Exhumed: Unearthing the History of the American Vampire by Aaron Mahnke
Around 200 years after the Salem Witch Trials took place, another supernatural hysteria grabbed a hold of the citizens of rural New England – this time, a vampire panic. As consumption (also known as tuberculosis) took the lives of many citizens, some turned to superstitions and folk beliefs as a way of protecting themselves and their families. They feared that the deceased were returning from the grave as vampires to drain the life of their surviving relatives, and they would dig up the corpse of the suspected vampire and remove its organs to put a stop to the illness. Perhaps the most famous instance of this happened to the body of young Mercy Brown in Rhode Island in 1892, and it is this incident that is central to Exhumed: Unearthing the History of the American Vampire by Aaron Mahnke.
Exhumed uses the story of Mercy Brown as a catalyst to explore the history of how humans have thought about the living and the dead, disease, science, and magic, and how these beliefs would have shaped the perspective of those in the 19th century. As host and producer of the award-winning folklore podcast Lore, Mahnke uses his skills in conversational storytelling to convey thousands of years of folklore and history in an accessible way.
The first part of Exhumed has a strong focus on scientific theories and philosophies from ancient times through the Scientific Revolution. Mahnke does an excellent job at providing the foundational knowledge to understand why people believed what they did, even if it seems a bit out there to the modern reader. Readers are entertained with many morbid anecdotes and strange remedies. Did you know physicians were grinding bits of mummies and adding them to a tonic to heal ailments? Or that a man in 1667 died after receiving a blood transfusion from a calf in an effort to heal him of mental illness? Forget about beef tallow – human fat from bodies that died a violent death was often used as a salve to treat all manner of injury and disease.
The second half of the book is where Mahnke’s talents really shine. He covers different philosophical ideas about the human soul and where consciousness lives within the body, drawing material from significant figures such as Plato and Leonardo da Vinci. We learn about a few murder cases in which the deceased’s lifeless body was the one to point fingers at the guilty party. Readers receive an overview of what it was like to pursue a career as an executioner.
When Mahnke returns to Mercy Brown at the end of the book, readers have gained a new understanding of the human emotions and reasoning behind the seemingly bizarre behavior of those New Englanders a little more than a century ago.
I would recommend Exhumed to any reader who is interested in early American folklore, strange and unusual history, or to anyone who is simply looking for a story that will unnerve them during this Halloween season.
Review by Samantha Monk, Reference Librarian.
