Rhode Island: Bigfoot & Vampires

This stop on the Backwoods Cryptid Road Trip pulls into Exeter, Rhode Island, where on the seventeenth of March in eighteen ninety-two a group of farmers opened the graves of three women from the same family and burned the heart of the youngest one on a rock behind the Chestnut Hill Baptist Church.

Her name was Mercy Lena Brown, she was nineteen years old, and she'd been dead for two months. Her neighbors believed she was feeding on her dying brother from the grave. The ashes of her heart were mixed into water and given to him to drink.

Brian tells the story of the Brown family from the beginning, starting with the death of Mary Eliza Brown in eighteen eighty-three and following consumption through the house as it took her daughter Mary Olive, then Lena, then Edwin.

Along the way the episode covers the wider New England vampire panic, the century of tuberculosis outbreaks that drove it, and the earlier Rhode Island cases that Exeter already knew by heart, including Stephen Staples and his petition to the Cumberland town council in seventeen ninety-six, the dream of Stukeley Tillinghast and his dying orchard, Nancy Young of Foster, the Rose family of Peace Dale, the Ray brothers of Jewett City, and the Connecticut farmer whose coffin was marked J B fifty-five.

The episode also follows the story out of Exeter and into the Providence Journal, the papers of Bram Stoker, the fiction of H. P. Lovecraft, and the research of folklorist Michael Bell.The cemetery has its own encounters. A teenager with a dying flashlight finds a girl standing over a headstone in nineteen seventy-nine. A groundskeeper's daughter watches a blue light travel along the back wall in nineteen fifty-seven. And a woman caring for her father in his last week walks into his bedroom at three in the morning and finds somebody sitting in the chair beside his bed.

Then the road turns west. Ten Rod Road runs from the cemetery straight into the Arcadia Management Area, fourteen thousand acres of forest grown up over the same farms that emptied out in Mercy Brown's lifetime, and it's the same road where the best-known Bigfoot video in Rhode Island was filmed. From there the episode moves through the state's Sasquatch encounters. A duck hunter on Worden Pond watches something pale wade across a frozen cove.

A forestry worker sees a figure step over a stone wall during the gypsy moth summer of nineteen eighty-one. A beagle man at Big River has his whole pack go silent at once. A firewood cutter in Burrillville turns around to find something at his woodpile holding a piece of his oak.

And a rider at Escoheag sits on a mare that won't take another step.If you've got a sighting, a story, or a stop you want added to the map, you can reach Brian at brian@paranormalworldproductions.com.



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Have you experienced a Bigfoot sighting, Sasquatch encounter, Dogman experience, UFO sighting, or any unexplained cryptid or paranormal event deep in the woods? We want to hear your story.

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Backwoods Bigfoot Stories is a paranormal storytelling podcast featuring real Bigfoot encounters, Sasquatch sightings, Dogman reports, cryptid experiences, and true scary stories from the backwoods.

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