When most folks close their eyes and envision a vampire, what often appears is an image derived from Bram Stoker’s Dracula. However, as Aaron Mahnke is thrilled to remind us in Exhumed, this hasn’t always been the case. Examining early medical practices and other 19th-century beliefs that could easily be dismissed as barbaric or ignorant now, the author and Lore creator makes a strong case for how the history of the American vampire mirrors our understanding of the dead and the living today.
Haley Hill: Vampire stories have captivated communities across cultures for generations. What caught your interest, in particular, about the New England Vampire Panic of the 1890s?
Aaron Mahnke: Mercy Brown’s story stands out to me for a couple of reasons, but primarily because of its recency. In the grand scheme of things, her death and exhumation wasn’t that long ago. It took place nearly 120 years after the founding of the United States, and an entire generation after the Civil War. There, in the middle of the Modern era—and just a few miles from the gilded mansions of Newport, Rhode Island—something happened that feels ancient and occult. What’s not to love about that?
In addition (and this is my other, smaller reason), Mercy’s story took place after the Industrial Revolution supercharged the speed and reach of all sorts of news stories. She might have been the last exhumation of her kind that we know of, but she was also the most reported on. Similar exhumations from a century earlier simply didn’t have the viral potential that Mercy’s did, and because of that, we’re still fascinated with her today.
What were you most surprised to learn while researching Exhumed?
There’s a lot of planning and research involved in writing history books like this, so I admittedly went into the book knowing—within reason—exactly where I wanted to go. Exhumed is an educational journey, spending the first 80 percent of the audiobook equipping the listener with all sorts of important ideas and traditions that help bring Mercy’s story into better focus. After all, the better the lens in your glasses, the more clearly you can see what you aim your eyes at. I wanted my readers to have great lenses!
That said, one big surprise that popped up in the writing process was a specific cultural slant that inhabited a lot of those seemingly disparate lessons and contextual elements. Whether I was writing about our belief in the power of fresh blood, the philosophy of vitalism, or the 19th-century obsession with premature burial and safety coffins, I started to notice how many German fingerprints were all over the material. I didn’t plan to find that, so when it became clear, I was amazed—and curious.
There are many iconic examples of vampires in literature, from Count Dracula to Lestat de Lioncourt. However, as the tagline for your hit podcast, Lore, reminds us, “Sometimes the truth is more frightening than fiction.” What common literary vampire tropes come from real historical examples?
Surprisingly, very little of our modern notion of vampires, the Hollywood bloodsuckers that everyone grew up on, is rooted in the oldest vampire folktales from history. Traits that you might assume were always there—for example, transforming into a bat, avoiding sunlight, long fangs, and a hatred of garlic—are all missing in early European tales. The tropes that do seem to have a deeper historical continuity are things like the method of killing a vampire (being pierced by a stake) and a general thirst for blood. When most people close their eyes and picture a vampire today, though, they are conjuring up some variation on Bram Stoker’s work and just assuming it’s always been that way.
What's a scary detail from your historical research that you think would make a great addition to the literary canon?
I love the many medieval descriptions of communities that banded together to hunt down and destroy vampires. Those tales often involved a handful of monks or desperate villagers who followed the clues to the local graveyard, where they used folklore to identify the vampire’s burial location before digging them up and putting an end to them. The fight scenes and gun battles might be exciting additions to modern vampire films, but for me those small, tense nighttime excursions into misty, fetid graveyards feel like the most horrifying of all.
Vampires are eternally in vogue, particularly at times throughout history when humans are grappling with death and disease, such as tuberculosis or AIDS. Do you think that the COVID pandemic is at all related to the current boom in vampire stories, or do you have any other theories as to why these monsters are having another cultural renaissance today?
I think the idea of immortality will always be attractive. And vampires add in other elements that modern readers/viewers love, namely power and sex. For the first people to whisper about them, though, vampires were a scapegoat for unexpected outbreaks of deadly disease, and perhaps their best attempt at explaining contagion and the fragility of life. And because life still is so fragile, and so few of us have the power over our lives that literary vampires possess, I doubt we’ll ever stop thirsting for stories about them.
What do you hope listeners take away from this audiobook?
In many ways, the beliefs described in this book can be easily dismissed as barbaric and ignorant. It’s natural to hear about real events that were fueled by folklore and write the people off as uneducated fools. I tried very hard to couch those tales with reminders that all of the cultures discussed in the book were just like us. They had a limited set of tools and knowledge, and they were using those resources to navigate their difficult lives as best as they could. I hope my listeners enjoy the journey, learn a lot of wonderfully creepy lessons, and—above all—walk away with respect and sympathy for those who came before us. We are, after all, only human.
