Exeter
2 legends
Exeter and the Lights over Kensington Road
On the night of 3 September 1965 eighteen-year-old Norman Muscarello was walking along Route 150 outside Exeter when, he said, a large dark object with a row of bright red lights pulsing in sequence came over a field. He ran to the police station; Officer Eugene Bertrand drove back out with him and saw the same thing, and so did Officer David Hunt, who arrived after. The Air Force first attributed it to a Strategic Air Command exercise, which had ended an hour before the sighting. The case stayed in the Blue Book files as unexplained. Exeter is comfortable with it: since the 2010s the town has held a summer festival on the anniversary, with the takings going to the fire department.
Mercy Brown, the Exeter vampire
In 1892 the Brown family of Exeter, Rhode Island, was losing one member after another to tuberculosis. Neighbours convinced the father that one of the dead was feeding on the living, and in March the bodies were exhumed. Two had decomposed; nineteen-year-old Mercy, who had spent the winter in a cold crypt, had not. Her heart was burned, the ashes mixed with water and given to her dying brother to drink. He died two months later. The case is the last and best-documented episode of the New England vampire panic — an attempt to explain an epidemic for which people had no other language.