What, indeed?
That question is at the heart of the digging around, both figurative and literal, in the author’s latest thought-provoking book. The daughter in question was Mercy Brown, whose demise at 19 helped fuel the late 19th century’s so-called New England Vampire Panic. The fast-moving form of tuberculosis that killed Mercy and several siblings between 1884 and 1892 was an unstoppable force in an era when the operation of communicable diseases was imperfectly understood and effective cures for them nonexistent. Robert Koch identified the bacterium that causes tuberculosis in 1882, but knowledge of the science involved didn't spread quickly or fully enough to prevent superstition from flourishing: specifically, the belief that consumptives might feed on the living after their deaths, consigning yet more drained and wasted victims to the graveyard. With a local doctor, the townspeople of Exeter, Rhode Island persuaded Mercy’s grieving father to open her grave to see if she had turned over in the coffin, remained full of blood, or failed to decompose normally, all of which were seen as proof that the deceased had turned vampiric. She hadn't, but her heart and liver were burned nonetheless, creating a potion fed to her tubercular brother Edwin in the hopes of halting his disease. Sadly but not surprisingly, he died anyway.
Mahnke, the creator of the multimedia success Lore, does the gruesome parts of the story full justice. But he does equally good job exploring their context, from age-old rituals to 19th-century custom, scrupulous scientific research to pernicious superstition. The focus on vampire beliefs in America is notable too, as the many explorations of the subject tend to focus on Europe. Ultimately, the book’s greatest strength is that it’s less about vampires than about human beings, about the way fear drives apparently ordinary people to do grotesquely extraordinary things.
Mahnke, the creator of the multimedia success Lore, does the gruesome parts of the story full justice. But he does equally good job exploring their context, from age-old rituals to 19th-century custom, scrupulous scientific research to pernicious superstition. The focus on vampire beliefs in America is notable too, as the many explorations of the subject tend to focus on Europe. Ultimately, the book’s greatest strength is that it’s less about vampires than about human beings, about the way fear drives apparently ordinary people to do grotesquely extraordinary things.
Buy Exhumed: Unearthing the History of the American Vampire by Aaron Mahnke on Bookshop and Amazon. Running Press, August 2026.