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VAMPIRE'S GARDEN
This poster is based on the Rhode Island vampire story of Mercy Brown.
It all began in 1883 in the small town of Exeter, R.I. when George Brown's
wife Mary Brown succumbed to a mysterious illness.
Six months later, his 20-year-old daughter Mary Olive,
also died.
On January 19, 1892, Mr. Brown's 19-year-old daughter Mercy
fell ill and also died of the mystery illness.
Without cause or warning, Mr. Brown's teenage son
Edwin Brown quite suddenly became frail and sickly. The people of
Exeter Woods began reporting nocturnal sightings of the ghost of Mercy Brown.
In March, 1892, close friends and members of the Brown family entered cemetery
No. 22, where they gathered in the belief that Edwin's life could
be saved only by exhuming the bodies of the Mother and the two daughters
to ascertain if the heart in any of the bodies still contained fresh blood.
If that were the case, the dead body was indeed living on the
living tissue and blood of poor young Edwin.
It was only by killing the vampire could Edwin's life be saved.
The bodies of Mrs. Brown and Mary Olive were exhumed, and upon finding
them both reduced to bone and dust, they turned their attention
to where Mercy Brown was interred. When they opened the coffin,
the men suddenly stepped back in horror.
Mercy had been dead for no more than 9 weeks
and yet she appeared well preserved.
Her hair and nails had grown, and more shockingly, she had turned partly over in
her coffin. Because of scant medical knowledge of the time, not only were
illnesses blamed on the presence of vampires, but in many cases
people were accidentally buried alive.
The men rushed in and pulled Mercy from her coffin and opened her chest to find
that her heart and veins dripped with vast quantities of fresh and florid
blood. They removed her heart and burned it to smoldering ash on a rock near her
grave.
The ashes of Mercy's heart was the needed "vaccination"
for the ailing Edwin Brown, which he dissolved in the
medicine his doctor had given him and drank it down.
Mercy and her Mother and sister were reburied but sadly, Edwin died two months
later on May 2, 1892.
The publicity surrounding the shocking exhumation of Mercy Brown was
the inspiration for Brom Stoker's character, Lucy Westrena in the
book Dracula.
"There lay Lucy, seemingly just as we had seen her the night before her funeral.
She was if possible more radiantly beautiful than ever and I could not believe she
was dead. The lips were red, nay redder than before, and on the cheeks there was a
delicate blossom."
This poster is 17 inches wide by 22 inches deep, generous black ink lushly
printed on old-fashioned type parchment stock.
The image for this poster was created
with pen and ink on paper and offset printed.
No computers were used in the making of this poster, all drawn entirely by hand.
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