Against the Grave

A few miles from where I live is a small graveyard with one tombstone more decorated than the rest. Offerings of trinkets and candles tell a story about a woman mourned by people who never knew her. No story from the life of this young woman, who died of tuberculosis at the age of nineteen, indicated that she would lead a notorious afterlife.

Mercy Brown’s grave. Photo by the author, March 2020.

Indeed, no story from the life of Mercy Lena Brown has survived at all, though round-ups of weird history or the dark side of Rhode Island sometimes call her “New England’s Last Vampire.”¹ Illness spreading in her family after she died in 1892 gave root to a story that she was feeding off the life-force of her remaining relatives. This story convinced members of her community of Exeter, observed by the medical examiner, to exhume her body and cut out her heart and liver two months after her death. The gruesome tale received sprinkles of lurid contemporary news coverage, but the piece missing in the story is Mercy herself.

We do not know anything about Mercy, called Lena in her death announcement, as a human being. The only reconstruction of the nineteen years she lived comes from timelines, assumptions, attempts to read against the grain and into the community unable to protect her in life or death. The historical record can only create a woman-shaped grave for Mercy Brown. She only gains a narrative after she dies.

Facts give a frame to her life: born August 1872; lost her mother, Mary Eliza (Arnold) Brown and sister, Mary Olive or “Ollie”, both to tuberculosis, in the 1880s; her brother Edwin traveled to Colorado Springs to treat his poor health; tuberculosis claimed her in January 1892. The disease would go on to claim three more of her sisters in the 1890s (Annie Laura Brown Taylor and Jennie Adeline Brown Edwards in 1895, and Myra Frances Brown Caswell in 1898), but they do not figure at all in Mercy’s immediate afterlife.²

Trinkets and a Bible held open with a rock at the base of Mercy Brown’s headstone. Photo by the author, March 2020.

The first time I visited Mercy L. Brown’s grave was in spring of 2020. Faux flowers and a Bible held open with stones attempted to honor her as I hoped to do on that glaringly sunny day. The cemetery’s above-ground tomb, where, I think, Mercy’s body laid while the ground was frozen, seems ready to crumble into the earth, its door ajar. It may not be the same structure as the one that stood in 1892; Mercy’s current grave might not be her original one, for all I know. When her brother Edwin’s health deteriorated shortly after her death, who first spoke aloud the superstition that one of the dead Brown women was feeding on a living man? Edwin had long been ill, and although he was coming home to die, something about this situation allowed a New England superstition to grow teeth in Exeter: one of the dead was feeding on Edwin, and they needed to be exhumed, any living organs destroyed.

Who stood at the unburials of Mary Eliza, Mary Olive, and Mercy Lena? Folklorist Michael E. Bell reports that Mercy’s father George T. Brown (d. 1922) and brother Edwin refused to be present, but they allowed the ritual.³ There is no mention in any account of Mercy’s other siblings. What could have twisted in the hearts of those who loved her when they saw her afterlife as gruesome? Were they coerced? Did anyone protest?

All I know of Mercy is this river of the unanswerable. Vital records and newspapers cannot answer any of my questions. An anonymous letter to the Pawtuxet Valley Gleaner written only about a week after the exhumation claimed that Mercy’s father and brother, as well as Dr. Harold Metcalfe, medical examiner for Exeter and adjoining North Kingstown, had been resistant to the ritual.⁴ Of the three corpses, only Mercy’s showed an irregular lack or lessening of decay. I want to ask this writer, as well as the people who stood in the cemetery in 1892, was this really unexpected if she had been dead in the cold for only two months?

To the community, it seems, her uncorruption demonstrated she was roaming a world that no longer belonged to her and taking from a man bound to her by blood. She had grown unnatural in her crossing between life and death, and perhaps unnatural too in the selfishness of a woman stealing life from a man.

The tale grows more lurid, details springing from a few sensational articles syndicated in newspapers across the country.⁵ Someone cut out Mercy’s heart—perhaps Dr. Metcalfe—and someone burned her heart and liver so her brother could drink the ashes in water. In the logic of the superstition, consuming her was supposed to stop her from consuming him. News coverage beginning in 1892 marveled at a phenomenon of exhumations in Rhode Island, calling the superstition and ritual “weird,” “strange,” “dread” and “grisly.”

“It is an extraordinary instance of a barbaric superstition outcropping in and coexisting with a high general culture . . .”

A lengthy article in the Boston Evening Transcript entitled “Vampires in Rhode Island” provides many of the details of Mercy’s story, yet was not published until 1896, four years after her death. The writer, Rene Bache, a “special correspondent” in Washington, cited recent ethnographic research, not accounts from people in Exeter.⁶ The impetus for the national attention was the publication of George R. Stetson’s article “The Animistic Vampire in New England” in the January 1896 issue of The American Anthropologist.⁷ Stetson remarks on the “mysterious survival” in the region of Exeter and surrounding towns of the “barbaric” vampire superstition, which he traces to ancient West Asia, even in “the closing years of what we are pleased to call the enlightened nineteenth century.”⁸ Bache largely replicates Stetson’s language without directly quoting the academic article.

Though contemporary print sources never mention Mercy or her family by name, the tales from within and without the Exeter community have woven together to portray what happened. A Brown descendant, Lewis “Everett” Peck, told Michael E. Bell in 1981 that when he was a child, adults warned him away from the rock where the burning of Mercy’s organs had taken place.⁹ There are a few candidates in the cemetery that could have been the site of the deed, one near the crypt and another on the opposite side of the cemetery, closer to where Mercy’s grave lies today. Peck’s oral history relays a much more powerful undead figure terrorizing the Brown family, making a dozen men sick, and Mercy’s body turning over in her grave. In reality, the only supposed victim of Mercy’s hunger was her brother Edwin, who died even after the rite of drinking the alleged undead. The later deaths of three other Brown sisters, occurring after the ritual, have no place in the vampire story because the story is not really about vampirism, but about the moment of deciding to mark someone as a monster. In that moment, what hope did Edwin and his father feel? What shame? When Edwin drank down his sister, did he remember the girl she had been—the one we do not know—or only imagine a fiend?

While the afterlife Mercy’s surviving family and community gave her was unusual, her death was not. There were 19 deaths in Exeter in 1892, five of them from tuberculosis or consumption.¹⁰ The death records list the occupations of the deceased, including two schoolteachers barely older than Mercy. We know from the Exeter state census of 1885 and federal census of 1880 that she attended public school, but Mercy had no occupation and we otherwise do not know her place in the community.¹¹ Her death did not take place in an unusual period of illness in Exeter, where tuberculosis tended to claim a handful of people every few years.

According to death records, Mercy’s mother Mary was one of four consumption deaths in the town, dying in December 1883 rather than 1884 as her headstone states. None of the following year’s 18 deaths are listed as being from consumption; Mary Olive’s death, which her grave gives as happening on June 6, 1884, is not listed at all. Between 1883 and 1891, the town’s death rate ranged from 11 to 21, with zero to four consumption deaths.¹² However, as with his sister Mary Olive, Edwin Brown’s death on May 2, 1892 is not in the death register. These omissions indicate the records might be incomplete and remind me that “truth” is not something so simple as fixing a number in ink. I wondered, reading these short lists circumscribing a community’s pain, how many people did Mercy grieve before infection began to strip her away into nothing but a soul? And did any other bereaved families in the town fear predation from their beloved dead?

The Brown family plot. In the front, we see the grave of her mother Mary on the right and her father George on the left. Mercy’s grave is behind her father’s and her sister Mary Olive’s grave is behind their mother’s. Photo by the author, October 2025.

Both Stetson and the Transcript article emphasize the social isolation of Exeter. Bache writes, copying most of Stetson’s language, “This region, where abandoned farms are numerous, is the tramping ground of the book agent, the chromo pedler [sic] and the patent medicine man. The social isolation away from the larger villages is as complete as it was two centuries ago.”¹³ Stetson credits poor education stemming from the isolated environment for the persistence of superstition:

the region […] suggests the almost criminal neglect of the conservators of public education to give instruction to our farming youth in a more scientific and more practical agriculture. It has been well said by a banker of well known name in an agricultural district in the midlands of England that “the depression of agriculture is a depression of brains.”¹⁴

Stetson notes that while Rhode Island overall had a high population density, the region where the superstition was most prevalent had a much lower population density combined with an abundance of abandoned farms. Federal and state census data confirm this, showing a rapid decline in the population of the town in the decade before Mercy’s death: 1310 in 1880, 1086 in 1885, and 964 in 1890. Economic decline seems to have been a far more powerful adversary to the town’s population than disease.¹⁵

In Pleasant places in Rhode Island, and how to reach them by Mariana M. Tallman, published one year after Mercy’s death, the author details a trip through Exeter on Ten Rod Road: “In this wild and desolate land of hills and valleys, far from social interests and many human ties, it is a wonder that the few discontented lingerers are not all insane.” Exeter is represented by two illustrations: a defunct mill and the church and graveyard where Mercy had recently been buried. Images and text from Mariana M. Tallman, Pleasant places in Rhode Island, and how to reach them (Providence: Press of the Journal Company, 1893), 139-141.

Historians and scholars surmise one of the articles about the fate of Mercy’s family and the spate of vampire tales in New England made its way to the eyes of Bram Stoker, and they see Mercy in Lucy Westenra in his 1897 Dracula: uncorrupted not like a saint but like an abomination, rising from the bower of her tomb to feast on the living. Mercy’s story was also part of the cultural milieu of Rhode Island writer H.P. Lovecraft when he wrote “The Shunned House” decades later. Nothing of Mercy’s human character could have made its way into fiction, though, because nothing was ever printed about who she was. Not a word from her mouth or pen, a brushstroke or line from a drawing, a stitch from her needle, a note from a song have survived. Accused of consuming, it is Mercy who was consumed: by disease, by her brother, and by other people’s stories. Bell argues that “Folk medicine is successful because it treats the community along with the patient. […] The practitioner must reunite and heal the broken community.”¹⁶ The anonymous writer to the Pawtuxet Valley Gleaner similarly concluded, “we do not blame any one for [their] proceedings as they were intended without doubt to reli[e]ve the anxiety of the living.”¹⁷ Mercy’s body and story were violated, cannibalized, remade, the fuel for assuaging the fear and grief of a bereaved town.

The local and national press only saw barbaric people performing an inverted sacrament and called Mercy a vampire, a term Everett Peck claims the community never used. How much of the truth did these writers twist, taking advantage of the remoteness of the place to spin a lurid tale? What social bias did George Stetson exhibit in concluding the superstition’s survival in the rural area was an example of a “depression of brains”? None of these writers can answer these questions, nor do they communicate any information about the victim herself. None of them preserved any memories of Mercy’s personality, her appearance, the soul of her laugh, her favorite season or color.

A Google Maps screenshot of the graveyard next to the historic Chestnut Hill Baptist Church. Screenshot captured July 20, 2026.

A “private member story” on Ancestry.com echoes dozens of times across user accounts, only the first few lines visible: “Mercy Lena Plantagenet Browne Brown, Her Ghost Hangs Out By The Bridge With The Scent of Roses Lingering, The First Recorded Vampire In Ame[…].” Mercy simultaneously becomes a different type of undead and America’s “first” rather than “last” vampire. I have not been able to find the origin of this story, a new view of Mercy through the cracked window of folklore, nor can I find evidence that she bore the name Plantagenet. One uncited photo repeats on the site, too, supposedly depicting the young woman. Scrolling through entries for Mercy in public family trees more commonly shows a Photoshopped girl in a coffin with blood dripping from her mouth or ClipArt of a bat.

Meditations like Francine Prose’s Anne Frank: The Book, the Life, the Afterlife and Cynthia Ozick’s 1997 essay “Who Owns Anne Frank?” try to envision the young writer propelled, alive, through a twentieth century she did not live to see. Anne’s own words, the memories of people who knew her, the photographs and material evidence and ten seconds of video that accidentally captured Anne all provide foundations for imagining her as an adult, perhaps a writer with a successful career. For all the imagining, traces remain of the person who lived and composed her own narrative about herself. In contrast, we do not have any evidence to believe anything about what Mercy’s life could have been like if she had lived past 1892. Correcting the oral traditions about her afterlife tell us nothing more about her. The disappearance of her identity has been rapid, rending a whole life into folklore in just over a century, and if not for facts on government documents and the existence of her grave, she might as well be imaginary.

I revisited Mercy’s grave last autumn. A new wave of offerings gathers around her tombstone, which is bolted to the ground to protect against theft. The stone is the last vestige of Mercy that we can take, and the only remnant of Mercy to which we can give.¹⁸ Countless people have paid homage and left mementos at her headstone. None of us know whom we are remembering.

The back side of Mercy Brown’s grave, bolted in place. Photo by the author, October 2025.

1. J.W. Ocker, “Grave of Mercy Brown in Exeter,” Atlas Obscura, October 12, 2016. Accessed July 20, 2026. https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/grave-mercy-brown.
2. Jennifer L. Galpin, “Have Mercy…,” Rhode Island Historical Society blog, October 31, 2016. https://www.rihs.org/have-mercy/. Accessed July 20, 2026.
3. Michael E. Bell, Food for the Dead: On the Trail of New England’s Vampires (Carroll & Graf Publishers, 2001), 36.
4. “Exeter Hill and Vicinity,” Pawtuxet Valley Gleaner, March 25, 1892, 5. West Warwick Public Library Community History Archive. https://westwarwick.advantage-preservation.com/viewer/?k=vampire&t=32373&i=t&d=01011876-12311901&m=between&ord=k1&fn=pawtuxet_valley_gleaner_usa_rhode_island_phenix_18920325_english_5&df=1&dt=8. Accessed July 20, 2026.
5. Examples ranging in geography and over several years include “A Rhode Island Superstition,” The Coffeyville Weekly Journal (Coffeyville, Kansas), July 29, 1892, 7; “Weird Superstition,” The Plattsmouth Daily Journal (Plattsmouth, Nebraska), August 4, 1892, 2; “Vampires in Exeter,” The News Tribune (Tacoma, Washington), March 28, 1896, 3; “Vampires in Exeter,” The Sunday Morning Leader (Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania), March 29, 1896, 9.
6. Rene Bache, “Vampires in Rhode Island,” Boston Evening Transcript (Boston, Massachusetts), January 18, 1896, 16.
7. George R. Stetson, “The Animistic Vampire in New England,” American Anthropologist 9, no. 1 (January 1896): 1-13. https://www.jstor.org/stable/658266.
8. Stetson, 7.
9. Bell, 8.
10. It is not clear how or why the record-keepers differentiated between the two terms; phthisis is another term used for the disease. See Deaths Registered in the Town of Exeter, R.I. for the Year ending December 31st, 1892. Rhode Island Death Index, 1852-1946. Rhode Island Department of State, Providence, RI. Ancestry.com. Rhode Island U.S., Death Registrations and Records, 1852-1946 [database on-line]. Lehi, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2024. Accessed July 20, 2026.
11. Inhabitants in the Town of Exeter, June 4, 1880. Tenth Census of the United States, 1880. (NARA microfilm publication T9, 1,454 rolls). Records of the Bureau of the Census, Record Group 29. National Archives, Washington, D.C. Ancestry.com. Accessed July 20, 2026.
12. The statistics are as follows: 1883: 19 deaths, 4 from consumption; 1884: 18 deaths, 0 from consumption; 1885: 19 deaths, 3 from consumption; 1886: 17 deaths, 0 from consumption; 1887: 12 deaths, 2 from consumption; 1888: 11 deaths, 0 from consumption; 1889: 21 deaths, 3 from consumption; 1890: 13 or 14 deaths (one partially crossed out), 3 from consumption; 1891: 16 deaths, 2 from consumption.
13. Bache, 16.
14. Stetson, 8.
15. Erin Bartram’s observation. (The editor wishes to express how very rare and appreciated this is).
16. Bell, 38.
17. ”Exeter Hill and Vicinity,” 5.
18. My thanks to Erin Bartram for this difficult insight on headstone theft as the final consumption of Mercy Brown, and for many months guiding me through the writing of this essay.