July Bonus Episode: Digging Into Exhumed with Aaron Mahnke

In 1892, a young doctor in Exeter, Rhode Island, cut open the chest of a teenage girl named Mercy Brown who had been stored in an above-ground crypt for two months. He pointed to her organs and told the assembled villagers: this is tuberculosis, exactly what you would expect. They looked at the same evidence and saw a vampire. That moment—where fear and a simple answer overrode the facts placed directly in front of people—is the knot Aaron Mahnke spent years trying to untangle, first in the debut episode of his podcast Lore, and now in his new book Exhumed.

The Structure of a Deeper Story

Exhumed is not just the Mercy Brown case retold. Mahnke describes it as a "fifth season" of his podcast Unobscured, which devoted entire seasons to single topics like the Salem witch trials. The book opens with the Mercy Brown story as it is usually told—short, sensational, full of errors—and then spends the next 80 percent of its pages on the context that makes that story legible. Only in the final fifth does it return to Mercy, and by then the reader has the tools to understand why otherwise reasonable people cut open a dead girl and burned her heart.

Mahnke calls context "3D glasses at the movie theater." Without it, the story looks flat and bizarre. With it, you see the chain of belief that made the villagers' actions feel necessary rather than barbaric.