Rhode Island Stories

What you will read below are items I gathered from various places via Email, or newsgroups. I hope you find them of interest. I have given the source of the information for each article, I hope they don't mind it being posted here for everyone to see. If the source wants them off please let me know.

Chazwick

Hi, I was checking out your site when i saw the section on Ri. vampires.
I live in Connecticut 2 miles from the Ri. border. It has always been an
intrest of mine and i have been to both Nellie and Mercy's graves many a
times. Here is some info in the attachment that i have collected. People
in the area don't really want to talk about it. Enjoy
-THE WOLF

Most of these stories, however, are set in our own region. In Rhode Island, 1993 was the date of the most recent encounter with Nelly Vaughn, the West Greenwich "vampire." Coventry resident Marlene Chatfield was making some gravestone rubbings, according to The New England Ghost Files, but when she tried to take an impression of Nelly's stone, "Complication after complication prevented me from doing the rubbing."

Later, when Chatfield and her husband returned to the cemetery, he heard a female voice saying, "I am perfectly pleasant," the curious words that appear on Nelly's gravestone. Red scratches appeared on his face. He left the cemetery.

New England vampires? Folklore battled a genuine specter

By JOHN CASTELLUCCI

Journal-Bulletin Staff Writer

Every Halloween, Rhode Islanders tell the story of Mercy Brown: How she was stricken by a mysterious illness more than 100 years ago and followed her mother and sister to the grave. How her brother Edwin fell ill, too, and their father was persuaded that Mercy was a vampire who was rising from the dead to feed on Edwin's flesh. How old George T. Brown and some neighbors in Exeter dug up her body one wintry March day and found that it had shifted in the coffin. How her heart was burned on a rock after it was found to contain fresh blood. However Edwin was fed the ashes as a cure but died less than two months later, on May 2, 1892.

Now a researcher is saying Mercy Brown was not the first Rhode Island vampire case - that she was the fifth and last. State folklorist Michael E. Bell says he has unearthed evidence that what happened to the Browns happened to at least 15 other New England families.

In the process, Bell says, he has uncovered reminders of a far deadlier killer than vampires, one that doctors say is making a comeback after 30 years.

Tuberculosis, the disease that physician Frank Ryan, author of the 1993 book The Forgotten Plague, calls "the greatest killer in history," is the common thread that connects Mercy Brown to the long line of vampire cases that Bell says began in this country in 1793.

Tuberculosis is a highly communicable disease. It was not until the development of antibiotics in the 1940s and 1950s - more than half a century after the cause of tuberculosis was discovered - that doctors could offer a cure.

Rather than stand by helplessly while their children died of the illness that was then called consumption - because the victim literally wasted away - Bell says desperate parents turned to folklore, which taught that vampires were responsible for the spread of the disease.

In none of the Rhode Island cases was the word vampire ever mentioned. But, in each case, Bell says, people clearly believed that the surviving members of a family struck by tuberculosis could be saved if the dead were exhumed and there bodies dismembered, burned or otherwise disrupted before being returned to the grave.

"To characterize it as nothing but an ignorant superstition is to miss why the people involved thought it was reasonable," Bell says. "Medical science had failed. So that's when you turned to folklore. Folklore always has an answer."

Bell first heard the Mercy Brown story when he arrived here with a team of folklorists from the Library of Congress's Folk Life Center in 1979. He identified the 15 other New England cases by sifting through town records, reading local histories, tracing genealogies and listening to family yarns.

The first known case occurred in 1793 in Manchester, Vt., where a local history says "a strange infatuation took possession of the minds of the friends and connections of the family" of Capt. Isaac Burton after his second wife, Hulda, began to die of consumption, the disease that killed his first wife, Rachel, a few years before. Rachel's body was exhumed, and, after her liver, heart and lungs were burned, Hulda was made to consume the ashes.

Three years later, in Cumberland, R.I., Stephen Staples got the permission of the Cumberland Town Council to exhume the body of a recently deceased daughter "to try an experiment" to save the life of another daughter, who had also fallen ill.

"It's not as explicit" as the Vermont case, Bell says. But when he described his research into other exhumation cases to the historian who told him about the Cumberland case, Ruth Wallis Herndon, "she jumped up and said, 'That's got to be it!' "

The next Rhode Island vampire case occurs in Exeter, and, as in a fairy tale, the deaths were foretold by a dream. Stukeley "Snuffy" Tillinghast, a prosperous Pine Hill farmer, dreamed one night that half his orchard had died. For a long time, according to Sidney Rider, a 19th-century historian, Tillinghast had no idea what the dream meant. But then, Rider wrote, six of Tillinghast's 14 children died of consumption, one right after another, and a seventh child was taken ill. "They all complained that Sarah (the first child to die) was coming back at night and putting pressure on their bodies," Bell says. A common symptom of pulmonary tuberculosis is a feeling of pressure on the chest.

Unable to stop the dying, Tillinghast consulted neighbors, who persuaded him to open the six graves and examine the bodies. The first five bodies were found in advanced stages of decomposition, but Sarah's heart and arteries were filled with fresh blood. "It was clear at once to these astonished people that the cause of their trouble lay there before them," Rider wrote. They burned Sarah's heart, and reburied all the bodies. Nevertheless, Rider wrote, the seventh child stricken with illness died.

"I did some genealogical research," Bell says. "I found that there was a Stukeley Tillinghast who had 14 children. Something like four children died in 1799." The three other deaths were an exaggeration, he says. "It's a better story to say half," Bell offers, "because of the dream."

In the next Rhode Island case, in 1827 in Foster, the remains of Nancy Young, 19-year-old daughter of Capt. Levi Young, were dug up and burned. In what Bell says was a variation of the vampire myth, the surviving family members inhaled the fumes. Genealogical research shows that four of Young's remaining eight children died anyway. Two sons and a daughter escaped.

The next exhumation case is sketchy. In 1874, according to a Catholic priest who Bell says believed in vampires, William G. Rose of Peace Dale had his 15-year-old daughter, Ruth Ellen, exhumed and her heart burned in the belief that she was causing the bodies of her relatives to waste away.

Bell says he has found connections between this case and two other suspected Rhode Island vampires. But, after the Mercy Brown exhumation in 1892, nobody in Rhode Island ever dug up the body of a suspected vampire again.

What made the practice die out? Bell theorizes that the discovery, in 1882, that tuberculosis was spread by bacteria finally began to take hold. In addition, the practice of embalming had reached rural areas, making it implausible to imagine that vampires were rising from the grave to search for blood.

Proof that New Englanders once believed in vampires doesn't come only from historical records. Three years ago, a lost cemetery in Griswold, Conn., yielded compelling evidence of the vampire myth. The cemetery was in a gravel pit run by a construction company. In the process of relocating the cemetery, the Connecticut state archeologist and some students found a coffin in which the bones of a 55-year-old man with the initials "J.B." had been rearranged. The upper leg bones had been crossed on the lower chest and the skull placed on the upper chest in a skull-and-crossbones pattern, said physical anthropologist Paul Sledzik. Lesions on the bones suggested tuberculosis, he said. The stake-in-the-heart legend notwithstanding, folklore prescribed other ways to kill vampires, says Sledzik, curator of anatomical collections at the National Museum of Health and Medicine. In the 19th century, Sledzik said, "the gist of 'killing the vampire' was to cause some disruption to the corpse."

Copyright © 1997 The Providence Journal Company

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Was she a victim ... or a vampire?

By KAREN LEE ZINER

Journal-Bulletin Staff Writer

EXETER -- The secret lies buried in Historical Cemetery No. 22, behind Exeter's Chestnut Hill Baptist Church on Route 102, on a hill framed by rustling dark woods that harbor their own uneasy mystery. The death certificate says that Mercy Brown went to her grave at age 19 on Jan. 17, 1892, a victim of tuberculosis. The legend says she was a vampire.

In fact, the story goes, an assemblage of family and townsfolk pulled Mercy Brown out of her final resting place one wintry day because they believed they had a means to cast out the evil spirit that they thought was disturbing her sleep. They performed their own dreadful "cure," but the story of Mercy Brown still haunts the town - especially at Halloween.

There are those from the Brown family who still care to tell the tale, and perhaps they know it best. Reuben Brown lives in the woods of Exeter in a house ancient and creaky and alive with the soft gonging and ticking of an old clock. Brown is 87, hard of hearing and a mite creaky himself. Still, he's full of wit and he loves to tell stories.

One of those is the legend of Mercy Lenna Brown. For this tale, Reuben Brown leans back in his worn brown leather chair, rests his feet on a wooden stool, and clutches his cane for emphatic, here- and-there taps on the floor. In the faded, sunlit living room, white- haired, 92-year-old Marion Brown sits on a couch and interrupts her husband now and then with laughter or correction. The whole fearful matter started with unexplained deaths, says Reuben Brown. Young girls, six or seven on one side of the Brown family, pined away and died. All of them "had a mark on their throats." "People figured they'd been bit by a vampire . . they all had that mark on them and nobody knows who made it," says Brown. Some folks were sure that Mercy - already gone to her grave - was the vampire.

A dozen people got together - members of Mercy's family and others in the town - and decided to open the grave and pull Mercy's body into the sunlight to perform a terrible task. Reuben Brown had a friend who was there. "I used to know a man who saw them when they unearthed her. He said he saw them cut her heart out and burn it on the rock. . . it appeared that Mercy had moved in the grave. She wasn't the way she was put in there . . .

"But he said there were no more deaths after that. That's what he said." Reuben Brown adds this footnote: "My father believed she was a vampire. He said all those girls had the mark on their throat when they died."

Another member of the Brown family, 51-year-old Lewis Peck, also lives in the Exeter woods, and is familiar with the legend. He keeps a collection of yellowed newspaper clippings that tell the story. "It's true, my people did this," says Peck. "They cut her right open, and they cut her heart out, and they burned her heart on the rocks to end what they thought was this vampirish disease. I remember as a kid my mother wouldn't allow us to touch those rocks."

But Peck himself believes that such folklore arose from a general lack of medical knowledge. Mercy Brown most likely died of tuberculosis, and the legend of a wandering predator full of blood lust most likely arose from fear and superstition. "These people came down with this rare sickness. . . of course I imagine the disease was tuberculosis. But they didn't know much about tuberculosis then." Other aspects of the legend are that when they opened the grave, "she had turned partly over."

Town records marking Mercy's death indicate that she certainly was not alone in going to an early death. Diphtheria, cholera, pneumonia, "the grippe," acute tuberculosis and gangrene claimed other young people that same year. But where Mercy was concerned, folks clung to superstition.

In "A Short History of Exeter, Rhode Island" Florence Parker Simister recounted this version of the Mercy Brown story:

" . . .Three members of that family died, probably of consumption, late in the nineteenth century - a mother and two daughters. Then a son became ill, too. The family held a conference and decided that he did not have consumption but was being attacked by a vampire.

"The bodies of the three women were dug up, the hearts were cut out of the bodies and burned on a nearby rock in the cemetery behind the Chestnut Hill Baptist Church. The object of burning the hearts, we are told, 'was to pocure medicine for the ailing Edwin Brown . . . He dissolved the ashes in the medicine his doctor had given him.' "

A newspaper report later said that "only one of the Brown women, Mercy, had blood in her veins when she was dug up and so she was the vampire,". . .Simister writes.

Peck, a hard-bitten Swamp Yankee, dismisses much of this with a sweep of his hand that says: Folderol. "Do you believe in vampires? I don't," he says with a laugh. Over the years, people have visited Peck to hear the story. Yankee magazine, news people from Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, television reporters. "You have no idea," he says with a sigh.

The last time, Peck got a little tired of it all and abandoned a TV crew as it stood in the graveyard wiring up electronic equipment "to listen to her grave or something." ("I didn't like their attitude," he says. "I asked them, 'What are you trying to do, make fun of my family?' ")

Though Peck says he doesn't believe in ghosts or roaming vampires, and though he insists this is all nonsense, he does admit he saw something strange one night, years ago, near Mercy's grave. That was when he was a young man out roaming with his brother and they drove up near that hill framed by restless trees, containing the supposedly restless spirit named Mercy.

"I was about 18 or 19 years old when this thing took place. We had a Model A. . . and I went up in the back of the Chestnut Hill Church with my brother David. "And by God, we looked and we saw a great big ball of light, so bright that it was blue." It hovered in the vicinity of the four or five graves where Brown family members, including Mercy, are buried. "It was a bright light, it was round. God she was bright, that's the part that stuck in you. I have no idea what it was.

"And to answer you how it went out, I don't know. We didn't stay," he says with a nervous grin that indicates he thinks he and his brother barely escaped an unfriendly encounter. The brothers drove down the road to a neighbor, also a member of the Brown family. He said of the glowing orb, 'Sonny, we've seen it before.' " "And then he laughed," says Peck. "Then we talked to someone from the other side of the family, and she'd seen it, too," Peck says, the memory of his boyhood fright driving the glint out of his eye. Does he think he saw a ghost? "Don't know what it was," he says. But he saw something.

And Lewis Peck says he just can't think of any way to explain it.

Copyright © 1997 The Providence Journal Company

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Courtesy of Yankee Magazine

January 1994.

© Charles T Robinson

THE WORDS ON NELLY'S TOMBSTONE

The villagers of Exeter, Rhode Island, knew that farmer George Brown had a problem. First, in 1883 his wife, Mary, succumbed to a mysterious illness. Six months later, his 20-year-old daughter, Mary Olive, also fell ill and died. Within the next several years, his 19-year-old daughter, Mercy, was also dead, and George's teenage son, Edwin, a healthy lad who worked as a store clerk, became suddenly frail and sick. The village doctor informed George that "consumption" was taking his family. But the country folk of Exeter had another explanation.

On a chilly March afternoon in 1892, a group of men entered Exeter's Chesnuthill Cemetery. There they began to exhume the bodies of George Brown's wife and two daughters. They had concluded that one of the deceased was leaving the grave at night to suck the life out of its relatives. Only by killing the vampire could young Edwin be saved.

First, the men examined the bodies of Mrs. Brown and daughter Mary. Finding them to be properly decomposed, they began to exhume Mercy Brown. Slowly they shoveled into Mercy's grave. When they reached the corpse, the men suddenly stepped back in terror.

Mercy, who had been buried for more than two months, appeared oddly well preserved. It seemed that her hair and nails had grown. And when the men curiously prodded the corpse with their shovel, they found that it was filled with fresh blood. The suspected vampire's heart was removed and burned on a nearby rock. The ashes were added to young Edwin's medicine. Still, the boy died less than two months later.

To the less superstitious, there was perhaps nothing so unusual about the well-preserved condition of Mercy's body. She had been in the ground during the two coldest months of the year. The mysterious wave of illness that swept George Brown's family was probably tuberculosis.

But that did not keep Rhode Island from becoming known as the "Vampire Capital of America". South County, whose isolated villages resembled the lonely hamlets of Transylvania, was a hotbed of vampire rumors between 1870 and 1900. When Bram Stoker, who wrote Dracula in 1897, died, newspaper accounts of Mercy Brown were found in his files.

The legend persists to this day. In Rhode Island Historical Cemetery No.2 stands the gravestone of alleged vampire Nelly L. Vaughn of West Greenwich, who died in 1889 at the age of 19. The grave is supposedly cursed. One local university professor who studies vampirism claims that "no vegetation or lichen will grow on Nelly's grave," despite numerous attempts to plant there. And people are still taken aback by the inscription along the bottom of Nelly's tombstone. The curious words read, "I am waiting and watching for you."