Rest in Peace.
That’s what you want when you’re pushing up daisies. You don’t want to be moved around from graveyard to cemetery, taken out for fresh air, or disturbed any more than you were in life. Just leave your body alone, right? Remember, though: these things are out of your control. As in the new book “Exhumed” by Aaron Mahnke, you may rest in pieces.
As the year 1883 came to a close, George and Mary Brown “had a full house”: two adults, seven children, then tragedy. On Dec. 8, Mary died.
Six months later, their eldest daughter was dead, and she was soon followed by George’s father. Because of the cold New England weather, when 19-year-old Mercy died in January of 1892, she was laid “in a stone outbuilding,” to be buried in the spring.
But when George’s only son, Edwin, fell ill, the townspeople feared that all this misfortune was more than a coincidence. One by one, they exhumed the graves of George’s family, until they finally looked in on Mercy and discovered a frozen corpse as fresh as if she’d died the week before.
Mercy Brown, they believed, was at fault for her family’s death and disease. But why her?
“To truly know a specific thing, we have to pause and gain a better understanding of the other things that touch it,” says Mahnke.
And so, to see why Mercy Brown was blamed for her family’s deaths, her heart and liver cut from her body and incinerated, you must learn first about George Washington the “zombie.” You must know about body snatching, the Brothers Grimm, folklore, Golems, Mary Shelley, and ancient chemistry. You’ll learn about floating hands, corpses as medicine, the weight of a soul, and blood that “talks”.
Then there are professional executioners and Medieval trials, a drowned woman’s face that’s familiar today, premature burial, Homo naledi, and disease.
And then there’s Mercy Brown…
Okay, so we’re getting to the season where creepiness is desired, bordering on mandatory. You want to get ready to be good and scared. You want “Exhumed.”
Right from the start, author and podcaster Aaron Mahnke snatches readers and takes them on a dark, dark ride through history, literature, culture, religion, and folklore to explain why it was perfectly reasonable to defile corpses in the past. Perfectly reasonable, even desirous.
The understanding takes time, but it’s a pleasant while, gruesome but not too much; chilling, but just right. You may be familiar with some of the information, but you’ll also find tidbits that may send you down a rabbit hole of research of your own, to learn more about revenants, death masks, the everyday life of an executioner, capital punishment, and literal blood baths.
Honestly, how can you resist?
“Exhumed” is edgy squirminess, it’s fascinating and funny sometimes, too, but it can be bloody, so beware. Despite that, it’s the perfect book for a campfire, or for your late-summer, early-fall, get-ready-for-Halloween reading about vampires and the macabre.
And then you’ll want the rest of the story.
“Exhumed: Unearthing the History of the American Vampire” by Aaron Mahnke c.2026, Running Press $30, 368 pages