Travel in Time with Dan — Episode 55: A Fictional Interview with Mercy Brown, the Last New England Vampire
Travel in Time with Dan | Chestnut Hill Baptist Church Cemetery Crypt, Exeter, Rhode Island
⚠️ Author’s Note: The following is a fictional historical interview. Mercy Lena Brown (1872–1892) was a real young woman from Exeter, Rhode Island, who died of tuberculosis at the age of nineteen. After the deaths of her mother and sister from the same disease, and with her brother Edwin gravely ill, the community of Exeter became convinced that one of the deceased Brown family members was a vampire feeding on the living. Mercy’s body, preserved by the winter cold in a stone crypt, was exhumed in March 1892. When she appeared less decomposed than expected and blood was found in her heart, the townspeople concluded she was the vampire. Her heart and liver were burned, mixed into a tonic, and given to her ailing brother Edwin, who died two months later. Mercy Brown is considered the last and most documented case of the New England Vampire Panic. This imagined conversation is set inside the stone crypt where her body was kept during that terrible winter. The historical facts are real. The dialogue is creative fiction, written with deep respect for a young woman who deserved far better than history gave her.
📍 Setting: The stone crypt near Chestnut Hill Baptist Church, Exeter, Rhode Island — winter, 1892. The crypt is cold and silent, the kind of cold that has no interest in you personally but will take everything from you regardless. Stone walls, frozen ground, pale winter light coming through the narrow entrance. A young woman sits very still near the far wall, her hands folded in her lap, her expression one of someone who has moved past the worst of something and arrived at a place that is quieter, if not easier. She does not look like a monster. She looks like a nineteen-year-old girl who is very, very tired.
Dan: Mercy. Thank you for speaking with me. I want to say first… I’m sorry. For what happened to you. For what this community did.
Mercy: (A long pause, her eyes steady)
Thank you for saying so. Most people who come looking for me are looking for the vampire. It is something, to be seen as a person first.
(Quietly)
I was always a person first.
Dan: Can you tell me about your family? Before the sickness came?
Mercy: (A softness crossing her face)
We were a good family. My father George was a careful, steady man. He was not a man given to fancy or dramatics. My mother Mary was warm. My sister Mary, the eldest, was the kind of person who made a room feel more settled just by being in it. And Edwin… Edwin was my brother. He was still young. He still had so much ahead of him.
(A pause)
We were an ordinary family in an ordinary town. And then the sickness came, as it came to so many families in those years, and one by one it took us. That is the whole of it, really. There is no curse in that story. There is only grief and illness and the cruel patience of consumption.
Dan: The town called it something else.
Mercy: (Evenly, without bitterness but without flinching either)
The town was frightened. I understand that now better than I did when I was living through it alongside them. When people watch a family die one by one of something they cannot see and cannot explain, fear fills the space where knowledge ought to be. And fear, left alone in that space long enough, becomes something that looks very much like certainty.
They were certain there was a vampire. They were certain it was one of us. And when they opened this crypt and found me less… changed… than my mother and sister, they were certain it was me.
Dan: The winter preserved you. The science of it is straightforward now.
Mercy: (A small, sad nod)
The cold kept me. I died in January. The ground was frozen. They could not bury me properly, so they brought me here. When March came and they opened the door, I looked as I looked because of where I had been, not because of what I was. There was no mystery in it. There was only a winter and a stone room and a girl who had died of tuberculosis.
But they did not have the science. And so they had the story instead.
Dan: Your father resisted for a long time. He didn’t want to exhume the family.
Mercy: (The first real complexity entering her expression)
He did resist. And I love him for that. He knew there were no vampires. He knew his wife and his daughters were not monsters feeding on his son. He knew it the way a rational man knows things… plainly, without needing it explained.
(A pause)
But he was also a father watching Edwin waste away. And the community would not stop. They came at him with their fear day after day, and eventually… (She looks down at her hands) …eventually the fear of losing Edwin became larger than the certainty that the rest of us were at peace. I understand that too. I do not think it was weakness. I think it was a father desperate enough to try anything, even something he did not believe in, because the alternative was to do nothing while his son died.
(Quietly)
I wish he had held firm. I wish it for my own sake, and I wish it because it would not have saved Edwin regardless. But I cannot be simply angry at him. It is more complicated than anger.
Dan: What they did afterward… the ritual…
Mercy: (A stillness, a breath)
I would rather not dwell in the details of it. What I will say is this: they believed they were saving Edwin. They believed, with complete sincerity, that what they were doing was the right and necessary thing. That does not make it right. But it makes it human. People do not commit atrocities because they are evil, most of the time. They commit them because they are afraid and they have run out of better ideas.
And Edwin died anyway. Two months later. The consumption took him just as it took the rest of us, because consumption does not care about rituals or tonics or the desperation of the people performing them. It only cares about lungs.
Dan: That is the tragedy at the center of all of it, isn’t it? The cure failed because the diagnosis was wrong.
Mercy: (Nodding slowly)
That is the lesson I would want people to take from my story, if they are willing to look past the vampire and see it. The diagnosis was wrong because the knowledge was not there. And because the knowledge was not there, fear stepped in and made its own diagnosis. And the treatment that followed from that false diagnosis could not save anyone, because it was not treating the real thing.
(Meeting Dan’s eyes directly)
When you do not understand what you are facing, you do not stop. People never simply stop. They act. And action without knowledge can cause more harm than the thing you were frightened of in the first place.
Dan: That is a lesson that reaches well beyond Exeter, Rhode Island in 1892.
Mercy: Every generation faces its invisible threats. Every generation has moments where fear moves faster than knowledge and leaders must decide whether to let the fear speak or to slow everything down and demand better answers before acting.
(Simply)
The ones who slow it down save people. The ones who let the fear run… they burn hearts and livers and call it medicine. And the people they were trying to save die anyway.
I am not a difficult lesson. I am a very simple one. I just came at a very high cost.
Dan: Last question, Mercy. People visit your grave. They leave coins and stones. They come here to this crypt. What do you want them to feel when they stand where you are?
Mercy: (A long pause, looking toward the pale light at the entrance of the crypt)
I want them to feel how ordinary I was. Not a monster. Not a legend. Not a vampire. A girl from Exeter who loved her family and got sick and died at nineteen, and was then made into something she never was by people who were too frightened to sit with what they did not know.
I want them to feel the weight of that… of what happens when a community stops asking questions and starts providing answers out of fear. And I want them to carry that feeling back into their own lives and their own times, because the same thing is always possible. It has always been possible. Mercy Brown is not a story about the past. She is a warning about a mistake that has no particular era.
(A pause, the faintest thing that might, in different circumstances, have been a smile)
And if they leave a stone on my grave… I do not mind that. It is something, to be remembered. Even like this. It is something.
I walked back up the road from the crypt as the winter light was fading, past the graves of Mary Brown and Mary Brown and Edwin Brown, past the stone that marks George Brown — the rational man who held out as long as he could and then couldn’t hold anymore.
Mercy’s grave is easy to find. People leave things on it. Coins. Stones. Small offerings to a nineteen-year-old girl who died of tuberculosis in 1892 and was then made into the last vampire of New England by a community that had run out of explanations and replaced them with fear.
The leadership lesson is one Mercy named herself, and it belongs to every era that has ever faced an invisible threat it did not fully understand: fear plus lack of knowledge equals dangerous decisions. Not because the people making those decisions are evil. Because they are human. Because humans do not stop when they are frightened. Instead, they act. And action without knowledge, driven by fear, has a long and terrible history of destroying the very people it was meant to protect.
The Salem Witch Trials. The New England Vampire Panic. Every moment in history when the fear ran faster than the facts and leaders failed to slow it down and demand better answers.
It is not a difficult lesson. Mercy said so herself.
It just keeps coming at a very high cost. 🕯️
Travel in Time with Dan is where travel, history, and leadership come together. Uncovering History. Inspiring Leadership.
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