REMASTERED — Episode 1: They Made a Tonic

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Hollywood is obsessed.

Sure, we often think of obsessions like sex, violence, gigantic robots, and of course, epic battles between good and evil.

But another obsession of Hollywood is vampires.

You have to admit, though, that there's a lot to love about vampires.

Immortality, wealth, power, and superhuman abilities such as flight and strength.

Yes, they come with trade-offs, such as incredibly bad sunburns, but every movie I've seen, and I've seen a lot, believe me, tends to show vampires that are fairly happy with their lot in life.

My exposure to the world of vampires happened in the late 90s when I was in college.

A friend of mine recommended the Anne Rice novel, Interview with the Vampire.

I devoured that and many of the sequels.

They're fun reads, and they certainly set the tone for a decade or more of vampire-centered entertainment.

I won't touch on the vampires of the Twilight books mostly because I haven't read them, but I will say this: those books, however lambasted they have been by critics, have shown that popular culture's love of all things vampires is as undying as the creatures themselves.

I'm Aaron Mankey, and this

is Lore.

When most people think of vampires, they envision something that is a purely European creation.

A foreign accent, Victorian-era dress, and dark manor homes and castles.

It's a common visual language for most of the Western world, so I don't blame movies and books for portraying that image, but it's one small facet of a legend that has hundreds of expressions.

The single most prominent historical figure attached to the modern notion of vampirism is, of course, Vlad III of Wallachia, otherwise known as Vlad the Impaler.

Vlad was the ruler of the small Eastern European kingdom of Wallachia and ruled from 1456 to 1462.

Vlad was known as Vlad the Impaler because he preferred to execute his enemies by impaling them on stakes.

The Ottomans called him Lord Impaler after entering his kingdom to find forests of impaled victims.

Vlad was a violent guy, you see.

Rather bloodthirsty, you might say.

And he, like his father before him, belonged to something known as the Order of the Dragon, a group established to protect Christian Europe from the invading Ottoman Empire.

Vlad's father, Vlad II, was known as Vlad Drakul, or Vlad the Dragon.

When Vlad III rose to power, he took the hereditary title and was known as Vladrakula, the son of the dragon.

That name might sound very similar to the most famous vampire story in the world, and that's because Brahm Stoker, when creating his famous Creature of the Night, used Vlad III as his inspiration.

Well, part of it, but we'll get to more of that later.

The roots of most vampire stories, however, can be traced back to superstitions rooted in ancient cultures all across the world.

Western Europe played host to countless stories of reanimated dead known as revenants.

These were animated corpses that climbed out of the grave to torment the living.

The word revenant comes from the Latin that means to come back.

Come back to do what, you might ask?

Well, I'm glad you did.

At first, it was just to terrorize the living.

But as the centuries passed, the legend became more specific.

Revenants were said to return from the grave to torment their living relatives and neighbors.

What was key though was that revenants were specific people, not anonymous zombies like the ones from our modern horror genre.

These things had a past and a purpose.

In Norse mythology we can find tales of a creature known as the Drauger, Aginwalkers, who would return from the grave and wreak havoc on the living.

These creatures possessed superhuman strength, smelled of decay, and were pretty ugly in appearance.

They could enter the dreams of the living, and while doing that, they were said to leave a tangible object near the sleeping victim so that, upon waking, they would know their dreams were more real than they feared.

Let's go back earlier than the Middle Ages, though.

The legends of some ancient cultures spoke of creatures that, while not immediately similar to the vampire we know today, nonetheless shared many core characteristics.

First, we have the Greek myth of Empusa, who was a daughter of Hecate.

Empusa was said to lure young men at night and then feast on their blood before moving on to the main course, their flesh.

Another Greek tale involves Lamia, the mistress of Zeus who becomes cursed by Zeus' wife Hera and doomed to hunt children, devouring them.

Stories of undead creatures, or creatures that feed on the blood of the living, seem nearly as common as written language itself.

Even on the small, isolated island of Madagascar, there are legends of a creature known as the Ramanga, which was known to attack nobles, drinking their blood and eating their nail clippings.

Yeah,

I said nail clippings.

Deal with it.

Are vampires real?

I'll let you make the final decision on that.

But what is clear is that most of these stories find their genesis in the human need to explain the unexplainable.

For instance, early Europeans used the myth as a way of explaining why a corpse wasn't decomposing at the normal expected rate.

You can see evidence of this in Bulgaria, where graves dating back over 800 years have been opened up, revealing iron rods forced through the chest of the skeletons.

And in a time when it was very common to bury someone that was thought to be dead, only to find out that they really weren't, you can imagine that stories would quickly circulate that the dead were coming back to life.

As a result, taphophobia, the fear of being buried alive, swept Europe and the United States.

Of course, once medical science caught up, people got more practical by building alert systems into graves, just in case the person woke up and wanted out.

I realize that being buried alive sounds like a rare occurrence, but it happened frequently enough that many people were sufficiently paranoid about it to actually spend time looking for a solution.

One of those people happened to be a medical doctor, a man named Adolf Gutzmith.

In 1822, and driven by the fear of being buried alive, he invented a safety coffin for his own interment.

And he tested it out himself.

Tested it out?

You bet.

Dr.

Gutzmith allowed himself to be buried underground in his new safety coffin for several hours, during which he had meals delivered to him through a feeding tube.

He enjoyed a wonderful meal of soup, sausages, and a local beer.

Sounds like a great date-night destination.

Dr.

Timothy Smith of New Haven, Vermont was another paranoid inventor.

He created a grave that can be visited to this day if you happened to be passing by Evergreen Cemetery.

It was a crypt, buried in the usual manner, but it had a cement tube positioned over the face of the body.

A glass plate was affixed to the top of the tube at ground level.

Dr.

Smith died a real, natural death and was buried in his fancy coffin with a view.

He never woke up, but early visitors to his grave reported that they had a clear view of his decomposing head until condensation obscured the glass.

Side note.

Vampires no longer scare me.

Waking up inside a small box buried six feet below the surface of the earth is what true fright looks like to me.

Another culprit in humanity's use of the vampire label was porphyria, a rare blood disorder, but modern science has pretty much closed the case on that one, saying that it's too far of a stretch to connect the two topics.

Rabies, of all conditions, has also been used as an explanation for the rise of vampire mythology.

Surprisingly, there are a lot of commonalities between them, such as sensitivity to light and garlic, as well as altered sleep patterns.

The most recent medical condition with a strong connection to vampire mythology was actually tuberculosis.

Those who suffered from TB had no vampire-like symptoms though, and that makes this one a harder connection to explain.

It's also, incidentally, where one of my favorite New England legends comes into the picture.

Allow me to introduce to you Mercy Brown.

Lena Mercy Brown was a young woman who lived in the latter half of the 19th century in the rural town of Exeter, Rhode Island, and she was a major player in what is now known as the Great New England Vampire Panic.

Stories like hers can be found repeated all across Rhode Island, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Vermont, echoed in the lives of others in similar situations, and the results have surprising connections to both the modern idea of vampires as well as the ancient stories, as we will see.

The first person to die was Mercy's mother, Mary Eliza.

That was December of 1882, and she fell victim to what was then called consumption.

Consumption, because as the tuberculosis ravaged the body, the person would appear to waste away, consumed, if you will, by the illness.

She, of course, was buried because that's what you do with a loved one who passes away.

The next year, though, Mercy's sister Mary Olive died at the age of 20.

Same illness, same symptoms.

I'm not sure when the people of Exeter, Rhode Island started to wonder if the deaths were connected, but it might have been then or it might have been a few years later when Mercy's brother Edwin took ill.

Edwin though was smart.

He packed up and moved across the country to Colorado Springs, which had a great reputation for the healing properties of its dry climate.

When he returned from the resorts out west some years later, he was alive but not doing well.

And in December of 1891, he took a turn for the worse.

That was also the month that Mercy herself became ill.

Her tuberculosis moved fast though.

They called it the galloping kind and it moved through her body quickly.

By January of 1892, she was dead and the people of Exeter were more worried than ever.

You see, they suspected something supernatural.

Now, this was surprising considering how close Exeter is to Newport.

That's the seaside city known for the summer cottages of the wealthy, folks like the Vanderbilts, the Astors, the Wideners, and the Wetmores.

It was the pinnacle of educated society, yet just a handful of miles away, one small town that should have known better was about to do something very, very creepy.

Edwin was still alive, you see, and someone got it in their mind that one of the women who died before him, either his mother or one of his sisters, was somehow draining him of his life from beyond the grave.

They were so convinced of this, you see, that they wanted to dig them all up.

Yes, all of them.

Once they received the father's permission to do this horrible thing, a group of men gathered in the cemetery on the morning of March 17th and began to dig up the bodies.

What they were looking for was any evidence of an unnatural state, blood in the heart, blood around the mouth, or other similar similar signs.

The first body, Mary Eliza, the mother, was satisfactorily decomposed though, so they ruled her out.

And of course she was, you might say.

She'd been dead and buried for a decade.

Mary Olive was also in a normal state of decomposition.

Again, being dead 10 years usually helps convince people that you're really dead.

But when they examined Mercy's body, a body that had not been buried because she died in the middle of winter, but instead had been stored in a stone building that was essentially a walk-in freezer, they discovered a remarkable state of preservation.

Shocking, I know.

So what did they do?

Well, these superstitious townfolk did what they had learned from their ancestors.

They cut out Mercy's heart and liver, within which they found red, clotted blood, burned them on a nearby stone, which, by the way, is still there near her headstone in the cemetery, and then mixed the ashes with tonic.

That tonic was given to Edwin to drink.

drink.

Yes, Edwin Brown drank his own sister's liver and heart.

Did it work?

Nope.

Edwin died less than two months later.

What it did do, however, was set up Mercy Brown to be the first American vampire.

I suppose it's not important to mention that she wasn't really a vampire, because you're an intelligent person, but it doesn't hurt to say it.

As unusual as an event like this must sound, you might be surprised to learn that it happened quite frequently.

In 1817, nearly a century before Mercy Brown's exhumation, a Dartmouth college student named Frederick Ransom died of tuberculosis.

His father, so worried that the young man would leave the grave and attack the family, had him dug up.

Ransom's heart was cut out and burned on a blacksmith's forge.

Even Henry David Thoreau heard tales of these types of events and mentioned one in his personal journal.

He wrote on September 26th of 1859,

I have just read of a family in Vermont who, several of its members having died of consumption, just burned the lungs, heart, and liver of the last deceased in in order to prevent any more from having it.

So of course, word spread about what happened to Mercy Brown, as it usually did when a body was dug up and carved into pieces like that.

Mercy's case actually made it into a newspaper called the New York World, and it made quite an impression on the people who read it.

How do we know?

Because a clipping of that article was found in the personal papers of a London stage manager after his death.

You see, his theater company had been touring America in 1892.

He evidently found the story inspiring, so much so that he sat down a few years later and wrote a book.

Who was the man?

Brom Stoker.

And the book?

Oh, I'm sure you've guessed that already.

It was Dracula, published in 1897.

I hope you enjoyed your tour of the bizarre and tragic events that took place in Exeter, Rhode Island in 1892.

Amazingly, it's not unique and there are many other examples throughout the history of New England, and I have one in mind that I think you're going to love.

Stick around after this brief sponsor break to hear all about about it.

When the Vermont Standard ran the headline on the front page of their little newspaper in the fall of 1890, it smacked of sensationalism.

Vampirism in Vermont, it said.

It's pretty hard to offer your readers a more scandalous, risky, and downright laughable news bulletin than that.

The trouble was, the small town of Woodstock had indeed been dealing with a vampire problem, and they had been for years.

The earliest record comes from the unpublished memoirs of a local man named Daniel Ransom, found in the Woodstock Public Library.

In it, Ransom described the events that happened in 1817 when he was just three years old.

His older brother Frederick was 20 at the time and attended school at Dartmouth College just 20 miles away.

Frederick had come home for the Christmas season, but took ill around that time with consumption, what we now call tuberculosis.

The local doctor tried his best to help the young man fight the sickness, but Frederick failed to recover.

He died on the 14th of February after weeks of wasting away and was buried in Cushing Cemetery.

Reflecting back on the events, Ransom commented on the popular belief at the time.

that illness was somehow hereditary.

In fact, he'd been told that consumption was so common in his family that he himself shouldn't expect expect to live past the age of 30.

It wasn't a hopeless situation, though, because they also believed in a cure.

If the heart of a family member killed by the illness could be dug up and burned, no other relatives would suffer the same fate.

So that's what they did.

I'm not sure if it was weeks or months later, but eventually the body of Frederick Ransom was exhumed by his father and the other locals.

His heart was cut out and burned, and then the men reburied the body.

Their hope was simple.

No one else had to die now.

Unfortunately, Daniel was the only one to escape the family curse.

Between 1821 and 1832, each of his remaining siblings, as well as his mother, passed away as a result of tuberculosis.

There's no record of what happened to his father.

Normally, we have to jump to a new state and village to find another tale with similar events, but not this time.

Because just 13 years later, Woodstock played host to another vampire scare.

This time, it was the Corwin family who suffered.

The oldest of the Corwin sons had passed away in December of 1829 and buried shortly after.

By June of 1830, others in the family were sick as well.

Most severely, the only remaining son was ill and it wasn't looking good for him.

So the local doctor was called in.

At that time, Dr.

Joseph Gallup served the community there in Woodstock, but he was joined by others from the medical field who wanted to help, and all of them were united in their diagnosis.

The Corwin boy's illness was a result of vampirism.

Upon their recommendation, family, friends, and all the doctors gathered together in Cushing Cemetery in the middle of June to exhume the dead Corwin boy.

It was well attended by others from the community.

In fact, we know that the events happened thanks to a woman who witnessed it all herself.

Her description is equal parts chilling and familiar.

Corwin was dug up.

His chest was cut open, and the heart was examined.

To their surprise, it was found to be full of fresh blood, and so the doctors recommended it be removed and burned.

But rather than do it there, they cut the heart out and paraded it to the village green, where it was burned in front of the entire town.

Afterward, the ashes were scooped up and placed in an iron pot, and then a deep hole was dug right there in the green.

The pot was placed at the bottom, and then the blood of a bull was sprinkled on it to ward off the curse.

After that, they filled in the hole and placed a large slab of granite over it.

Apparently, you can't be too careful when it comes to vampires.

Incidentally, some of the ash had been set aside before the pot was buried.

Dr.

Gallup took the ash and mixed it with more of the bull's blood before giving it to the sick Corwin boy as a cure.

There's no record as to whether or not he survived.

There's a legend in Woodstock that the story didn't end there.

According to the stories told in town, about a decade after the ashes were buried in the green, some local teenagers decided to dig them back up again.

They met each other in the middle of the night with shovels and began to dig down toward the buried pot.

As their shovels got closer and closer to the bottom, though, something began to happen.

A noise began to come from the hole, quiet at first, but quickly growing louder.

To them, It sounded like the roaring of a great fire, as if hell itself were down beneath those last few feet of dirt and stone.

Without a word, the boys climbed out and quickly filled the hole back in.

No one, they say, has touched the location since.

This episode of Lore was researched, written, and produced by me, Aaron Mankey, with music by Chad Lawson.

Lore is much more than just a podcast now.

There's a book series available in bookstores and online, and two seasons of the television show on Amazon Prime Video.

Check them both out if you want more lore in your life.

I also make and executive produce a whole bunch of other podcasts, all of which I think you'd enjoy.

My production company, Grim and Mild, specializes in shows that sit at the intersection of the dark and the historical.

You can learn more about all of those shows and everything else going on over in one central place: GrimandMild.com.

And you can also follow the show on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.

Just search for lore podcast, all one word, and then click that follow button.

When you do, say hi.

I like it when people say hi.

And as always, thanks for listening.

Today,

23?

What are my moments?

Okay, that's 23.

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