Mercy (and Me) on Camera

By Mercy’s gravestone in the Chestnut Hill Cemetery, Rhode Island.

It was cold but not too cold, and the sun was shining. We were very lucky. January in Rhode Island, you never know what weather you’re going to get. Outside in the Chestnut Hill Cemetery, I got to kneel down by Mercy Brown’s grave and tell her story on camera, for the Travel Channel’s show, Monumental Mysteries. (When I arrived, along with my lovely and talented publicist, Kirsten Cappy from Curious City, the camera guy, Rob, and the producer, Sarah, were trying hard to set up the camera for a shot that would make Mercy’s plain and unadorned headstone look “monumental.”)

I must confess I was nervous, afraid that I would stumble and trip over my words, afraid that my incompetence with mascara would show, and mostly afraid that I would not know enough. I’m a novelist, after all, and not a historian or a folklorist. But it turned out that all I had to do was tell Mercy’s story, and okay–I do know that. Well enough to tell it over–and over–and over, which is apparently what you do to be on TV.

Thanks to producers Alice and Sarah, camera guy Rob, and sound man Steven, for putting me at ease–they must work with camera neophytes all the time, they were so patient. And thanks to Kirsten, too, for listening to stories of vampire folklore, human decomposition, and tuberculosis remedies all the way from Portland, Maine, to Exeter, Rhode Island.

They called this the “hero shot.” All I had to do was stand there and look straight at the camera. Harder than it sounds!

By the crypt where Mercy’s body was kept before the removal of her heart. The ground was too cold to dig her grave.

A tad more attention than I, as your typical introverted writer type, was entirely comfortable with….

Filming continued at Smith’s Castle, a colonial homestead. Inside but not that much warmer.