Chapter one

Mercy lena Brown Born in Exeter, Rhode Island, Mercy was one of many Brown family members who contracted consumption. Mercy was just 19 when she died in 1892, a few years after her mother and sister had also succumbed to the disease. Mercy's father, George Brown, survived.

In Exeter, Rhode Island, several members of George and Mary Brown's family suffered a sequence of tuberculosis infections in the final two decades of the 19th century. Tuberculosis was called "consumption" at the time, and was a devastating and much-feared disease.

The mother, Mary Eliza, was the first to die of the disease, followed in 1884 by their eldest daughter, Mary Olive, according to her grave stone. In 1891, daughter Mercy and son Edwin also contracted the disease.[1] Friends and neighbors of the family believed that one of the dead family members was a vampire, although they did not use that name, and had caused Edwin's illness. This was in accordance with threads of contemporary folklore, which linked multiple deaths in one family to undead activity. Consumption was a poorly understood condition at the time and the subject of much superstition.

George Brown was persuaded to give permission to exhume several bodies of his family members. Villagers, the local doctor, and a newspaper reporter exhumed the bodies on March 17, 1892.[1] The bodies of both Mary and Mary Olive exhibited the expected level of decomposition, so they were thought not to be the cause. However, the corpse of a daughter, Mercy, exhibited almost no decomposition, and still had blood in the heart. This was taken as a sign that the young woman was undead and the agent of young Edwin's condition. Her lack of decomposition was more likely due to her body being stored in freezer-like conditions in an above-ground crypt during the two months following her death.

As superstition dictated, Mercy's heart and liver were burned, and the ashes were mixed with water to create a tonic and was given to the sick Edwin to drink, as an effort to resolve his illness and stop the influence of the undead. The young man died two months later.[1] What remained of Mercy's body was buried in the cemetery of the Baptist Church in Exeter after being desecrated.

In the end, the father, George Brown, was one of very few never to contract tuberculosis, living until 1922, just long enough to see bacteriologists Albert Calmette and Camille Guérin discover the BCG vaccine which was widely used to treat and cure tuberculosis.