The Internet Explorer's Podcast
The Internet Explorer's Podcast is a comedy-ish, science-ish, history-ish, popculture-ish parody podcast where curiosity meets absurdity. Each week, self-proclaimed "internet explorer" Jimmy dives headfirst into the wildest, weirdest, and most questionable corners of the internet. He “researches” topics like DIY invisibility cloaks, medieval alchemy, and whether plants can feel pain—then confidently explains his findings to a real expert, who sets the record straight while humoring Jimmy’s misguided brilliance. It’s part curiosity, part chaos, and always a hilarious exploration of ideas you never knew you needed to hear.
The Internet Explorer's Podcast
Lord have Mercy (and let us learn our lesson)
In 1892, in the sleepy town of Exeter, Rhode Island, a teenage girl named Mercy Brown died of tuberculosis. Two months later, her body was pulled from its crypt, her heart cut out and burned, and the ashes fed to her dying brother as a medical treatment. Why? Because the townspeople believed she was a vampire.
In this episode, we dig deep into one of the strangest, most tragically hilarious moments in American medical history: the Mercy Brown vampire panic. It’s a true story of grief, fear, community hysteria, and just the tiniest bit of 19th-century grave-robbing ritual cannibalism.
You’ll meet the Browns: a family ravaged by tuberculosis, known back then as “consumption”. You’ll attend the now-legendary Exeter town hall meeting, where a group of very confident but very underqualified citizens voted to desecrate Mercy’s body based on local folklore, zero science, and one woman’s dream. We’re talking backwoods epidemiology, complete with shovels, torches, and a clay bowl full of teen heart ashes.
But the story doesn’t end there. Because Mercy Brown didn’t just die, she became a symbol. A cautionary tale. And maybe even the inspiration for Dracula. This episode explores how magical thinking, medical ignorance, and the irresistible pull of a good monster story shaped not just one New England town, but a whole national tradition of getting history spectacularly wrong.
So if you like your true stories with a side of social critique, a dash of cryptid energy, and a whole lot of “Are you kidding me?”, this one’s for you.
Coming to you from cyberspace and beyond, this is the Internet Explorers Podcast. I'm Jimmy, your guide through the endless maze of the World Wide Web. Every episode we'll journey from corner to corner, diving into fascinating, obscure, and sometimes downright bizarre topics to uncover surprises hidden just a mouse click away. Now, it's time for the show. If you were unfortunate enough to be alive in 1892 in rural Rhode Island, congratulations. You were probably cold, poorly nourished, vaguely Presbyterian, and surrounded by death. This was a time before penicillin, before germ theory had gotten through to the general public, before TikTok, but with all the same misinformation vibes. Just delivered by a man with no teeth holding a go in front of you instead of on your phone. And lurking at the top of the most feared ways to die list was something called consumption. It was the old-timey term for what we now call tuberculosis, but it might as well have been a death sentence written out in slow motion. Consumption didn't kill you overnight. It took its time. Weeks, months, even years of coughing up blood, running fevers, and shrinking down into a little Victorian skeleton. It made you pale, weak, hollow-eyed, and essentially turned you into a spooky little Tim Burton character long before that was cool. Your body would waste away while your mind stayed alert, which meant you got to be fully conscious as your lungs turned into wet confetti. Now, don't take what I'm about to say as an attack on the local public, because globally speaking, nobody knew how it spread. They had theories, sure, but they were all the worst kind of theories in that they were wrong, but they were wrong with confidence. Doctors believed it came from bad air, which was termed miasma, or through inherited melancholy, or from reading too many novels where boys and girls were acting sinfully scandalous by wait for it, holding hands. Yes, that is totally real. Other people thought it was due to imbalances in your humors. No, no, no, not like your likelihood to laugh at my dumb jokes, but your bodily humours, which is a collective term for blood, bile, phlegm, and that thing where your uncle coughs into the soup and then goes, it's just allergies. Yeah, sure. In Exeter, Rhode Island, a lot of folks took a look at their friends dying one by one, wasting away like candle wax, and decided the most logical explanation was vampires. Not cape wearing fangy bellalagosi vampires. These were closer to old school European folklore vamps. Usually your dead cousin or mom or neighbor crawling back from the grave in spectral form to suck the life out of their surviving family members. Because, I mean, that's kind of what family does. They feed on your energy until you die and then haunt you like property taxes. By the 1800s, vampire panics were already baked into parts of rural New England. In Connecticut, Vermont, even some parts of Massachusetts, which is ironic considering it was also home to Harvard Medical School. It's like a microcosm of America itself. Groundbreaking scientific research in one town, and in the next town over, some guy yelling, Digger up, I seen her blink. And this wasn't a Halloween one-off vampire thing. We have dozens of documented cases of communities digging up dead family members to perform makeshift vampire rituals on them. These ranged from the mildly disturbing, where they flipped the body to face downward, to the aggressively unhinged, where they would cut out the heart, burn it while inhaling the smoke, and then throw some bones at the moon. The logic, such as it was, went like this. Someone dies of tuberculosis, then another family member starts showing the same symptoms, and clearly that means the dead person isn't really dead, they're feeding on the living from beyond the grave. And the solution to that is to dig up the body, look for signs of freshness, and if the body looks too well preserved for your liking, then it's time to break out the firewood and turn that corpse into a public service announcement. If all of this sounds ridiculous, good. It was. But to the people of Exeter in 1892, it was a hell of a lot more comforting than the truth. Because the truth, which is we don't know what's killing us and we can't stop it, was too fucking beyond their grasp to formulate in their little pea brains or admit. Because, again, pea brains, especially in a town where people had more guns than books, and nobody knew what bacteria was, but everyone could quote scripture about demons entering you through the mouth. Which brings us to the stars of today's tale, the Brown family. Now, let's be clear, these weren't mystics or occultists or weirdos, they were just a normal farming family doing normal 19th-century things like growing corn, praying, not questioning authority, and dying at an alarming rate. George Brown, the patriarch, had already lost his wife Mary and their daughter, Mary Olive, to consumption. Then his younger daughter, Mercy Lena Brown, fell ill. She died in January of 1892 at the age of 19. They placed her in a stone crypt while the ground was too frozen to dig her a grave. And then the last surviving Brown child, Edwin, who's George's only son, started to waste away too. The community had seen enough. They smelled undead nonsense. And in the absence of any doctors with actual microscopes, the neighbors started whispering. Then the whispering turned into talking. Then the talking turned into the infamous town hall comedian. Now it's important to remember that this was not a town flush with doctors. Exeter did not have a hospital. It barely had a library. But what it did have was a surplus of hand-me-down Bibles, aggressively undereducated farmers, and enough communal paranoia to make Salem look like a rational group of people. The occasion for this particular gathering was, of course, strictly limited to the ongoing misery of George Brown and his children. To George's neighbors, this wasn't a slow-moving respiratory plague. No, sir. This was something darker, something folkloric, something that explained things. Because tuberculosis was too vague, and science was too new, and feelings, well, feelings always win. So naturally, the townsfolk did what any irresponsible, barely literate community might do. They gathered up every rumor, every nightmare, and every third-hand superstition they could find, and marched them into the old Grange Hall like it was a courtroom for the paranormal. The meeting was held in the town's main civic building, which doubled as a church on Sundays, a pig auction every second Thursday, and a social hall if no one was currently vomiting in. The floors were uneven, the walls were splintered pine, there was a small stove in the middle of the room giving off just enough heat to ensure nobody would freeze to death lest they become a corpse themselves. At the center of it all sat Ebenezer Tuggins, who had somehow become the chair of Exeter's unofficial town health committee by virtue of having owned a pencil since 1873. Tuggins was a retired cranberry inspector, or possibly a failed cobbler. That wasn't really clear according to some of the accounts that I read. But what he lacked in credentials, he made up for in volume. When he stood up and cleared his throat, it sounded like someone choking on a pigeon. He slapped the desk with an open hand.
SPEAKER_01:Alright then, he declared.
SPEAKER_03:Mrs. Winifred Cole. A woman so committed to righteousness, she once petitioned to have dancing legally renamed to Public FootSend. She had eyes like a hawk and a voice like the first few seconds of a boiling kettle.
SPEAKER_02:I seen her! I seen her in my dreams! Mercy Brown! She was sitting on Edwin's chest like a demon with ringlets. I tell you plain, he won't last a month.
SPEAKER_03:There was an approving grunt from the back of the room. Jedediah Groom, the town blacksmith, who believed deeply in three things fire, metal, and the supernatural revenge of unquiet teenage girls. He spat into a tin bucket and nodded solemnly.
SPEAKER_01:Mercy's the one. Earl told me Millie told him the Undertaker's cousin said her chinks still had color. Pink. Like she'd just come back from a sleigh ride.
SPEAKER_03:Mrs. Cole crossed herself.
SPEAKER_02:Pink cheeks in March unholy!
SPEAKER_03:Another voice joined in. Thaddeus Wainwright, the nominal mayor of Exeter. Thaddeus was born a man to wear suspenders and avoid responsibility. His gift, if you could call it that, was the ability to look like he was thinking deeply about something while actively deciding nothing.
SPEAKER_00:Now now, people, let's not rush to conclusions. Could be her body was just stored unusually. Wasn't she buried above the ground?
SPEAKER_03:That detail caught the crowd's attention a little. There was some light murmuring. Mercy, after all, hadn't been buried in the ground. Remember, her body had been placed in the stone crypt, which was really more of a holding vault because the ground was too frozen when she died, which, from a public health standpoint, was standard practice. But to the people of Exeter, that was vampire-like behavior. She wasn't buried in the dirt, barked Jedediah. The good book says ashes to ashes, dirt to dirt. Someone else, Walter Tink, the innkeeper, raised his hand, then immediately began talking without even waiting for permission. I'm just saying, Walter began, with the tone of a man who always had a story, usually involving something he heard from a stranger after a couple hard siders.
SPEAKER_02:I'm just saying a fresh looking corpse in an above-ground box in the middle of a consumption plague is the exact sort of thing my uncle Hero warned us about. He said they feed on the living through the nather, like spirits, or smoke, or humidity.
SPEAKER_03:There was a pause as people tried to imagine evil humidity. It didn't take long to convince them, and at this point the preacher, Deacon Ezekiel Fletcher, weighed in. Ezekiel was a stern man with a beard shaped like a Bible verse in the kind of voice that made kids hide their playing cards. He hadn't said much yet, which made what he said now sound all the more serious.
SPEAKER_00:I have prayed, and the answer came to me in a dream. The heart is the seat of the soul. If that girl's heart is still red, still full of blood, it means she ain't at rest. The devil keeps her warm. Several people gasped.
SPEAKER_03:Winifred clutched her shawl. Jedediah slammed a hand on the bench like a man who had just had his worst instincts confirmed by someone with authority. Then louder. And that was it. The switch had flipped. The next 15 minutes were a cyclone of folklore, half memories, apocalyptic dreams, and anecdotes that always started with, well I heard, but never ended with anything resembling evidence. Someone suggested using a mirror to check for her reflection. Someone else asked if Mercy had ever refused to eat garlic. A man near the back, who may or may not have been drunk proposed sprinkling salt in a circle to see if a toad appears. At no point, though, did anyone suggest asking a doctor, mostly because there wasn't one present, and also because the last time anyone in Exeter had seen a real physician, he'd been laughed out of town for owning a thermometer. Eventually, Ebenezer stood back up and slammed his palm again. Enough!
SPEAKER_01:We're wasting time. Let's write down a plan.
SPEAKER_03:The room hushed like school children sensing a quiz.
SPEAKER_01:Step one, we dig her up.
SPEAKER_03:Heads nodded.
SPEAKER_01:Step two, we check her heart.
SPEAKER_03:Murmurs of agreement.
SPEAKER_01:Step three, if it's full of blood, we burn it.
SPEAKER_03:A few people clapped. It was unclear whether this was out of joy or anxiety. Step four, added Winifred helpfully.
SPEAKER_02:We mix the ashes in with water and feed them to Edwin.
SPEAKER_03:Now that got a reaction. Some gasps, some uncomfortable shifting, but no real objections.
SPEAKER_02:You wanna save that boy or don't ya?
SPEAKER_03:Jedediah stood up and cleared his throat. I'll bring the shovels. And just like that, a town with no pathologist, no microscope, no idea how lungs work voted to exhume a teenage girl's body and perform backwoods necromancy because a woman had a weird dream and a blacksmith heard a rumor. There were no dissenting voices, no objections, no, hey, wait a minute, maybe it's a germ. Because if there's one thing America has always been good at, it's trading experience for the loudest voice. They would meet the next morning, tools in hand, bloodlust on their mind, and a dying boy waiting for the kind of medicinal intervention that came from a burned organ mixed with water in a coffee mug. Because once you live in a town where the only medical journal is a hymn book and the pharmacy is a bonfire, then there's only one prescription that you need: ashes and faith. With the vote settled, the meeting turned from should we do this? to the more pressing and logical question of how exactly does one execute a vampire elimination protocol in the year of our Lord 1892 without getting blood on their suspenders. And in case you already forgot, the plan was not just to dig her up, they were going to examine her heart for signs of blood, and if it looked too alive to them, they were gonna set it on fire, and then because every horror show needs a third act twist, they were gonna take the ashes, mix them with water, and feed the potion to her dying brother Edwin. That's when Thaddeus Wainwright, the mayor, or at least the man who once owned the largest barn and thus declared himself the mayor, tapped the podium with a wooden spoon he'd apparently brought from home.
SPEAKER_00:Right. So now we got the gist. Now let's iron out the details. We're not savages. We need a process.
SPEAKER_03:There was a pause as the room transitioned from emotional pitchforking to bureaucratic brain fog, because nothing slows momentum than throwing in the word process. Ebenezer Tuggen stood up again, slightly out of breath from that effort. Now, this man had not walked quickly since the Garfield administration, but he had stamina, and more importantly, he had the ability to write, which meant he was about to take minutes for what was essentially a supernatural project plan.
SPEAKER_01:I'll write down the steps. If this goes well, maybe we'll use the method again.
SPEAKER_03:This wasn't said as a joke. The first to weigh in was Walter Tink, the innkeeper with too much enthusiasm and not enough filter. Walter was the kind of man who always had this cousin in Maine, who had tried something just like this one time and usually involved chickens and ended with regret.
SPEAKER_02:Well, step one's easy!
SPEAKER_01:We go to the crypt!
SPEAKER_03:Right, said Ebenezer, scribbling that down.
SPEAKER_01:Visit crypt, what time?
SPEAKER_03:Jedediah Groom, the blacksmith, and the unofficial town enforcer grunted from the back.
SPEAKER_01:Don! Cold enough to keep things still, light enough to see what's what.
SPEAKER_03:Winifred Cole chimed in again, wringing her hands like she was choking an invisible devil.
SPEAKER_02:We should pray first before the desecration.
SPEAKER_00:And a brief prayer to the top, Deacon Fletcher said solemnly.
SPEAKER_03:Ebenezer nodded.
SPEAKER_01:Prayer and shovels.
SPEAKER_03:A silence followed as people considered the grim nature of what they were actually planning to do. This wasn't some quaint ritual. They were going to open a teenage girl's tomb, inspect her body like it was a bad ham, and then destroy her organs in front of her father and neighbors, all to save a boy who was already halfway to the afterlife. But the thing about collective insanity is that once you've got enough people nodding at the same time, it stops feeling insane. And so the plan grew. Once we open the coffin, we need to check for signs. Signs? asked Thaddeus, whose working definition of science was anything that came in a tin.
SPEAKER_01:Blood in the heart, freshness of the skin, length of the fingernails, and the cheek color, Jedediah said, as if he was describing a fresh apple pie.
SPEAKER_02:Also hair!
SPEAKER_03:Winifred added. Someone in the back said, What if she smiles? And was immediately told to shut up. More notes were taken. Step three, cut open the heart, said Deacon Fletcher in a calm, matter-of-fact tone, just like he was giving communion instructions. We need to know if it's full. If it's dry, she's clean. But and if it bleeds, he didn't even need to finish his sentence. Burn it, said Jedediah in the same way that some men say amen.
SPEAKER_01:Step four: build a fire pit nearby.
SPEAKER_03:Ebenezer scratched it down.
SPEAKER_02:I got a square pyre box behind my chip, Walter said. Use it for a pasta look.
SPEAKER_03:There was a moment of polite but unspoken confusion about what a pybasket was, followed by a collective decision not to ask Walter any further questions.
SPEAKER_02:What's bird? We collect the ashes. And then we make the boy drink them.
SPEAKER_03:That hung in the air like a 19th-century poverty ass ripper fart. The idea that this frail, sick young man, already weak, already dying, would be handed a mug full of his sister's cremated insides and told, bottoms up, should have given them pause. But instead, it was greeted with a kind of grim satisfaction, like they were doing something, putting this plan into motion, setting the wheels into action, doing something like medicine. A hand went up. It belonged to Tobias Alkins, a quiet man who rarely spoke at meetings, but when he did, it was usually to ask about grain prices or comment on the beauty of someone's horse.
SPEAKER_00:I just have a thought. What if it doesn't work? There was a pause. What if we burn her heart, beat it to Edwin, and he still dies?
SPEAKER_03:Now nobody had considered this outcome because they were all too busy trying not to be the first person to suggest they should do nothing. But now that Tobias had said it out loud, a few people squirmed. Even Deacon Fletcher blinked twice, as if noticing daylight for the first time in hours. Jedediah was the one who broke the silence. If and it don't work, at least we know we did everything we could. And that truly is the thesis statement of this whole affair. Let's do something so horrifying so we can sleep at night. Even if it helps no one, even if it traumatizes everyone, even if it's an act of desecration that would make the devil himself ask for a seat in the back. They weren't scientists, they weren't doctors, they were desperate, and that's what made them dangerous. Thaddeus cleared his throat, trying to inject a note of optimism. Well then, who's got the knives? And just like that, it was as good as done. All of it decided in one afternoon in one building by people whose entire understanding of disease control could be boiled down to the body was too pink. They had written the plan down, they had assigned tools and roles. They had even, in an accidental moment of irony, scheduled the whole thing to begin just after a prayer circle. What came next would put Exeter on the map. Not for progress, not for enlightenment, but for one of the last and best documented cases of vampire hysteria in American history. The men arrived with shovels, the women arrived with prayer books, a few children came too, even though they'd been told not to, because nothing in this world is more magnetic than the desecration of a corpse dressed up as a community event. Mercy Brown's exhumation had officially become Exeter's most anticipated attraction since someone claimed to see a goose lay an egg the size of a grapefruit. George Brown, the father, was there, but not in the way others were. He didn't carry tools, he didn't speak, he just stood a little off to the side in the crisp March air, staring at the crypt like it might open on its own and release not a vampire, but the memory of who his daughter had been. And maybe, underneath that, the ghost of who he'd been before, this town convinced him to help tear his family apart one organ at a time. That practical choice, made in grief with love, was now being reinterpreted as proof of dark magic. With a few coordinated grunts and an unsettling lack of ceremony, they pried open the stone lid. The air that rushed out was cold, stale, and vaguely metallic. A few people coughed, not because of the disease, but because of guilt, or the shape of guilt when it's pretending to be curiosity. Inside lay Mercy. Nineteen years old at the time of death, barely two months in her crypt, preserved not by witchcraft nor demonic willpower, but by New England's natural refrigerator setting, winter. Her features were unsurprisingly intact. Too intact, if you ask the people gathered that morning. Her skin had color, flesh tone, not the gray of decay. Her hair seemed thicker, her nails appeared longer. At that point, Jedediah Groom, the blacksmith who'd never met a piece of metal he didn't want to cut, produced a blade. Maybe it was ceremonial, maybe it was just sharpened nearby. Either way, he cut open her chest, removed her heart and liver for inspection. Her heart was found to still contain blood. Of course it did. That's what cold does. It slows decomposition, it preserves. It doesn't mean something's alive any more than a ham sandwich in the fridge is preparing its comeback to her. But none of them saw it that way. To the townspeople of Exeter, this wasn't a preserved corpse. It was a caught creature. They nodded, they whispered prayers. Some crossed themselves, others spit. One woman fainted, but no one said stop. Not one voice in that crowd, not George Brown's, not the deacon's, not the supposed voice of reason from Mayor Thaddeus or any other warm body with access to a thought, stood up and said, Hey, maybe this is insane and we're violating a young woman's body because we're scared of wearing cloth masks. Instead, Mercy's heart and liver were placed, again without irony, into a cooking pan. The fire had already been lit. Walter Tink had brought wood soaked in oil as if there were just another weekend chore, like searing barn lice or boiling fence grease. The organs hissed when they hit the flame. There's no elegant way to say this. They sizzled. The smell was what you'd expect. Somewhere between overcooked meat and the worst kind of incense. It hung in the air like a punishment, and they were cooked until nothing remained but ash. The ashes were collected in a dish, a clay bowl, if local accounts are to be believed, and someone brought in some spring water. Maybe it was sanctified, maybe it was just wet, and the mixture was stirred together. And then, as casually as a church elder handing out communion, they carried that bowl to Edwin Brown, sick, weak, barely clinging to his life, and told him to drink it. Now there are no surviving records of what Edwin said in that moment. No quotes, no letters, no outraged diary entry that said, Today my neighbors turned my sister into a smoothie and handed it to me like it was a normal Sunday. But what we do know is that Edwin drank it. He drank his sister's heart and liver in slurry form. I mean, what choice did he have? He was dying, and in 1892 in Exeter, Rhode Island, you didn't challenge the village consensus unless you wanted to be the next person they dissected. The belief was that it would cure him. That ingesting the ashes of the undead would break the bond between Mercy and Edwin, cutting off whatever spectral blood siphon was draining him one wheeze at a time. But of course, it didn't. Edwin died less than two months later. There was no resurrection. No miraculous turnaround. No evidence that any of this had accomplished anything other than the irreversible desecration of a young woman's body and the ritual humiliation of a dying boy. And still, still, no one in that town recanted. Because that's the thing about magical thinking. It's a fortress. You can pour logic on it all day. You can throw evidence at it like rocks. You can even point out that the patient died anyway, and the response you get will still be something like this. Well, imagine how much faster he would have died if we hadn't done that. That's the real horror right there. Not the burning, not the drinking, not the silence of a winter grave cracked open for superstition. The real horror is how easily people can convince themselves that they did the right thing, even when the result is more death, more grief, and the absolute absence of a cogent thought. To be clear, none of this was unique. There had been dozens of similar incidents across New England's in the 1800s. Families whose graves were opened, hearts burned, ashes consumed, vampires blamed, every one of them a desperate attempt to explain tuberculosis before germ theory reached rural America. But in the Mercy Brown case, this one got attention, partly because it was one of the last of its kind, partly because it happened so late. I mean, 1892 was well into the age of railroads and telegrams and actual scientists, and partly because Mercy, through no action of her own, had become folklore, a symbol, a legend of sorts. Her story would be retold, folded into vampire mythos and horror novels and obscure academic journals about epidemic folklore. Bram Stroker, the author of Dracula, is believed to have clipped newspaper articles about her. He was researching vampire legends at the time, and five years after Mercy's heart was turned into hot ashy tea, his book was published. And whether or not she influenced the final draft, Mercy Brown, the girl in the crypt, the girl with the pink cheeks, the girl who was never given peace, was now part of the global undead pantheon. She didn't volunteer to become New England's vampire queen, she just died, like her mother, like her sister, like her brother. But because her town couldn't understand illness, and because America has always preferred mythology to medicine, her body became a scapegoat, and her heart became the offering. If the story of Mercy Brown were just a creepy footnote in New England folklore and abandoned as a weird rural fluke from the dusty corner of America's attic, it might be easy to laugh and move on. But it's not. Because what happened in Exeter in 1892 wasn't just the product of its time, it was unfortunately a preview of what America was to become. Let's take stock. A girl dies of tuberculosis, so does her sister, then her mother, then her brother gets sick, and instead of blaming, say, a contagious bacterial infection and poor acceptance of the public health education, the townspeople blame the one person who can't talk back, the teenage girl in the crypt. They dig her up, burn her heart, feed the ashes to her brother like it's powdered hope, and then when he dies anyway, nobody learns anything. It would be funny if it weren't still happening, because what Exeter revealed in grim little details is the kind of American impulse that we've never really outgrown. When things go wrong, like when someone gets sick or systems fail or reality gets too uncomfortable, we reach not for knowledge, but for narrative. We don't want the boring answer. We want the one that pits us against our already concluded enemy. That's the heartbeat of America's cultural idiocy. It's about the willful rejection of experts while escaping into the comfortable embrace of ideological motivated ignorance. See, scientific truth is cold. It's impartial. It doesn't care about your feelings, it won't hold your hand or tell you who to blame. But a good superstition, a nice clean conspiracy theory? Now that's got a villain. That's got a cure. That's got a plan that might be horrifying, but at least makes sense in a way that lets you do something. So you burn the heart, you blame the outsider, you elect the guy who promises to put the stake through the problem, whatever it is this year, and you never stop to ask, what if we're just wrong? What happened in Exeter is just a particularly medieval version of a very modern story. In fact, let's rewrite the events of 1892 using the language of the 2020s. A deadly disease starts spreading through a community. Instead of trusting experts, people invent supernatural explanations based on gut feelings and grainy local gossip. A treatment is proposed that has no basis in science and is actively harmful. The treatment is administered, the patient dies, and the community decides it still did the right thing. That sound familiar? This is the same country where people proposed injecting bleach straight into your veins during a pandemic, where anti-vax crusaders insisted mRNA vaccines were mind controlled, where politicians stood on camera and said COVID was over because they felt like it should be. Exeter didn't die, it evolved, it got Twitter, it became QAnon. The Mercy Brown case isn't just folklore, it's the American feedback loop. Fear, then fiction, then ritual, then failure, then amnesia, then fear, and so on and so on. And that loop has fucking range, buddy. Oh fucking hell does it ever. In 1892, the ritual was fire. In 2020, it was ivermectin. In both cases, someone got sick, someone died, and someone somewhere said, at least we tried something. That's not science, that's science cosplay. Just enough structure to look like a cure, but powered entirely by bad actor influencers, local gossip, and people who think shouting louder makes them right. And look, it's easy to point and laugh at the people of Exeter, but the truth is they were just working with what they had. And what they had was a Bible, a shovel, and an absolutely deranged willingness to set a teenage girl on fire and feed her brother like it was a viable treatment plan. What saddens me about this story is that Dr. Jon Snow had already cracked the code on cholera back in the 1850s. The man literally took the handle off a contaminated water pump and ended a whole ass epidemic with nothing but data and a scientific mind. He proved disease could spread invisibly through contaminated water, not curses, not miasma, and thus established the germ theory of disease as part of the mainstream public health consciousness. But do you think it mattered to Exeter? Fuck no. Nobody in that town had read Louis Pasteur's papers, nobody had heard of Robert Cook, the guy who identified Mycobacterium tuberculosis as the cause of consumption, and even if they had, it wouldn't have mattered. Science doesn't beat superstition in a fight where the judges are dreams in Deuteronomy. So yeah, they did what they felt was right. Because the idea that invisible bacteria could float out of someone's lungs and sneak into yours was ridiculous. But a dead teenage girl coming back from the grave to drain her brother's life force from beyond the veil wasn't. And why? Because the vampire was visible, the devil was the enemy, and it was narratively satisfying. So in the end, the real tragedy isn't just that they burned Mercy Brown's heart, it's that they never stood a chance not to. Because when you live in a world without facts, without science, without trust, when your fear is louder than knowledge, of course you're gonna dig up your daughter. Of course you're gonna light her on fire and call it medicine. And the worst part, we're still doing it. We've just traded the shovel for a smartphone and the holy water for a YouTube rabbit hole. The rituals change, but the heart stays burning. Alright, and that's gonna do it for this episode of the Internet Explorers Podcast, the show that bravely asks the questions no one else will. Like, what if your public health policy was just grave robbing with extra paperwork? Hey, I just want to say thank you for all the support you've given me over the past few months. Doing this show has meant a great deal to me and has been a terrific creative outlet. However, this will be the last episode of season one. With starting a new role, buying a new house, trying to spend some more time doing dad stuff, I'm gonna take a between seasons production break. Keep following so when I do resume, you'll be the first to know. Until then, I'm Jimmy, reminding you that if someone ever hands you a steaming cup of organ ash and calls it medicine, it might be time to get the fuck out of there. Alright, we'll see you in season two. The words and thoughts presented today are that of the speakers only. Do not try any of this at home, and please don't take any advice from this podcast. It's for entertainment purposes only. All rights reserved.
