31 Days of Halloween | Day 6: The Vampires of New England

In March of 1892, a group of men entered a cemetery in rural Rhode Island and opened the coffin of nineteen-year-old Mercy Brown.

Then they cut out her heart.

Her family had been dying from tuberculosis, one after another, and some of Mercy's neighbors believed they knew why. Something inside one of the graves was still feeding on the living.

So they burned Mercy's heart and liver beside a rock in the cemetery and prepared the ashes as a cure for her dying brother.

And Mercy Brown wasn't the only one.

For generations, families across New England had been digging up their dead, examining their bodies, burning their organs, and sometimes consuming the ashes in a desperate attempt to stop tuberculosis from moving through their homes.

They rarely called them vampires.

But that's what everyone else would eventually call them.

Tonight, we're digging into the New England vampire panic, the real story of Mercy Brown, a bizarre grave discovered in Connecticut, and how a nineteenth-century medical superstition became part of America's Halloween mythology.

Welcome to Day Six of 31 Days of Halloween