CONSPIRACY THEORY: Mercy Brown & the Vampire Panic featuring Dr. Harini Bhat

Summary

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Episode Overview

Podcast: Conspiracy Theories, Cults, & Crimes
Episode: CONSPIRACY THEORY: Mercy Brown & the Vampire Panic (feat. Dr. Harini Bhatt)
Host: Vanessa Richardson
Date: May 25, 2026
Theme:
This episode dives deep into the Mercy Brown vampire panic of 1892, a real case where fear, superstition, and lack of medical knowledge contributed to ritual exhumations and “vampire” hunts in New England. Host Vanessa Richardson explores how grief, fear, and disease led to desperate acts—including the infamous Mercy Brown heart-burning—and how these historical events intersect with the birth of vampire mythology. The episode also features an interview with Dr. Harini Bhatt, who brings a scientific and historical lens to classic mysteries and legendary creatures.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Origins and Spread of Vampire Legends

• Across cultures and history, fear of the undead has been pervasive:
  • Ancient Mesopotamia had priests fighting reanimated corpses.
  • India’s Vetala demons, the Chinese Jiangshi (hopping vampire), and European medieval vampires all fueled stories of corporeal fiends.
• The rise of Christianity and its conflict with lingering pagan beliefs gave vampires, witches, and other monsters a place in European folklore.
• Pandemics like the Black Plague intensified the need for supernatural explanations.

"There’s always been a fear lurking underneath the grief. What if they come back? What if the grave isn’t enough to hold them?" – Vanessa Richardson [05:14]

2. Early American Vampire Panics and Rituals

• European colonists brought their folklore to New England, but local indigenous peoples already had tales of corpse-eating monsters.
• The Puritan obsession with evil manifesting in the real world (e.g., Salem Witch Trials) laid the groundwork for later panics.
• By the late 18th and 19th centuries, tuberculosis (then called “consumption”) ravaged communities, with its slow, wasting symptoms eerily echoing vampire myths.
• When medicine had no cure, rituals became routine: exhumation, heart/liver removal, and burning. Sometimes ashes were mixed into tonics for the sick.

“You found the body, you opened the coffin, and if something looked wrong... you destroyed it. You removed the heart or the liver or the head. You burned what you found.” – Vanessa Richardson [10:00]

• Documented cases included Justice Forward (Massachusetts, 1788), Captain Isaac Burton (Vermont, 1793), and others across New England.

3. The Mercy Brown Case (Central Segment)

The Brown Family Tragedy

• From the early 1880s, the Brown family of Exeter, Rhode Island lost member after member to consumption:

  • Mary Eliza (mother, 1883)
  • Mary Olive (daughter, 1883)
  • Mercy Lena Brown (daughter, 1892, at 19)
  • Edwin “Eddie” Brown (son, 1892, at 21)
  • Ultimately, 6 of George Brown’s 7 children perished.

• As Edwin returned from Colorado and sickened rapidly, rumors grew: “She was here, he’d say. She haunts me. She wants me to come with her.” [23:00]

The Exhumation & Ritual

• Pressured by neighbors, George consented to his family's exhumation (March 17, 1892).
• Mercy, in the ground only two months, appeared unusually preserved; her heart still had clotted blood.
• Dr. Metcalfe explained this as normal decomposition, but villagers insisted on the ritual: Mercy's heart and liver were burned, ashes fed in a tonic to Eddie—who soon died.
• Local and national media descended, turning Exeter into a spectacle.

“The men quietly laid Mercy’s heart and liver on a rock and set them on fire. No one spoke as the fire burned down to ash.” – Vanessa Richardson [29:11]

The Last American Vampire Panic

• The Mercy Brown case drew unprecedented attention. Anthropologists and reporters flocked to Exeter, further stigmatizing the community.
• Mercy’s story became international, inspiring elements of Bram Stoker’s Dracula and H.P. Lovecraft’s fiction.
• Afterward, such exhumations ceased in New England.

4. The Medical Truth: Tuberculosis

• TB, one of history’s deadliest diseases, was misunderstood for millennia. In 1882, Koch proved the bacterial cause, but in rural areas like Exeter, news and science lagged.
• The episode draws a powerful parallel between the need for answers in the face of grief and the lengths people go to for a sense of control.

“It was easier to believe in a monster. That impulse to find something to blame when the truth is unbearable isn’t a relic of the 1800s. It’s a feature of how human beings process fear.” – Vanessa Richardson [39:37]

• TB's shadow persisted: “By the 1800s, one in every seven humans who had ever lived had died of it.” [31:55]

5. Legacy & Social Impact

• Advances in public health, urban planning, and even popular culture trace roots back to the TB epidemic (e.g., building codes for better ventilation, the invention of the ice cream cone, declining beards, shorter skirts).
• Warning about modern complacency: After historic progress, TB is again the world’s deadliest infectious disease as funding and attention wane.

“The monster does not always come in the shape we expect. Sometimes it’s a bacterium we’ve known about for 140 years, spreading quietly through populations we’ve decided not to look after.” – Vanessa Richardson [40:54]

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Notable Quotes & Timestamps

• "The dead are supposed to stay dead. You bury them, you mourn them and you move on. But for most of human history, people weren’t so sure... What if the grave isn’t enough to hold them?" – Vanessa Richardson [05:14]
• "Consumption took someone and the people left behind went looking for a reason. Grief curdled into suspicion, suspicion curdled into action..." – Vanessa Richardson [16:30]
• “‘She was here, he’d say. She haunts me. She wants me to come with her.’ Those words traveled fast. In a town of a thousand people.” – Vanessa Richardson [23:18]
• "The men quietly laid Mercy’s heart and liver on a rock and set them on fire. No one spoke as the fire burned down to ash." – Vanessa Richardson [29:11]
• "It was easier to believe in a monster. That impulse to find something to blame when the truth is unbearable isn’t a relic of the 1800s. It’s a feature of how human beings process fear." – Vanessa Richardson [39:37]
• "The monster does not always come in the shape we expect. Sometimes it’s a bacterium... spreading quietly through populations we’ve decided not to look after." – Vanessa Richardson [40:54]

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Segment Timestamps

• Overview & Introduction: [00:58–05:14]
• Vampire Folklore & Historical Background: [05:14–10:00]
• Early American Vampire Cases: [09:58–16:59]
• The Mercy Brown Family & Exeter Panic: [18:43–28:08]
• Exhumation, Ritual, & Aftermath: [28:08–34:14]
• Medical Truth & Sociocultural Impact: [31:55–40:54]
• Reflections on Fear & Blame: [39:37–41:10]
• Interview with Dr. Harini Bhatt (Hidden History): [41:38–46:06]

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Interview Segment: Dr. Harini Bhatt (Preview)

• Dr. Bhatt’s Approach: Science meets legend—investigates whether historical mysteries (aliens, Bigfoot, supernatural events) are myth, science, or something in-between.
• On balancing skepticism and openness: “When I ask questions like, could this really be a UFO crash? ...I want to get to the root of these questions and see how they can inform what is in the historical record.” [42:10]
• Favorite topics:
  • Tunguska Event: Theories about the 1908 explosion—meteor or alien spacecraft? [43:03]
  • Bigfoot: Indigenous legends plus scientific theories about Gigantopithecus. [43:47]
  • Mary Celeste: Abandoned ship; did a sea monster get the crew? [44:42]
• Underlines the value of pairing scientific curiosity with legendary narratives.

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Takeaways & Legacy

• The Mercy Brown case is a haunting intersection of medicine, myth, and mourning. It demonstrates how fear—when it meets scientific ignorance—can create real horror.
• The episode closes with a warning: “Mercy Brown’s story is about fear, about what happens when grief has nowhere to go and science hasn’t caught up yet. But it’s also a warning about what happens when the science has caught up and we stop paying attention.” [40:42]

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For Further Listening

• Hidden History with Dr. Harini Bhatt—exploring vanished civilizations, unsolved prophecies, and legendary events with a scientific eye.
  [45:49] "You can check out new episodes every Monday on Apple Podcasts or Spotify and on YouTube at HiddenHistoryPod. Follow and subscribe so you don’t miss a moment." – Dr. Harini Bhatt

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Transcript

[Vanessa Richardson]

Hi, listeners, it's Vanessa. Before we get into today's episode, I want to tell you about another show I think you'll love. Hidden history with Dr. Harini Bhat. Every Monday, Dr. Bhat goes where history gets mysterious. Vanished civilizations, doomsday prophecies, paranormal phenomena, and events that science still can't fully explain. Dr. Bot treats these moments like open case files. Not myths, not superstition, just incomplete explanations waiting for a closer look. Hidden History drops every Monday. Follow now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen, so you never miss a mystery.

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[Vanessa Richardson]

On May 29, 1892, the Chicago Tribune published an article about a small town in Rhode Island.

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Normally, the stuff going on in rural

[Vanessa Richardson]

New England wouldn't have been interesting enough for a big city paper, but this story was different. The town of Exeter, Rhode island, was in crisis. Young people in the community were dying slow, painful deaths with brutal coughs, fevers, and cold, pale skin. The townspeople believed there was only one explanation. They were under the spell of a vampire. And according to the Chicago Tribune, the people of Exeter had some interesting ways of dealing with the issue. The article said, quote, to get rid of the vampire, it is necessary to exhume the body and burn the parts, generally the heart, and administer the ashes in some manner to the living and afflicted ones. The people of Exeter were trying to grapple with forces they didn't understand. But in doing so, their superstitions changed the way we think about vampires forever. From UFO cults and mass suicides to secret CIA experiments, presidential assassinations, and murderous doctors, these aren't just theories. They're real stories that blur the line between fake fact and fiction. I'm Vanessa Richardson, and this is Conspiracy Theories, Cults, and Crimes, a Crime House original powered by Pave Studios.

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[Vanessa Richardson]

Today, I'm digging into the folklore behind one of humanity's most enduring monsters. The vampire. For centuries, people in rural New England were haunted by an unseen force. Perfectly healthy men, women, and children would suddenly fall into a wasting sickness. Skin pale, energy gone, life slipping away. And when one person died, the people closest to them would start to fade, too. There was only one explanation that made sense to them. The dead were rising in the night to feed on the living. It sounds like superstition, but the fear was real, and so were the desperate, gruesome rituals people used to fight back. It wasn't until a young woman named Mercy Lena Brown died in 1892 that this panic would be immortalized forever, and her story is stranger than any legend. All that and more coming up.

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The dead are supposed to stay dead. You bury them, you mourn them and you move on. But for most of human history, people weren't so sure. Across every culture, on every continent, there's always been a fear lurking underneath the grief. What if they come back? What if the grave isn't enough to hold them? Ancient Mesopotamian priests were taught to fight back against reanimated corpses. In India, Sanskrit texts warned of the Vetalas, demons who hung upside down in cemeteries and inhabited fresh bodies. The Chinese Jiangshi, or hopping vampire, was said to steal life force from the living. In medieval Europe, between roughly 500 and 1500 CE, the vampire mythology we know today began taking shape. Christianity was the dominant religion, but paganism, a more disorganized, nature based form of worship, lived on in the shadows. The tension between those two worlds gave rise to a whole category of supposedly unholy monsters. Witches, werewolves, and vampires. That's why Christian protections like holy water and the crucifix were thought to defend against so many different creatures, because the Church had positioned itself as the only shield against a world full of evil. And it seemed like there was a lot of that going around. In the 1300s, the Black Plague hit Europe and killed a third of the population. It moved through communities in ways no one could explain. Striking one family and skipping the next, killing a man in days while his neighbor went untouched. The mouth lesions bled like the wounds of a blood drinker. Survivors looked at their dead and drew the only conclusion that made sense to them. Something was coming back. Something was feeding. And soon, those fears were given a face. In the 1400s, Vlad the Impaler ruled Wallachia, now part of Romania. He was a notoriously vicious military commander who lined the road to his castle with a forest of impaled bodies and had a reputation for drinking the blood of his enemies. Stories about his brutality spread across Europe, and the idea that a vampire lived near Transylvania stopped being just folklore. For many people, it felt like fact. These stories traveled with the colonists and evolved in the New world. By the 1600s, in England, a new Christian movement was gaining power. The Puritans. They saw the Church of England as hopelessly corrupted by Catholicism. Too many rituals, too much pageantry, not enough pure obedience to scripture. They wanted to strip all of that away and rebuild the faith from the ground up. They called it purifying. Their opponents called them fanatics. When the pushback got too severe, the Church expelled them, and they went looking for somewhere new. That search brought many of them to the shores of North America, to New England. When their colonies took root in New England, they encountered the indigenous peoples of the region, including the Pequot and the Wabanaki. These tribes had their own monster traditions. The Wabanaki told of the skedegamuch, a corpse that rises at night to feed on human flesh. The Puritans dismissed all of it. They declared indigenous religious practices satanic and used that framing to justify violent expansion into native territory. Conflicts like the Pequot War and King Philip's War followed. So did the diseases, smallpox, yellow fever that devastated indigenous communities. The Puritans called these outbreaks a wonderful plague sent by God to clear the land of people who opposed his will. But that same paranoia eventually turned inward. Between early 1692 and mid-1693, the Puritan town of Salem, Massachusetts, tore itself apart over accusations of Witchcraft. Neighbors turned on neighbors. 19 men and women were hanged. The trials damaged the Puritans grip on the region permanently. But their bone deep conviction that evil operated in the physical world, taking real forms, doing real damage, outlasted them by generations. And it kept surfacing for another two centuries. By 1788, nearly 100 years after the Salem witch trials, New England had changed a lot. The Revolutionary War happened five years ago.

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new country, still figuring out what it was. A rising merchant class had turned the region into a bustling economic hub. And new developments in agriculture, fishing and lumber had created a more diverse and mobile workforce. At least in the cities and the ports, the old Puritan austerity had given way to something more modern. But out in the rural corners of the countryside, cut off from those changes, the old suspicions never really went away. In the small village of Belchertown, Massachusetts, a man named Reverend Justice Forward led the local Congregationalist church. He'd studied theology at Yale and served his community for nearly 30 years. In other words, he seemed like a reasonable and educated man. And yet, by the summer of 1788, he was desperate enough to dig up his own daughter. This wasn't as unusual as it sounds. For centuries, across the cultures we've already talked about, the response to a suspected vampire wasn't to run. It was to act. You found the body, you opened the coffin, and if something looked wrong, if the corpse seemed too fresh, if there was blood where there shouldn't be, you destroyed it. You removed the heart or the liver or the head. You burned what you found. It was gruesome, but it was logical. Within the framework people had inherited, you didn't wait for the next death. You went looking for the source. And in rural New England, that framework had a new consumption. It was the great killer of the age, a wasting disease that crept up slowly, draining its victims of color and war, weight and breath over months or sometimes years. First came the cough, then the blood, then the long, grinding fade toward death. No one understood why it spread the way it did, or why it seemed to stalk certain families while leaving others untouched. Doctors had no cure and no real explanation. All they could do was watch. By 1788, consumption had already taken three of Justice Forward's first five daughters. Now his two surviving daughters were sick, and he was out of answers. The town whispered that the dead girls were stealing blood from the living. Justice resisted until one of his daughters began hemorrhaging blood from her lungs. He dug up one of the dead girl's bodies. The Liver and the blood clots in the lungs looked fresher than expected. He and the town doctor removed those organs and buried them separately. His sick daughter died the following January anyway. But the other one recovered. And whether it was just a coincidence or something else, justice didn't question it. Reverend Justice Forward was the first documented case of a suspected vampire exhumation in New England. But he wouldn't be the last. And the practice would only get more extreme. Five years later, in 1793, another prominent man was facing the same impossible choice. And Captain Isaac Burton had served in the Revolutionary War and become both the Reverend and a local hero in Manchester, Vermont. In 1790, 35 year old Isaac married 20 year old Rachel Harris. She got extremely sick within a year of the wedding and died in 1791. Reportedly, her last words were, I'll be with you always. Isaac took Rachel's stepsister Hulda as his second wife. And then Hulda got sick too. And he brought in doctors from across the country. None of them could help. Hulda's family offered their own theory. Rachel had come back as a vampire and was draining her stepsister's life force. Isaac gave the order to dig. In the winter of 1793, more than 500 people marched to the Meads Mill cemetery and watched as Rachel's coffin was pried open. The body was bloated and decayed. That didn't stop anyone. Halda's aunt cried out, gorged on the blood of its victim. Look. See the stains about the mouth? Rachel's lungs, liver and heart were cut out on the spot by a local government official. The crowd followed him to the blacksmith's forge, cheering as the organs burned. Some claimed to see a demon rising from the chimney. Hulda Burton died a few months later. The ritual hadn't been worked, but that didn't slow anything down, because by then the panic had taken on a life of its own. Over the following century, the ritual spread. As consumption spread and doctors offered nothing, digging up the dead became almost routine in some parts of New England. There are more than 80 documented exhumations from this period, concentrated heavily in Rhode island, but stretching as far as Minnesota Soda. Each one followed roughly the same logic. Someone died, someone else got sick, and the family concluded that the dead person was responsible. In 1796 in Cumberland, Rhode Island, a young girl named Lavinia Staples was wasting away from TB while her sister Abigail, who had already died of the disease, reportedly visited her in her dreams. Lavinia told her father that her sister would come into her room at night, sit on her chest and steal her breath away. Her father petitioned the town council to exhume Abigail and perform the heart burning ritual. The council approved it. Abigail was dug up. In 1843, a 55 year old farmer named John Barber died in Griswold, Connecticut. Five years after his death. His body was exhumed, his chest cracked open and his heart removed. Then someone went further. His head and femurs were taken out and arranged on his chest in a deliberate skull and crossbones pattern. It wasn't just a ritual, it was a warning left for whoever eventually found the body. Barber's remains became something like a message. These rituals weren't just happening in poor, isolated communities. Frederick Ransom was a 20 year old Dartmouth College student when he died of concussion consumption in 1817. His father was wealthy and educated and he still had Frederick's heart burned on the village green in Woodstock, Vermont. The logic was always the same. Consumption took someone and the people left behind went looking for a reason. Grief curdled into suspicion, suspicion curdled into action, and one more body got dug up in the dark. But there was one case that eclipsed all the others and ended the practice for good.

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In the summer of 1882, George Brown and his wife Mary Eliza were tending their small farm on the eastern edge of Exeter, Rhode Island. George was 40, Mary Eliza was 35. They had seven children and 40 acres, most of it too rocky to farm well. George and Mary Eliza's oldest daughter, 18 year old Mary Olive, worked in town as a dressmaker. Their other children were 12 year old Annie, 9 year old Mercy, 7 year old Hattie Mae, 5 year old Jenny and 2 year old Myra. Their only son was Edwin or eddie who was 11. Exeter had seen better days 60 years earlier. The town had a population of over 2,500. Not exactly a metropolis, but busy and full of life. By 1882 it had dropped to around a thousand. That was because of westward migration. The railroads pulling young men toward better opportunities and the Civil War having taken many of those who remained. The town had been hollowed out slowly, year by year. And what remained was a tight knit community of people who had chosen to stay or had no choice but to. They leaned on each other and they showed up in tough times. There were a lot of those. Consumption hung over Exeter like a permanent cloud. And in early 1883 it came for the Brown family. Mary Eliza was the first to show symptoms. A few months later, her oldest daughter Mary Olive got sick too. The town doctor, Harold Metcalfe, did what he could. High fat diets, heavy on fish oil. Brown sugar dissolved in water, horseback riding to shake loose the lungs. None of it worked. Mary Eliza succumbed to the sickness on December 8, 1883. It was a hollow Christmas for Eddie and the younger children, especially because their sister Mary Olive was still deathly ill. And it wasn't long until she joined her mother in the grave. The entire town of Exeter came to Mary Olive's funeral. At the Chestnut Hill Cemetery, a third thousand people sang one sweetly solemn thought, the hymn she had chosen from her deathbed. After the funeral, life was never quite the same for Mercy Brown. She had watched her mother and sister disappear, one after the other. She knew what consumption looked like and she knew what it meant. The shadow of what might be coming for her never fully lifted. The years that followed were shaped by grief. Mercy leaned on her father, her siblings and the community around her as she grew into a teenager. But her world was getting smaller and smaller. Then in 1889, when Eddie turned 18, he left home. He'd grown into a strong young man, found work at the general store in town as a clerk, and gotten married not long after. For the first time in years, something seemed to be going right for someone in the Brown family. Then his health started turning. He woke at night crying out from nightmares. Suffocation, drowning, the sensation of being bled dry. When he came to, he said it felt like he'd been drained completely. Within a matter of weeks, he'd gone from one of Exeter's strongest young men to one of its most frail. Friends urged him to head west. Colorado Springs had become a destination for consumption patients. Across the country. The crisp, dry mountain air and supposedly curative mineral waters drew desperate families just like eddie's. By the 1880s and 90s, an estimated 1 third of Colorado's entire population was living with the disease. It had become, in a strange way, a community built around dying slowly in a better climate. In early 1889, Eddie said his goodbyes and boarded a train west with his wife. Wife. It was the last time Mercy would ever see him. Two years later, in 1891, Mercy turned 18 in a town that had shrunk to 961 people. Work was scarce. The world beyond Exitor felt very far away. Despite all of it, her whole life was still ahead of her. Then, a few months after her birthday, she started coughing. The symptoms came fast and hard. Blistering fever, a cough that made her lungs feel like they were on fire. Blood in the handkerchief, and nights spent gasping and turning. She dreaded each coughing fit, both for the pain and for what she knew it meant. The winter of 1892 was unusually mild for New England, temperatures hovering around 60 degrees. But there was a lot of rain, and the wet and air made it even harder for Mercy to breathe. Two weeks into January, she took a sharp turn for the worse. George called Dr. Metcalfe. The doctor came to the house, examined her, and told him plainly that further medical aid was useless. All George could do was sit with his daughter while she slipped away, the way he had watched his wife and his oldest daughter slip away 10 years before. Mercy Brown died on January 17, 1892. She was 19 years old. Her obituary in the local paper ran a single cold line. Ms. Brown, who has been suffering from consumption, died Sunday morning. Because the winter was unseasonably warm, they were able to bury her right away next to her mother and sister at Chestnut Hill. Ordinarily, the ground would have been too frozen. As it turned out, that detail mattered. More than anyone realized, Eddie heard the news in Colorado and decided to come home. His health had improved steadily out west, and he believed he was strong enough to make the trip. He wasn't. Almost as soon as he arrived back in the Northeast, his cough returned and the weight he'd gained in Colorado fell away. Soon he was bedridden at his in laws. Within days of his return, he'd gone from walking off a train to barely clinging to life. The whispers started almost immediately. He looked fine when he stepped off the train. What happened? Was it just the disease or was something following him? The community was heartbroken over George Brown's situation, but they were also frightened. One newspaper wrote, quote, if the good wishes and prayers of his many friends could be realized by friend, Eddie would speedily be restored to perfect health. End quote. What the paper didn't print was what people were saying quietly to each other. That something evil had followed Eddie home, that it was feeding on him, that George needed to do something about it. It got worse when word spread about Eddie's nightmares. He would wake up violently in the middle of the night, crying out about his late sister Mercy. She was here, he'd say. She haunts me. She wants me to come with her. Those words traveled fast. In a town of a thousand people. Neighbors started approaching George directly. They said a vampire was preying on his family, and it was almost certainly his late wife or one of his daughters. Rising from their graves at night to steal from the living. They begged him to let them dig up the bodies and check for blood. George Brown had already buried his wife and two daughters. Now he was watching his only son die in a stranger's house, bedridden and fading fast. And there was nothing medicine could offer him. Dr. Metcalf had already told him there was nothing to be done. The church offered prayer. The neighbors offered a theory, a terrible one, but at least it was something to act on. George was not a superstitious, but he was a desperate father. And so, reluctantly, he gave the men his permission. The next morning, they picked up their shovels and marched to the Chestnut Hill cemetery, ready to find out if Mercy Lena Brown was a vampire.

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Crime as we know it will never be the same. I'm like, oh my God, he's lying. From CBC's Uncover the Expert Witness, available now on CBC, listen or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Vanessa Richardson]

On the morning of March 17, 1892, a small group of men from Exeter walked to the Chestnut Hill Cemetery in the river Rain. George Brown refused to go with them. He'd given them permission, but he couldn't bring himself to watch. Dr. Harold Metcalfe was there, and a reporter from the Providence Journal. The men dug up the Brown family plot and worked through it methodically. Mary Eliza and Mary Olive had been in the ground for over a decade. Their bodies were severely decomposed, but Mercy had been buried just two months earlier. The dirt was still loose, and when they opened her coffin, her body looked fresher than the others. Dr. Metcalfe said this was entirely normal. But the men kept going. They split open Mercy's chest cavity and pulled out her heart and liver. They cut into the heart. There was still clotted blood inside. Dr. Metcalfe explained that too was consistent with the way the body decomposes. He pointed to her lungs, which showed clear evidence of consumption. The men weren't listening. They thought Mercy Brown was a vampire. Her brother was dying and she had to be destroyed. What happened next had none of the spectacle of the Manchester exhumation, none of the cheering crowds and Blacksmith's Forge. The men quietly laid Mercy's heart and liver on a rock and set them on fire. No one spoke as the fire burned down to ash. When it was done, they swept the ashes into a container and carried them to the home of Willie Hyams, Eddie's father in law, where Eddie was barely conscious. The ashes were mixed into a tonic and fed to him, a last attempt to drive out whatever evil was consuming him from inside. It did nothing. The consumption kept taking him slowly and without mercy. And on May 2, 1892, Eddie Brown died at the age of 21. He was buried near his family at Chestnut Hill, near Mercy, who had been returned to her grave. George Brown had now lost his wife, two daughters, and his only son. But he wasn't finished burying children. Ultimately, six of his seven would die of the same disease. In 1895, he lost Annie at 25 and and Jenny at 18, a month and a half apart in 1899. His youngest daughter, Myra, also died at 18. All of them had married before they died. None of them survived long enough to have children. The shadow that had come from Mary Eliza in 1883 moved through that family for two full decades. And it had a name. Not vampires. Tuberculosis. Tuberculosis has been killing people for as long as people have existed. For most of history, it went by other names. Consumption, phthisis, the white plague. But it was always the same disease, and it's one of the most contagious in human history. By the 1800s, one in every seven humans who had ever lived had died of it. The evidence goes back to the neighborhood neolithic era. The first tuberculosis hospital in recorded history was built in Egypt around 1500 BCE. Two centuries later, the pharaoh Akhenaten and his wife Nefertiti both died of the disease. In ancient Greece, Hippocrates, the father of modern medicine, Warned his students not to take patients in the final stages of tb because they would infect everyone else. He called it phthisis, A Greek word for wasting away. The disease was so deadly and so mysterious that even the greatest medical minds of the ancient world could only advise staying away from it. As civilization grew and cities became denser, TB became more deadly. It spread through crowded tenements, factory floors, churches, schools. By the 1800s, it had become what doctors called the captain of all these men of death, the leading killer of the modern world. And the more people lived and worked in close quarters, the faster it moved. By 1882, tuberculosis was the cause of one in every four deaths in the United States. Between 1870 and 1910 alone, the disease killed between 3 and 4 million Americans, among them, Doc Holliday, who was consumptive his entire adult life, and the writer Henry David Thoreau. TB reshaped the country in ways that aren't always traced back to the disease. The American west was partly settled by people chasing drier air for their damaged lungs. Cities like Los Angeles, Denver, and Colorado Springs boomed with consumption, Migrants seeking a cure that only sometimes came. New Mexico reached statehood in part because TB refugees had moved there. The disease even became romanticized after famous young women, including Emily Bronte, died of it. The pale, fragile, thin aesthetic of the consumptive became a beauty standard. The modern ideal of being pale and thin has some of its strangest roots right there. Then, on March 24, 1882, the very same year that consumption first came for the Brown family, a pro Russian scientist named Robert Koch stood before the Berlin Physiological Society and announced that he had isolated Mycobacterium tuberculosis, the bacteria responsible for the disease. He proved it wasn't hereditary. It wasn't a moral failing. It wasn't caused by cold air or grief or God's judgment. It was a pathogen spread through the air when an infected person coughed or breathed. The science that could have saved millions had finally arrived. The news just hadn't reached Exeter

[Crime House Announcer]

by

[Vanessa Richardson]

the time Mercy Brown was exhumed in March of 1892. Koch's findings had been public for 10 years. The rest of the country had moved on from the idea that consumption was supernatural. But rural Rhode island was another world. The Providence Journal reporter who stood at Chestnut Hill that morning wrote about what he witnessed with something like careful bewilderment, describing the ritual in full without condemning the people who performed it. The story spread anyway. The Chicago Tribune picked it up. The Boston Daily Globe ran its own piece and even blamed the ritual on, quote, the frequent intermarriage of families in these backcountry districts. Exeter became a national curiosity, a relic of backward superstition held up to make modern readers feel better about themselves. Then a prominent anthropologist named George Stetson came to Rhode island to document what he called the barbaric superstition firsthand. His paper in the American Anthropologist Journal spread the story internationally. And suddenly Mercy Brown was known around the the world. A 19 year old girl from a dying Rhode island town had become famous for the worst possible reason. She had been dug up and burned. The international attention seemed to end the practice in New England for good. No documented exhumations followed. But that wasn't Mercy's real legacy. After her story was published in London, Bram Stoker allegedly read it and inquired incorporated elements into the novel he was writing. That novel was Dracula. Scholars still debate the direct connection, but the scene in which Lucy, a young woman, is exhumed as a vampire tracks closely with the details of what happened to Mercy at Chestnut Hill. The pale young woman, the violation of the grave, the desperate attempt to stop something inexplicable from spreading. HP Lovecraft was also drawn to her case and wove it into his short story, the Shunned House. A girl from a dying Rhode island town buried without ceremony became a cornerstone of the vampire mythology we inherited. She didn't choose that. It was given to her without her consent. The Way Everything in her final years was. George Brown survived all of it. At the turn of the century, he had only, only one child left, Hattie Mae, his and Mary Eliza's fourth daughter. By 1900 she was 25 and had been married for 10 years with three children. She had a fourth in 1903, divorced her husband in 1910 and remarried at 45. George was still alive for her second wedding. A remarkable thing for a man who had buried six of his seven children. He lived long enough to see tuberculosis finally begin to lose its grip on the country and to see the world change in ways that tied directly back to the disease that had consumed his family. Once people understood that TB was contagious and airborne, things moved fast. Contact tracing and disease statistics were first used in New York in 1889 to slow infection. Building codes were rewritten around ventilation to protect tenement residents. Ice cream parlors had been reusing cups until the dangers became clear. The ice cream cone was invented in 1896 partly to solve that problem. Reclining chairs were first designed to ease pressure on TB patients lungs. Beards went out of fashion when they were identified as bacteria traps. The last bearded US president, Benjamin Harrison, left office in 1893. Women's skirts got shorter because longer hems dragged along germ covered streets. And in 1921 French bacteriologists Albert Calmette and Camille Guerin successfully developed a vaccine to immunize people against tb. After centuries of helplessness, tuberculosis could finally be be stopped. George Brown died in Exeter on November 17, 1922 at the age of 80. He had outlived nearly everyone he loved. His daughter Hattie Mae outlived him by 32 years, dying in 1954 at 79. Mercy Lena Brown never got to be any of that. She was 19 years old, buried in cold ground and then dug back up and burned. Not because she had done anything wrong, but because the people who loved her dying brother were terrified and out of options. Her body became a symbol of everything they couldn't explain and couldn't control. The doctor standing right there told them what they were seeing was normal decomposition. They didn't believe him because believing him meant accepting that Eddie was was going to die and there was nothing anyone could do about it. It was easier to believe in a monster. That impulse to find something to blame when the truth is unbearable isn't a Relic of the 1800s. It's a feature of how human beings process fear. The vampire panic spread through New England for a century. Not because people were stupid, but because they were Grieving and powerless and reaching for any explanation that gave them something to act on. Dig up the body. Burn the heart. Do something. Today, tuberculosis isn't something most Americans think about. The vaccine exists. The treatments exist. We've known exactly what causes it and how to stop it for nearly 150 years. And yet in 2024, TB reclaimed its title as the deadliest infectious disease in the world, killing over a million people annually. Institutions like the World Health Organization and USAID had been central to fighting it in the developing world. But in 2025, they lost crucial funding. Millions of people are now more vulnerable to a disease we know exactly how to treat. The monster does not always come in the shape we expect. Sometimes it's a bacterium we've known about for 140 years, spreading quietly through populations we've decided not to look after. Mercy Brown's story is about fear, about what happens when grief has nowhere to go and science hasn't caught up yet. But it's also a warning about what happens when the science has caught up and we stop paying attention. Anyway,

[Crime House Announcer]

Thanks so much for listening.

[Vanessa Richardson]

I'm Vanessa Richardson and this is Conspiracy Theories, Cults and Crimes. Come back next week. We'll decode the episode together and hear another story about the real people at the center of the world's most notorious cults, conspiracies and and criminal acts.

[Crime House Announcer]

But before I get out of here, I'm welcoming Dr. Harini Bhatt, the host

[Vanessa Richardson]

of Hidden History, the debut show from pave's new history studio.

[Crime House Announcer]

Rewind and be sure to stick around

[Vanessa Richardson]

after for a special preview of the show.

[Dr. Harini Bhatt]

So excited to talk more.

[Crime House Announcer]

We're excited to have you. Thank you so much for sticking around. Now, I know your background as a

[Vanessa Richardson]

clinical pharmacist and you also have an

[Crime House Announcer]

amazing YouTube channel called Today.

[Vanessa Richardson]

I Learned Science. So phenomenal. Definitely check it out.

[Crime House Announcer]

So when I hear that I don't usually think about a show called Hidden History, you know, where you entertain possibilities like demonic possession, alien visitors, or even the existence of Bigfoot.

[Vanessa Richardson]

So tell us a little bit more about your approach.

[Dr. Harini Bhatt]

Yeah, I know you might not think that a show called Hidden History covers stuff like that. And I promise it's also very much about the hard historical facts. But here's the thing about a lot of these cases, there is a reason people still have questions about them all these years later. So when I ask questions like, could this really be a UFO crash? Or does Bigfoot really exist? I'm not necessarily putting on the tinfoil hat and divorcing myself from reality. I want to get to the root of these questions and see how they can inform what is in the historical record. That being said, I am very willing to entertain any. Every possibility because you never know when the aliens come out of Area 51 hand in hand with Bigfoot. I don't want to be caught by surprise.

[Crime House Announcer]

That is a conspiracy theory mashup, and I'm loving it. So let's talk about some of the most out there theories you've explored so

[Vanessa Richardson]

far on the show.

[Dr. Harini Bhatt]

Okay, so, of course, some spoilers ahead, but one of our first episodes is on the Tunguska event, A massive explosion deep in Siberia. I'm talking about a nuclear level blast here.

[Crime House Announcer]

But.

[Dr. Harini Bhatt]

But this was in 1908, decades before the atom bomb was invented. So you're probably thinking it had to be a meteor, right? Well, that's what the scientists who went out to investigate thought too. But here's the thing. There was a massive blast site, but no impact crater, which opened up a lot of alternate theories, including that it was caused by an alien spaceship whose nuclear reactor exploded.

[Crime House Announcer]

That's insane. I'm dying to know. Like, so many questions are coming up. What did they find? Did they have, you know, so many questions. I cannot wait to hear this.

[Hidden History Host]

Okay.

[Dr. Harini Bhatt]

And I know we've mentioned Bigfoot a couple times now, so we've got to talk about it. There's a lot of different theories that could explain Bigfoot's existence. And the cool thing I learned is that a lot of indigenous people have stories about Bigfoot, like, creatures, which made me take the possibility a lot more seriously. And for me, the one that really stuck out is that Bigfoot could be a gigantopithecus, which is a massive prehistoric ape that went extinct about 300,000 years ago. Or at least that's the general consensus. But there's a theory that a surviving population made it to what's now North America, giving rise to the Bigfoot legend. Now, there's a lot of holes in that theory, all of which I get into, But I just love the idea of some kind of truth motivating the legend, whether or not the modern sightings of Bigfoot are actually real.

[Vanessa Richardson]

Oh, my gosh.

[Crime House Announcer]

So Bigfoot is one of my favorites. So I cannot wait to hear your theories, your research. This is gonna be so cool.

[Dr. Harini Bhatt]

Here's my last one. And it's another one where science meets legend. I did an episode about the Mary Celeste, a sailing vessel that was found perfectly intact, drifting through the Atlantic Ocean, but with its entire crew Nowhere to be found. A lot of theories have popped up, but the one I want to talk about is that the crew was taken by a sea monster. Here's the cool thing about it. The part of the ocean where the Mary Celeste was found is known to have a giant squid. Now, do I think one of them dragged her crew to the watery grave? Not necessarily. But it's these overlaps where science meets superstition that really fascinate me.

[Vanessa Richardson]

I love that. And I love hearing the science. That's the thing that gets me with you.

[Crime House Announcer]

It's like all about the science, which I love. Pairing science with all these awesome, interesting

[Vanessa Richardson]

theories and conspiracy theories.

[Crime House Announcer]

How cool is that? Well, thank you so much for sharing this little peek. We cannot wait. And if that didn't convince you to check out Hidden History, I don't know what will. It's gonna be great. It's such a great companion to conspiracy theories, Cults and crimes. And Harini, will you please tell everyone how to find it?

[Vanessa Richardson]

Of course.

[Dr. Harini Bhatt]

Absolutely. You can check out new episodes every Monday on Apple Podcasts or Spotify and on YouTube at HiddenHistoryPod. Follow and subscribe so you don't miss a moment.

[Crime House Announcer]

I'm already such a huge fan. So Harini, thanks again for joining us. It's such a pleasure. We're very excited about the show.

[Dr. Harini Bhatt]

Pleasure is all mine. Thank you so much.

[Crime House Announcer]

Conspiracy Theories, Cults and Crimes is a Crime House original powered by Pave Studios. Here at Crime House, we want to thank each and every one of you for your support. If you like what you heard today, reach out on social media, Rimehouse on TikTok and Instagram.

[Vanessa Richardson]

Don't forget to rate, review and follow

[Crime House Announcer]

Conspiracy Theories, Cults and Crimes. Wherever you get your podcasts, your feedback

[Vanessa Richardson]

truly makes a difference.

[Crime House Announcer]

And to enhance your conspiracy theories, Cults and crimes listening experience, subscribe to Crime

[Vanessa Richardson]

House plus on Apple Podcasts. You'll get every episode ad free. We'll be back on Wednesday. Conspiracy Theories, Cults and Crimes is hosted by me, Vanessa Richardson, and is a Crime House original. Powered by Pave Studios. This episode was brought to life by the Conspiracy Theories, Cults and Crimes team. Max Cutler, Ron Shapiro, Alex Benedon, Natalie Pertzovsky, Lori Marinelli, Alyssa Fox, Jake Natureman, Leah Roche, Kaylee Pine and Michael Langsner. Thank you for listening.

[Hidden History Host]

When it comes to mass psychogenic illness, there's not much you can do to protect yourself, your mind and body. Weaponize your own belief against you, blurring the line between fiction and reality until a perceived threat is made Very real. And once it has you in its grip, there is no letting go. Before we get out of here, I want to introduce you guys to a segment we'll be doing at the end of each episode called if It Happened Today. As the name suggests, I'll be looking at the event in question and asking, what would it be like if it happened right now? So let's imagine that on a summer day in 2026, a young woman stands, steps out of her downtown apartment and just starts dancing. Your first thought would probably be, this girl's on something, and you wouldn't be alone. It's actually been pointed out that the dancing plague has a lot of similarities to modern rave culture. The dancing plague has even been called the world's longest rave. And think about it. People at raves go long stretches without food, water or rest while they dance. Their movements aren't graceful or coordinated. Of course, there are plenty of ravers out there who aren't on drugs. And soon enough people would realize this girl on the street isn't on them either. So maybe you'd think, as more people join in, is this a flash mob? Some sort of protest? Maybe an event put on by an online streamer? I'm sure it would come off as all fun and games with bystanders live streaming to TikTok and every social media app until the dancers start collapsing. Doctors would take some of the dancers in for testing just to find that nothing is physically wrong with them. And all of a sudden it would be all over the Internet. Endless Reddit theories, blog posts and speculation. Maybe some fringe religious groups would take it as a sign that the apocalypse is here. One thing's for sure, there would be plenty of opinions on it. But eventually, with what we know about mass psychogenic illness now, someone would realize the truth. The question is, would anyone believe them? If we're actually thinking about it with a modern lens, like if that happened today, I think the best analogy is Havana Syndrome. If the dancing plague happened in 2026, I'm pretty sure scientists would label it as mass psychogenic illness. In other words, mass hysteria. In our current landscape, it's easy to go online and find a viewpoint that supports your thinking. It can be a good way to seek out a community of like minded people or fall into a dangerous echo chamber. Back in 1518, the ceremony at the Shrine of Saint Vitus helped the dancers feel like something was helping them, that they had found the solution to their curse. They united around a common cause and found a way through. But could that happen today? In 2026? You tell me. Would we be able to harness the fear that started our Dancing Planet Plague and work together to end it? Or maybe we succumb to it one by one until the whole world is one big deadly party. Thanks for listening to this preview of my new show, Hidden History. If you want to hear what happens next, follow Hidden History on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or subscribe on YouTube.

[Vanessa Richardson]

I'm Katie Ring, host of America's Most Infamous Crimes. Each week I take on one of the most notorious crimes criminal cases in American history. Listen to and follow America's Most Infamous Crimes available now wherever you get your podcasts. Looking for your next listen? Check out hidden history with Dr. Harini Bot every Monday. Dr. Bhatt goes where history gets mysterious vanished civilizations, doomsday prophecies and events that science still can't fully explain. Follow Hidden Histories now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen.