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The New England Vampire Panic: JB-55 and Mercy Brown

By Weird Burial Stories Editorial Desk · 2026-10-16

In 1990 a Connecticut gravel pit yielded a coffin lid tacked JB-55 and a skeleton rearranged after death. In 2019 a military DNA lab pointed to a man named John Barber, and called the name putative. In 1892, in Exeter, Rhode Island, the same fear had a name, a newspaper, and a date.

By C. V. Wooster

New England's vampire panic was a theory of contagion before the countryside trusted germs. Consumption, the old name for tuberculosis, moved through a family and looked, to people watching it, like the dead feeding on the living. Two files carry the history. One is archaeological: an unmarked burial ground at a sand and gravel works in Griswold, Connecticut, and a coffin lid whose brass tacks spelled JB-55. The other is a newspaper year: Exeter, Rhode Island, 1892, and Mercy Lena Brown. The Rhode Island Historical Society calls her the last person exhumed as a suspected vampire in New England. Neither file is a novel. Both are arguments about what the living did to a grave because they were afraid of a disease.

The coffin lid in the gravel

The 2019 paper in Genes, by Jennifer Daniels-Higginbotham and colleagues at the Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory, is the careful account. In 1990 an unmarked cemetery of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was excavated in Griswold when skeletal remains turned up during sand and gravel operations. The paper counts twenty-seven burials. Smithsonian Magazine, in Abigail Tucker's 2012 feature, says children playing near the hillside mine found the first graves, and that one boy brought a skull home to his mother. Tucker counts twenty-nine burials. The numbers do not match. The peer-reviewed count is twenty-seven. The children's discovery is Tucker's reporting, and it is the reason the ground was opened as a possible crime scene before Nick Bellantoni, then Connecticut's state archaeologist, dated the bones to a colonial farm cemetery.

One grave was not like the others. Brass tacks on the coffin lid spelled JB-55, which the Genes paper reads as initials and an age at death of 55. The hardware, screws and copper dowel hinges, dates the coffin to the early nineteenth century. The skull and the femurs had been rearranged after death into a skull-and-crossbones. The ribs showed lesions the authors call consistent with chronic lung infection, perhaps tuberculosis. The paper's own hypothesis, following an earlier study by Sledzik and Bellantoni, is that if there was no heart left to burn, the remedy was to rearrange the bones. That is an interpretation of a practice. The rearrangement itself is what the excavators found.

In 2019 the Armed Forces lab returned to the bones. A Y-chromosome profile, searched against a public surname project, had its closest matches in men named Barber. Historical records led the authors to a death notice for a John Barber whose son Nathan was buried in Griswold in 1826, and they write that Nathan's description fits a nearby burial marked NB-13. The paper's title calls the identification putative. The abstract then says the identity "has been revealed." Both sentences are in the same document. The Department of Defense news service, reporting the announcement at the National Museum of Health and Medicine, quotes the senior analyst Jennifer Higginbotham: "Our research points to a male named John Barber." "Points to" is the right verb. A Y-chromosome match is a surname, not a fingerprint, and the authors say so by the word they put in the title.

The fear around Jewett City, a borough of Griswold, is described in the paper as a mid-nineteenth-century belief that the dead rose and drained surviving relatives, and that consumption was the visible form of that feeding. Tucker’s Smithsonian piece is the longer portrait of how that belief worked across rural New England. It is also where the five-years-after-death detail lives: Bellantoni told her the beheading and other damage looked to him like a disturbance about five years after death. The 2019 paper does not repeat that interval. It says the bones were rearranged after death. The interval is a recollection in a magazine, not a result in the DNA study.

Exeter, 1892

Mercy Lena Brown is the case with a calendar. The Rhode Island Historical Society's account, by Jennifer L. Galpern, says she was born in Exeter in 1872, and that family and friends called her Lena. Her mother, Mary Eliza, died of consumption on 8 December 1883. Her sister Mary Olive, a dressmaker of about twenty, died on 6 June 1884. Lena's own illness was the "galloping" kind. She died on 17 January 1892. Her brother Edwin had been sick for years, had tried Colorado Springs, and came home after her death in worse health. Galpern writes that scared neighbors begged their father, George Brown, to dig up the women's bodies, find which one was to blame, and stop whatever was taking Edwin.

Smithsonian supplies the morning. On 17 March 1892 a party of men exhumed the bodies. The family doctor and a correspondent from the Providence Journal watched. George was not there. The mother and the sister, dead for years, were nearly bone. Lena, dead for two months in winter, was not. The correspondent wrote that the heart and liver were removed, and that the heart, when cut, held clotted and decomposed blood. The doctor, Tucker reports, again said the lungs showed tuberculosis. The villagers burned the heart and liver. Edwin was given the ashes. It did not save him. Galpern dates his death to 2 May 1892. Tucker, without the calendar day, says he died less than two months after the exhumation. The two accounts agree on the sequence. The Society's date is the specific one.

Galpern is also the source for the "last" claim: Mercy was the last person exhumed as a suspected vampire in New England. The same essay refuses a tidy ending. Consumption kept taking George Brown's children after Edwin. The panic did not stop the disease. It only opened a grave. A haunted cemetery in the later sense is often a tour. Chestnut Hill in Exeter became one. The 1892 event is a public health disaster read, by neighbors, as a problem in the ground.

What the two graves share

JB-55 and Mercy Brown are not the same ritual. One is a rearranged skeleton in a Connecticut farm plot, identified only as far as a surname hypothesis. The other is a documented exhumation, with a doctor, a newspaper, and a father who gave permission and stayed away. What they share is the disease and the idea that destroying the suspected corpse would protect the living. Polish graves with sickles are a different century and a different object, and the archaeologists there are just as careful about the vampire label: Drawsko and Pień. The English medieval pit at Wharram Percy is the older cousin, argued from cut marks and isotopes rather than from a newspaper.

The contested points should stay contested. John Barber is a putative name, in the paper's title, even though the abstract sounds more certain. The burial count is twenty-seven in Genes and twenty-nine in Smithsonian. Mercy's exhumation is not a folktale: the Providence Journal was in the churchyard, and the Historical Society cites the death records. The belief was wrong about the mechanism. Tuberculosis does not require a revenant. The families buried their dead anyway, and then, in Exeter, buried them twice.

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