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In 1892, Exeter, Rhode Island was practically a ghost town.

The Civil War had decimated the population, farms sat abandoned, some had even burned down.

On a cold morning, in the dead of winter, the remaining townspeople gathered at the Chestnut Hill Cemetery,

and watched as shovels broke frozen ground to exhum three caskets.

Inside were three women from the Brown family, all of whom had fallen victim to consumption.

Two of the women had been dead almost ten years, and they looked it, but one, Mercy,

had only been in the ground for a few months.

And when they opened her coffin, she appeared just as she had the day she'd died, as

though she'd been sleeping or waiting. The Brown family had been hit particularly hard by the wasting disease,

and when Mercy's

brother Edwin took a turn for the worse, the town had decided enough was enough. Something was

sucking the life out of this family, and they were going to find it. They cut out Mercy's

liver and cast it aside, but when they sliced into her heart, they found

what they were looking for. Blood. Clotted and decomposed, but blood all the same. Mercy Brown,

the villagers were now certain, was a vampire. Mercy's friends and neighbors burned her heart

and liver on a rock nearby, and in an effort to cure him of his vampire affliction, fed them to her brother Edwin.

Less than two months later, he too was gone.

It didn't matter that the doctor who performed the autopsy on Mercy confirmed the presence of tuberculous germs in her lungs,

or that unlike her relatives, she'd only been dead a few months, preserved in the ice-cold

ground, or that poor Mercy had been very much alive and human when she watched the life

...