Mercy Brown, the Exeter “Vampire”

Mercy Lena Brown – her family called her Lena – grew up on a farm in Exeter, a thinly populated, stony corner of southern Rhode Island that had been losing people for decades. Her mother, Mary Eliza, died of consumption, as tuberculosis was then known, in December 1883, and her elder sister Mary Olive followed in June 1884. Lena fell ill years later with the fast-moving “galloping” form of the disease and died in January 1892, aged 19. By then her brother Edwin, who had gone to Colorado in the hope of a cure, had come home gravely ill.

Consumption was the leading killer in 19th-century New England, and when it swept through one family, some rural communities explained it with a folk belief: one of the dead might be draining the life from the living. Neighbours pressed Lena’s father, George Brown, to let them check. On March 17, 1892, with a local doctor present and a Providence Journal correspondent watching, the bodies of the three women were exhumed at the Chestnut Hill cemetery. The mother and elder daughter were little more than bones; Lena, who had lain in a cold above-ground vault for only two months, was well preserved. Her heart and liver were removed and burned on a nearby rock, and the ashes were given to Edwin. He died less than two months later.

According to the Journal, George Brown did not believe in the ritual and agreed only to satisfy his neighbours; the doctor told those present that Lena’s lungs showed the marks of tuberculosis. The case drew wide press coverage and an anthropologist’s study of the “barbaric superstition.” Folklorist Michael Bell, who has documented 18 such cases in Rhode Island alone and more than 80 across New England, stresses that the people involved did not call the dead “vampires” – the newspapers did – and describes the exhumations as a desperate act of a family with no other medical hope.

Lena now lies beside her father and brother in the cemetery behind the 1838 Chestnut Hill Baptist Church, which is still in use. Her headstone has been stolen and is now held down with an iron strap; visitors leave coins, cough drops and plastic fangs. Around her a ghost lore has grown: she is said to murmur in the cemetery, to appear as the scent of roses on a nearby bridge, and to visit the dying. Exeter has never promoted the story, and many locals would rather it were left alone.

Legend-trippers report a voice or murmuring captured on recorders at the grave, a glowing light or figure in the cemetery, and the smell of roses on a local bridge. Folk tradition also says she visits the terminally ill to reassure them, and that no grass grows on her grave.

Lena Brown’s grave in the cemetery behind Chestnut Hill Baptist Church on Ten Rod Road (Route 102) in Exeter; visits peak around Halloween. The cemetery is still in use, and the grave should be visited only in daylight and with respect.

The case is often linked to Lucy Westenra in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) and is referenced in H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Shunned House.” It has featured in documentaries such as Connecticut Public Television’s Vampires in New England and the MonsterQuest episode “Vampires in America,” and inspired songs, novels and children’s books. Michael Bell’s Food for the Dead is the standard history.