Weird Historical Events: The New England Vampire Panic
Public DomainA cartoon from the Boston Daily Globe accompanying an article about belief in vampires in Rhode island.
Throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, as tuberculosis ravaged families in New England, something else haunted their dreams: vampires. Eventually, people were whipped into such a frenzy over their belief in the mythical creatures that a weird historical event now known as the New England Vampire Panic broke out.
At that point in time, tuberculosis was known as “consumption,” because it appeared to consume the bodies of the infected. It was also thought to be caused by the deceased rising from their graves to feed on their surviving relatives.
When one family member died of consumption, others were often infected as well and gradually lost their strength. This led desperate communities to exhume bodies and ritually burn internal organs to stop the deceased “vampires” from returning from the dead and attacking others — a belief that closely resembles European folk tradition regarding “vampire” burials.
But how could people know for certain if their loved ones were vampires? Typically, the corpse was deemed to be feeding on the living if it was exhumed and determined to be unusually fresh, especially if the heart or other organs contained liquid blood. Often, these organs were burned to stop the dead from returning. Affected family members would then sometimes inhale smoke from the burned organs or consume the ashes in an attempt to cure their own consumption.
Public DomainAn illustration depicting one of the ways people dealt with “vampires” in their graves.
While this happened numerous times in 18th- and 19th-century New England, the most famous case took place in Rhode Island in 1892. It involved a 19-year-old woman named Mercy Brown who died of tuberculosis along with her mother, Mary, and sister, Mary Olive.
Shortly after their deaths, Mercy and Mary Olive’s brother, Edwin, fell ill, and all of their bodies were exhumed. While Mary and Mary Olive had decomposed, though, Mercy’s body was “oddly well-preserved” with what appeared to be blood still in her skin. To the townspeople, this was all the evidence they needed that Mercy was a vampire.
They removed and burned her heart on a nearby rock, and Edwin reportedly consumed the ashes. Unfortunately, doing so was not an actual medical treatment for tuberculosis, and as such, Edwin died several months later anyway.
After learning about these weird historical events, see some of the most bizarre photos from history that prove the past is far stranger than you realize. Or, dive into nine other historical events that you didn’t learn about in school.
