Welcome to brain Stuff, a production of I Heart Radio. Hey brain Stuff Lauren Vogelbaum. Here, today's episode gets a bit graphic about nineteenth century tuberculosis, death and post burial happenings. So listener discretion is advised, because yes, it was a scene only Dracula, Lestat Nadia and their blood spottered ilk could love. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries,
New Englanders were gripped by vampire panic. In desperation, they began dismembering suspected vampires and hopes of driving off the terror and death that threatened to upend their lives. So how did vampires come to invade the newly created United States. It all began in some unfortunate New England villages as tuberculosis,
then called consumption, ravaged entire families and communities. This bacterial lung disease, which spreads easily among family members, gives those infected horrific symptoms, fever and ashen appearance, and some can eyes in some cases that bleed from their mouths. It was a slow, deadly course of disease, almost as if the life was gradually being drained out of the patient. It earned the name consumption for the way it caused
dramatic weight loss. So severe was the epidemic that it claimed around two percent of the region's population from to eighteen hundred and eventually killed perhaps a quarter of the East Coast citizens. We spoke by an email with folklorist and author Michael Bell. He said, imagine a communicable disease a great deal slower to manifest than COVID nineteen, with
symptoms even more ambiguous. One that did not explode through a population, leaving in its wake the dead and those who survived through good fortune or natural immunity, and then disappear or become latent. A disease that instead, once it grasped, person could go in and out of remission over a period of months, or years, or even decades. No one understood how diseases spread back then. All they knew was that as consumption victims perished, their surviving family members would
begin to fall ill one by one. Neighbors could be afflicted too, seemingly at random. Some families would be all but wiped out, while others escaped completely intact. So frightened villagers began to believe that the first to die were perhaps vampires of sorts. At night, the rumors went those sharp toothed blood suckers would wriggle out of their graves, stock their own families, and slowly but surely suck the life out of them until they too died horrendous deaths.
Terrified villagers reasoned there was only one way to halt the vampire attacks, but first they had to dig up the bodies and examine them. If the corps appeared to be less decayed than expected, that sliced the bodies open and sift through the internal organs. If those organs contained
liquid blood, the person was deemed possessed. Bell said. The theory seems to have been that this corpse was being inhabited by some sort of evil spirit that was sustaining itself by draining the life or blood from the living. This spiritual possession had to be destroyed, and the evil bond between the living and dead needed to be broken, usually by burning the infected organ and sometimes feeding the ashes to those who were ill to be extra sure
that the vampire would not arise again. Sometimes the corpses were beheaded, some had their bones shattered and rearranged in a skull, and crossbones symbol, but Bell reiterates that these assumed vampires were never living people, and they didn't often use the term anyway. He said, the vampires were always corpses.
The people who were performing the ritual never referred to the corpses they exhumed as vampires, although some outsiders, including newspaper writers and local historians, sometimes labeled these consumption rituals as vampirism. According to Bell, desperate grave digging scenes played
out at least eighty times throughout the vampire panic. Often the bodies were disinterred at night, the grizzly ceremony attended only by close relatives, but some Vermont towns took things a step further, burning organs for hundreds of witnesses to see and perhaps providing them some hope that the plague of vampires was ended. Bell said. The earliest documented consumption vampire ritual I found is from Willington, Connecticut, in seventeen
eighty four. The last authentically documented case occurred in eighteen ninety two in Exeter, Rhode Island. These dates coincide with the consumption epidemic in New England, which began to rise dramatically in the late seventeen hundreds and continued to the eighteen hundreds. But in eighteen eighty two, the year that German physician Robert Coke proved the tuberculosis was caused by bacterium,
the vampire rituals slowed to a halt. But before it all ended, there was a climax of sorts, one that's become known as the Mercy Brown vampire incident. The story goes like this. In two a Rhode Island farmer named George Brown watched consumption kill his wife and then two daughters in succession. Then his son Edwin became deadly ill too. Although he wanted no part of the ritual, villagers eventually persuaded Brown to let them exhume the bodies of his
wife and daughters for examination. The bodies of his wife and one daughter were just bones, but Mercy, the most recent to die just two months prior, was very intact. That she died in midwinter and thus was partially preserved by the frigid temperatures did not stop the examiners from being suspicious. They also noted that her fingernails and hair had grown, which we now know as an optical illusion
caused by the flesh retracting around them. But armed with this evidence, the villagers were certain that found their vampire. They cut out her heart and burned it in For good measure, they had Edwin drink the ashes and hopes that he'd recover. Not long after, consumption claimed him too. Perhaps it's not surprising, then, that Rhode Island was reportedly called the vampire capital of America. Such was the power of the Exeter vampire slayings that their stories carried across
the Atlantic. According to some accounts, when Irish born writer Bram Stoker, the author of the novel Dracula, died in witnesses say they found newspaper clippings of the Mercy Brown saga in his files. Today's episode was written by Nathan Chandler and produced by Tyler Clang. For more on this lots of other creepy topics is at how stuff works
dot com. Brain Stuff is production of iHeart Radio. For more podcasts from my heart Radio because the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows,