🧛‍♀️ Did You Know? America’s First Vampire Panic Began in Rhode Island

A Fright That Swept New England

Before vampires sparkled in novels or haunted Hollywood, they terrified rural New Englanders for real. In the late 1700s and 1800s, long before modern medicine explained tuberculosis, families across Rhode Island and nearby states believed something supernatural was preying on the living.

Known as “consumption” at the time, tuberculosis spread quietly through close-knit communities—pale skin, weight loss, and persistent coughing led many to think the dead were draining the life from the living. Fear turned into folklore, and folklore into panic.

The Mercy Brown Case

The most famous case unfolded in Exeter, Rhode Island, in 1892. The Brown family had already lost their mother and eldest daughter to consumption when their teenage daughter, Mercy Brown, also fell ill. After her death, her brother Edwin continued to waste away. Neighbors whispered that one of the deceased Browns must be feeding on him from beyond the grave.

Driven by desperation, the townspeople exhumed the family graves. While most remains had decayed, Mercy’s body—kept in the cold of a stone crypt—appeared unnaturally preserved. Interpreting this as proof of vampirism, they burned her heart and liver, mixed the ashes into a tonic, and gave it to Edwin to drink as a supposed cure.

He died two months later.

Science Meets Superstition

The “vampire panic” might sound like a gothic fantasy, but it reflected the medical ignorance of the time. Germ theory was still new, and doctors didn’t yet understand how tuberculosis spread. When entire families died one by one, villagers grasped for explanations that made emotional sense.

Similar incidents occurred across Vermont, Connecticut, and Maine, where families dug up loved ones in the hope of ending what they believed were supernatural attacks. Newspapers of the era reported on the “Rhode Island Vampire” with both fascination and ridicule, calling the region “the vampire capital of America.”

How Folklore Endures

The Mercy Brown case inspired authors such as Bram Stoker, who researchers believe drew from the story while writing Dracula in 1897. More than a century later, her grave in Chestnut Hill Cemetery still draws visitors who leave coins, flowers, and plastic fangs in tribute.

Today, historians view the panic as a tragic blend of fear, grief, and myth. It stands as a reminder of how quickly misinformation can spread—and how folklore often grows from our deepest need to explain the inexplicable.

What began as fear of the undead ultimately became a reflection of something very human: our struggle to understand death, disease, and the hope that love might outlast them both.