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Exhumed: The Mercy Brown Story

1:40:53 recording · EN · 3 speakers

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Brief overview

Aaron Manke's book Exhumed argues the New England vampire panic was fear and logic, not barbarism.

  1. Context turns barbarism back into human logicManke compares context to 3D glasses: without them the same story looks flat and strange.
  2. Burial practice, not vampires, made the 'evidence'Social outcasts were buried shallow in cloth, so their bodies decomposed oddly and confirmed the fear.
  3. Lore started as an email-list freebieA friend told him not to zip the audio files, and day one brought nine downloads.
Executive Summary AI
  • Ash and Alayna host Aaron Manke of the podcast Lore to mark his new book Exhumed, out August 4th, which Alayna read in an early copy and blurbed on the back alongside Amy Bruni and Josh Gates.0:36
  • Manke explains that Mercy Brown was the very first Lore episode back in March of 2015, and that over almost 12 years of making the show he kept filing away episodes that 'smelled like' her story until they became a book.3:26
  • He built Exhumed so the last 20% covers Mercy's story while the first 80% supplies the context — blood, souls, corpse medicine, the hand of glory — that explains why cutting out her heart seemed acceptable.5:10
  • The panic ran on tuberculosis: scientists in Europe had identified its cause only months before Mercy's mother died in the early 1880s, and by Mercy's death in early 1892 that news still had not reached a farming village outside Newport, Rhode Island.8:01
  • TB took nearly the whole Brown family anyway — Edwin, then Jenny and 25-year-old Annie in 1895, then youngest sister Myra in 1899 — leaving only Hattie, who lived until 1954 and saw the premieres of I Love Lucy, The Ed Sullivan Show and American Bandstand.48:17
Key Quote
“It sounds barbaric, but when you actually dig into it, it's really human.”
— Aaron7:06
Key Quote
“So all you need is a handful of moments where it seems to have worked for people to say, see?”
— Aaron21:06
Key Quote
“Well, blood meant something to people in previous eras.”
— Aaron28:43