11. There are records of 60 known anti-vampire rituals in 19th-century America
Between 1883 and 1891, several members of the Brown family of Rhode Island were sickened and died. Doctors diagnosed them with consumption, but locals thought otherwise. They convinced George Brown to exhume his dead family to check for signs of vampirism in 1892. They found that George’s daughter, Mercy, who’d been dead some time, hadn’t decomposed. The superstitious Rhode Islanders cut out Mercy’s heart and liver and burned them. They used the ashes to make a tonic for her sick brother, who died 2 months later despite drinking it. Amazingly, we know of 59 other similar incidents from 19th-century America.
