Vampires are Alive!

This is a transcript for the We're All Stories podcast. This episode can be heard in all its spooky glory here: https://www.buzzsprout.com/1685008/9425876 or on whichever podcast app you use. Want to listen on your favourite smart speaker? just say 'Alexa, play the We're All Stories podcast!'

As many of you know, I had a patron poll to decide what spooky topics I cover in the month of October to celebrate Halloween.

You have spoken and the subject of vampires came out as the most popular choice. Who am I to do other than what you ask, so today I am talking Vampires.

Second place was a two way tie between werewolves and the history of Robert the Doll, so look out for one of those coming soon to a listening device near you!

Now the idea of vampires is old. Real old. They have a long and varied history all over the world. With stories popping up in a number of cultures seemingly independently. Since these are mostly folk traditions, there is not a whole lot of documentation and with them seeming to pop up pretty much all over the world, this makes it hard to stake down a sure and hard origin.

In its basest definition, a vampire is a creature that feeds on the essence, the life force, of another living thing. This is most commonly and recognizably, in the form of blood. This is not always the case though, as you will come to see a little later.

So if you do any searching on the web for the origin of vampires, you will quickly be inundated by the myth of Ambrogio. Said to have originated in "the scriptures of Delphi", in a chapter called "the Vampire Bible" The originator of this tale tells us that a friend of the family who lives in Delphi is descended from the author of these scriptures. After these thousands of years. the time had finally come to bring this story to light.

Sometime between 450-425 bc, there was a boy named Ambrogio. He was an Italian kid who went on a trip to Greece, to visit the oracle at Delphi. He gets there and the oracle gave a prophesy in the form of three cryptic statements. "The curse. The moon. The blood will run."

While the oracle is giving this prophecy, Ambrogio's eye is caught by the beautiful Selene, sister to the Oracle and her caretaker. The two hit it off and quickly fall in love, arranging to run away together at sunrise the following day.

While Apollo, sun god and lord of oracles is checking on his oracle, he notices these crazy kids and becomes jealous because he was in love with Selene AND he had seen her first and called dibs. So he lays a curse on Ambrogio so he will burn if ever his skin should be touched by the light of the sun, making him meeting Selene at sunrise impossible.

Ambrogio flees from the wrath of Apollo into the depths of a conveniently placed cave, which also happened just so happened to be a door to the underworld. Imagine that!

So Ambrogio goes down and makes a deal with Hades who promises to give Ambrogio and Selene sanctuary so they can live happily ever after. In exchange, Ambrogio must bring the Silver bow of Artemis to Hades. As collateral, Ambrogio leaves his soul with Hades in the underworld. To help the lad on his way, Hades gives Ambrogio a simple wooden bow and ten arrows which he is to use to hunt animals to sacrifice to Artemis, winning the goddesses favour.

Ambrogio agrees to Hades' terms and sets off to win the favour of Artemis, virgin goddess of the moon and the hunt.

Now Ambrogio has a dilemma. He was supposed to meet Selene at sunrise but he couldn't be out in the sun. So he decides to write her a letter, but he doesn't have pen or ink. Or paper for that matter but what can ya do?

So Ambrogio hunts a swan, he plucks a single feather to use as a quill and drains its blood to use for ink then he writes a letter to his lady love, leaving it in their meeting spot for her to find. In his letter he tells her all about jealous Apollo and his curse and the deal with Hades. He promises to keep her updated as things unfold.

His letter written, he presents the swan, perfect save for that it is missing a single feather, to the temple of Artemis.

He goes on like this, for the next eight nights, killing a perfect swan, presenting it to Artemis, and writing a letter to his girlfriend in creepy bird's blood ink, as normal people do.

On the tenth night, he hunts his swan but this time he misses, throwing away his shot. I don't know why he didn't just reuse the other arrows, or recover the arrow he had just fired but we'll roll with it.

The guy breaks down, weeping because he now had no arrows with which to hunt his nightly swan. No way to write his letter, and no way to present his offering tovthe goddess of the hunt.

Artemis sees this fervent follower weeping at not being able to present her with a gift and takes pity on the boy, appearing before him to cheer him up.

Ambrogio begs her to let him borrow her silver bow so he can redeem himself and present her with the offering. Instead of asking him why he didn't reuse any of his old arrows from other nights, or why he didn't retrieve his misfired arrow, or why he needed her bow when it was an arrow he needed, instead she handed the bow over without a second thought and the boy took off running, back to the underworld.

Artemis sat there thinking what a nice, devout boy before it struck her what had just happened. Angered, Artemis placed a second curse on Ambrogio, causing all silver to burn him.

As the boy us nearing the cave, the silver bow grows hot, until it is burning him, causing him to drop his prize. Letting Artemis catch up to the thief at her leisure to retrieve her stolen property and punish the malefactor.

When she comes upon the boy, inconsolable beside the stolen bow, he begs for mercy and explaining why he did it.

The goddess again takes pity on the boy, granting him super speed and strength and sharp fangs to tear the throats of his prey to drain their blood and write his love letters.

She further offers him and his woman her protection, as long as they continue to follow her and leave offerings from the hunt at her temples. Only catch was, as I said, Artemis was a VIRGIN goddess and expected her new acolyte and his girlfriend to follow her example. So he could have his cake, but could not eat it too. The lovers had to remain chaste, no kissing or even touching at all, not to mention doing it. Taking what he can get, Ambrogio readily agrees and writes a letter to Selene, telling her to run from the temple to the dock where a ship would be waiting to take her away. On the ship there would be a coffin but she could not open it until the sun had gone down after the ship had made landfall.

She flees the temple, away from jealous Apollo, boards the ship, then waits until the sun goes down after making it to her destination to open the coffin, exposing her love.

The two live for many years, faithfully serving the goddess and not servicing each other. As time goes on, Selene grows old while Ambrogio, his soul still residing in the Underworld, making him deathless and keeping him forever young.

One day, old, frail Selene falls deathly ill. Ambrogio cries to Artemis again, begging her to make Selene immortal as he was.

Artemis, who apparently really had a soft spot for this guy, agrees. She tells him that show will permit him to touch his love just this once and instructs him to bite her throat with his sharp fangs and drink her blood until it was all gone.

He does so and Selene, absent blood, dies but then her body begins to glow, shining ever brighter and floating up off the ground. Artemis lifts Selene to her domain on the moon where she continues to live to this day, where she can look down, watching over her lover she may never touch.

Artemis tells Ambrogio that by drinking Selene's blood, the two blood became one inside him so that from then on, people he bit would become the children of himself and Selene, becoming like him.

In this way Ambrogio sired a large number of Vampires into his family and every vampire in the world is descended from him.

Or so the story goes. It is of course, a total load of crap. If you scour all of Greek mythology. no matter how hard you look, you will find not even the slightest mention of anyone named Ambrogio. Apollo is not the sun, nor the sun god, though he is associated with the sun, the actual sun god and its personification is Helios. Likewise Artemis is not the moon, that honour actually goes to Selene. Wait a second, you mean Selene IS the moon??? So how could Artemis raise her to… herself…?

Of course. she couldn't. In fact. in Greek mythology, the moon, Selene, is a titan and existed BEFORE Artemis. And while their are stories of her lovers, none of them are Italian and none of them named Ambrogio. And wait, so Ambrogio and Selene agreed to commit themselves to each other and live virginally forever, and their blessing from Artemis is contingent on them following through, so how can there be canon myths about Selene's lovers? And the canonically extremely vengeful Artemis seems awfully soft and forgiving, far from the goddess who, with her brother Apollo, ruthlessly slaughtered the children of a woman who became a little too prideful and felt she was a better mother than Artemis' mom. The woman didn't even insult Artemis herself in any way, much less steal her bow, and look what she got. This Artemis seems VERY different from the one in the story.

And while we're talking about deities, can we talk about Hades? All souls of the dead go to Hades, the god and the place. Hades has no need to bargain with humans for their souls, he will possess all human souls in his domain at the time of their death. And just because your soul is in the underworld, doesn't mean you can't die, that's not how souls worked back then. And it DEFINITELY did not mean they did not age. And when Selene is deathly ill, Ambrogio is freaking out because he will not be able to reunite with his love after she died because her soul would go off to wherever while his was in the underworld of Hades. But remember when i said all human souls go to the underworld? There is only one underworld and all mortals, good or bad, go to the same place.

They are misconstruing Hades and Hades with the Judeo-Christian devil and the concept that there are different parts to the afterlife. IE, Selene was dying and going to heaven while Ambrogio was going to hell because he had sold his soul to Hades.

This whole story is a fabrication by our supposedly learned, self proclaimed "mythologist" who devotedly brings to light the "true" versions of myths. Instead of telling us the origin of the vampire, it reverse engineers reasons behind modern tropes associated with vampires, most of which only popped up in the last hundred years, some of only showing up in the past decade or so.

So if this isn't it. what is the origin of the vampire?

So what we see identified as our vampiric precursors in the ancient myths look a little different from our modern notions of the creature. Chief among these are Lamiai, Empusa, Mormos and Lillith. One way in which these are different from modern concepts is that they are not human, with perhaps an exception being made for Lamia, and possibly Lillith depending on which mythology you use. These, while being inhuman monsters, their originators may have been people once, depending on who you ask, though they are usually considered to have lost this humanity so they are classified as monsters or daemons.

Ok, so Lamiai, Empusai and Mormos. These are creatures that show up in the mythologies of ancient Greece. They are sometimes considered to be synonymous because of their many similarities. Whether this is an accurate way of looking at them, I cannot say for sure, though I would say it is unlikely. You'll see why.

Lets start with Empusai. An Empusa was a spirit sent by the Hecate, (heck-CAW-tee)or was Hecate (again, depending on who you ask) this female spirit is said to have one leg, made of copper in its true form, but it can shift shapes to become any animal or a beautiful woman. She then finds a likely young man, seduces him, fattens him up before eventually devouring him.

For Mormos, or mormons, I can't find a whole lot about them. just that they were an ancient Greek Bogeyman. Children seem to have been warned that if they misbehaved, the Mormo would come and eat 'em. see, already way different than the Empusa.

Then, last stop on our vampiric tour of ancient Greece we meet Lamia. Lamia is said to have been the beautiful HUMAN queen of Libya. She fell in love with Zeus, which Zeus's wife didn't appreciate. So in the tradition of the Greek Pantheon taking things too far, Hera puts a curse on the poor girl who had a crush on her man, forcing her to kill and/or eat her own children. So this was already going way too far, but to take it even further, Hera cursed Lamia with perpetual insomnia, so she could not even escape her guilt and remorse in the stillness of sleep. It is said that the act of eating her children, transformed her into a deformed monster. Which when coupled with the insomnia, is understandable. I know when I don't get enough sleep, I'm a monster, so imagine how cranky you'd be after a lifetime of no sleep. Her and her progeny are often depicted as half beautiful women, half snake. Now in some sources, the Lamiai roam the night and seduce young men, luring them off before devouring them. In others, perhaps while eating her children she developed a taste for it, or it is a remnant of Hera's curse but whatever the reason Lamiai are said to hunt children, especially babies, sometimes devouring them bodily as she did with her own children, or devouring their spirit, causing the poor infant to sicken and die. This could possibly be an explanation for SIDS or why a healthy child could suddenly become mortally ill.

Parents of the time of course capitalize on this and use it to scare kids into submission, telling them they better be good or Lamia will gobble them up in the night.

Ok, so looking at these three stories, while Empusai seem vastly different than Mormos, we can see Lamiai as the link that binds them together. Possessing qualities and traits of Empusai as the temptress of the night, leading hapless young men to their dooms like a succubus, and the child eating food habits of the Mormo.

So, looking at it purely logically, if A (Lamiai) equals B (Empusai) and A equals C (Mormos) then logically B equals C too. So on this way perhaps, can we say that Lamiai, Empusai and Mormos are all synonymous, even though Empusai and Mormos share nothing in common. This is the problem with divorcing logic and reason when looking at a topic. It seems to make mathematical sense while ignoring any details that would disagree.

That brings us to Lillith, so lets leave Greece and head to the fertile crescent of ancient Mesopotamia where we see mention of Lillith or Lilliths in Babylonian, Akkadian and Hebrew traditions, to name a few. Now Lillith is a whole 'nother can of worms, popping up in so many different cultures and traditions in that area and deserves more time than I have here to do her, or them, justice so i will save that for perhaps a future episode. Suffice it to say for the purposes of this episode, Lillith seems to share many characteristics with our Greek three.

Now this is in no way an exhaustive list, with similar creatures seeming to pop up all over the ancient world pretty much everywhere where people are. In many cases likely to explain illness and death. I guess it is more comforting to parents whose child is wasting away to have the doctor tell them an evil creature is draining the life of their child rather than scratching their head and saying: 'I dunno.' Also, if it were an outside entity doing this, then you have something to fight against, giving hope to otherwise hopeless people. All they had to do was consult the old stories and or the gods for a way to defeat these beasts and save their loved ones from their grip. Now if you hold onto that and use it as a lens to look at much of folklore and mythology, you can get a better understanding of how these stories grow and develop to help our ancestors explain the natural world around them, and why they have persisted and survived from their often ancient origins into the modern day and the Vampire is no different.

So accounts of our recognizable, modern vampires start popping up around the 1600s in Eastern Europe. Though it should be understood that this is because folk traditions that had been passed on through generations were being written down. So again, it is hard to pin down a time. These folk stories could have been circulating for centuries at this point. We may never know.

Ok, so what exactly does our modern understanding of what a vampire is look like?

Modern Vampires, instead of being inhuman monsters, are counted among the ranks of the undead, having formerly been human, dying then being resurrected in some way. They belong to a class of undead known as Revenants.

Revenants are, more or less, when the body is reanimated sans the soul, whereas a ghost is the spirit without a body. Oftentimes a revenant would come back and seek out their family, whether it is some instinct calling them home, or an innate desire for familiar faces to join them in their eternal loneliness or some other unfathomable reason, or maybe they're just angry about being dead and it's as simple as that. Whatever the reason, they usually end up doing harm in one form or another.

Revenants can count among their number zombies the Nordic draugr, of course. vampires.

The earliest known record of a human turned vampire comes to us from Istria, in what is now Croatia or Hrvatska (her-watts-ka) as the locals say. It is said to have been recorded in the three volume collection The Glory of the Duchy of Carniola written by Johann Weikhard von Valvasor, (yo-han vie-hErd von valve-a-sore)published in 1689. I have been unable to find a translation of this volume to ascertain the veracity of the provenance of this story, but from all I have been able to find, this information is accurate and the story goes like this:

Jure Grando Alilivić (YOU-ra grond-o ah-lee-lo-vich) was born in 1579, in the town of Kringa. Some say that he was a surly, disagreeable man, unloved by his neighbours, but I can find nothing to back this up. This may well have been added later as an embellishment to the original story, playing on the connection of the word Striga related to both witchcraft and vampirism. Striga could be referring to a witch and/or a vampiric entity, with the former often becoming the latter after death. This belief is seen elsewhere too, but we'll get to that later. My point in all this is that the details of him not being liked and not fitting in with society fits the stereotype for many convicted of being witches. So it seems to me that this is a modern embellishment to provide a little more character and a bit of back story to an otherwise relatively unknown man in life, only becoming remarkable by his alleged reanimation. There are other Contemporary accounts of this story but the account of Valvasor is credited with being the first and is the most commonly cited.

Anyway, at least so far as I have been able to piece together, all we really know is that he was born in 1579, lived in Kringa, was married and died in 1656. It is after his death that his story truly begins.

After his death, he would return to terrify his neighbours, coming in the middle of the night and knocking on their doors. It is said that shortly after he visited a house in this way, someone within would turn up mysteriously dead. He also made nightly uh… visits… to his wife's bed. This was also par for the course striga behaviour, Them being known to violate the beds of local women in the night, though in this case Jure seems to have stuck to his wife, even after death had parted them. It would almost be romantic, if it weren't so wrong and terrifying.

This went on for SIXTEEN years! Sixteen years! If it were me I woulda been demanding an exorcism or something day one. Definitely within the first week.

after this had been going on for sixteen years, the local priest, Father Giorgio finally had a personal encounter with Jure for himself when he is said to have stumbled upon him roaming the night and reportedly drove the creature off by presenting a cross and invoking Jesus' name. Up til now it had been the rumours and whispering of scared townsfolk, but now that the priest had seen with his own eyes, he decided something needed to be done. He gathered up some of the men from the town and they tried to kill the creature by driving a wooden stake into its chest but the stake simply bounced off his chest, leaving the unable to penetrate the skin, much less kill the thing.

the next night, a party of nine townsfolk, including Father Giorgio, descended on the graveyard to exhume the body. They say his body, even after sixteen years was completely undecayed and had a smile on its face.

They tried again to stake the vamp a la Buffy with the same result, the wood refused to pierce the skin, doing no damage. Seeing this had no effect, they performed an exorcism on the corpse to drive out whatever malignant thing inhabited it. At this point one of the villagers went for its neck, some say with a wood saw, some with an axe. Either way, the weapon tore easily into the flesh of the cadaver, causing the strigoi to scream and bleed freely, giving further proof that this creature had been feeding on the townsfolk. Some accounts say that the body was then flipped over and reburied face down.

This type of prone burial is a common method to prevent someone considered likely to become a vampire from being able to return. The idea being that when the vamp awakens, it will think it was buried on its back like normal and will attempt to burrow forward, what it would think was up when in reality it would be digging itself deeper into the ground.

Whether this last part happened or not, according to Valvasor, the people of Kringa were never bothered by this entity again.

This story is indicative of a trend that would last for hundreds of years, up into modernity. A great vampire scare seems to have swept Europe, similar to the witch scares and subsequent hunts, everyone was terrified as they, perhaps, tried to reason and come to terms with disease, plagues, and sudden shifts in the mood and/or health of their loved ones. Whether we believe the old stories or not, to our ancestors these vampires were very real and deadly dangerous.

While largely left out of the historic accounts, can see evidence of this in folk traditions and in the large number of anomalous burials from this period. It should be remembered that similar stories are told all over the world, and we see similar burials and defenses elsewhere, for the sake of this episode we are focusing on the European front in the war against the undead.

In stark contrast to the vision of the slim, sleek, ghostly pale creatures that inundate our senses now, surrounding us in books, tv and movies, historic vampires were bloated, with a dark, ruddy complexion and their sustenance was not limited to the blood of the living but was more concerned with their holistic life force, their essence and energy. If you or a loved one suddenly found yourselves constantly drained, with no energy or will, perhaps sickly where once you had been bright and full of health, there was a chance you were being drained by a vampire.

We can still see this now in energy vampires. You know, that person in the office so exceptionally boring and trivial that they seem to drain all the energy from the room. You know who I'm talking about. There's one in every office. If you say, not in mine there isn't, then maybe it's you. Maybe one day you were drained without even realizing it, and now you go out to feed on those around you.

Joking aside, this was a big deal and a dark time. Just as with witches, people were in a panic, friends, family, neighbours, alive or dead, anyone was a potential threat.

After all, ways of becoming a vampire were many and varied and unbelievably simple.

We already discussed how someone who was a witch in life risked becoming a vampire in death, but other risk factors included being mean, disagreeable or greedy in life,, suicides, those that didn't receive proper Christian burials, something as simple as an animal jumping over your grave, especially if it was a dog or a cat, and of course, dying as the victim of a vampire yourself.

Perhaps even more varied than their methods of creation, are the ways to defend yourself and fight this dark threat.

As we saw in the story, a common method was removing the head of a suspected vampire, or one believed to have the potential to become one. we can see many bodies that exhibit evidence of having their head removed post mortem, whether in an attempt to destroy an attacker, or just as a preventative measure. Sometimes, along with the skull being out of place, long bones, often from the legs would be crossed in an x beneath the skull in that age old, universal sign of danger. Sometimes this skull and crossbones might mark the coffin instead or as well, warning people not to risk opening it up, releasing the evil sleeping inside. There is the reverse or prone burial we already talked about. driving a stake of some sort through the heart, we see evidence of this in remains found with a metal rod within the ribcage, having fallen as the flesh that held it withered and decayed. My favourite method of keeping the dead underground where they belonged was by sprinkling rice or seeds in the grave dirt because it is a well known fact that, just as sesame Street teaches us, vampires love to count. A common method to escape the clutches of an undead predator was to scatter rice or seeds or sand, anything like that really because the undead OCD would compel your attacker to stop and count each and every grain. So this is the preventative form of that. We can actually see this outside of Europe too, popping up in Asia as well. Maybe they had something there. It might be a good idea to keep a pocket full of rice with you when you go out. Just in case.

With the discovery and subsequent colonization of the new world and as people emigrated in from all corners of the globe they brought with them their stories along with the superstitions and fears of their homeland.

George Thomas Brown and his wife Mary Eliza Arnold Brown (a somewhat distant relative of the infamous Benedict Arnold) lived together on a farm and had five children: Mary Olive, Edwin Atwood, Mercy Lena, Hattie M. and finally Myra Frances.

Just two short years after the birth of Myra, Mary Eliza dies of consumption, what we know now as tuberculosis, followed by Mary Olive the following year.

The disease seemed to be content with this for a while, leaving the family alone for 7 years, but strikes again when Edwin becomes sick. Edwin packs up and he and his wife travel away to find healing air elsewhere. This seems to help him as his symptoms ease.

Later that same year, while her brother was convalescing, Mercy suddenly falls prey to the disease and dies soon after.

Now here is where we start seeing some differences between accounts. Some say Edwin, feeling better, returns home only to take a turn for the worse while others say the worsening symptoms prompted his return to be with his family as his health failed. Either way, it is said this change in his health happened just after Mercy's death. According to some accounts. Edwin was heard to scream that Mercy was there in the room with him, crushing his chest so he could not breath. Personally I feel like this "fact" was a little too convenient, it likely being a later embellishment added over the years.

Neighbours of the Browns, who had thought til now that this was a streak of uncommon bad luck for George Brown now begin talking, saying this chain of misfortune had to come from a supernatural being, preying on this family. One of those who had died had to be returning to take their family into the ground with them, feeding on their life force.

What prompted this supposition on their part? It seems a leap to think sickness and vampirism go hand in hand but to understand this, you need to understand a little about the disease itself.

Tuberculosis is a bacterial infection, chiefly affecting the lungs, though it can also affect the rest of the organs, including the brain, and even the bones and spinal chord of its victim. Those that contract the disease seem to shrivel and waste away, as if something were consuming them from the inside, hence the name consumption. This consumption could be slow and painful, taking years to kill its victim, or it could move fast, as was the case of Mercy. This was known as the galloping kind, referring to its rapid pace as it moved through the body.

Because of how the disease seemed to eat away at its victim until they were nothing but skin and bones, each breath more difficult than the last, the light and life in their eyes fading, it is easy to see how, when so little was known about the disease, people looking for answers could fall back on the old knowledge, and see this infection as the result of a vampire, feeding on and eventually draining its prey.

With this fear of the undead in everyone's mind, folks from the town told George their theory, trying to convince him to take action against this threat.

George reluctantly acquiesces, giving them permission to exhume the bodies of his family dead. A doctor Metcalf is called in to inspect the remains, though unwillingly according to all accounts. He did not believe in this superstition. Some accounts have George Brown excusing himself from this procedure, not believing in it himself, but letting his neighbours sate their curiosity, and in the off chance they were right, maybe it could heal his only son. As a father, he was at this point, after seeing his young daughters so cruelly cut down, Mercy was only nineteen when she died, willing to do anything and everything if there was even a sliver of hope that it would help him protect his remaining children. While other accounts include him among those present, grimly seeing this determination through to the end.

On March 17 of that year,, a small group gathered at the cemetery. The mother, Mary Eliza, was the first to succumb and is the first to be exhumed. After eight years, as you can imagine, Mary was pretty thoroughly decomposed, so they reburied her and moved onto the next victim, Mary Olive, who being there only a year less than her mother, was likewise rotted away.

Now there was only Mercy left. Now Mercy had died in January, in the dead of winter. while some sources say she was likewise exhumed, most agree that she was kept in a crypt in the graveyard which acted as a sort of cold storage, the ground being too frozen to bury her right away.

Either way, the cold had effectively kept her refrigerated, stopping decay from setting in so she seemed almost as fresh as when they had put her there. When they cut onto her, blood flowed from the wound, proving to them that she had been feeding. You can't forget, she had only just died, so between the cold and the short amount of time, it is no wonder to us now that she was not decomposed. And if this were all the result of a vampire attack on the family perpetrated by Mercy, wouldn't she have needed to have been the first to have died?

The terrified townsfolk took this preservation as proof positive that Mercy was the one afflicting the Brown Family, feeding on her own family, draining them and killing them, one at a time.

They removed Mercy's heart, still full of blood that had not had a chance to coagulation, as well as, by some accounts, her liver. These were burned on a stone right there in the graveyard, next to the grave of her mother. Imagine the level of fear that could cause these probably rational men to desecrate this family's remains, violating the corpse of the daughter on the grave of her mother. Stay with me because it gets worse.

They took the ashes of Mercy's organs and mixed it with some liquid to make a tonic. According to the old tales, the only way the still living victim would recover was to consume these remains. To in a sense consume the one who had been feeding on them, reabsorbing their life force back into themselves. Edwin drank the tonic made from the remains of his dead sister, 2 months dead. Edwin's condition. rather than improving became worse and he died shortly after on May 2. Perhaps it had been too late to save Edwin, but it seems that, to the townsfolk at least, the two youngest children of George Brown had been saved.

Myra died 7 years later at the age of just 17, but I cannot find her cause of death. According to the story at least, it was not tuberculosis though, that curse having been lifted from the family with the re-killing of Mercy. Hattie on the other hand lived a good, long life giving birth to two children of her own (the only Brown family member live long enough to reproduce and carry the family line) She died at the rule old age of 79.

Surely this tale took place in the distant past somewhere far away, right? Mercy Brown and her family lived in the town of Exeter, Rhode Island on the East coast of the United States. The year? Mercy died and was exhumed as recently as 1892. She was the last and best known of a string of such stories, marking the end of the New England Vampire panic.

A quick note for any looking to research this story for themselves, most sources, even published books, claim the year of Mary Olive's death as having occurred in the year 1886 but if you look at her gravestone, her death is clearly Inscribed as June 6, 1884.

Though she may be long dead and buried, Mercy Brown continues to live on. See, when the press found out about all these strange happenings, the newspapers had a field day, the story being recounted over and over in a wide variety of places. While this was circulating, a young Irish born manager of an English Theatre company named Abraham is said to have been touring America with his acting troupe at the time of these events. Sources say newspaper clippings recounting the story of Mercy Brown were found among his papers after his death in 1912. So why are concerned with whether or not this theatre manager saw this story or not? This young man was better known as Bram Stoker and he would go on to write a little story of his own. A story wherein a vampire feeds on the blood of a young woman, ultimately killing her. After her death she rises up, coming to feed in turn on the life of her loved ones. And the name of this story? You may have heard of it. It's a little book known as Dracula.

According to some, Mercy's ghost still wanders the streets of Exeter, perhaps looking for her family, perhaps seeking her next meal. I choose to believe Mercy is at peace now, resting with her family evermore.

Mercy's grave and those of her family can still be visited, residing in the Chestnut Hill Cemetery in Exeter. The crypt too can still be seen wherein her body was stored until it was inspected, dissected and taken apart by her fearful neighbours.

Whether real or just a superstitious way for our ancestors to deal with their grief, who can say. Who can tell what lurks there, just out of sight, hiding in the dark of the night.