The New England Vampire Panic
Revenants of the Wasting Sickness
Fear has a way of reaching backward.
When medicine failed and death refused to follow its expected course, the living turned to the dead for answers. Across New England, from quiet churchyards to farm plots, families disturbed the earth in acts shaped more by love than cruelty, love strained to the breaking point by desperation. They opened graves in search of understanding, hoping to explain why the sickness continued its slow, relentless march through their homes. What if the illness had not ended with the last breath? What if it lingered, fed, even, on those still breathing? This was the grim logic behind the New England Vampire Panic, a chapter of American folklore carved from grief, amplified by fear, and carried on the breath of the dying. The region was not haunted by monsters. It was haunted by memory.
There is a grave on a hill in Exeter, Rhode Island. The name on the stone is Mercy Brown. She died in 1892 at the age of nineteen. But after her burial, the townspeople came to believe she had not stayed buried.
Mercy became the most famous figure in what historians now call the New England Vampire Panic, a grim, folkloric chapter in American medical history. Between the 1790s and 1890s, at least eighty documented exhumations took place across the region, a startling number for communities confronting an invisible killer. Families, desperate to explain the relentless toll of tuberculosis, turned to the dead for answers. They dug up bodies. They burned hearts. They fed ashes to the living. These actions sound medieval, but they occurred not in the distant past, but in the lifetimes of our great-grandparents, rituals carried out in barns and burial grounds across rural New England.
The disease driving this panic was tuberculosis. In 18th- and 19th-century America, many called it consumption, believing it consumed its victims from within. One family member would fall ill. Then another. Then another. In towns without microscopes, physicians, or modern plumbing, such patterns of death felt less like contagion and more like a curse.
Before germ theory or antibiotics, grief gave rise to folklore. And it often pointed its finger at the recently dead.
From the wooded hills of Connecticut to the stony fields of Vermont, communities told stories of revenants, beings who returned from the grave to drain life from the living. These weren’t the vampires of Gothic fiction. They didn’t avoid mirrors, turn into bats, or haunt candlelit castles. They were more familiar. More unsettling. They came from the next room. From the family plot. They shared your name. They had once sat at your table. They looked like your daughter. Your brother. Your wife. People you loved, who died, and whose deaths refused to end.
Unlike literary vampires that preyed on strangers, these revenants fed on kin. That intimacy made them terrifying.
Dozens of recorded cases describe families exhuming relatives after successive illnesses. Corpses were examined for signs of unnatural preservation: a ruddy flush to the cheeks, blood in the heart. These were read as proof that the dead were still feeding. The responses were ritualized. Hearts were cut out and burned. In some cases, the ashes were mixed with water and given to the sick as a kind of cure.
In Exeter, Rhode Island, that ritual reached its final and most public expression. George Brown had already buried his wife and eldest daughter. Then his son Edwin fell ill. Then his daughter Mercy. She died in January 1892 and was placed in a stone crypt. That spring, as Edwin grew weaker, the villagers grew restless. They insisted that Mercy be exhumed.
The cold had preserved her. Her body appeared relatively intact. There was still blood in her heart. That was all the proof they needed. Her heart was removed, burned on a nearby stone, and the ashes were mixed into water and given to Edwin.
He died two months later.
Though shocking, the Mercy Brown case was not an isolated incident. Such exhumations occurred in isolated communities with little access to modern medicine. The boundary between science and superstition was still thin. Clergy often framed illness as a spiritual affliction. Doctors worked with fragmentary knowledge. Families acted with what they had: stories, memory, fire.
Even Henry David Thoreau, writing in 1859, recorded local accounts of these rites. In his journal, he wrote: “I have heard of a family in which the mother and several children died of consumption, and the survivors attributed it to the dead, and actually dug up the bodies and burned them.” He added, “The savage in man is never quite eradicated.”
Archaeologists have since found physical traces, graves with rearranged bones, reversed skulls, and broken ribs, evidence of rituals born of grief and fear. The hills of New England are quiet now. But the ground remembers.
What makes Mercy’s story especially uncanny is its timing. It took place five years before Bram Stoker published Dracula. Some scholars suggest Stoker, known to follow American newspapers, may have been influenced by reports of Mercy’s exhumation. But vampires were not born in New England. They’ve haunted the cultural imagination of nearly every society on earth.
In Eastern Europe, vampires were tied to premature death and improper burial. Romanian strigoi, Slavic upirs, and Bulgarian spirits were believed to rise and torment kin. The rituals were similar: staking, burning, dismembering. In Greece, vrykolakas were feared undead blamed for disease and famine. In parts of Africa and Asia, blood-drinking spirits and life-draining ancestors played similar roles. In China, the jiangshi, a stiff, hopping corpse animated by spiritual imbalance, was said to feed on the qi, or life energy, of the living.
The details varied, but the core pattern held: unexplained death, unnatural preservation, and the proximity of the dead to the suffering of the living. New England’s vampire panic wasn’t an anomaly. It was an echo. A regional expression of something older and widespread. A timeless fear: that love cannot protect us from death, and that grief, when left to fester, becomes ritual.
New England’s vampires were never strangers. They were kin. That was what made them terrifying. That was what made the rituals so difficult to resist.
As hearts were burned in the rural Northeast, the cities to the west faced the same affliction. In Albany, Troy, and Schenectady, tuberculosis spread quietly through crowded tenements. Brick buildings with poor ventilation housed large immigrant families, their rooms thick with coal smoke and damp winter air. The disease found easy purchase.
By 1900, tuberculosis was the leading cause of death in Albany County, responsible for more than ten percent of all recorded deaths—figures comparable to those in Boston and Philadelphia. Cities didn’t turn to the grave for answers. They turned inward. The sick were removed from their homes and placed in institutions like Albany’s Home for Incurables and City Hospital, where care often meant isolation rather than healing. Vulnerable children were enrolled in experimental open-air schools, some built on rooftops and ventilated year-round, even in deep winter. Students wore coats and scarves indoors while teachers kept the windows open wide. The method, adapted from European practice, was based on a simple belief: that fresh air and rest could strengthen the body’s resistance to disease.
These efforts may have lacked drama, but they stemmed from the same need as the vampire panic, the need to do something. When death took hold and medicine offered no answers, action itself became a form of hope.
Newspapers like the Troy Times covered Mercy Brown’s story in 1892. The tone was cautious. Not mocking. Editors understood their readers had seen tuberculosis erase entire families. The idea of a young woman’s heart being burned to save a brother wasn’t fantasy, it was desperation made visible. And in parts of upstate New York, belief in lingering illness after death endured well into the 20th century.
North of Albany, the Adirondacks became a sanctuary. In 1873, Dr. Edward Livingston Trudeau was diagnosed with tuberculosis and told he would soon die. He retreated to Paul Smiths, a hamlet in the northern wilderness. There, amid fresh air and stillness, he began to recover.
Trudeau came to believe that cold air, rest, and nature could slow or even halt the disease. In 1885, he founded the Adirondack Cottage Sanitarium in Saranac Lake, the first tuberculosis sanatorium in the United States. It began as a few cottages but grew into a network of cure homes, laboratories, and support services.
Patients from across New York, including Troy, Schenectady, and New York City, traveled north to take the cure. They spent their days bundled in blankets on glassed-in porches, breathing the mountain air. A cottage economy formed around them. Shops catered to their needs. Libraries delivered books. And the Saranac Laboratory, opened in 1894, became the country’s first dedicated TB research facility.
Other institutions followed. Stony Wold for women. Ray Brook for veterans. The Will Rogers Memorial Hospital for entertainers. The region’s architecture still bears their imprint. Cure cottages, with their iconic sleeping porches, still line the streets of Saranac Lake.
The sanatorium model was rooted in science. But its emotional foundation was familiar. Like the families who burned hearts in Rhode Island, the patients of Saranac Lake placed their hope in something they could not fully explain.
In Washington and Rensselaer Counties, local stories tell of graves opened without ceremony, bones repositioned, families who took matters into their own hands. These accounts stretch back generations and reflect the same patterns seen across New England during the tuberculosis era. Beneath them lies a deeper, national fear: that death might not be final, that disease could cling to the body, and that the danger didn’t end with the last breath. In rural towns and growing cities alike, that fear shaped how communities mourned, how they acted, and what they were willing to believe.
Everything changed in the 1940s with the arrival of antibiotics like streptomycin. Sanatoria emptied. Cure cottages closed. Open-air schools in Albany shut their windows for good. Rituals gave way to proven science.
In Albany’s archives, death ledgers list “consumption” beside thousands of names. In Saranac Lake, cure cottages stand in quiet rows. And in the forests of New England, weathered stones still bear the names of those whose rest was not allowed to last.
The New England Vampire Panic and the tuberculosis crises of the Capital Region were not separate events. They were twin responses to the same terror: the slow, merciless death of someone you love. When science failed, or hadn’t yet arrived, families acted. Sometimes through fire. Sometimes through silence. Sometimes through rest.
The fear that powered these stories was never just superstition.
It was love, sharpened by helplessness, twisted into ritual by the ache to save someone slipping away. And beneath every exhumation, every burning heart, every desperate cure, the same question smolders still, quiet, unbearable, and human: what if you could have done something… and didn’t?
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Documentation
Michael Bell, Food for the Dead: On the Trail of New England’s Vampires
Historic Saranac Lake: Trudeau Institute Archives
Albany Anti-Tuberculosis Committee Records, NYS Archives
The Troy Times, April 1892: "Ghastly Rites in Exeter"
Friends of Albany History: Open Air School Movement
Adirondack Almanack: "The Luxury of Health"
Reben, Martha. The Healing Woods
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Fascinating. Have you read Everything is Tuberculosis, by John Green? Not the most important part of his book, but he mentions the Adirondack chair can be traced to TB. It was created to allow TB patients to enjoy fresh air outside without needing to bring out a bunch of beds.