She lived in Exeter, Rhode Island and was the daughter of George Brown, a farmer.Īfter George lost many family members, including Mercy, in the late 1800s to tuberculosis, his community used Mercy as a scapegoat to explain their deaths. Unlike Count Dracula, however, Mercy was a real person. Mercy Brown may rival Count Dracula as the most notorious vampire. Other accounts describe the decapitation and burning of the corpses of suspected vampires well into the nineteenth century. In some cases, a stake was thrust through the corpse’s heart to make sure they stayed dead. When a suspected vampire died, their bodies were often disinterred to search for signs of vampirism. Other diseases blamed for promoting the vampire myth include rabies or goiter. Some symptoms of porphyria can be temporarily relieved by ingesting blood. Many researchers have pointed to porphyria, a blood disorder that can cause severe blisters on skin that’s exposed to sunlight, as a disease that may have been linked to the vampire legend. It wasn’t uncommon for anyone with an unfamiliar physical or emotional illness to be labeled a vampire. The disease often left behind bleeding mouth lesions on its victims, which to the uneducated was a sure sign of vampirism. Vampire superstition thrived in the Middle Ages, especially as the plague decimated entire towns. Nonetheless, the similarities between the two are intriguing. Many people believe these stories sparked Stoker’s imagination to create Count Dracula, who was also from Transylvania, sucked his victim’s blood and could be killed by driving a stake through his heart.īut, according to Dracula expert Elizabeth Miller, Stoker didn’t base Count Dracula’s life on Vlad Dracul. Whether those gory tales are true is unknown. He earned his nickname because his favorite way to kill his enemies was to impale them on a wooden stake.Īccording to legend, Vlad Dracul enjoyed dining amidst his dying victims and dipping his bread in their blood. Some historians describe him as a just-yet brutally cruel-ruler who valiantly fought off the Ottoman Empire.
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