That Time New England Was Swarming With Vampires | Answers With Joe

this is salem massachusetts which famously got cut up in a witch craze in 1692 that led to the executions of 19 people it was a society gone mad overcome by fear and suspicion and it's not the last time this happened in fact 200 years later in 1892 you get the story of mercy brown mercy brown was the unassuming daughter of george brown a rhode island farmer whose life had just been through a series of tragedies tuberculosis had been ravaging the area they called it consumption at the time and in this outbreak george lost his wife mary his daughter mary olive brown and yeah in the same year mercy brown herself died of the illness and even as he was burying mercy his son edwin became sick but if mercy's life had been unassuming her death would be nothing of the sort because two months later a mob of people from the nearby town of exeter dug up mercy's body pulled out her heart and set it on fire mercy unfortunately got caught up in another salem witch trial like event that took place in new england in the late 1800s only this time they didn't think that mercy was a witch they thought she was a vampire [Music] so just to put this time period into perspective this was the 1890s this was the gilded age we had light bulbs and telephones transatlantic steam ships mercedes had its first car on the road at this point we even had the germ theory of medicine though it was still in its early days and hadn't been universally adopted in some rural areas you know the old folk remedies and superstitions held sway and yeah rural new england was one of those places by the way mercy brown was not an isolated event another story involves rachel harris of manchester vermont this was about 100 years earlier in 1790 but rachel died of tuberculosis uh her husband then married her stepsister hilda who also started to show signs of tb and yeah the local townspeople thought that it was rachel's fault that she was escaping her grave at night and enacting revenge on her stepsister so they exhumed rachel's corpse in february of 1793 they removed her heart liver and lungs and burned them on a blacksmith's forge this was a big event by the way like 500 people showed up to take part in this although i don't know in fairness there probably wasn't a whole lot to do in 1793 vermont regardless despite their uh valiant efforts it didn't stop holder from dying in september of that year so yeah this was a real thing people were convinced that vampires existed and were preying on the living but these weren't exactly the vampires that we think of today you know today we've seen vampires in any conceivable way possible from count dracula to edward cullen from twilight to grandpa munster but all vampires in fiction have a few core characteristics in common they drink human blood they can turn their victims into vampires they prey on their victims at night because the sun kills them they have hypnotic powers and they can't see their images in mirrors and have no shadows of course a lot of what we think of now as a vampire was kind of popularized first by bram stoker who wrote dracula in 1897. he was the first person to take all these sort of folk stories about vampires and sort of codify them in a way it's thought that he named the character dracula after vlad iii who ruled an area of modern day romania called wallachia from 1456 to 1462. his father was vlad ii who went by vlad drakul meaning vlad the dragon so vlad iii was called dracula it was also called vlad the impaler because he got a kick out of you know impaling his enemies on wooden stakes it was also said that he enjoyed dining amongst his dying victims and would dip his bread in their blood which is horrifying and really unsanitary another historical figure that may have inspired bram stoker is a hungarian countess named elizabeth bathory yeah if you've never heard of elizabeth bathory it's probably because she killed everyone who met her it's rumored that she tortured and murdered more than 600 young women during the 16th and 17th centuries and she would even bathe in the victim's blood again guys pathogens jeez it should be noted that these accusations may have been politically motivated and completely untrue but they did feed into beliefs that people already had about monster drinking the blood of others so these stories go all the way back to the middle ages as plagues began to spread throughout europe you know people didn't know what was going on they often turned to folk tales and supernatural stuff to explain it like for example some of the victims of the plague had mouth lesions that bled and yeah some thought that their mouths were bloody because they'd been you know drinking other people's blood the point is there are a few diseases that historians think are related to vampire stories the first one is rabies in 1998 neurologist juan gomez alonso published a paper in neurology that argued that the symptoms of rabies might explain vampire myths rabies lysavirus causes rabies in animals it's transmitted through direct contact with saliva or brain nervous tissue from an infected animal and yet rabies affects the central nervous system once it reaches the brain it can cause things like agitation anxiety confusion hallucinations even before eventually killing the victim yeah have you ever actually looked into rabies it's rabies sucks and people with rabies go rabid they bite and scratch and clot people like a wild animal seeing a person do that might put some ideas in your head the article also mentions that people who die from rabies often die from suffocation or cardio respiratory arrest this apparently can make the blood less likely to coagulate and hinder the composition which might lead some people to think that the dead person is looking more undead than dead he also pointed out some correlations in rabies outbreaks and the birth of vampire tales in the 1720s in eastern europe in fact one physician in 1733 got closer than he thought when he described vampires as quote a contagious illness more or less the same nature as that which comes from the bite of a rabbit dog but another contender is porphyria so rabies may explain the biting and scratching parts of vampire lore but other characteristics could be explained by a blood condition called porphyria for people with porphyria their bodies have trouble making heme which is an essential part of hemoglobin that's what carries oxygen around in our blood and there are two broad types of porphyria there's acute porphyria which affect the nervous system and cutaneous porphyrias that affect the skin the most common type of acute porphyria is acute intermittent porphyria which causes sudden and painful attacks these attacks may include seizures breathing problems and red or brown urine which one might expect one's urine to look like if you were drinking a lot of blood and these attacks are often set off by triggers including stress medications and sunlight now similarly the skin porphyria is also set off by sunlight it didn't cause blisters and excessive hair growth porphyria cutana tarda or pet is the most common form of cutaneous porphyrias it's characterized by extreme sensitivity to sunlight if exposed to sunlight people with pet might experience again skin blisters excessive hair growth or red or brown urine so they're burned by sunlight they only come out at night and they have red pee like they've guzzled so much blood that they're just peeing red in attack on top of that one of the treatments for perferia was to drink animal blood and people have even speculated that repeated porphyria attacks may cause facial disfigurement and gums to recede kind of leading to the teeth having a fanged look oh and believe it or not garlic has a high sulfur content and that can make it a potential trigger for a porphyria attack so yeah there's a lot of interesting connections there and i definitely could see people mistaking that disease for vampirism but i don't think that that's where it all came from yeah porphyria is a very rare disease so i find it kind of unlikely that all the vampire myths came from the very few people walking around with that but i could totally see how somebody back then might have had their belief reinforced by seeing somebody that has porphyria but the disease that's most associated with vampires is tuberculosis yeah tb is especially associated with the new england vampire beliefs in the 18th and 19th centuries a bacteria called mycobacterium tuberculosis causes tb which destroys lung tissue and can be fatal if not treated properly people who experience untreated tb lose weight become weak have fevers and can cough up blood it basically makes a person look like their blood is being slowly drained out of their bodies like they wake up every morning a little bit paler than the day before like like something is taking it from them in the middle of the night tb can also be spread from person to person through the air it's airborne but you know most people back then didn't understand how that worked so it's no wonder that they might have thought that a supernatural creature was sucking the life out of those dying from tb and usually that creature was somebody who had recently died you know while we're at it real quick there are a few other supernatural myths that we may have a disease to thank for that like werewolves may have been inspired by rabies for all the reasons i listed before there's also a condition called lycanthropy that makes people hallucinate that they're four-legged animals there's also hypertrichosis which in some cases causes hair to grow all over a person's body giving them a sort of a teen wolf flavor witches are sometimes associated with ergot poisoning which is a wheat fungus that can cause manic episodes and hallucinations but in the case of the vampire craze of the 18th and 19th centuries in new england it was tuberculosis it was totally tuberculosis a disease that so appears to consume the body that they actually called it consumption it's easy to see why someone might expect that something else is consuming the body maybe maybe somebody who just died someone like marcy brown as tuberculosis ravaged nearby exeter the townspeople began to suspect things maybe out of desperation it just started looking for patterns and while everybody had suffered during this outbreak maybe none more so than george brown who had lost his wife his two daughters and now his only son was sick i can only imagine that by the time these townspeople showed up with their shovels intent on digging up his family george was just too exhausted to say no they dug up his wife mary and his older daughter mary olive but they had deteriorated to the point that they decided that it couldn't possibly be them but mercy who had only been on the ground for two months in the winter no less looked remarkably fresh in fact her hair and nails seemed to have grown a little bit and blood still pooled in her body so they did the thing that the folk tales said to do they took out her heart burned it and then mixed the ashes into a potion for edwin to drink this would hopefully cure him of the vampire curse it it didn't he died a few months later the mercy brown story did make some headlines though and in fact clippings of these stories in these articles were found in bram stoker's files after he died so he didn't know about it may have even been inspired by it the vampire panic started to die down in the early 20th century when you know medical knowledge improved and tuberculosis became treatable with antibiotics in fact mercy brown is thought to be the very last confirmed vampire in america today her gray site is a tourist attraction visitors to the grave may leave gifts behind like jewelry and flowers or in one case a note that simply read you go girl hey one little life hack that i can pass on to you if you want to make sure that somebody isn't a vampire just invite them over and cook hello 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Channel: Joe Scott

Views: 337,839

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Length: 12min 59sec (779 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 08 2022