The late 1880s was a difficult time for the George and Mary Brown family of Exeter, Rhode Island. In 1888, Mary fell ill with consumption, (or it is more commonly known today, tuberculosis) and a short time later, died from the disease, leaving George to care for the couple's children and run the family farm on his own. But her casket was barely in the ground before the dreaded disease struck the family once more, this time claiming the life of the eldest of the Brown offspring, a daughter called Mary Olive. Two years later, a son, Edwin, and another daughter, Mercy, also contracted the disease. While, in Edwin's case, the disease took a more protracted form, laying waste to his body but not killing him right away, his 19-year-old sister Mercy died shortly after falling ill and was buried alongside her mother and sister. Devastated by his loss, George Brown focused all of his attention on caring for his son.
That was when things took an even worse...and stranger turn...for what remained of the Brown family. Within days of his sister Mercy's death, Edwin told his father that he had seen Mercy walking outside the house at night. As might be expected, his father dismissed his son's claims, insisting that the so-called sighting must have been a dream. But if it was a dream, it was a recurring one, because Edwin continued to see what he believed was his sister on several subsequent nights. It was a perplexing situation for George. He was a simple man whose life had always revolved around his family and their farm. Although not particularly religious, he was known as a God-fearing person who had always attended the local Baptist church and who had never been known for having any unusual interest in things of an occult nature. But faced with the probable loss of his son to the same disease that had robbed him of his wife and two daughters, George Brown now became obsessed with the idea that his youngest child, Mercy, might actually be....a vampire. And not only was Mercy a vampire, but that she was responsible for Edwin's increasingly weakened state. That was the reason that she came to Edwin at night, George decided. It was to prey on Edwin, to drain what little life had had left inside of him in order to satiate her own, perverse, "undead" appetite. In fact, george was so convinced that this was the case that he prevailed upon several of his friends to assist him in exhuming the bodies of Mercy, her mother, and her sister.
It could not have been an easy thing for George Brown to dig up the bodies of his family members, even if he did believe that one of them was a vampire. Nor could it have been anything less than horrific to look at those bodies once the grim task had been completed. Mary Olive's corpse was nothing more than a skeleton with some hair still attached to the skull. Mary's body was in better condition, with most of the muscle tissue still intact, but her heart was devoid of blood. However, Mercy's body, which had only been in the ground for two months, showed almost no sign of decay at all. In fact, her heart, when removed from her chest, was dripping with blood. Surely this was proof that she was, in fact, a vampire! Convinced that his worst fears had been realized, George tore Mercy's lungs from her body as well, and burned them, along with her heart, on a nearby rock. Afterward, he gathered up the ashes, took them home, and mixed them into a glass of water which he gave to Edwin to drink.
The seemingly strange concoction that George gave to his son was in keeping with local beliefs about vampires. Even in the early 1890s, the residents of small, rural communities like Exeter, Rhode Island believed that things like vampires could and did exist. Under ordinary circumstances, a God-fearing man like George Brown might put such thoughts out of his mind, but assailed by grief and familial loss, he was desperate to assign blame to someone...or something...and there seemed to be no better candidate than his dead daughter, Mercy. Unfortunately for George, news of his desperate attempt to put an end to Mercy's alleged nocturnal activities seeped past the village borders, prompting a visit from state law officials who were not impressed with his actions. For a time, there was even talk of charging him with the crime of desecrating a corpse. But in the midst of the hoopla, Edwin finally succumbed to his disease, and the judge who was presented with the case decided that George had already suffered enough. George buried his son, and no charges were ever filed in connection with the exhumation of Mercy and the other Brown family members. With Edwin's death, things in Exeter quieted down, with no one reporting anything any more sightings of Mercy....at least for a while. Years later, people in the area began claiming that they had witnessed "unusual activity" around her grave, although no one ever claimed to actually see the unfortunate girl herself. Although, even today, there are still occasional reports of odd lights and strange apparitions in the cemetery where the Brown family are buried, it seems that Mercy Brown is finally at peace...despite the infamy that will always be attached to her name.
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