STRANGE FACTS
In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, doctors of the Brown family in England could not explain why several Brown family members were dying. As a last resort they dug up all the bodies to discover only one that remained un-decayed - that of Mercy Lena Brown. Her heart held fresh blood, so they cut it out, burned it, mixed the blood with ashes and water, and drank it, thinking that this would prevent further attacks. In fact there is far more evidence that people drank the blood of the dead, than that the dead drank the blood of the living. The practices were most common in Eastern Europe.
"J.B.," as he is known from his initials inscribed on a brass plaque on his coffin, was originally from Connecticut. He now rests in the National Museum of Health and Medicine in Washington, D.C. A forensic anthropologist discovered that someone had jumbled J.B.'s bones into a skull and crossbones pattern, a practice known to identify a vampire. J.B. was later found to have tuberculosis - a disease that ties many vampire cases together as a result of the characteristics of death.
In the early 1920s, A German butcher named Fritz Harmon lured twenty-seven young boys to his home where he killed them with a bite to the neck, then drank their blood and sometimes dined on their flesh. He finally put his skills as a butcher to good use when he ground up the remaining bodies and parts and sold it as sausage in his shop.
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