The Sorrell Family: A Perfect Fit - Pbs: Fill & Download for Free

JENKINS VIA FLICKR // CC BY-NC-ND 2.0In the late 1800s, New England was in the midst of a vampire fad—but it was nothing like the Twilight saga vampires of today or Anne Rice's Vampire Coven. No, these New England vampire scares were rooted in a distorted perception of reality. Not so real that the supposed vampires were, in fact, vampires, but real enough considering that a disease was spreading and consuming humans.Rhode Island, Connecticut, and Vermont were all suffering from outbreaks of tuberculosis, called consumption at the time.[1] Its cause was still unknown at the time, although people knew that once one family member got the disease, others were soon to follow.Consumption (also known as tuberculosis) was a leading cause of death in the 1800s; by all accounts, it was a gruesome way to die. As tuberculosis spread from the cities out into the countryside, people didn’t know what caused it or how to stop it. Tuberculosis was entrenched in the Americas even before the United States existed as a country. President George Washington himself likely fought the disease after contracting it from his brother—ironically, on a trip taken to Barbados in an attempt to treat Lawrence Washington’s illness.[2] Washington wasn’t alone, other notable American sufferers of tuberculosis included James Monroe, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Washington Irving, John “Doc” Holliday, and Helen Hunt Jackson.[3]In some New England towns, such as Lynn, Massachusetts, it was the leading cause of death.[4] Entire families were wiped out, and there didn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to who caught the illness. In 1786, when health officials first began recording mortality rates connected to the deadly infection, Massachusetts alone recorded 300 consumption deaths for every 100,000 residents.[5] Between that year and 1800, tuberculosis killed 2 percent of New England’s population.[6] In many cases, communal living and extended families provided a prime breeding ground for the disease to spread throughout an entire family. It was estimated that anywhere from 70 to 90 percent of the American population had latent or active tuberculosis infections.[7]When New Englanders Blamed Vampires for Tuberculosis DeathsIt was not a pleasant way to die. Symptoms included an extremely high fever, wasting,, night sweats,fatigue, sunken eyes and a persistent cough that sometimes produced white phlegm or foamy blood.[8] Occasionally, the cough turned into hemorrhaging. Those who caught it could not know if they would eventually recover, painfully waste away over the course of years, or die in a matter of months from the “galloping” form of the disease.[9] If they did recover, there was always the fear that the illness would return.Cholera, plague, smallpox, yellow fever, influenza, and measles were fast-burning epidemics that appeared, killed, and then went dormant as immunities kicked in.[10] Tuberculosis did not. It was an unrelenting fact of life in the 1800s. With no other explanations, people turned to the supernatural to understand the epidemic, and to offer hope of a cure.The popular theory of the time was that the first infected member of a family was believed to drain the life force of their loved ones through some spiritual connection that continued even after death.[11] Those who died from consumption were exhumed and examined. If their body seemed “too fresh”, it was assumed to be still feeding on the living.There were a number of ways proposed to stop this vampiric feeding. In parts of Massachusetts and Maine, bodies were simply flipped over and left alone facing the dirt, the simplest and least gruesome of practices.[12] In Rhode Island, Connecticut and Vermont, villagers burned the hearts and livers from bodies of suspected vampires.[13] Sometimes, this was combined with decapitation. Some even believed that inhaling the smoke and ash from the burned organs would cure their tuberculosis.[14]Mercy Brown – MercyMercy Lena Brown and her family lived in Exeter, Rhode Island.[15] The area was sparsely populated and farmers struggled to cultivate the hardscrabble land. Consumption, like many afflictions, was not entirely understood by residents, and was viewed with fear. In fact, many residents regarded consumption as a dark and mysterious thief in the night.Beginning in December 1882, the Brown family began to die from consumption in rapid succession. First was Mary Eliza, Mercy’s mother. The following year, Mercy’s sister, Mary Olive, died at the age of 20. Mary’s obituary described her suffering as having been so great that she was ready for the afterlife.[16] Next, Mercy’s brother Edwin, known as a big and husky man, began to wither away, but quickly left New England for Colorado Springs in the hopes that a better climate would cure him.[17]By the time Edwin returned a decade later, Mercy herself was on the threshold of death. She had been suffering from a more silent form of consumption for years—galloping consumption—named so because of its fast transition from invisible to fatal.[18] An attending doctor informed Mercy’s father George that medical care was useless. In January 1892, Mercy died, her simple obituary reading: “Miss Lena Brown, who has been suffering from consumption, died Sunday morning.”[19]When Edwin returned home after Mercy’s death, his health declined. His desperate father turned to an old folk belief: when members of the same family waste away from consumption, it could be because one of the deceased was draining the life force of their living relatives.[20] Desperate for an answer to cure his family's misfortune, patriarch George Brown was convinced by his neighbors that there might be something supernatural leeching their strength. Two centuries after the Salem Witch Trials, New Englanders continued to search for monsters in their midst. Townsfolk reported seeing Mercy walking about both in the cemetery and through fields. Her brother Edwin who had recently returned from a wellness center in Colorado and who was succumbing quickly to the disease reported that his sister Mercy was "siting on his chest" suffocating him.[21]Brown family plot at Chestnut Hill Cemetery (The Vampire Case of Mercy Brown - Locations of Lore)The neighbors asked George Brown’s permission to exhume the bodies of his wife and two daughters to check for fresh blood in their hearts. He agreed, and with village doctor Harold Metcalf and town undertaker George T. Cranston, with some neighbors in tow, the exhumations took place on the morning of March 17, 1892.[22]Accounts differ as to whether Mercy’s body had already been buried or if it rested in a crypt until the ground could thaw and undertakers could dig a grave.[23] After nearly 10 years, Mary Olive and Mary Eliza were almost entirely decomposed. But Mercy, had been interred for nine weeks in the cold New England weather, was almost perfectly preserved.[24] The vampire hunters of Exeter had found their target.Despite assertions from the doctor that this was fairly standard and not a sign of the supernatural, the community's course of action was clear. Dr. Metcalf explained in vain that the weather conditions would have kept her preserved and that her lungs were clearly showing symptoms of tuberculosis, but the people of Exeter were not going to be dissuaded.[25] Upon cutting open her heart, the doctor found decayed blood. An examination of her lungs indicated the dormant presence of consumption germs.The community believed that Mercy continued her reign of terror from beyond the grave. On the assumption that Mercy had been preying on her family since she was just a small girl, they removed her heart and liver, burned her heart to ashes on an adjacent rock, and fed the resulting ashes to Edwin.[26] But it was no use. Edwin Brown died two months later on May 2, 1892. The remainder of Mercy’s violated body was buried in Exeter’s Baptist Church Cemetery.[27]The rock adjacent to the Brown family plot, where it is theorized that Mercy's organs were burned (The Vampire Case of Mercy Brown - Locations of Lore)Maybe it seems strange that vampires were at the forefront of Exeter's mind. The reason is that Mercy Brown was really only the most recent of many similar vampire hunts during what was known as New England Vampire Panic — although they had largely died down in the late 19th century.[28] Newspapers were quick to connect these folk rituals with vampire legends, especially those of Eastern Europe. Vampire stories from all over were featured on the front pages of 19th-century New England[29] , describing similar stories in distant locations. Like the New Englanders, people in remote parts of Europe were exhuming bodies when people fell ill, and burning or planting stakes in those that seemed too full of life.One of the more remarkable cases is that of the Rev. Justus Forward and his daughter Mercy (no relation to Mercy Brown). In 1788, the minister had already lost three daughters to consumption; Mercy and another sister were fighting the illness.[30] As Mercy Forward traveled to a neighboring town with her father one day, she began to hemorrhage.Rev Justus Forward (1730-1814) - Find A Grave...Forward was reluctant to try opening the graves of his deceased family members, but allowed himself to be convinced, willing to do anything to save his daughter. His mother-in-law’s grave was opened first, without result.[31] However, he soon found a grave that fit the requirements. From a letter written by Forward:“Since I had begun to search, I concluded to search further ... and this morning opened the grave of my daughter ... who had died—the last of my three daughters—almost six years ago ... On opening the body, the lungs were not dissolved, but had blood in them, though not fresh, but clotted. The lungs did not appear as we would suppose they would in a body just dead, but far nearer a state of soundness than could be expected. The liver, I am told, was as sound as the lungs. We put the lungs and liver in a separate box, and buried it in the same grave, ten inches or a foot, above the coffin.”[32]The act didn’t save Mercy, but Forward’s other children seemed to recover. And the willingness of Forward and his family to attempt the ritual impartially helped to relieve fear in his community. He ultimately authorized a ritual that, in effect, reestablished social stability, essentially proclaiming that the dead were, indeed, dead once again.There were other cases as well. At the end of the 19th century, Daniel Ransom wrote in his journal about his brother Frederick, a Dartmouth College student who died of tuberculosis in 1817.[33] The boys’ father worried that Frederick would feed on the rest of the family, and had Frederick exhumed and his heart burned at a blacksmith’s forge.[34] The cure didn’t work, however, and Daniel Ransom lost his mother and three siblings over the next several years.New England 'Vampire' Was Likely a Farmer Named JohnIn the 1850s, Henry Ray of Jewett City, Connecticut exhumed the bodies of his brothers and cremated them when he, too, contracted tuberculosis.[35] In a nearby case, a grave belonging to someone known only as “J.B.” was broken into—possibly by family members or friends, who often conducted the rituals—and the skeletal remains were rearranged into a skull and crossbones shape.[36] Researchers speculate that it might have been done to stop J.B. from becoming a vampire, or because he was blamed for a living person’s illness.Henry David Thoreau wrote of another case in his journal in September 1859:“The savage in man is never quite eradicated. I have just read of a family in Vermont—who, several of its members having died of consumption, just burned the lungs & heart & liver of the last deceased, in order to prevent any more from having it.”[37]Isaac Johnson (A Double Exhumation in 1784 Connecticut)The vampire legend may have made its way into New England as an early version of the unproven “miracle cure” for tuberculosis. In 1784, a newspaper published a letter about a foreign “quack doctor” who had been disseminating an unusual cure for consumption.[38] According to the letter, when a third member of the Willington, Connecticut family of Isaac Johnson contracted the disease, the quack doctor advised him to dig up two family members who had already died of the illness.[39] The bodies were inspected for any sprouting plants, and the letter writer—who said he was an eyewitness—reported that sorrel was found. The doctor advised the Johnson family to burn the sorrel with the vital organs to remove sickness from his family, an idea the letter-writer called an imposture.[40]In 1882, Dr. Robert Koch identified the causative agent of tuberculosis.[41] The sad fact was that, until drug treatments became available in the 1940s, a person afflicted with the disease would have to basically just hope for the best. That could explain why people were so eager to find another explanation for their symptoms.Today, most people understand that tuberculosis is spread through the air, by inhaling the bacteria from those with active infections in their lungs or throats.[42] There are vaccines, though they’re rarely used in the U.S., and treatments for those who contract active tuberculosis infections.[43]In the 1800s, however, germ theory was only just beginning to gain supporters among the medical community. Through 1895, doctors continued to argue over the causes of tuberculosis and treatment mainly consisted of leaving large cities like New York and Boston, where the disease ran rampant, for places like California, Colorado and New Mexico where the climate was supposed to help ease the symptoms.[44] Until the rise of the sanatoria movement (basically, rest-oriented treatment centers) at the end of the 19th century, few medical treatments worked.[45] Even sanatoria only helped some patients.An 1864 French lithograph showing farmers exhuming a body believed to be a vampire (Did Vampires Really Stalk New England Farm Families? - New England Historical Society)Before Koch's discovery, though, supernatural explanations were even more common. One suspected vampire was "J.B." (from the letters spelled out in brass tacks on his coffin). He was one of several bodies found in a forgotten 1830s cemetery in Griswold, Connecticut in 1990.[46] But unlike the other remains found in that place, J.B. had been decapitated, his skull and thighbones placed atop his vertebrae and ribs.[47] Experts believe his corpse had been desecrated in an attempt to prevent him from returning from the dead.The rituals continued until Mercy Brown’s exhumation in 1892, 10 years after Koch discovered the bacteria that caused tuberculosis.[48] Eventually, germ theory began to take hold, and contagion was better understood. Infection rates began to go down as hygiene and nutrition improved. But until then, people were often willing to cling to any chance for themselves and their loved ones under the gnawing sense of hopelessness those with the disease lived with. In short, for the pragmatic Yankee, the bottom line was, ‘What do I have to do to stop this scourge?’[49] The ritual was a folk remedy rather than an elaborated detailed belief system.In death, Mercy Brown has achieved a a cult following of sorts, comprised of both sympathizers and vampire enthusiasts. She has been the inspiration for numerous writings, including H.P. Lovecraft’s The Shunned House, [50] and supposedly, for the character of Lucy in Bram Stoker’s Dracula.Footnotes[1] http://Sledzik, Paul S.; Nicholas Bellantoni (1994). "Bioarcheological and biocultural evidence for the New England vampire folk belief" (PDF). American Journal of Physical Anthropology. 94 (2): 269–274. [2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/[3] A Gentle Death: Tuberculosis in 19th Century Concord[4] Hospital for treatment of tuberculosis[5] The Forgotten Plague | American Experience | PBS[6] When New Englanders Blamed Vampires for Tuberculosis Deaths[7] Contagion: Historical Views of Diseases and Epidemics[8] What are the signs and symptoms of pulmonary tuberculosis (TB) (consumption)?[9] Galloping consumption - PubMed[10] Evaluating plague and smallpox as historical selective pressures for the CCR5-Δ32 HIV-resistance allele[11] The history of tuberculosis: from the first historical records to the isolation of Koch's bacillus[12] When New Englanders Blamed Vampires for Tuberculosis Deaths[13] Google News Archive Search[14] A haunted history: Vampires in Woodstock village & other tales[15] Mercy Brown vampire incident - Wikipedia[16] The story of Mercy Brown: New England’s last vampire[17] When A Mob Burned The Heart Of A Teenage "Vampire" Suspected Of Killing Her Family[18] Vampires and the Tuberculous Family - Hektoen International[19] The story of Mercy Brown: New England’s last vampire[20] The Great New England Vampire Panic[21] Mercy Lena Brown (1872-1892) - Find A Grave...[22] http://smallstatebighistory.com/vampires-in-exeter-the-gruesome-tale-of-mercy-l-and-edwin-a-brown/[23] The Last American Vampire[24] The Mercy Brown Vampire Story | Historic Mysteries[25] The Vampire Case of Mercy Brown - Locations of Lore[26] http://smallstatebighistory.com/vampires-in-exeter-the-gruesome-tale-of-mercy-l-and-edwin-a-brown/[27] https://archive.org/details/foodfordead00mich[28] New England's Vampire History | Legends and Hysteria[29] The St. Charles herald. [volume] (Hahnville, La.) 1873-1993, September 06, 1884, Image 1[30] American Vampires and the Ongoing Ambiguity of Death...by Michael E. Bell, Kritikos V.10, March 2013[31] The Vampire. Origins of a European Myth. New York: Berghahn, 2019.[32] Justus Forward papers[33] Then Again: When vampires were to blame for a deadly wasting disease - VTDigger[34] Meet the Real-Life Vampires of New England and Abroad[35] Jewett City Vampires[36] New England 'Vampire' Was Likely a Farmer Named John[37] “The Savage in Man is Never Quite Eradicated“ - The New England Vampire Panic[38] How Tuberculosis Inspired the 19th-Century New England Vampire Panic[39] A Double Exhumation in 1784 Connecticut [40] THE WILLINGTON VAMPIRES[41] The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1905[42] Understanding Tuberculosis: Perspectives and Experiences of the People of Sabah, East Malaysia[43] Vaccines | Basic TB Facts | TB | CDC[44] Early Research and Treatment of Tuberculosis in the 19th Century - American Lung Association Crusade[45] The history of tuberculosis: the social role of sanatoria for the treatment of tuberculosis in Italy between the end of the 19th century and the middle of the 20th[46] https://www.nytimes.com/1992/09/10/nyregion/28-graves-giving-up-secrets-of-the-1700-s.html[47] New London County, Conn.[48] Robert Koch: Centenary of the Discovery of the Tubercle Bacillus, 1882[49] Tuberculosis: From an incurable scourge to a curable disease - journey over a millennium[50] The Shunned House by H. P. Lovecraft