A Modern Vampire: Eerily Similar to Mercy Brown

In The Shunned House, HPL thinly veils Mercy Dexter (i.e. Mercy Brown of Exeter, Rhode Island) as a parody of Mercy Lea Brown. Space does not permit the full telling of the tragic story of the Brown family - and the long tradition of attempting to prevent tuberculosis by exhuming bodies and burning hearts in Rhode Island and Connecticutt. Perhaps in a future blog - but one can easily google on the tradition.

However, we know that HPL made use of the 1892 newspaper article raging about the superstition - perhaps found in Sidney Rider's books.

The tradition has a modern outbreak of note. In 2004, a farmer named Petre Toma died. Upon burial, a child in the village became ill and a group of panicked villagers exhumed the body, pried the rib cage open with a pitchfork, burned the heart and made a brew of the ashes and made the sick child drink it.

The story is long, and to save space, I'm putting them in the comments section attached to this post.

The citations are: Massimo Pollidoro [1] & Seattle Times.