Colonial Vampires: A Mini-Essay

     The plot for Sarah Thomson’s Mercy follows the experiences of Haley Brown, a teenager whose genealogical research reveals that her colonial ancestor, Mercy Brown, was a purported vampire. According to her findings, four of the Brown relatives, including Mercy, contracted tuberculosis and died from the disease. Because their fellow colonists were unable to explain why the affliction struck only the Browns, they exhumed Mercy’s body and discovered fresh blood inside her heart. The evidence, in turn, led many to believe that Mercy was a vampire who fed on her family. Centuries later, as Haley uncovers the story, strange occurrences begin to befall the current Browns. These bizarre acts prompt the teenager to wonder if Mercy truly was a vampire and has returned to feast on her modern relations. Although Thomson’s novel is a work of supernatural fiction, it highlights the current research surrounding accounts of vampirism in colonial New England.
      As David Keyworth explains, the vampire craze which emerged in medieval Slavic lore and quickly consumed much of Europe underwent a slightly different manifestation in colonial New England. The rampant bouts of tuberculosis which plagued the colonies engendered notions of vampirism among parts of the alarmed masses. As communities struggled to understand why the affliction affected only certain households and the relatives of recently deceased individuals, European mythologies carried over from motherlands took charge, leading some to speculate that the corpses of departed souls had returned to drain the life from those family members who, shortly following the vampire’s death, began to exhibit similar symptoms. In fact, the transmission of the disease, as Nicholas Bellantoni and Paul Sledzik emphasize, played into this mythos. Tuberculosis is easily transferred between individuals living in crowded conditions. The congested and unsanitary accommodations found in many New England farming communities, coupled with seasonal periods of low nutrition, proved ideal for spreading the contagion quickly within households. Hence, one individual would contract and succumb to the disease and, shortly thereafter, other members of the same family would follow suit, leading many to believe that the first victim had returned from the grave to feast upon surviving relatives. Like the fictional Browns in Thomson’s novel, the death of one family member – Mercy – and subsequent infection of others prompted an exhumation of graves, where the blood-filled heart – a product of postmortem decomposition – confirmed suspicions and resulted in the apotropaic remedy (removal and incineration of the heart and destruction of the corpse). 

Works Referenced  

Keyworth, David. “Was the Vampire of the Eighteenth Century a Unique Type of Undead Corpse?” Folklore 117.3 (2006): 241-260.

Sledzik, Paul and Nicholas Bellantoni. “Bioarcheological and Biocultural Evidence for the New England Vampire Folk Belief.” The American Journal of Physical Anthropology 94.2 (1994): 269-274.

Thomson, Sarah. Mercy: The Last New England Vampire. Yarmouth, ME: Islandport Press, 2011.