Mercy Brown
45
MENTIONS
9
EPISODES
9
PODCASTS
Search complete. 45 mentions across 9 episodes found for "Mercy Brown".
Nov 2, 2026
speaker_2ADVERTISER
See Lowe's.com slash appliance delivery.
Henrique CoutoNARRATOR
Mercy Brown was dead.
Henrique CoutoNARRATOR
Her brother was dying.
Henrique CoutoNARRATOR
In Rhode Island, some people searched her body for evidence that she was feeding on the living.
50 MINS LATER
Henrique CoutoNARRATOR
I am waiting and watching for you.
Henrique CoutoNARRATOR
Those are words from a gravestone.
Henrique CoutoNARRATOR
The name on that memorial is Nellie Vaughn, not Mercy Brown.
Henrique CoutoNARRATOR
Nellie's cemetery record places her at the Plain Meeting House Cemetery in West Greenwich, Rhode Island.
Daniel HamiltonHOST
So let's see here.
Daniel HamiltonHOST
A lot of haunted sites, Mercy Brown Cemetery and Nellie Vaughn Cemetery.
Daniel HamiltonHOST
Let me kind of see where we're going with some of this stuff because I have a itinerary here.
Daniel HamiltonHOST
Let's kind of see what we got going on.
Daniel HamiltonHOST
Franklin, what's up, bud? Amity, hello, hello, hello.
Daniel HamiltonHOST
How are you? All right.
Daniel HamiltonHOST
So, VMR, he mentioned Mercy Brown.
Daniel HamiltonHOST
let's talk about mercy brown anybody have an idea vmr you cannot speak on this what's up there mountain man anybody have an idea of what mercy brown being brings to the table anybody
DanielleHOST
Lena.
DanielleHOST
Mercy Lena Brown.
DanielleHOST
She's also just...
DanielleHOST
Okay.
BrianHOST
[ominous music] There's a flat rock in a cemetery in Exeter, Rhode Island, and on the seventeenth of March in eighteen ninety-two, a group of men built a fire on it and burned the heart of a nineteen-year-old girl.
BrianHOST
Her name was Mercy Lena Brown, and her family called her Lena.
BrianHOST
She'd been dead for two months.
BrianHOST
The men who opened her coffin that morning were her neighbors, and most of them had known her since she was a baby.
21 MINS LATER
BrianHOST
He stayed there the better part of two years, and for a while, the reports that came home were good ones.
BrianHOST
While he was gone, his sister Lena got sick.
BrianHOST
Mercy Lena Brown had been a girl of about eleven when her mother and her sister died.
BrianHOST
She'd grown up in that house doing the work the two of them left behind.
KellyHOST
The doctor was standing in a graveyard being outvoted by grief.
KellyHOST
They cut out Mercy Brown’s heart and her liver and burned them on a nearby rock.
KellyHOST
They mixed the ashes with water and then gave that to Edwin to drink as medicine.
KellyHOST
Edwin Brown died two months later.
KellyHOST
It is still visited, and it has been vandalized and had to be secured, and the person in that grave never did anything to anyone.
KellyHOST
She was the sickest one in a sick house, and then she was blamed for it.
KellyHOST
The case was covered in the newspaper, and scholars have argued that Bram Stoker read about it and that Mercy Brown is part of the raw material behind Lucy Westenra in Dracula, the girl who dies of a wasting illness, is buried, and has to be dealt with in her tomb.
KellyHOST
That is how close the folklore and the fiction actually are.
KellyHOST
The doctor was standing in a graveyard being outvoted by grief.
KellyHOST
They cut out Mercy Brown's heart and her liver and burned them on a nearby rock.
KellyHOST
They mixed the ashes with water and then gave that to Edwin to drink as medicine.
KellyHOST
Edwin Brown died two months later.
KellyHOST
It is still visited, and it has been vandalized and had to be secured, and the person in that grave never did anything to anyone.
KellyHOST
She was the sickest one in a sick house, and then she was blamed for it.
KellyHOST
The case was covered in the newspaper, and scholars have argued that Bram Stoker read about it, and that Mercy Brown is part of the raw material behind Lucy Westerna in Dracula, the girl who dies of a wasting illness, is buried, and has to be dealt with in her tomb.
KellyHOST
That is how close the folklore and the fiction actually are.
BillyHOST
Obviously, it didn't.
BillyHOST
Edwin Brown died less than two months later, and that makes Mercy Brown's story par- particularly tragic.
BillyHOST
Nobody involved needed a supernatural explanation.
BillyHOST
The family was being devastated by tuberculosis, but they didn't have any effective treatment at that time, and they were desperate, and desperation turned a dead teenage girl into one of America's most famous alleged vampires.
Nick AlexanderHOST
It would happen in Rhode Island in 1892.
Nick AlexanderHOST
The dead girl's name was Mercy Brown.
Nick AlexanderHOST
Mercy Brown lived with her family in Exeter, Rhode Island.
Nick AlexanderHOST
By the time her name became attached to one of the most famous vampire panic stories that's ever been told in American history, the Brown family had already been devastated by consumption.
Nick AlexanderHOST
Mercy's mother, Mary, she died first.
15 MINS LATER
Nick AlexanderHOST
The Mercy had been dug up, cut open, had her organs burned, and her ashes fed to her dying brother, and tuberculosis still took his dumb ass.
RobHOST
But by then,
Nick AlexanderHOST
the Mercy Brown case, it had become something bigger than one grieving family.
Christopher FeinsteinHOST
The idea was that he would swallow it and it would save his life.
Christopher FeinsteinHOST
This girl's name was Mercy Brown.
Christopher FeinsteinHOST
And in the years since, people have called her a lot of things.
Christopher FeinsteinHOST
The last vampire in New England.
Christopher FeinsteinHOST
What actually happened is stranger and a lot sadder.
Christopher FeinsteinHOST
And it wasn't a one-time thing.
Christopher FeinsteinHOST
Mercy Brown was just the last time it made the papers.
Christopher FeinsteinHOST
I'm Christopher Feinstein, and this is the 31 Days of Halloween.