The New England Vampire Panic: Mercy Brown and America’s Consumption Graves

Snow-covered nineteenth-century New England graveyard with slate headstones and bare trees at dusk

The last well-known vampire exhumation in the United States happened in 1892, in Exeter, Rhode Island, and it was reported in the newspapers. That fact still stops me. We tend to file vampire panics away in a distant Balkan past, comfortably remote. Mercy Brown was disinterred nine years after the Brooklyn Bridge opened. What Actually … Read more