In rural Exeter, the Brown family was torn apart by consumption: Mary Eliza Brown died in 1883, her daughter Mary Olive in 1884, and Mercy Lena Brown in January 1892 while her brother Edwin was wasting away with the same disease. In a town where tuberculosis was poorly understood and death moved house to house, neighbours came to believe one of the dead Browns was feeding on the living, and Mercy became the family member most feared after she was buried in the frozen ground of winter. On 17 March 1892, villagers, a doctor, and a newspaper reporter exhumed the bodies at Chestnut Hill Cemetery beside the Baptist Church in Exeter. Mary Eliza and Mary Olive showed the expected decay, but Mercy’s body appeared unusually well preserved, with blood still found in the heart, which local folklore treated as proof that she had risen as a vampire. Her heart and liver were cut out and burned, and the ashes were mixed into a tonic given to Edwin in the hope of saving him. He died anyway, but the horror of what was done to Mercy fixed her permanently in New England folklore as the region’s most famous “last vampire.”