MERCY: Just let me tell it. The locals exhumed my mother and Mary Olive first. My mother was essentially a skeleton. Mary’s body was in a similar state of decomposition, though her skin formed a tight leather around her bones and her hair had continued growing, forming a dark, dusty wreath around her head. They found me turned around, facedown in the grave, which caused a gasp or two. Some of the gathered argued I’d turned over after being buried—which was a sign—while others said I’d been buried that way to prevent my returning, in accordance with local superstition.

ART: Which was it?

MERCY: Can’t say I remember, sorry. And stop interrupting. When Dr. Metcalf examined my body, he found my heart and liver to be full of blood, which he said was a natural occurrence given the timeline of decomposition. But according to the locals, my blood-filled heart was proof of their greatest fears, that at night I’d been feeding off Edwin. With the doctor and my father—I can’t imagine what my father was thinking, what this spectacle must’ve done to him—and sickly Edwin, barely with the strength to stand on his own power, all looking on, the gathered burned my heart and liver atop a stone. Once the organs were no more than ashes, Edwin drank a tonic with the ashes mixed in. That was supposed to stop my nocturnal visitations and cure him of his affliction.

ART: Did it stop your nocturnal visitations? Was he cured?

MERCY: Edwin died two months later. And of my remaining family, only my father and youngest sibling survived into the new century.

ART: The Providence Journal ran their first disapproving story about the ritual on March 19, 1892, calling it a “barbaric superstition” and criticized the lack of education and the amount of ignorance in the rural communities of New England.

MERCY: They were right to be skeptical, but I have sympathy for the people of Exeter too. They did what they did because they were afraid and wanted the horror to stop. When people become desperate, it’s human nature to assign blame to someone.

ART: Yours wasn’t the sole case of exhumation and suspected vampirism in New England in the nineteenth century. Interestingly, in the documented cases I found referenced, all focused on curing or stopping the suspected vampire and none of them posited how people became vampires in the first place. Circling back to the beginning of this where you said you were indeed a vampire, I want to know how …

MERCY: I didn’t say I was a vampire.

ART: I can play the tape back for you if you’d like.