"Lore" Have Mercy - an Interview with author Aaron Mahnke

The case attracted contemporary media attention, and the lurid details lingered in the public’s imagination for more than a century. Enter author and historian Aaron Mahnke, host of the podcast “Lore.” As he collected tales of folklore and weird history for the first episode, Mahnke discovered the story of Mercy Brown. Her tale became the first episode of “Lore,” but for Mahnke, Mercy never fully left his mind.

That story is the basis for “Exhumed: Unearthing the History of the American Vampire,” Mahnke’s latest book. To understand Mercy Brown’s story, Mahnke leads readers through tales of folk remedies and superstitions, showing where myths and magic ran parallel with science and medicine, the strange ways they intersected, and why they ultimately diverged. Mahnke digs into the history and science behind folk medicine, like the accidental healing properties of moss found growing on the skulls of the dead. “Exhumed” dives into the guts of America’s scientific and spiritual history and unravels a story that’s at once outrageous and very human.

Maine Coast Life recently caught up with Mahnke at his Aug. 7 event at SPACE Gallery, hosted by Print: A Bookstore. This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.  

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Maine Coast Life: You told Mercy Brown’s story in the very first episode of Lore. Why did her story stick with you for more than a decade? 

Aaron Mahnke: One of the things I've learned over the past 12 years is that the stories we find entertaining or interesting are not always as shallow as they feel at first blush. In the very first episode of Lore, I framed it as, “Oh my gosh, guys, you should hear this wild story about this thing that happened in Rhode Island back in 1892," and that was pretty much where I left it. … When the podcast was adapted for TV, [Mercy Brown] was the first episode of the show. People often ask me, "What's your favorite episode?" and it's like picking your favorite child, but … the Mercy Brown episode is one of them.

So it was a story that was frequently on my mind, and when I engaged with new material for the show, it frequently became this thing … I held new stories up against and said, “This new story actually has a lesson in it that could be applied to the tale of Mercy Brown.” And as I went through that process over and over again over the course of the last decade, I started to realize that maybe I didn't engage enough with her story back in 2015. Maybe there was more to be discovered or more questions that could finally have some answers. I started pulling together all those pieces that reminded me of her tale, concepts of folk traditions or medical history … and I started to  think about how I could explore her story on a bigger scale. And that was kind of the seed moment for the book. 

MCL: Was there a specific point when you made the jump from having these disparate ideas and pieces of information that had a connection to Mercey Brown to thinking, “Oh wow, there’s a book here?”

Mahnke: They say that when it comes to writing books … some people are plotters and some are pantsers.

MCL: I’m a pantser — I write without a plan, by the seat of my pants.

Mahnke: I have lots of respect for people who are pantsers. [Laughs] My brain won't let me do that. I have to plan. For me, there wasn't necessarily one story or one fact or one moment. It was more like there was a point at which I looked down metaphorically at these things I'd been gathering and I realized, I have a book here, I have all the pieces to explore her story more. I do remember a moment, a couple of years ago, of seeing a photo of a big white mansion … that had this giant chandelier hanging outside on the portico. I thought … this massive light is being held up by four chains. If any of those chains were to go, then the chandelier is not going to hang in a proper way. I realized that's the underlying metaphor for the book. I'm going to build these four chains. The four parts of the book are essentially four separate strands of folk tradition and history and medicine, so that at the end of the book … we can finally hang the story of Mercy Brown from those four chains so that it's fully supported and it all makes sense. That was the framework that I took into the planning process, the research process, and the writing process. 

MCL: As you researched, how did you keep yourself focused and prevent going down rabbit holes or not knowing when to stop researching? 

Mahnke: I think the trick there is the planning. In my office, I've got a blank wall. I’ve never put framed art or posters or anything up on it because it's within eyeshot of my desk and anything I put up there I can see really well. So, we just stood in front of that blank wall with index cards and painter's tape and sort of built an outline. I knew there were four strands. What do we cover in each of these strands? And the more you discuss it, the more you realize, oh, well, in order to discuss that part, we actually have to have a part that's earlier that discusses this.

There's a lot of the book that was built backwards. Maybe you start with Mercy Brown’s story and what you're dealing with at the end of the day is a very strange, almost ritualistic exhumation of a human being and the reasoning behind it. What were the clues they were looking for in her open grave? Fresh blood, unusual preservation. Well, why were they looking for those things? So you answer that question and you realize, oh, well, those answers actually raise new questions. And so before we talk about those answers, we have to go back and talk about even earlier material.

So … it was this moment where you realize, Mercy's story isn't a house. It's the attic of a house. And in order to explore the attic, we first have to start in the basement and work our way up through the house. And every time we change floors, every time you move a little closer to Mercy's room, we are bringing with us a little bit of information that we picked up that goes in our backpack and we're equipped and now we have the tools we need for when we get to her story in those moments where we say, well, that used to not make sense. But now with these tools that I have, now it's starting to make sense. 

MCL: Tell me a little bit about Mercy Brown. I can tell that as part of your research, you grew close to her as a subject. What did you learn about her as a person, and as someone whose story was worth revisiting so that she could have the legacy she deserves? 

Mahnke: One of the things I hope readers take out of this book is a change in our attitude about what people in the past did. You can think about something that's very New England, like the Salem witch trials. There are so many different folk practices or traditional practices that fall under this umbrella, and it's really easy for us to look back and say, wow, what a bunch of really ignorant people. You come at it from this … ivory tower modern mentality. The reality is that when you really start to explore the material and look at the context of what happened to her, you realize … these were just normal people who are doing the best they could with what they had at the time. I grew closer to Mercy as a subject and I would say I grew closer to the Brown family in general. One of the things that I remember early on with this book was that when you search online for Mercy Brown … they usually mention only a certain cast of characters. You've got George Brown, because he's a thread that runs through it. You have his wife, who passed away 10 years earlier. You have his oldest daughter who passed away a year after the mother. Then Mercy and [her brother] Edwin get sick. And then Mercy dies. Then at the end of the tale, Edwin dies. And that's your cast of characters. You've got the mom and the dad, and then three of the kids. When, in reality, that was only half the family. When Mercy's mother passed away, there was a 2-year-old daughter in the house. 

And that brings home the humanity of what they were experiencing. Just a couple of years after his first daughter passed away, George Brown's father dies, not of tuberculosis, but it's still a death, right? It's another knock on the door, reminding him that things are not as safe as they could be. As you dig into the material and you realize what was going on in their family life, you realize, wow, there was so much more to this than just this select cast of like five characters. There were three other siblings of Mercy’s, three other sisters who died after Edwin. They died before the 1900s.

Of all of the kids in the Brown family, only one of them ever actually made it out of the 1800s. And that was Hattie. She had this really weird life where she starts out as a kid, knowing that they've exhumed her sister's body looking for these supernatural signs. And by the time she dies in 1954, she has seen the premiere of “I Love Lucy” and “American Bandstand” and the modern automobile and all of these things. It's a stretch of history that is almost mind-boggling to think about. It humanizes the people that you're reading about in this book, that they really did start off knowing very little about the world around them, but they were doing the best they could with what they had, and often that just wasn’t enough.

MCL: When Mercy Brown is exhumed, we're in a place in history where we don't have the kind of pop culture idea of vampires that we have now. What was the point when vampires went from a monster of folklore to being a monster that we kind of identify or empathize with? 

Mahnke: I don't know necessarily that we ever really left the fear behind. As people, we really love finding really big spikes in a timeline and saying, “That's the flash point, that's where it really took off.” And in reality, the idea of a vampire was just a slow burn for centuries and centuries.

My research assistant was looking into the general idea of when the word "vampire" came into the public record. It was a word that people were using, that was on the lips of the people who were exhuming the Brown women in Rhode Island that day. … There's no proof that anybody leading up to the exhumations mentioned the word vampire. We have some editorials written about a week after the events by people who claim to have been there, firsthand accounts, and none of them mention the word vampire. They mention a lot of the core details of the story, the cutting out of the heart and the liver, that kind of thing, but they don't use the word vampire.

But we do know that at the time, and even in the century and a half before Mercy Brown, people were using the concept of a vampire as a metaphor for things in their lives. Oliver Wendell Holmes very pigheadedly referred to women as vampires, which I hope his wife gave him hell about. There are articles about various discussions in Congress and people wondering about politicians or players in industry being vampires on the American public. And what occurred to us was that in order for people to use the word as a metaphor, it meant that people had to understand what the metaphor meant. And so, just to see it in print meant that that word had been active for a lot longer. It had been out there floating around. And I guess in some ways, [vampires] had moved on from being feared to kind of coexisting with us, because people were using it in such a benign way. To refer to a politician as a vampire is to disconnect the word from the fearful monster and attribute its qualities to a person. But even then it wasn't, you know, some high-collared, cloaked Eastern European man who is slipping in and drinking your blood. The idea of a vampire was simply someone who drains the life from you, in a metaphorical sense. 

MCL: There are some spectacularly gross medical history facts in the book. I'm sure that you've encountered all manner of weird medical history as part of your research of Lore, but was there any one thing that knocked you back a little bit? 

Mahnke: The encounter that John Ross Brown documents, of witnessing an execution by sword … in his travels. And the description of the people who had almost a church experience. They rushed to the front rail to drink the blood from sometimes a cup, but sometimes straight from the stump of someone’s neck, to drink the blood while it’s hot. … John Ross Brown — no relation to Mercy and her family — is a journalist who does a really good job of explaining the details of what’s going on … and there’s a pretty vivid image he paints. 

MCL: Is it frustrating to read these stories of medicine and folk traditions and think, “You guys were so close to identifying what was actually going on here”? 

Mahnke: Absolutely. That’s part of what helps me humanize them, because they really were close. Think about something like tuberculosis and virology. They had discovered, within a handful of years before the events of Mercy Brown's exhumation, the actual biological cause of tuberculosis. But they figured it out in Europe. And this wasn't a time when news could break in one place in the world and you could post about it online instantly. It took a long time to get out there. And when it traveled across the ocean, It was traveling through the medical network, so it was going to doctors who were then thinking about it, and saying, “I guess I'll keep that in mind as I go about treating my patients.” It wasn't trickling down quickly to folks living in a farming community out in the middle of nowhere. If you went to them and you said, "Tell me what you think is going on?" they might say, "Well, we think that there's an invisible force that's making the living sick. And that's going to continue to spread through the family until we get rid of this invisible force." In a lot of ways, they are describing the way that virology works. … They just leaned toward an idea that made more sense to them, which was, it has to be a supernatural cause. …

It does feel like, as I read these stories, I'm watching someone who's blindfolded, walking through a very, very, very dark room, looking for the door handle, and they get within inches of it. And they do it on sheer luck, on guesswork and working with the knowledge that they have. When you stand back and think about it, it’s impressive that they worked out what they were doing.

MCL: One final question – which character is your favorite American vampire? 

Mahnke: I confess that I don't know if I can name any, outside of, I guess, Anne Rice’s vampires. At some point they come from Europe to America, right? … I think that folks who are interested in vampires in literature should read the novel “The Historian” by Elizabeth Kostova. It’s stunning. It's possibly one of my favorite novels of all time. It explores the vampire mythology from a really unique standpoint.