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.

Sigue leyendo

Alcatraz

La prisión insular de la bahía de San Francisco, en servicio de 1934 a 1963 para hombres que otras cárceles no podían retener. El bloque D tiene fama propia: las celdas de aislamiento llamadas el agujero, donde se tenía a los presos a oscuras por completo; de allí, y de la celda 14D, vienen la mayoría de los relatos de gritos de los guardias — de esa celda se dice que un hombre murió en una noche tras gritar que había algo con él dentro. Las tribus de la bahía tenían la isla por lugar de malos espíritus mucho antes de la cárcel.