Post by Joanna on Dec 18, 2017 13:21:32 GMT -5
Digging up the Dirt in Exeter
EXETER, R.I. – Volunteers caring for the historical cemeteries of Exeter share some of the mystery lore buried in the graveyards. The murder of a peddler, the “Peckham holocaust” and a mass grave, and two young girls thought to be vampires were some of the stories at the meeting of the Exeter Historical Association.
The program, “Digging Up the Dirt in Exeter: Beyond Mercy Brown” drew enough people, about 20, to fill a meeting room at the Exeter Public Library. Sheila M. Reynolds-Boothroyd, president of the association, had a slide show prepared, she said she’d leave the lights on. Good thing. She showed a trailer for The Tillinghast Nightmare, a documentary that tells the story of Sarah Tillinghast and Mercy Brown, both suspected vampires who died at age 19 almost 100 years apart and whose stories reached Bram Stoker in New York City and may have inspired him to write Dracula. With the lights off, the video clip would have been scary.
Reynolds-Boothroyd said she planned the presentation with Dory Wagner, of West Kingston, to encourage more people to adopt a cemetery and keep it tidy. She and Wagner stumbled upon a mystery while part of a volunteer crew clearing overgrowth from Exeter Historical Cemetery No. 62, on Route 165, near the Arcadia Management Area Midway parking lot. They found a single grave just outside the fenced-in Tefft Barber cemetery and they wondered why.
Local lore and a newspaper clipping from the Hope Valley Advertiser of Jan. 11, 1900, apparently solved the mystery. The tale, written by Annie Greene in 1959, was that every fall, a landowner named Barber would dig up soil from a marsh and bring it home as fertilizer. One year, he unearthed bones that he assembled into a human skeleton. He washed off the bones, stored them in his attic, and, asking around, learned that a peddler had stopped at a house to discover a woman crying and a man cleaning up blood. The peddler asked, jokingly, if they had “been murdering somebody,” but the man didn’t answer. The peddler then tried asking about his original assumption – that the man had been killing chickens – and the man grunted in the affirmative. The man and his wife were never seen again and the bones were found by Mr. Barber’s daughter and her friends when they were playing in the attic. The newspaper clipping told of a peddler named Daily being killed with an ax by a man named Bailey. Bailey buried his victim in a shallow grave. Years later, the newspaper story said, the bones were plowed up and stored in an attic, where they remained until after 1839. The bones were buried outside the Tefft L. Barber burying ground and Mr. Daily’s single grave has its own designation, No. 168.
The pastor, Elder Grisham Palmer, had a revival and built a church on Ten Rod Road that was said to have 732 members. The congregation was so large that he had three weddings on the same day, all at different locations, Reynolds-Boothroyd told her listeners. At the first wedding, “much rum was served,” she continued. At the second wedding, more rum. “He never got to the third wedding.” He told people he had stopped to help a man with a broken leg and townspeople were curious about who had broken his leg. In reality, the pastor had curled up beside the road and fallen asleep. An inquiry was held. Church fathers “didn’t care about the rum,” Reynolds-Boothroyd related, they cared about the lying. Banished from his original church, Palmer founded Liberty Church with his family and some followers who remained loyal. It’s still an active church on Liberty Church Road. The church that banished him bought land and became Chestnut Hill Baptist Church, where “vampire” Mercy Brown is buried.
And then the story of Historical Cemetery No. 25 (above), which contains a mass grave of the victims of the Peckham Holocaust in the 1840s. The land on Purgatory Road at William Reynolds Road was the site of Exeter’s poor farm. The story goes that a traveler looked for lodging there, but the Peckhams found him to be “intemperate,” or drunk, and asked him to sleep in the barn. In retribution, he set fire to the house, killing dozens of people.
After Julie and Jack Kliever adopted the cemetery, they found the grave of someone who fought in the French and Indian War, which predates the Revolutionary War. When they were decorating graves, Julie said, Jack put a Union Jack on that soldier’s grave because the United States hadn’t been created when he died.
Sarah Tillinghast died of consumption in 1800. Mercy Brown died of the same disease, now known as tuberculosis, in January 1892. Her body was placed in an above-ground crypt until the ground thawed enough to dig her grave. In March, when rumors of a vampire in the Brown family started, she was removed from the crypt. Her body was probably just beginning to thaw and because her corpse had not decomposed, she was pronounced a vampire.
Reynolds-Boothroyd showed a slide of Mercy Brown’s grave, where the grass has been worn away because of so many visitors. Some say the lack of grass on her grave is evidence she is a vampire, but in this case, it isn’t. Mercy is buried on the other side of her marker, where the grass grows fine.
Source: Donita Naylor, The Providence Journal, November 28, 2017.