Mercy Brown became the center of Rhode Island's best-known vampire panic after several members of her family died from tuberculosis in the late 1800s. In 1892, townspeople exhumed her body, removed and burned her heart and liver, and used the ashes in an attempted folk remedy for her sick brother. Her grave survives in Chestnut Hill Cemetery and remains one of New England's most important vampire-lore sites.
Filed under folklore: stories a place tells about itself, passed down and still repeated.
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Source: Atlas Obscura