About Tillinghast: A dark and utterly original literary horror debut, following a priest whose bloodthirsty life has extended far longer than any mere human’s—and is upended when a stranger comes to town. Out now.

On the 17th of March 1892, a woman named Mercy Brown, who had been dead for exactly three months, was exhumed from her grave in the small town of Exeter, Rhode Island. A team of local villagers, accompanied by a medical doctor and a newspaper reporter were there to watch as her heart and liver were removed from her body and burned on a fire nearby. The ashes were carefully collected and mixed with water, and her brother Edwin drank the resulting concoction. Mercy wasn’t the first. Nearly one hundred people were exhumed from their graves across New England, especially Rhode Island, throughout the nineteenth century.

Why did they do this? Depending on who you ask, you might get one of two answers.

Answer one is that it happened because Mercy Brown had died of tuberculosis, or consumption, as it was then known. In the wake of the industrial revolution, populations in New England became more concentrated, and these higher density communities provided the ideal conditions for TB to spread. With no effective treatments until the 1940s, contracting the illness meant certain death. In response, local communities developed the belief that TB was spreading through families and towns because those who had already died were somehow sapping the energy of the sick. Perhaps, then, neutralising the dead might halt the disease. Mercy might be harming Edwin, and by destroying her body and giving him pieces of it to consume, he might be cured.

Answer two is that it happened because Mercy Brown was a vampire.

What do you picture when you read the word ‘vampire’? An alluring, Eastern European aristocrat who never drinks… wine? A Louisiana-dwelling, blond Frenchman? A sparkling, perpetual seventeen-year-old?

What, if anything, do these figures have in common with Mercy Brown? On the face of it, not much. The New Englanders who exhumed the bodies of their dead relatives to prevent the spread of tuberculosis never used the word ‘vampire’ themselves – it was projected onto them by newspaper reports which brought the story of Mercy Brown to a national and international audience, one of whom, it seems, was the Irish writer Bram Stoker, who would publish Dracula five years later.

The first seeds of my novel, Tillinghast, came from research into the New England vampire panic, as the exhumations are now known, but it was also shaped by vampires in mythology, fiction and film. There are plenty of fascinating links between what really happened in Rhode Island and the vampires of page and screen. These links are diaphanous and suggestive, and made a great place to play – with the historical record, with readers’ expectations, with the vampire tradition in general. The New England vampire panic and the mythological, fictional vampire can illuminate one another, but they can also stand in opposition. Examining four key characteristics of the vampire, the vampire as outsider, as seducer, as revenant and as parasite, will show these points of union and opposition, and help explain why the story of Mercy Brown holds such enduring fascination.

The Outsider

Vampires are outsiders, in space and in time. Their artificially lengthened lifespans leave them cut off from their own chronological context, adrift in an infinite present. Very often, too, they’re geographical outsiders. Dracula emerges from deepest, darkest Eastern Europe, Lestat is an old world traveller to America. The vampire is non-human and foreign. He’s outside the house and needs an invitation to enter. Once he’s in, he spreads death and corruption.

At the time of the exhumations, Rhode Islanders were in a sense outsiders to their New England neighbours. Founded by a religious refugee from Massachusetts, Rhode Island retained a secretive permissiveness which allowed many of its inhabitants to avoid affiliation with church congregations, which could be systems of surveillance as well as religious communities. Rhode Island was a place for outsiders and a place where you could keep secrets – fertile ground for vampire myths.

To the writers and readers of newspaper reports such as that which appeared in the Providence Journal two days after Mercy Brown’s exhumation, the people of Exeter were outsiders too, cut off from the genteel enlightenment of larger cities. The Journal describes, in frenzied all caps, the “BODIES OF DEAD RELATIVES TAKEN FROM THEIR GRAVES” with the aim of “Testing a Horrible Superstition”, something their readers, of course, would never do. Intriguingly, Dr Michael E. Bell points out that international responses to the exhumations seemed to regard them as a typically American problem: taking a step back makes the Rhode Islanders look a lot less foreign, a lot more integrated into US society. Perhaps they’re not as outside as we’d like them to be.

What’s worse than a vampire lurking outside the door, begging to be invited in? A vampire who’s already inside the house. A vampire who looks like your mother, your sister. Worst of all, a vampire who looks like you.

The Seducer

Vampires are sexy. They can be beautiful and charming when they want to, and their sex appeal can be an excellent tool for hunting their prey. Vampirism is an eloquent stand-in for sexual desire, especially in a conservative context: an alluring, often male figure is in thrall to a barely-contained appetite, the fulfilment of which will result in the destruction of his partner. To me, this sounds a lot like some of the abstinence-forward sexual education I was offered in my early teens.

But what does this have to do with the New England vampires? Surely there’s nothing sexy about a tuberculosis epidemic? As Alicea Hibbard and Annette Lopez Rosa explain in their article, ‘Tuberculosis and the Fatal Beauty of Romanticism’, “the characteristic consumptive appearance of TB victims was the predominant European beauty standard. Suffering from the disease’s effects was seen not only as a beautiful and dramatic way to die, but also an aspirational way to live.” The bright eyes, pale skin, livid cheeks and lips and delicate frame of the TB sufferer were considered beautiful, and it was thought that consumption favoured victims of a romantic or artistic disposition. The disease sought out sexy people and made them sexier as they died.

The idea of a sexy illness sounds weird, but the description of the consumptive body is very close to the heroin chic aesthetic of the 1990s. Echoes of that style are returning right now as changing fashion and rising use of GLP-1 receptor antagonist drugs bring extremely thin body types back into fashion. It’s also worth noting that unlike fictional vampires, who tend to be male, the ‘vampires’ of New England tended to be female – women spent more time in the enclosed spaces of the home, and more time caring for ill family members, leaving them disproportionately vulnerable to contracting disease themselves.

The delicate, vulnerable, suffering woman is a sexualised trope familiar to everyone. Through direct replication and revisionist subversion, it’s still nearly ubiquitous in horror and thriller media today. And if the delicate, suffering woman can double up as the aggressor, the antagonist; if she can die sweetly on a chaise longue and then reappear to sap the life from more victims, all the better. This fetish-figure twines together the historical record and the vampire as cultural artefact. It seems certain to have driven public interest in Mercy Brown’s story back in the 1890s, and the enduring appeal of the story today.

The Revenant

Vampires are undead. Their bodies don’t decay, often they don’t even change.

Human bodies, of course, change constantly, After they die, they alter in ways that are disturbing, even counter-intuitive. The unusual experience of witnessing advanced human decomposition during the exhumations probably contributed to the practices that made up the New England vampire panic. Corpses bloated with decomposition gasses could be mistaken for revenants who had been consuming something. The fluids in the cavities of a decomposing body might be mistaken for fresh blood. Colour changes in the skin could be surprising and frightening.

In between the moment of death and the point at which decomposition is largely complete and only skeletal remains are left is a period of great risk, when the lines between human and non-human, living and dead seem threateningly porous. Decomposition takes a familiar body and makes it unrecognisable, full of uncanny movement and alteration. Victim becomes monster, ailing consumptive becomes vampire.

This fear isn’t one we’ve left behind with the nineteenth-century New Englanders. In the contemporary US, rates of embalming are extremely high, and have only begun to decline recently as cremation becomes more and more popular. Both embalming and cremation stave off the dangerous period of decay, either by temporarily preventing it or by skipping through it to the skeletal phase. They’re technological responses to the threat of a beloved body turning on us. Even now, we prefer people alive or dead. When they’re somewhere in between, horror ensues.

The Parasite

Vampires drink blood. This is a pretty big moral problem, and if the vampire is to appear as anything but a villain, it requires a work-around, such as the animal-blood-only diet of the vampires in Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight series.

When working on Tillinghast, I knew that this point of conflict – a vampire who knows right from wrong, prefers to do the right thing but nevertheless kills victims – was one I didn’t want to resolve or work around. The further I got into writing the book and the better I got to know my main character, the more it seemed that his moral impasse was not only the key to understanding him, but a difficulty that a lot of real people shared, very much including me.

I know that my day-to-day comfort and flourishing is supported by the suffering and even the deaths of other people. Unlike Tillinghast, I don’t have to dispatch them myself, but like him, I have a sense of justice, a desire to do the right thing, and a complete inability to solve this problem in a way that might absolve me of my culpability. Being able to keep on going in circumstances like this is, I think, a far more universal human struggle than it first appears.

I think this is the point at which the New England vampires diverge definitively from their fictional counterparts. I do not think that the people involved in the New England vampire panic acted selfishly, and I don’t even really think that they hurt anyone. In the case of Mercy Brown, the record shows that her father, George Brown, was reluctant to agree to the exhumation, and did not believe that exhuming her would be effective. Dr Metcalfe, who attended the burials, didn’t think it was a good idea either. So why did they go through with it? They did it in order to protect their community, through essentially the only method available to them. The results, however brutal and grotesque they might seem, were the fruits of their selflessness and bravery.

Sometimes it feels that the New England ‘vampires’ have become lost in the fictional and mythological mist that surrounds them, but they are there if you look closely enough. If you take a trip to the Chestnut Hill Baptist Church in Exeter, Rhode Island and walk around the back of the church, you’ll find the headstone of Mercy L. Brown, daughter of Geroge and Mary Brown, who died aged 19. It stands in the shade of a tree, near the graves of her family members. Mercy died in the winter, and the cold preserved her. In some tellings, it was so cold she couldn’t be buried, and instead her body was stored in the crypt, which you’ll find off to your right as you look at the headstone, waiting for the ground to thaw enough for digging.

Something terrible did happen to her, but it wasn’t supernatural. It was nothing worse than what happens to all of us, sooner or later. And that, surely, is a truth too terrible to contemplate. That’s the kind of thing you’d have to do something about. You’d have to find a way to extract the vampire from yourself, your sister, your mother. You’d have to find a way to send her out into the night, where she can’t get at you anymore, where she can beg and beg all she wants, but you’ll never let her back inside.

If you’d like to find out more, I recommend Dr Michael E. Bell’s books Food for the Dead and The Vampire’s Grasp.

The post What is a Vampire Anyway? The New England Vampire Panic appeared first on The Nerd Daily.