft,
Mercy Brown, the girl in thecrypt, the girl with the pink
cheeks, the girl who was nevergiven peace, was now part of the
global undead pantheon.
She didn't volunteer to becomeNew England's vampire queen, she
just died, like her mother, likeher sister, like her brother.
(32:35):
But because her town couldn'tunderstand illness, and because
America has always preferredmythology to medicine, her body
became a scapegoat, and herheart became the offering.
If the story of Mercy Brown werejust a creepy footnote in New
England folklore and abandonedas a weird rural fluke from the
(32:55):
dusty corner of America's attic,it might be easy to laugh and
move on.
But it's not.
Because what happened in Exeterin 1892 wasn't just the product
of its time, it wasunfortunately a preview of what
America was to become.
Let's take stock.
A girl dies of tuberculosis, sodoes her sister, then her
(33:17):
mother, then her brother getssick, and instead of blaming,
say, a contagious bacterialinfection and poor acceptance of
the public health education, thetownspeople blame the one person
who can't talk back, the teenagegirl in the crypt.
They dig her up, burn her heart,feed the ashes to her brother
like it's powdered hope, andthen when he dies anyway, nobody
(33:41):
learns anything.
It would be funny if it weren'tstill happening, because what
Exeter revealed in grim littledetails is the kind of American
impulse that we've never reallyoutgrown.
When things go wrong, like whensomeone gets sick or systems
fail or reality gets toouncomfortable, we reach not for
(34:02):
knowledge, but for narrative.
We don't want the boring answer.
We want the one that pits usagainst our already concluded
enemy.
That's the heartbeat ofAmerica's cultural idiocy.
It's about the willful rejectionof experts while escaping into
the comfortable embrace ofideological motivated ignorance.
(34:24):
See, scientific truth is cold.
It's impartial.
It doesn't care about yourfeelings, it won't hold your
hand or tell you who to blame.
But a good superstition, a niceclean conspiracy theory?
Now that's got a villain.
That's got a cure.
That's got a plan that might behorrifying, but at least makes
(34:44):
sense in a way that lets you dosomething.
So you burn the heart, you blamethe outsider, you elect the guy
who promises to put the stakethrough the problem, whatever it
is this year, and you never stopto ask, what if we're just
wrong?
What happened in Exeter is justa particularly medieval version
of a very modern story.
(35:05):
In fact, let's rewrite theevents of 1892 using the
language of the 2020s.
A deadly disease startsspreading through a community.
Instead of trusting experts,people invent supernatural
explanations based on gutfeelings and grainy local
gossip.
A treatment is proposed that hasno basis in science and is
(35:26):
actively harmful.
The treatment is administered,the patient dies, and the
community decides it still didthe right thing.
That sound familiar?
This is the same country wherepeople proposed injecting bleach
straight into your veins duringa pandemic, where anti-vax
crusaders insisted mRNA vaccineswere mind controlled, where
(35:49):
politicians stood on camera andsaid COVID was over because they
felt like it should be.
Exeter didn't die, it evolved,it got Twitter, it became QAnon.
The Mercy Brown case isn't justfolklore, it's the American
feedback loop.
Fear, then fiction, then ritual,then failure, then amnesia, then
(36:12):
fear, and so on and so on.
And that loop has fucking range,buddy.
Oh fucking hell does it ever.
In 1892, the ritual was fire.
In 2020, it was ivermectin.
In both cases, someone got sick,someone died, and someone
somewhere said, at least wetried something.
(36:33):
That's not science, that'sscience cosplay.
Just enough structure to looklike a cure, but powered
entirely by bad actorinfluencers, local gossip, and
people who think shouting loudermakes them right.
And look, it's easy to point andlaugh at the people of Exeter,
but the truth is they were justworking with what they had.
(36:53):
And what they had was a Bible, ashovel, and an absolutely
deranged willingness to set ateenage girl on fire and feed
her brother like it was a viabletreatment plan.
What saddens me about this storyis that Dr.
Jon Snow had already cracked thecode on cholera back in the
1850s.
The man literally took thehandle off a contaminated water
(37:15):
pump and ended a whole assepidemic with nothing but data
and a scientific mind.
He proved disease could spreadinvisibly through contaminated
water, not curses, not miasma,and thus established the germ
theory of disease as part of themainstream public health
consciousness.
But do you think it mattered toExeter?
(37:37):
Fuck no.
Nobody in that town had readLouis Pasteur's papers, nobody
had heard of Robert Cook, theguy who identified Mycobacterium
tuberculosis as the cause ofconsumption, and even if they
had, it wouldn't have mattered.
Science doesn't beatsuperstition in a fight where
the judges are dreams inDeuteronomy.
(37:59):
So yeah, they did what they feltwas right.
Because the idea that invisiblebacteria could float out of
someone's lungs and sneak intoyours was ridiculous.
But a dead teenage girl comingback from the grave to drain her
brother's life force from beyondthe veil wasn't.
And why?
Because the vampire was visible,the devil was the enemy, and it
(38:22):
was narratively satisfying.
So in the end, the real tragedyisn't just that they burned
Mercy Brown's heart, it's thatthey never stood a chance not
to.
Because when you live in a worldwithout facts, without science,
without trust, when your fear islouder than knowledge, of course
you're gonna dig up yourdaughter.
Of course you're gonna light heron fire and call it medicine.
(38:45):
And the worst part, we're stilldoing it.
We've just traded the shovel fora smartphone and the holy water
for a YouTube rabbit hole.
The rituals change, but theheart stays burning.
Alright, and that's gonna do itfor this episode of the Internet
Explorers Podcast, the show thatbravely asks the questions no
(39:09):
one else will.
Like, what if your public healthpolicy was just grave robbing
with extra paperwork?
Hey, I just want to say thankyou for all the support you've
given me over the past fewmonths.
Doing this show has meant agreat deal to me and has been a
terrific creative outlet.
However, this will be the lastepisode of season one.
(39:33):
With starting a new role, buyinga new house, trying to spend
some more time doing dad stuff,I'm gonna take a between seasons
production break.
Keep following so when I doresume, you'll be the first to
know.
Until then, I'm Jimmy, remindingyou that if someone ever hands
(39:53):
you a steaming cup of organ ashand calls it medicine, it might
be time to get the fuck out ofthere.
Alright, we'll see you in seasontwo.
The words and thoughts presentedtoday are that of the speakers
only.
Do not try any of this at home,and please don't take any advice
from this podcast.
(40:13):
It's for entertainment purposesonly.
All rights reserved.
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