So I have a quick story for you.

Eleven years ago, I was in the middle of a crisis.

I had written a handful of these weird historical essays, but my reason for making them

to create a cool PDF to give to email subscribers had started to sound like a really bad idea.

Fast forward a couple of months, and I figured out what to do with them.

I made a podcast, this podcast. So if you've enjoyed lore over the last decade, that's where

it all started. Me, at home, writing little historical essays about weird and creepy moments

on the historical record. Obviously, things grew from there, and the fact that I'm still

making the show today

continues to blow my mind. I'm a lucky guy, for sure. But back to those original essays. The very

first one I wrote was also the one I picked for the first episode of lore. It was the one that

grabbed my attention the tightest and had me asking all sorts of questions.

And if you've been with the show long enough, you know which one I'm talking about.

The story of Mercy Brown.

Allow me for a second to give the uninitiated among us a quick overview of her story.

Mercy Brown was a teenager from a small Rhode Island farming community who died in 1892. But she was the

third member of her family to die from the same illness. And her brother was also sick at the same

time. So people were starting to get a bit desperate. And desperate people, as we know, tend to do

some pretty weird things. In Mercy's case, that meant the

townsfolk had begun to wonder if something more supernatural might be at work. One of the dead

browns, either Mercy, her mother, or her older sister, might be feeding on the living from their

grave. And they believed evidence of this would be found if they exhumed all the bodies and checked them.

...