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How the New England Vampire Panics Worked · Stuff You Should Know

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: Hey, everybody. We've already made our big tour announcement for
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  Speaker 1: Come out and see us. Welcome to Stuff you should
• 0:36
  Speaker 1: Know from House Stuff Works dot com. Hey, and welcome
• 0:45
  Speaker 1: to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, Charles W. Chuck, pri
• 0:49
  Speaker 1: Jerry Stuff you should know. I love this one. Yeah.
• 0:56
  Speaker 1: Vampires December fourwelve was our our main podcast on vampires.
• 1:05
  Speaker 1: It was like it was a good one and I
• 1:07
  Speaker 1: don't remember touching on this at all, did we No?
• 1:10
  Speaker 1: I had no idea about it, that's nutty. It wasn't
• 1:12
  Speaker 1: until I read a great um, a great article about
• 1:20
  Speaker 1: vampire panics in New England that I had first heard
• 1:23
  Speaker 1: of it. Abigail Tucker from Ye she did an amazing
• 1:27
  Speaker 1: job on that one, agreed. So let's start. Let's start
• 1:33
  Speaker 1: where that article starts, because I think it's a great
• 1:36
  Speaker 1: place to dive into this this weirdness. Yeah. Yeah, that's
• 1:42
  Speaker 1: not what most people would think. You would say. In Connecticut,
• 1:45
  Speaker 1: I'm a freshman in college. There were there were some
• 1:48
  Speaker 1: kids playing at I think a gravel quarry and they
• 1:52
  Speaker 1: discovered some graves. It's basically the dream of every kid
• 1:56
  Speaker 1: who's ever played outside to discover some like long lost graves.
• 2:01
  Speaker 1: Like any kid poking around the woods. Were all really
• 2:04
  Speaker 1: just looking for dead bodies pretty much at the very least,
• 2:07
  Speaker 1: you're prepared for it at all times. Yeah, um remember
• 2:11
  Speaker 1: stand by Me, kid, Mean, that's what inspired it all.
• 2:13
  Speaker 1: That was one of like the great unnerving, disturbing dead
• 2:18
  Speaker 1: kids of all time. And you know what, Ray Brower, Um,
• 2:21
  Speaker 1: my friend, my best friend Brett came upon a dead
• 2:25
  Speaker 1: body one time playing in the woods. Yeah, and it
• 2:27
  Speaker 1: wasn't It was a neighbor who who had a heart
• 2:30
  Speaker 1: attack while like raking leaves or cleaning up in the
• 2:33
  Speaker 1: woods or something, So it wasn't nefarious, but he still
• 2:36
  Speaker 1: ran across the dead body as a kid. How why
• 2:39
  Speaker 1: was the guy cleaning up the woods? Well, I mean
• 2:41
  Speaker 1: I think it was the woods on the edge of
• 2:42
  Speaker 1: his yards or something like that. How long had he
• 2:45
  Speaker 1: been there for? Uh, don't think it had been that long.
• 2:51
  Speaker 1: He wasn't decomposed or anything. I think it was just
• 2:55
  Speaker 1: like lifeless body. There's Mr whatever, Mr Whipple, Right, don't
• 3:02
  Speaker 1: squeeze charm, I'm cleaning the woods. So these these kids
• 3:07
  Speaker 1: found graves that were very, very old. They weren't, you know,
• 3:10
  Speaker 1: a dead neighbor or anything like that. They were actually
• 3:13
  Speaker 1: it turned out to be a lost family cemetery again
• 3:17
  Speaker 1: in Connecticut, right, and in very short order, the Connecticut
• 3:23
  Speaker 1: state archaeologist, which is pretty cool, position, a guy named
• 3:27
  Speaker 1: Nick Bellantoni. He was called out and he starts excavating
• 3:31
  Speaker 1: the place, right, yes, I'll keep going. He finds a
• 3:36
  Speaker 1: bunch of graves, lots of kids, because it's New England
• 3:39
  Speaker 1: nineteenth century, late eighteenth century, early nineteenth centuries. When they
• 3:43
  Speaker 1: finally said, this is about when this this graveyard was
• 3:46
  Speaker 1: in use, and there were kids, some adults buried normally
• 3:51
  Speaker 1: exactly like you'd expect. How she said they were buried
• 3:55
  Speaker 1: Yankee style. Yeah, I didn't know what that meant. It
• 3:57
  Speaker 1: meant like in a very thrifty manner, very bare bones,
• 4:01
  Speaker 1: I feel forgiven, not like our ostentatious southern coffins. Right,
• 4:05
  Speaker 1: what about that lady who got buried in her ferrari?
• 4:08
  Speaker 1: Did you hear about her? I think I did. She
• 4:10
  Speaker 1: was great just for doing that, you know, like, I'll
• 4:13
  Speaker 1: see y'all in Hell. I'm taking my ferrari with that.
• 4:16
  Speaker 1: She was like buried sitting up behind the wheel in
• 4:19
  Speaker 1: an agle j in her ferrari. That's how she was buried.
• 4:22
  Speaker 1: That's like the Elon Musk's tesla in space, a little
• 4:26
  Speaker 1: estro not riding around it. Well, yeah, everyone knows that
• 4:29
  Speaker 1: that's actually the body of one of his enemies, of course,
• 4:32
  Speaker 1: who was alive when that rocket went off. I'm sure so. Um,
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  Speaker 1: there's this one grave out of all of them that
• 4:40
  Speaker 1: is a little hinky, you could say. Bellentoni starts um
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  Speaker 1: pulling away some of the rocks. It's entombed now like
• 4:48
  Speaker 1: the others. There's rocks around it. And he finds that
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  Speaker 1: the coffin has been broken, and on the coffin, on
• 4:54
  Speaker 1: the coffin lid in brass tacks is J. B. I
• 4:58
  Speaker 1: believe hyphen five. Yeah, and this coffin is red, which
• 5:02
  Speaker 1: is also different I think than the others. Most of
• 5:05
  Speaker 1: the coffin's fine, or most of the skeletons fine. But
• 5:08
  Speaker 1: when he gets a little further up, he finds on
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  Speaker 1: top of the ribs the thigh bones are crossed across
• 5:15
  Speaker 1: the ribs, and the skull is no longer attached the
• 5:18
  Speaker 1: end of the spinal column. It's on the rib cage
• 5:21
  Speaker 1: as well, and the rib cage has been broken. And
• 5:24
  Speaker 1: upon further inspection he finds the coffin has been smashed.
• 5:27
  Speaker 1: And Nick Bellantoni says, we'll I'll be yeah. I mean,
• 5:32
  Speaker 1: this is not what normally happens as a body decomposes.
• 5:36
  Speaker 1: They don't go into the shape of the Jolly rogers
• 5:38
  Speaker 1: pirate flag. Um. And it's funny that you picked this
• 5:42
  Speaker 1: because uh and this is sort of an announcement. But
• 5:46
  Speaker 1: the Great Aeron Mankey of Lore fame, was telling me
• 5:50
  Speaker 1: these stories this week in the office because uh we
• 5:55
  Speaker 1: he has partnered with us. He's gonna do some shows
• 5:57
  Speaker 1: with us. Now, yeah, not Lore He's like, no, no, no,
• 6:02
  Speaker 1: you don't get that one. But he's gonna do some
• 6:03
  Speaker 1: new shows with us and we're all super excited. But
• 6:05
  Speaker 1: he was telling me all these stories and you were
• 6:08
  Speaker 1: falling asleep, stroking my head gently. And uh, the next
• 6:13
  Speaker 1: day you sent this article or this, uh, this collection
• 6:17
  Speaker 1: of articles you put together and said, let's do one
• 6:19
  Speaker 1: in vampire panics. And I was like, that's weird. Man,
• 6:22
  Speaker 1: Like Aaron Mankey was just talking about this, and he
• 6:25
  Speaker 1: has like three Laura episodes, one on Mercy Brown that
• 6:28
  Speaker 1: I listened to, uh as part of this research, but
• 6:31
  Speaker 1: then two others, and it was just it all can
• 6:33
  Speaker 1: kind of really weirdly came together the spirits of the vampires.
• 6:37
  Speaker 1: And so anyway, welcome Mr Manky, Yeah, welcome, We're glad
• 6:41
  Speaker 1: to have you. And are we calling him Mr Mankey
• 6:44
  Speaker 1: not Aaron? No, but it was very sweet. He's an
• 6:48
  Speaker 1: long time all time stuff you should know listener, and uh,
• 6:51
  Speaker 1: he's a legit. I'm sure that he is going to
• 6:53
  Speaker 1: hear this and say, oh, guys, I did this so much,
• 6:57
  Speaker 1: so much better. I don't like you any longer. So anyway,
• 7:02
  Speaker 1: JB fifty five year right is spelled out in brass tacks. Uh.
• 7:05
  Speaker 1: It's a male skeleton. It's from the eighteen thirties at
• 7:09
  Speaker 1: the latest in there in the body is probably in
• 7:12
  Speaker 1: his fifties or so, and it's just very very creepy
• 7:17
  Speaker 1: and perplexing. Yeah, very perplexing. First blush, Bellentoni said in
• 7:21
  Speaker 1: that Smithsonian archicly he'd never seen anything like it before, right, right,
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  Speaker 1: So he's he obviously, being an archaeologist, He's not like,
• 7:29
  Speaker 1: well that's pretty interesting. I'm going back to my sandwich now.
• 7:35
  Speaker 1: He wanted to get to the bottom of it, that's right.
• 7:37
  Speaker 1: So he started asking around and finally one colleague said, well,
• 7:41
  Speaker 1: maybe it was a vampire. This is Michael Bell not
• 7:45
  Speaker 1: yet okay, he it was apparently a colleague, I guess,
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  Speaker 1: a fellow archaeologist who's like, there was actually such things
• 7:52
  Speaker 1: as vampire panics. And then Bellentoni met Michael Bell, right,
• 7:57
  Speaker 1: and notably Uh in eighteen fifty four. This is about
• 8:00
  Speaker 1: twenty years after the gentleman j B. Which is probably
• 8:07
  Speaker 1: his age, right, or I guess maybe Jim Brown years old,
• 8:12
  Speaker 1: let's let's just call him that. Uh, and Jewitt City, Connecticut,
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  Speaker 1: there was a vampire panic that had broken out and
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  Speaker 1: the corpses were exhumed that people might thought were vampires. Uh.
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  Speaker 1: And then I think is when he finally gets in
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  Speaker 1: touch with this Rhode Island folklorist named Michael Bell. Yeah,
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  Speaker 1: and Bell is like, my friend, I'm going to tell
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  Speaker 1: you something. Are you sitting down and Bell Andoni says yes,
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  Speaker 1: and Bell goes, have you had your sandwich? Um? Bell goes,
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  Speaker 1: you are sitting on the only intact physical evidence of
• 8:48
  Speaker 1: what was a series of vampire panics that gripped New
• 8:52
  Speaker 1: England in the late eighteenth to to actually late nineteenth century,
• 8:57
  Speaker 1: almost up to the twentieth century. Yeah, that's the remarkable
• 9:01
  Speaker 1: thing here, because if you hear this and you're like, yeah, yeah,
• 9:03
  Speaker 1: I know about Salem. This was a couple of hundred
• 9:06
  Speaker 1: years later. Yeah, this was Yeah, this is about less
• 9:10
  Speaker 1: than a d and fifty years ago. Yeah, Like we
• 9:12
  Speaker 1: we had evolved way past that by this point to
• 9:15
  Speaker 1: believe that vampires existed and we need to dig up
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  Speaker 1: bodies of our relatives. Yeah, that's what's so shocking about this.
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  Speaker 1: Like the Enlightenment had come and gone. Science was a thing.
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  Speaker 1: It was just it was it's very weird to think
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  Speaker 1: about how late this happened, but sure enough, there is
• 9:31
  Speaker 1: bel ATONI looked into it and talked to Michael Bell
• 9:34
  Speaker 1: and found out, No, there was, there was vampire panics.
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  Speaker 1: A lot of people don't know about them because most
• 9:40
  Speaker 1: people don't dig into that kind of thing. But they're
• 9:42
  Speaker 1: actually because they happened as late as they did, they're
• 9:46
  Speaker 1: actually fairly well documented. The thing is is most of
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  Speaker 1: the graves are lost. Um you have an actual grave
• 9:54
  Speaker 1: of one of the vampires that was basically a victim
• 9:57
  Speaker 1: of this vampire panic. Yeah, and apparently it happened. Um.
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  Speaker 1: He documented Bell about eighty of these exhimations as far
• 10:04
  Speaker 1: west as Minnesota, but obviously most of these took place
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  Speaker 1: in the Connecticut, Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire area, Rhode Island,
• 10:14
  Speaker 1: Tohode Island. Because I don't know what it is with
• 10:17
  Speaker 1: New England. Well, we'll get to it. We'll get to it.
• 10:20
  Speaker 1: They're weird because it's it definitely is a very weird thing,
• 10:24
  Speaker 1: especially considering that, like at the time, people who were alive,
• 10:29
  Speaker 1: We're like, what are you guys doing? How backwards can
• 10:34
  Speaker 1: you be? You know? Um, So they're contemporaries were even
• 10:39
  Speaker 1: like put off by this kind of thing. And at
• 10:43
  Speaker 1: first it was um like you had to know somebody
• 10:46
  Speaker 1: to know that this was going on. But eventually a
• 10:49
  Speaker 1: couple of them became high enough profile that, um, it
• 10:52
  Speaker 1: became international news that there was some weirdness going on
• 10:56
  Speaker 1: in New England that the locals were we're we're in
• 11:00
  Speaker 1: the grips of a vampire panic. Yeah. Thorrow wrote about
• 11:03
  Speaker 1: it in his journal. That's Henry David. Yeah, he wrote.
• 11:08
  Speaker 1: He said he was at an exhimation and he wrote
• 11:11
  Speaker 1: it was like wow, man. Uh And as you said,
• 11:16
  Speaker 1: Rhode Island, Like, this wasn't just like out in the
• 11:18
  Speaker 1: sticks a rural uh, New England. This happened close to Newport,
• 11:24
  Speaker 1: Rhode Island, which at the time and is still very
• 11:27
  Speaker 1: tony area where oh yeah, dude, beautiful that that cliff
• 11:31
  Speaker 1: walk or whatever, unbelievable and those houses were around back then.
• 11:35
  Speaker 1: These were well healed, rich people and that's where they summered, right,
• 11:39
  Speaker 1: murdering one another and getting away with it, drinking champagne
• 11:42
  Speaker 1: all the while. That's what they did. God bless him
• 11:46
  Speaker 1: as a beautiful town. Yeah, Newport Rhode Island is a
• 11:50
  Speaker 1: gorgeous town. Yeah. I was very taken with it and
• 11:53
  Speaker 1: thought I could totally live here if I had about
• 11:57
  Speaker 1: fifty times as much money as I have right now.
• 11:59
  Speaker 1: And it was nine hundred. So um, as I said, like,
• 12:03
  Speaker 1: this is this is it's it is very well documented
• 12:07
  Speaker 1: in some respects, but you have to be a guy
• 12:09
  Speaker 1: like Michael Bell who knows where to look because Gray's
• 12:12
  Speaker 1: like this don't pop up every day. Right. There was
• 12:15
  Speaker 1: this dude who documented it probably better than anybody, um,
• 12:19
  Speaker 1: and he didn't hear about it until I think the
• 12:21
  Speaker 1: late eighteen nineties. But he was an anthropologist named George Stetson.
• 12:25
  Speaker 1: He published like a monotype on it, on the New
• 12:28
  Speaker 1: England vampire panics and exactly what the beliefs were. So
• 12:32
  Speaker 1: he he established like the baseline for these beliefs and
• 12:35
  Speaker 1: really documented it in the late nineteenth century. Yeah, and
• 12:38
  Speaker 1: kind of shook up the world. Yeah. So again everybody
• 12:43
  Speaker 1: at the time who wasn't involved is looking in like
• 12:47
  Speaker 1: what are you guys doing? Um? Apparently the Boston Daily
• 12:51
  Speaker 1: Globe said that was basically inbreeding was responsible for this
• 12:54
  Speaker 1: weird behavior. Um, like people from the South, We're going,
• 12:59
  Speaker 1: what our nation? Are you guys doing it? There? Right?
• 13:02
  Speaker 1: There was a there was the idea that the that Stetson,
• 13:05
  Speaker 1: George Stetson, the anthropologists had basically been fooled, been fleeced
• 13:10
  Speaker 1: by you know, the slick New England city rural folk um,
• 13:15
  Speaker 1: and that they were just pulling his leg as it
• 13:17
  Speaker 1: was put. Um, that's not the case. This actually did happen,
• 13:22
  Speaker 1: and it it turns out that it is basically an
• 13:26
  Speaker 1: extension of a tradition that finds its roots back in Europe,
• 13:30
  Speaker 1: goes back many many centuries to Europe. And here is
• 13:33
  Speaker 1: where it gets extremely interesting to me. The vampire legend
• 13:39
  Speaker 1: that we understand today actually grew out of real superstitions.
• 13:45
  Speaker 1: Like everything you know about vampires is is what some
• 13:50
  Speaker 1: people hundreds of years ago and not that very long ago,
• 13:53
  Speaker 1: believed was actual reality. And this, this vampire panic was
• 14:00
  Speaker 1: an actual manifestation of those beliefs in real life. That's right, man,
• 14:08
  Speaker 1: The spirit of the vampires are with us, all right,
• 14:10
  Speaker 1: we'll be back right after this. Okay. So the vampire,
• 14:43
  Speaker 1: as we probably pronounced it like that in that episode
• 14:47
  Speaker 1: so many years ago, I have a one note sense
• 14:50
  Speaker 1: of humor. Uh, it came It's reliable. That's a nice
• 14:54
  Speaker 1: way to say. It came out of Europe, not the
• 14:57
  Speaker 1: United States. And that word for disappeared in the tenth century.
• 15:01
  Speaker 1: And um Bell, as far as he's concerned, says or
• 15:05
  Speaker 1: thinks at least that, um, well, we all know that
• 15:08
  Speaker 1: it came out of like a Germany and the Slavic
• 15:11
  Speaker 1: immigrants coming here. But he thinks, for his money is
• 15:16
  Speaker 1: that it probably wasn't just one big way. It probably
• 15:18
  Speaker 1: came over from different people at different times, but eventually
• 15:21
  Speaker 1: it made its way over to the United States through
• 15:25
  Speaker 1: probably Pennsylvania and then made its way north right. And um,
• 15:29
  Speaker 1: from his research he's found, the earliest he's found is
• 15:34
  Speaker 1: a reference to it comes from four in the Connecticut
• 15:38
  Speaker 1: Koran and Weekly Intelligencer. And you think the Hartford newspapers
• 15:43
  Speaker 1: still called the Hartford Koran, So that's an old paper, right, yeah,
• 15:47
  Speaker 1: and um in it in this it's a letter to
• 15:50
  Speaker 1: the editor from a guy named Moses Holmes, who is
• 15:52
  Speaker 1: a councilman in the town of Willington, m Connecticut. And
• 15:57
  Speaker 1: he's basically warning people not to listen to what he calls,
• 16:01
  Speaker 1: quote a certain quack doctor, a foreigner. And um, basically
• 16:06
  Speaker 1: this doctor was saying there there's vampires of foot and
• 16:10
  Speaker 1: you need to exume your family and kill them because
• 16:13
  Speaker 1: they're vampires now. And Moses Holmes was saying, don't don't
• 16:16
  Speaker 1: do that. This is wrong and weird. Well, yeah, and
• 16:19
  Speaker 1: that's the legend that came over from Europe. The Slavic
• 16:22
  Speaker 1: people had the upier and the Romanians had and the
• 16:28
  Speaker 1: upier and the stragoy would die, be buried and would
• 16:32
  Speaker 1: come back to drink the blood of their relatives. And
• 16:35
  Speaker 1: that was the legend and what it really was. Well,
• 16:38
  Speaker 1: maybe we should hold onto that little yeah, let's just yeah,
• 16:41
  Speaker 1: I'm sorry, I meant to cross that out on your Okay.
• 16:45
  Speaker 1: I was like, this came into yeah, all right, so
• 16:48
  Speaker 1: we'll we'll we'll tease that out for later. So you
• 16:50
  Speaker 1: ask yourself, like I think of Yankees as like pretty
• 16:56
  Speaker 1: solid people, salt of the earth, especially nineteen cent or
• 17:00
  Speaker 1: Yankees salts of the Irish people, really stable, like it
• 17:04
  Speaker 1: would take quite a bit to drive one of them,
• 17:06
  Speaker 1: just totally crazy. Right, they had to put up with
• 17:09
  Speaker 1: these winters, nor easters, um saleasters, sure, all that stuff, right,
• 17:15
  Speaker 1: and um, you know, how would how would this happen
• 17:19
  Speaker 1: outside of say, puritanical New England in the in the
• 17:23
  Speaker 1: nineteenth century. And it turns out I didn't realize this,
• 17:26
  Speaker 1: but Abigail Tucker points out that the Yankees that we
• 17:30
  Speaker 1: think of are not the Yankees, and I'm not talking
• 17:34
  Speaker 1: baseball here, are not the Yankees, who, um, we're in actuality.
• 17:40
  Speaker 1: So I sat up very late last night trying to
• 17:42
  Speaker 1: figure out the most convoluted way to say that sentence,
• 17:47
  Speaker 1: and I think of pay Yeah. I thought this was
• 17:50
  Speaker 1: super interesting because when I think of New England, I
• 17:53
  Speaker 1: think of very religious, puritanical Christian Christian. They don't do
• 17:58
  Speaker 1: this kind of thing you think of um And actually,
• 18:02
  Speaker 1: you know what's funny is because Mankett was here. I
• 18:05
  Speaker 1: had him on movie Crush. I guess what his movie was,
• 18:08
  Speaker 1: hold On, hold On, So I said Christian, which makes
• 18:13
  Speaker 1: me think of this song Sister Christian by Night Ranger,
• 18:17
  Speaker 1: which factored in big time into Boogie Night No. His
• 18:21
  Speaker 1: favorite movie is The Village, which makes total sense. I
• 18:25
  Speaker 1: watched that again within the last couple of months, and
• 18:28
  Speaker 1: I'm like, this movie is even better now. Yeah, I
• 18:30
  Speaker 1: liked it more when I saw it again, which is
• 18:33
  Speaker 1: weird because you know the twist at the know, because
• 18:35
  Speaker 1: it's the m night Sham movie. Yeah, And I think
• 18:37
  Speaker 1: it bugged me at the time because I and I
• 18:39
  Speaker 1: told him this in the show. But I think at
• 18:41
  Speaker 1: the time I was sort of like over M. Night
• 18:44
  Speaker 1: and the Twists. I was like, come on, dude, another
• 18:47
  Speaker 1: twist and now I'm looking out for it, so I
• 18:50
  Speaker 1: had better be really good. Yeah, but I think years
• 18:53
  Speaker 1: later I watched it again, I was like, you know what,
• 18:55
  Speaker 1: I think I kind of dig this movie. I did too,
• 18:57
  Speaker 1: so anyway, very fitting. But I think of those people
• 19:01
  Speaker 1: like these Puritans, living off, removed from society, very strict
• 19:06
  Speaker 1: religious people's but apparently that was not the deal. In
• 19:10
  Speaker 1: the eighteen hundreds in rural New England, only ten belonged
• 19:14
  Speaker 1: to a church. Shocking to me, and especially it says
• 19:18
  Speaker 1: that you're in this article Rhode Island and I love this.
• 19:21
  Speaker 1: I had no idea it was founded as a haven
• 19:24
  Speaker 1: for religious dissenters. So I think they just wanted to
• 19:28
  Speaker 1: go in party. Yeah, the seaside, they were like, let's
• 19:32
  Speaker 1: party and engage in hex magic. Gosh, they were Another
• 19:36
  Speaker 1: way to put it is that the New Englanders in
• 19:38
  Speaker 1: the nineteenth century were superstitious, but right exactly, because if
• 19:44
  Speaker 1: you were um hardcore Christian, superstition didn't play a part,
• 19:49
  Speaker 1: you wouldn't like, I mean, what are the some of
• 19:51
  Speaker 1: the things they did. They would um barry shoes by
• 19:55
  Speaker 1: the fireplace, to catch the devil from coming down the chimney,
• 19:58
  Speaker 1: like a horse shoe over your door. Yeah, that kind
• 20:00
  Speaker 1: of stuff. Like basically anything you think of is like
• 20:02
  Speaker 1: locker weird kind of Pennsylvania witchcraft, that kind of stuff.
• 20:08
  Speaker 1: This is like, that's what it was. It was like
• 20:10
  Speaker 1: country witchcraft. That's what they believed in. Because even if
• 20:15
  Speaker 1: you weren't Christian, you still believed in things like good
• 20:18
  Speaker 1: and evil and spirits and demons and stuff like that.
• 20:22
  Speaker 1: You just had to have a different way of dealing
• 20:24
  Speaker 1: with them. Since you weren't Christian in the way of
• 20:26
  Speaker 1: dealing with and wasn't like praying to God or whatever.
• 20:29
  Speaker 1: She had to hang up a horse shoe or barry
• 20:32
  Speaker 1: a shoe to keep the devil from coming down your
• 20:33
  Speaker 1: chimney because you were as backwards as a game. When
• 20:38
  Speaker 1: are we going to reveal the reveal? When are we
• 20:40
  Speaker 1: going to do our m night twist? Yet? Not yet?
• 20:44
  Speaker 1: All right, Well, then you gotta go because I got
• 20:45
  Speaker 1: nothing else. Okay, are you ready for now? Well? No,
• 20:48
  Speaker 1: if you've got more, if you can, were where we were?
• 20:54
  Speaker 1: All right, Well, here's the reveal. Because being superstitious does
• 20:59
  Speaker 1: an ex playing the vampire panic. No alone what else
• 21:04
  Speaker 1: does I'll let you drop the hammer. So they are
• 21:08
  Speaker 1: not entirely certain, but the general consensus among people who
• 21:12
  Speaker 1: study this kind of thing is that this was a
• 21:14
  Speaker 1: reaction to infectious disease outbreaks, specifically tuberculosis. Boom boom. That's
• 21:22
  Speaker 1: why superstitious New Englanders were running around in the nineteenth
• 21:26
  Speaker 1: century digging up family members and driving stakes through their
• 21:30
  Speaker 1: hearts or beheading them in their graves. I love stuff
• 21:35
  Speaker 1: like this when you can look back years later. I
• 21:38
  Speaker 1: wonder what they're gonna in a hundred years about the
• 21:40
  Speaker 1: Satanic panic. Oh, it wasn't some disease, obviously, this is
• 21:45
  Speaker 1: better reveal it was a panic though. Yeah. Um, it's
• 21:49
  Speaker 1: interesting that two of our favorite episodes probably are going
• 21:51
  Speaker 1: to end up being Satanic panic and vampire panics. This
• 21:55
  Speaker 1: one's going pretty well. So all right, so let's talk
• 21:58
  Speaker 1: about TV for a minute. This is obviously pre antibiotics.
• 22:03
  Speaker 1: There is still tuberculosis, but it's super curable now if
• 22:06
  Speaker 1: you're you know, lucky enough to live where you can
• 22:09
  Speaker 1: get antibiotics. But it is caused by Bacterium um, two
• 22:16
  Speaker 1: of which can infect humans M. Tuberculosis and M. Bovus.
• 22:20
  Speaker 1: And you've heard the word consumption in movies like The
• 22:24
  Speaker 1: Village from that time period they're dying of consumption. Consumption
• 22:28
  Speaker 1: was almost always tuberculosis. That's just what they called it
• 22:31
  Speaker 1: back then, right, that was the name for it, the
• 22:33
  Speaker 1: reason they called it consumption, and actually that that term
• 22:37
  Speaker 1: to describe tuberculous is actually predates the more common usage
• 22:41
  Speaker 1: of consumption today. It was like ingesting or eating something. Yeah,
• 22:44
  Speaker 1: it takes back to like I think, so it's the
• 22:47
  Speaker 1: original meaning was that your body was consuming itself. That
• 22:50
  Speaker 1: it was like the word for tuberculosis. Well, yeah, And
• 22:53
  Speaker 1: the reason they call it that is because it looked
• 22:55
  Speaker 1: like your life force was being sapped away from you.
• 23:01
  Speaker 1: The way that the disease progressed, um, it included coughing
• 23:05
  Speaker 1: fits where they said, like you couldn't even stop to talk.
• 23:08
  Speaker 1: You would be coughing so hard that's not good. Um.
• 23:13
  Speaker 1: You would lose a lot of weight, so it looked
• 23:15
  Speaker 1: like you were wasting away to um. But at the
• 23:19
  Speaker 1: same time, you were um voracious ly hungry. You wanted
• 23:24
  Speaker 1: to eat. It wasn't that kind of illness where you
• 23:26
  Speaker 1: just can't even eat. You were hungry like all the time,
• 23:29
  Speaker 1: but you were still wasting away. So there's this duality
• 23:33
  Speaker 1: between hunger, rampant hunger and the loss of a life force.
• 23:39
  Speaker 1: And this it's possible that all vampire tales and legends
• 23:44
  Speaker 1: and the origin of it is found in tuberculosis, because
• 23:49
  Speaker 1: that's what you think of with vampire is um. The
• 23:52
  Speaker 1: whole idea at this time was if you had tuberculosis
• 23:56
  Speaker 1: and you were the say, second, third, fourth member of
• 24:00
  Speaker 1: your family to come down with this with consumption, it
• 24:03
  Speaker 1: meant that the one of the previous family members who
• 24:07
  Speaker 1: had died of this disease was still alive in some way.
• 24:12
  Speaker 1: Their soul was in a supernatural way and was coming
• 24:15
  Speaker 1: at night and sucking the life from you to sustain themselves.
• 24:20
  Speaker 1: If this was the case, then there was only one
• 24:22
  Speaker 1: thing to do. If you were in New England at
• 24:25
  Speaker 1: the time, you had to dig up that family member
• 24:27
  Speaker 1: and take care of business. Yeah, it's funny. Emily and
• 24:31
  Speaker 1: I always laugh at the movie trope of the the
• 24:34
  Speaker 1: cough like it has almost a percent return rate. If
• 24:39
  Speaker 1: a character coughs in a movie, then they're going to
• 24:41
  Speaker 1: die because you just don't leave coughs in movies. That's
• 24:44
  Speaker 1: a sure sign. Or especially if they like cough into
• 24:48
  Speaker 1: a hanky. There's always blood in it, Like remember Hodgeman's
• 24:52
  Speaker 1: um doc Holiday. Yeah, I'll be your Hucklebert coughing up
• 24:57
  Speaker 1: the blood and lung tissue. Well, we just started watching
• 25:00
  Speaker 1: The Crown last night. You know that show on Netflix?
• 25:03
  Speaker 1: Do you watch it? Yeah? We saw the very just
• 25:07
  Speaker 1: the first episode last night of season one. And of
• 25:10
  Speaker 1: course there's Jared Harris as Queen Elizabeth's father, the King Camember,
• 25:15
  Speaker 1: which what his name was, King, the King of England,
• 25:19
  Speaker 1: and he's got he's got TV. Of course he starts
• 25:21
  Speaker 1: coughing in the very first scene into the hanky and
• 25:24
  Speaker 1: you're like, well, he's probably just going to be in
• 25:26
  Speaker 1: the bilin um. That's how she became queen. If we're
• 25:30
  Speaker 1: shouting out things we've seen recently, I want to give
• 25:32
  Speaker 1: a shout out to Wonder. Wonder what what's that the
• 25:38
  Speaker 1: the movie about the kid with facial differences? I've heard
• 25:41
  Speaker 1: this parents are Owens Wilson and Julia Roberts. So good though, Yeah,
• 25:47
  Speaker 1: all right, you know what, let's take a break. Okay,
• 25:50
  Speaker 1: who thought I Wonder was going to make an appearance
• 25:52
  Speaker 1: in the Vampire Panic and not me? Alright, we're gonna
• 25:55
  Speaker 1: take a break and we'll come back and talk a
• 25:56
  Speaker 1: little bit more about how a family might do this
• 25:59
  Speaker 1: right after this. Alright, so dad has gone from TV
• 26:29
  Speaker 1: or consumption, brother has, sister has, Yeah, maybe ones on
• 26:36
  Speaker 1: their deathbed, the other ones about to die. Um, we
• 26:40
  Speaker 1: should talk a little bit about consumption a little more.
• 26:43
  Speaker 1: At the time, there were people out there in the
• 26:45
  Speaker 1: world in the late nineteenth century who understood that consumption
• 26:51
  Speaker 1: was Tuberculosis was an infectious disease caused by these germs.
• 26:56
  Speaker 1: The people engaged in these vampire panics did not generally
• 27:01
  Speaker 1: think that They didn't realize that this was a contagious disease.
• 27:04
  Speaker 1: They thought that a relative was sapping your life force. Right.
• 27:07
  Speaker 1: The thing is is that tuberculousis is a very contagious
• 27:10
  Speaker 1: disease spread by coughing sneezing, which you do a lot
• 27:14
  Speaker 1: of when you have tuberculosis. And if you're living in
• 27:17
  Speaker 1: like a one two room house in rural New England
• 27:22
  Speaker 1: and you're a family of six, you can say that
• 27:26
  Speaker 1: high percentage of your family members are going to eventually
• 27:29
  Speaker 1: contract this disease. Yeah, whenn't it? I mean, what was
• 27:31
  Speaker 1: the number it was killing people over a certain period
• 27:35
  Speaker 1: that's a really big point here. The vampire panics started
• 27:39
  Speaker 1: in the late eighteenth century. Tuberculousis really started to gain
• 27:43
  Speaker 1: a foothold in New England and about the seventeen thirties,
• 27:46
  Speaker 1: and by the time the vampire panics hit their height
• 27:49
  Speaker 1: in the late eighteenth early nineteenth century, it was the
• 27:53
  Speaker 1: number one killer of New Englanders at the time. Again,
• 27:58
  Speaker 1: they weren't like gosh learned that tuberculosis. I caught this
• 28:02
  Speaker 1: infectious disease. It was one of our family members is
• 28:06
  Speaker 1: sapping the life out of one of our other family members,
• 28:08
  Speaker 1: because our family members a vampire. Still, the effect was
• 28:12
  Speaker 1: the same that they were. They were they they felt
• 28:16
  Speaker 1: totally powerless against this condition. They just had what it
• 28:20
  Speaker 1: was wrong, and because they had it wrong, they would
• 28:24
  Speaker 1: dig up dead bodies and do weird stuff to them.
• 28:27
  Speaker 1: All right, so brother dies, sister dies, maybe another sibling,
• 28:32
  Speaker 1: maybe one of the parents. And then if you're in
• 28:36
  Speaker 1: rural New England, you say, all right, it's clearly what's
• 28:40
  Speaker 1: going on here is that whoever the first one that died,
• 28:43
  Speaker 1: or maybe one of them, it's coming back and killing
• 28:45
  Speaker 1: the rest by sucking out their blood. I have a
• 28:48
  Speaker 1: vampire in my family, what do I do. I'm going
• 28:51
  Speaker 1: to dig with some help. Probably sometimes it's quiet, sometimes
• 28:55
  Speaker 1: in the middle of the night. Sometimes, like in the
• 28:58
  Speaker 1: case in Vermont, it would be like a daytime public
• 29:03
  Speaker 1: festival type of there was like a party, like a
• 29:05
  Speaker 1: community party. Yeah, and that's and in fact, I think
• 29:08
  Speaker 1: that's the one Henry David Threau attended in Woodstock, Vermont
• 29:12
  Speaker 1: in his journal and he was like, wtf with these people, Right,
• 29:16
  Speaker 1: there's a weird party. So you would dig these people up,
• 29:19
  Speaker 1: depending on where you are. Well, first of all, let's
• 29:22
  Speaker 1: talk about what they might find when they opened this coffin. Yeah,
• 29:25
  Speaker 1: because there were a couple of steps. The first step
• 29:27
  Speaker 1: was you had to diagnose vampireism. Because they like, let's say, uh,
• 29:34
  Speaker 1: they finally decided by the fourth family member being sick
• 29:39
  Speaker 1: um that this family was being being sapped by a vampire.
• 29:43
  Speaker 1: They didn't automatically know which dead family member was doing it.
• 29:47
  Speaker 1: They got to look at them all. Yeah, so you
• 29:49
  Speaker 1: might dig up multiple coffins. What they were looking for
• 29:53
  Speaker 1: was the belief. The belief was that the the you
• 29:57
  Speaker 1: could tell just by looking at them whither they were
• 30:00
  Speaker 1: a vampire. Maybe poking around a little bit too sure,
• 30:03
  Speaker 1: but the problem was is that so the idea of
• 30:07
  Speaker 1: what we what we think of as vampires is basically
• 30:09
  Speaker 1: the bram Stoker vampire, which comes later. Um, these vampires
• 30:15
  Speaker 1: were like the ghoules from the grave type farato looking. Yes, yeah,
• 30:21
  Speaker 1: so like real long fingernails and like pale and bloody
• 30:25
  Speaker 1: mouth from kind of slipping away from your body. The
• 30:28
  Speaker 1: problem is is like this idea of vampires, what we
• 30:31
  Speaker 1: understand is, or what they understood at vampires was a
• 30:34
  Speaker 1: tradition handed down from people who had broken up or
• 30:37
  Speaker 1: broken into graves before and could tell you what a
• 30:40
  Speaker 1: vampire looked like, which is basically a body in a
• 30:44
  Speaker 1: certain stage of decomposition, right, and specifically a lot of
• 30:49
  Speaker 1: times a body in a certain certain stage of decomposition
• 30:52
  Speaker 1: who had died from tuberculosis. Uh. So you know, you
• 30:57
  Speaker 1: might dig up a grave and see a bloat because
• 31:02
  Speaker 1: they have a built up of gas in their stomach.
• 31:04
  Speaker 1: That is not what they thought it was from. They
• 31:06
  Speaker 1: thought what they thought they were vampires full from blood.
• 31:10
  Speaker 1: They'd be like, look at this fat vampire. Yeah. They
• 31:13
  Speaker 1: might see uh, long finger nails and say that looks
• 31:16
  Speaker 1: to me like a vampire, right, But that is what
• 31:19
  Speaker 1: your skin receding. Your skin pulls back from the nail bed,
• 31:23
  Speaker 1: which makes it look like your nails have kept growing
• 31:25
  Speaker 1: after um after death, which is not the case. Same
• 31:28
  Speaker 1: with your hair too. They may see red lips, bloody
• 31:32
  Speaker 1: lips even possibly sure because apparently the breakdown of your
• 31:35
  Speaker 1: lung tissue from tuberculpsis um continues even after death. So
• 31:40
  Speaker 1: they would see blood on the lips and be like, yeah,
• 31:41
  Speaker 1: they've been sucking the blood out of their their loved one.
• 31:44
  Speaker 1: But the key to all this is the heart. Uh.
• 31:47
  Speaker 1: That was what they were trying to get to, to
• 31:49
  Speaker 1: see if there was any fresh blood near the heart. Uh.
• 31:52
  Speaker 1: And if they did find that one one of the
• 31:54
  Speaker 1: well we'll get to what they would do. But um,
• 31:57
  Speaker 1: And again, a lot of time you would see fresh,
• 31:59
  Speaker 1: a pure, hearing blood because of the way the body
• 32:02
  Speaker 1: decomposed from tuberculosis or period. So this thing, yeah, but
• 32:06
  Speaker 1: but tuberculous is a lot too, especially like the blood
• 32:08
  Speaker 1: on the lips kind of thing. Right, So this thing
• 32:11
  Speaker 1: was kind of self sustaining, self fulfilling when somebody died
• 32:14
  Speaker 1: of tuberculosis if you dug them up at a certain
• 32:18
  Speaker 1: period of time, especially if they say like died in winter,
• 32:21
  Speaker 1: they might seem inexplicably in a in a pristine state
• 32:25
  Speaker 1: because they're underground in New England's freezing in the winter. Um,
• 32:29
  Speaker 1: So they would fit the bill for a vampire just
• 32:33
  Speaker 1: by definition of being a decomposing body. But to the
• 32:36
  Speaker 1: people who didn't understand what decomposition was, it was just
• 32:39
  Speaker 1: plain as day that they were looking at a vampire
• 32:41
  Speaker 1: in the grave. Right, So they find a family member
• 32:45
  Speaker 1: that fits the bill of a vampire. That step one
• 32:48
  Speaker 1: vampire is m is being diagnosed. Next is dispatching the vampire,
• 32:53
  Speaker 1: dealing with the vampire. And the problem is this, the
• 32:56
  Speaker 1: vampire is already dead. So there are only certain things
• 32:59
  Speaker 1: you can you to a vampire to kill it. And
• 33:02
  Speaker 1: really what you're not trying to do is kill it.
• 33:03
  Speaker 1: You're trying to make it so it can't get out
• 33:05
  Speaker 1: of the grave and keep sapping the life force out
• 33:08
  Speaker 1: of these family members, hence hopefully saving the dying family member. Right. Uh.
• 33:13
  Speaker 1: And it was technically called epo tropaic remedy. That's a
• 33:18
  Speaker 1: clinical name for it. Basically, it's something that you're doing
• 33:21
  Speaker 1: to counteract this evil. So it depends on where you
• 33:24
  Speaker 1: were what you might do. Um, everyone had their own methods.
• 33:27
  Speaker 1: Um in Maine and Plymouth, Massachusetts. I love this one.
• 33:31
  Speaker 1: All they did was flip it over so it was
• 33:34
  Speaker 1: face down, and they're like, everyone knows the vampire just
• 33:37
  Speaker 1: very creepily rises from the waist out of their coffin.
• 33:41
  Speaker 1: What if we just slipped them over? They couldn't do that.
• 33:43
  Speaker 1: They went and let's go get some ice cream. Or
• 33:47
  Speaker 1: the steak through the heart that didn't arise because they
• 33:50
  Speaker 1: thought the steak had some magical powers. But they thought
• 33:52
  Speaker 1: they would literally just stake them into the ground so
• 33:55
  Speaker 1: they couldn't get up. That's another thing too. So you
• 33:58
  Speaker 1: know the steak through the heart with the vaan pire,
• 34:00
  Speaker 1: you think that that's trying to kill the vampire. That
• 34:03
  Speaker 1: is not what they were trying to do. But the
• 34:06
  Speaker 1: larger thought here is that our understanding of staking a
• 34:09
  Speaker 1: vampire through the heart comes from people who actually did
• 34:12
  Speaker 1: this because they were trying to battle tuberculosis. That's so
• 34:16
  Speaker 1: amazing to me. It's a confluence of all these weird
• 34:19
  Speaker 1: things really that led to this, but but in all
• 34:22
  Speaker 1: of it has been refined into this neat, tidy vampire legend.
• 34:26
  Speaker 1: This this is the compartment and fits in vampire legend
• 34:29
  Speaker 1: to those of us alive today. But it's got this
• 34:31
  Speaker 1: amazing history and backstory, some of which happened in real life.
• 34:35
  Speaker 1: This reminds me of the real life zombies too. Yeah, exactly.
• 34:40
  Speaker 1: Good point, like this weird religious hysteria combined with um
• 34:46
  Speaker 1: what they didn't understand at the time was kind of
• 34:47
  Speaker 1: medicine and science. This weird pre science era, so fascinating
• 34:52
  Speaker 1: to me. Y're not pre science, but I guess it
• 34:55
  Speaker 1: was pre real science, rudimentary science. Um. So. In the
• 35:00
  Speaker 1: Connecticut Rhode Island, Vermont, in that region, the go to
• 35:05
  Speaker 1: was to burn the heart, take the ash from the
• 35:08
  Speaker 1: heart and ingest it to give it to someone who
• 35:12
  Speaker 1: may be sick in the family or may even be
• 35:14
  Speaker 1: healthy trying to ward off sickness, and they would actually
• 35:17
  Speaker 1: eat that. So that was one way of dealing with it. Yeah,
• 35:20
  Speaker 1: that's There's a quote here from Woodstock, Vermont, when Daniel
• 35:24
  Speaker 1: Ransom in his journal it was said that if the
• 35:27
  Speaker 1: heart of one of the family who died of consumption
• 35:30
  Speaker 1: was taken out and burned, others would be free from it.
• 35:33
  Speaker 1: And father, having some faith in the remedy, had the
• 35:36
  Speaker 1: heart of Frederick taken out after he had been buried
• 35:39
  Speaker 1: and it was burned and Captain Pearson's blacksmith forge. Um,
• 35:43
  Speaker 1: here's the thing, though it did not ever save anyone
• 35:47
  Speaker 1: from tubercules. No, that's the thing. And I was wondering, like,
• 35:50
  Speaker 1: what is what was the superstition? How did the superstition
• 35:53
  Speaker 1: explain a failure to cure I don't know, you know
• 35:58
  Speaker 1: where they just like, we waited too long. I bet
• 36:01
  Speaker 1: you they did that that had to be. They would
• 36:02
  Speaker 1: just have some explanation that we didn't do it right.
• 36:05
  Speaker 1: Maybe they would try another method, not burning the heart,
• 36:08
  Speaker 1: like the Jolly the jb They think that the reason
• 36:13
  Speaker 1: they did that weird jolly Roger thing was because it
• 36:16
  Speaker 1: was so decomposed. They were just bones, so they I
• 36:19
  Speaker 1: guess they just improvised, like why don't we just do this?
• 36:22
  Speaker 1: Well that that apparently finds its root in Europe. In
• 36:25
  Speaker 1: some places in Europe that was the way to deal
• 36:27
  Speaker 1: with the vampire was to cut its head off. Other places, um,
• 36:30
  Speaker 1: they would stick a brick in the vampire's mouth. Some
• 36:33
  Speaker 1: places they would bind them with thorns. In Europe, and
• 36:37
  Speaker 1: that that's another thing that kind of fascinates me about
• 36:39
  Speaker 1: this whole thing chuck. Is that at some point somewhere,
• 36:43
  Speaker 1: maybe in Europe, maybe in Asia, maybe in Africa, somebody
• 36:47
  Speaker 1: came up with this idea of vampires of relatives coming
• 36:51
  Speaker 1: back from the grave and sucking the life out of um,
• 36:55
  Speaker 1: their their friends, family members, villagers. And that person had
• 37:00
  Speaker 1: this idea that spread and it made it centuries later
• 37:04
  Speaker 1: to New England, where it led to the desecration of
• 37:09
  Speaker 1: the graves family members, including one that was discovered another
• 37:14
  Speaker 1: couple of centuries later by some kids playing in a
• 37:17
  Speaker 1: gravel pit. That's led to us talking about this today.
• 37:21
  Speaker 1: If if that doesn't make history interesting, I don't know
• 37:23
  Speaker 1: what does. Yes, some kids running around listening to the
• 37:26
  Speaker 1: Pixies finds a mountain of skulls st band the Pixies
• 37:31
  Speaker 1: are top nuts. It's great. Um. Should we finish with
• 37:34
  Speaker 1: the story of Mercy Brown? All right? So Mercy Brown
• 37:37
  Speaker 1: lived in Exeter, Rhode Island. This was a farming, farming
• 37:41
  Speaker 1: land and by all accounts, by the time she was around,
• 37:45
  Speaker 1: it had the town had definitely seen its better days
• 37:48
  Speaker 1: thanks to the Civil War, um kind of decimating the town. Yeah,
• 37:55
  Speaker 1: that's a good fact to it. The town is actually
• 37:59
  Speaker 1: kind of metaphor for vampireism itself like it had lost
• 38:02
  Speaker 1: its own life force in a lot of ways. It
• 38:05
  Speaker 1: dropped by like two thirds and seven the seventy years
• 38:08
  Speaker 1: before Mercy Brown died. The population did it was. It
• 38:12
  Speaker 1: was not a good scene for this, the people who
• 38:15
  Speaker 1: were left behind. Plus they had tuberculosis running around town
• 38:19
  Speaker 1: right and certainly through her house. Um, her mother died,
• 38:23
  Speaker 1: Her sister, Mary Eliza died. Oh no, that was her mom. Sorry,
• 38:27
  Speaker 1: Mary Olive was her sister. It's a great name, Mary Olive, agreed. Um,
• 38:32
  Speaker 1: she was twenty and Mary Olive. That is a good name.
• 38:37
  Speaker 1: And I think some of those names are coming back,
• 38:39
  Speaker 1: the classic names. Yeah, little house from the prairie trend. Well,
• 38:44
  Speaker 1: I know I know one person who named their daughter
• 38:47
  Speaker 1: Olive recently, and I thought that was a pretty sweet name. Yeah,
• 38:50
  Speaker 1: you should have You should have been like Mary Olive
• 38:52
  Speaker 1: would have been better. I was listening to a my
• 38:56
  Speaker 1: favorite murder the other day and they were laughing at
• 38:58
  Speaker 1: funny Aimes that it's just you can't imagine a baby
• 39:03
  Speaker 1: being called like Barbara, and they listened out a few
• 39:06
  Speaker 1: other ones, like it comes out with like a clunky
• 39:10
  Speaker 1: jewelry and a cigarette, exactly, sweet little baby Barbara. Um
• 39:15
  Speaker 1: So anyway, Mary Olive goes Mary Eliza goes the brother. Uh.
• 39:20
  Speaker 1: And this is where it gets a little weird because
• 39:22
  Speaker 1: I saw like eight different accounts of this, and they
• 39:25
  Speaker 1: all had different timelines of death and sickness, whether or
• 39:29
  Speaker 1: not Mercy died and then Edwin got sick or not.
• 39:34
  Speaker 1: But at any rate, brother Edwin is sick. Mercy eventually
• 39:37
  Speaker 1: dies of TB and the town says, we gotta do
• 39:42
  Speaker 1: something here. Yeah, they went to the dead George Brown
• 39:44
  Speaker 1: and said, man, you've got a problem on your hands.
• 39:47
  Speaker 1: And if you think about it, so all this took
• 39:49
  Speaker 1: place over like a decade, which you're like, that's a
• 39:51
  Speaker 1: long time. I would think the end of the nineteenth century.
• 39:54
  Speaker 1: That's a pretty average mortality rate for a family. Apparently not,
• 39:58
  Speaker 1: but they were kids, you know, they were in their
• 40:00
  Speaker 1: early twenties. Well. Also he lost his wife as well.
• 40:02
  Speaker 1: So over the over the course of a decade, this
• 40:05
  Speaker 1: family of five went down to basically a family of
• 40:10
  Speaker 1: one in a quarter depending on whatever you want to
• 40:12
  Speaker 1: count Edwin as he's dying, right, So George Brown was like,
• 40:17
  Speaker 1: you're probably right, we should do something. Later on, it
• 40:21
  Speaker 1: was revealed that he didn't believe in this at all.
• 40:24
  Speaker 1: That he basically agreed to this because the neighbors wouldn't
• 40:27
  Speaker 1: leave him alone about it. And the neighbors aren't doing
• 40:30
  Speaker 1: this just out of complete selflessness. There was this idea
• 40:32
  Speaker 1: that once this vampire um finished with the family, they
• 40:36
  Speaker 1: would move on to another family. So if you lived
• 40:39
  Speaker 1: in a small village, you had a real problem with
• 40:41
  Speaker 1: this vampire being allowed to go on, and you would
• 40:44
  Speaker 1: bother your neighbor to dig up their family member until
• 40:47
  Speaker 1: they relented. And that's what happened with George Brown. Yeah,
• 40:50
  Speaker 1: I mean the writing was on the wall certainly with
• 40:52
  Speaker 1: Edwin as far as the neighbors are concerned. Like he said,
• 40:56
  Speaker 1: he's like, fine, do what you gotta do. He did
• 40:59
  Speaker 1: said I want to die her there, which is amazing
• 41:02
  Speaker 1: that doctors would actually preside over an exhimation. I think
• 41:05
  Speaker 1: that doctor was trying to be the voice of reason
• 41:07
  Speaker 1: throughout this process, even cutting open Mercy's chest and removing
• 41:13
  Speaker 1: her heart and then her dominating removing her liver. He's
• 41:17
  Speaker 1: pointing out is this Abigail Tucker article says, um, look
• 41:22
  Speaker 1: this is evidence of tuberculosis. Yeah, like, shut up, college boy,
• 41:26
  Speaker 1: give me that heart. Yeah, that's what happened. I got
• 41:29
  Speaker 1: a hot fire burning and that's exactly what happened. Like
• 41:32
  Speaker 1: you said, um, they burn this heart. They mix the
• 41:36
  Speaker 1: ashes into a tonic. Edwin drank it thinking that they
• 41:40
  Speaker 1: would save him. And what he lived a couple of months,
• 41:43
  Speaker 1: maybe not even because he had tuberculosis. Cutting open the
• 41:49
  Speaker 1: chest of a dead relative and burning their heart and
• 41:52
  Speaker 1: liver does nothing to cure tuberculosis. The sister. Yeah, this sister,
• 41:56
  Speaker 1: which is it's it's really sad, but at the same time,
• 41:59
  Speaker 1: it kind of gives you a pick. Sure, George Brown
• 42:01
  Speaker 1: he doesn't believe in like all this vampire superstition. He
• 42:05
  Speaker 1: apparently also is cool with the desecration of a grave.
• 42:09
  Speaker 1: He's not a very sentimental guy. He's the impression that
• 42:12
  Speaker 1: I have of him, you know, he's like, yeah, go
• 42:14
  Speaker 1: cut her open, that's fine, Just stop bothering me. Just
• 42:16
  Speaker 1: make sure that my my doctor friend Ted is there
• 42:20
  Speaker 1: to point out how stupid all of this is. Yeah,
• 42:23
  Speaker 1: because he they sent Edwin away, I think to try
• 42:25
  Speaker 1: and get well. And I don't know if George was there,
• 42:29
  Speaker 1: but he definitely wasn't at that the exhimation. No, there
• 42:32
  Speaker 1: was a guy there from Providence newspaper. Here's our other
• 42:37
  Speaker 1: m Night Shamalan twist. He wrote an article that basically
• 42:41
  Speaker 1: told the world about this, and it got picked up,
• 42:43
  Speaker 1: and it got picked up by a number of papers,
• 42:45
  Speaker 1: including the New York World, and in the New York
• 42:50
  Speaker 1: World reported on the vampire exhamation of Mercy Brown. And
• 42:55
  Speaker 1: a clipping of that article was found in the papers
• 42:58
  Speaker 1: of a certain person. How cool was it, That's right,
• 43:04
  Speaker 1: the author of Dracula. Yeah. So scholars have said this
• 43:08
  Speaker 1: all came too soon before Dracula was published. It he
• 43:12
  Speaker 1: was probably working on it already, or he was working already.
• 43:15
  Speaker 1: It didn't influence it at all. Some people say, no,
• 43:18
  Speaker 1: he definitely did. He was influenced by this vampire panic
• 43:22
  Speaker 1: for sure. Yeah. And Manky's Laura episode on Mercy Brown,
• 43:27
  Speaker 1: because he's just a great storyteller. He ended it just
• 43:30
  Speaker 1: by saying, you know, I think the last words of
• 43:32
  Speaker 1: the show are Bram Stoker. Oh he didn't say, you know,
• 43:36
  Speaker 1: maybe he did. Maybe he didn't. Okay, you ready, So
• 43:38
  Speaker 1: hold on, let's we're gonna do this lower style. So
• 43:43
  Speaker 1: chuck of newspaper clipping of Mercy Brown's exhamation was found
• 43:49
  Speaker 1: in the papers of bram Stoker. Did we have classical
• 43:55
  Speaker 1: music going? But I hope so. Jerry all right okay?
• 43:58
  Speaker 1: And he also didn't have met giggling in the background. Uh.
• 44:02
  Speaker 1: If you want to know more about lore, we'll go
• 44:05
  Speaker 1: check out that podcast and look for more good stuff
• 44:07
  Speaker 1: coming soon from Aaron Monkey, who's now our coworker, which
• 44:11
  Speaker 1: means we have to buy him a Christmas present and
• 44:13
  Speaker 1: I know um. And in the meantime, while we're figuring
• 44:16
  Speaker 1: out what to get Aaron Monkey, it's time for listener. Now,
• 44:25
  Speaker 1: I'm gonna go with this one. Venezuelan living in Chile.
• 44:32
  Speaker 1: Hey guys, a new fan of the podcast started with
• 44:34
  Speaker 1: the Seven Wonders, So that's super new and I was
• 44:37
  Speaker 1: hooked since then. Uh, and now listen to the new
• 44:41
  Speaker 1: ones and go back in time to two thousand nine ones.
• 44:44
  Speaker 1: I want to go through all that sounds like they're sandwich.
• 44:47
  Speaker 1: Maybe I'm from Venezuela living in Chile, And I want
• 44:50
  Speaker 1: to suggest one about identity. We as Venezuelans are going
• 44:54
  Speaker 1: through a difficult time as the government is not issuing passports.
• 44:57
  Speaker 1: As an immigrant, It's is super hard art. Basically, if
• 45:01
  Speaker 1: I want to travel, I can only go to the
• 45:04
  Speaker 1: UH more costur member countries because I could do so
• 45:09
  Speaker 1: with the rut r U T, which is the Chilean
• 45:12
  Speaker 1: I D card, and I'm I'm a lucky case since
• 45:15
  Speaker 1: I have friends that while asking for Chilean visa, the
• 45:19
  Speaker 1: Venezuelan passport expired, and now they don't have either Chilean
• 45:22
  Speaker 1: or Venezuelan documents. I feel like an orphan if my
• 45:25
  Speaker 1: home country does not want to give me I D documents,
• 45:29
  Speaker 1: and as a resident, Chile can't either only if I
• 45:33
  Speaker 1: apply to nationalization, and it will have to wait a
• 45:37
  Speaker 1: few years until I can do that. She sounds like
• 45:39
  Speaker 1: Tom Hanks in the Terminal basically, but in Chile UH
• 45:43
  Speaker 1: and I have no one to claim. I just want
• 45:45
  Speaker 1: to put the word out about our situation. The Venezuelan
• 45:48
  Speaker 1: government pretends that everything is okay when it's not. My
• 45:51
  Speaker 1: family is broken across the world that I'm incapable to
• 45:54
  Speaker 1: go see them and they can't come to me. It
• 45:56
  Speaker 1: is a painful situation. Keep up with good work, guys.
• 45:59
  Speaker 1: Thanks to you, I have new topics to discuss with
• 46:02
  Speaker 1: my friends. They were particularly interested in how frogs work.
• 46:05
  Speaker 1: Sorry for the broken English. I'm still working on my grammar.
• 46:08
  Speaker 1: I think you did great. Agreed. PS. I will love
• 46:11
  Speaker 1: to hear a shout out hearts hearts that is emmanuela
• 46:15
  Speaker 1: guia shout out Emmanuel hang in there. Yeah, that's really
• 46:20
  Speaker 1: sad to hear, and you're doing great with your English.
• 46:23
  Speaker 1: We are very sad to hear about that situation. Um.
• 46:26
  Speaker 1: If you want to get in touch with us and
• 46:28
  Speaker 1: let us know about something going on in your country
• 46:30
  Speaker 1: that we weren't aware of, uh, we want to hear
• 46:33
  Speaker 1: about it, you can tweet to us at josh um
• 46:36
  Speaker 1: Clark or s Y s K podcast. I also have
• 46:39
  Speaker 1: a website called Are You Serious Clark dot com. Chuck
• 46:42
  Speaker 1: is on Facebook at Facebook dot com slash Charles W.
• 46:45
  Speaker 1: Chuck Bryant. He's also at Facebook dot com slash stuff
• 46:48
  Speaker 1: you Should Know. You can send us an email to
• 46:51
  Speaker 1: Stuff podcast at how stuff Works dot com and it's
• 46:53
  Speaker 1: always joined us at at home on the web, Stuff
• 46:55
  Speaker 1: you Should Know dot com. For more on thiss and
• 47:02
  Speaker 1: thousands of other topics, visit how Stuff Works dot com.
• 47:11
  Speaker 1: M