The terrifying Mercy Brown vampire that inspired ‘Dracula’
The large majority of movie monsters that haunt the Hollywood screens, such as Frakenstien’s monster, the Creature from the Black Lagoon, and the Wolfman, are thankfully based on utter fiction. The same can be said of Dracula, the vicious vampire who sucks the blood from his enemies and hides in the dark shadows of his gothic home, yet, there is one terrifying case that seems to mirror several traits of the character.
The Mercy Brown incident is one of the most infamous cases of the New England vampire panic of the 19th century, which saw the deadly disease tuberculosis spread across Rhode Island, Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont. Believing that tuberculosis was spread due to deceased relatives consuming the lives and souls of their surviving family, the panic saw bodies exhumed and human organs burned to stop the ‘vampiric’ disease.
Occurring in Rhode Island in 1892, the incident of Mercy Brown is the most famous of such exhumation cases. The grim process of exhumation during the vampire panic era of the late 19th century saw a corpse being turned over in its grave so that the person’s mouth would face the earth, whilst more gruesome accounts involved decapitation and the burning of internal organs.
In the case of the recently deceased Brown, her family weren’t too keen on the idea of her body being dug out and potentially burned, particularly as they didn’t believe that vampires were to blame for the spread of tuberculosis. Unfortunately, the world was nowhere near as democratic back then as it is today, and when the local community began to insist on exhuming Brown’s body, her family could do nothing to quell the fury of the mob.
Yet, when Brown’s body was exhumed, there was not the rotting corpse that onlookers expected, instead, it had barely decomposed, and, worse still, it had turned over by itself.
To make matters even more mysterious, there was evidence of fresh blood on the body, with her heart still in surprisingly good condition. Understandably, given the lack of moral reason during this era, the villagers panicked and burned her heart and liver, using the ashes to make a tonic that was given to Edwin, Mercy Brown’s brother, in an effort to rid him of the disease. Yet, to the bewilderment of the community, Edwin passed away anyway two months later.
The shocking nature of the story went on to influence contemporary tales and urban legends, spreading across the country. As such, it is popularly believed that the character of Lucy Westenra, the young and beautiful daughter of a wealthy family, in Bram Stoker’s original Dracula novel from 1897 is based on the life of Mercy Brown, with the author having read about the shocking story through newspaper articles at the time.
Stoker wasn’t the only iconic author to take inspiration either, with the great H. P. Lovecraft referring to the vampiric case in the novelette, The Shunned House.
Whilst the ‘facts’ of the creepy tale can be called into question in a modern context, there’s no denying that the Mercy Brown incident remains an eerie campfire story and a gruesome reminder of the power of paranoia and superstition in human history.
