Mercy of the Fallen

A cold and misty day in January seemed like a good time to visit the undead.

George Brown was a farmer in the small town of Exeter, Rhode Island in the late 19th century.  Consumption was all the rage, then, and George lost his wife to the disease in 1883, and his eldest daughter, Mary Olive, died less than six months later in 1884.  It was quiet for a while, the disease, until it struck George's seemingly healthy only son Edwin around 1891/2.  He struck out with his wife to Colorado Springs to seek treatment from Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman   cure his illness in the healing waters, and while he was away, his younger sister, Mercy, fell ill and died on January 18th, 1892.  She was placed in a crypt while everyone waited for the ground to thaw.

George's neighbors began to whisper.  Something wasn't right--illness was common, but it seemed George's family was having a considerable run of bad luck.  They confronted him with their suspicions that one of his family members was in fact undead, and feeding on the living.  They demanded he do something before the vampire started finding victims outside of the Brown family.

With a group of friends and neighbors, George had a doctor exhume the corpses of his wife and daughter Mary Olive, who were, having been ten years in the ground, in advanced states of decay.  However, when they looked in Mercy's coffin, she seemed to have shifted, and her body was still fresh. When the doctor removed her heart, it dripped blood.  The doctor drained her body of fluids, and her bloody heart was burned on a nearby stone wall.  The ashes were given to Edwin, who had recently returned, still ill, so he could drink them in a protective potion.  Mercy's body was buried, as was Edwin's when he died just two months later.  George himself lived until 1922, and the fates of his other two youngest daughters is unknown.  People who visit Mercy's grave often report seeing blue orbs...like this one in a picture I took, to the right of her grave.