30 Odd Minutes with Vampires

They say you can still smell Mark Twain’s cigars here in his billiard room. Could his ghost be smoking them?

I went for a little wander at ghostvillage.com, a site collecting information on paranormal occurences. I was pleased to see that they had a long, well-researched entry on Mercy Brown, and even more pleased that the writer had interviewed Michael Bell, folklorist and author of Food for the Dead. If you want to know more about the history and folklore of the New England vampire tradition, this is the resource to check out.

This is an interesting and spooky site–if you’re up for a little wander among ghostly photographs, unexplainable phenomena, and haunted hotels, it’s worth a visit! And for other ghosts and spooky occurrences from Southern New England, you can listen to author Jeff Belanger chat with some experts about whether Nicholas Cage is a vampire, haunted kitchens, the ghost of Mark Twain (or just his cigars), and Mercy herself, at 30 Odd Minutes. The expert interviewed implied that Mercy’s corpse, taken out of her grave, had fangs–not something I have ever heard elsewhere, and not really consistent with the tradition of New England vampires. But the liquid blood in her heart–yes, that was confirmed by the newspaper at the time.