Classification: Legendary & Supernatural Humanoids

Temporal Range: 1892

Geographic Range: Rhode Island, USA

Diet: Blood

Horde: North American

When 19-year-old Mercy Brown died of tuberculosis in January 1892, it was just another tragic moment in a series of sad events for the Brown family. Unfortunately, this death did not mark the end of the Brown family’s suffering, but the start of a whole new horror. After Mercy’s death, her brother Edwin continued to get sicker, and the townspeople of Exeter, Rhode Island, decided that Mercy must be at fault, even from the grave.

Mercy’s father, the local doctor, and a newspaper reporter dug up the graves of several Brown family members in March 1892 to find the culprit of Edwin’s ongoing sickness. When they did, they found that, unlike her mother and sisters, Mercy’s body had not decomposed, and when studied in more detail, she still had blood in her heart. The locals concluded that Mercy must be undead and had been rising from the earth to attack her sibling. It was decided that the only way to save her brother was to make a tonic from her heart and liver, which were burned to ashes and mixed with other substances. The pungent cocktail did little for Edwin, who died two months later.

One of the first and most famous cases in the New England vampire panic, Mercy Brown may be one of the US’s first documented vampires, and her grave can still be seen today. While we have not heard any reports of her rising from the grave after this incident, we can only assume that, after achieving her goal of killing her brother, she could finally rest. After all, sibling rivalry can be murderous; Cain and Abel, Queen Mary I and Queen Elizabeth I, the Gallagher brothers, and so on and so forth.