There Are 2 Must-See Roadside Attractions Within The Small Town Of Exeter, Rhode Island
By Meghan Byers|Published February 24, 2022
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Meghan Byers
Author
A New Jersey native, Meghan is passionate about travel and enjoys finding off-the-beaten path destinations. You're most likely to find her at a coffee shop, or hitting the trails with her dogs. She graduated with a creative writing degree from Fairleigh Dickinson University and has been writing professionally for over a decade.
Rhode Island boasts an eclectic collection of roadside attractions, from the Big Blue Bug in Providence to the Mr. Potato Heads scattered across the state. But these enchanting oddities aren’t just found in Rhode Island’s cities – the small town of Exeter has its own roadside attractions to explore.
Exeter, Rhode Island is a bucolic little town in Washington County, Rhode Island, extending east from the Connecticut border toward North Kingstown. It’s home to the state’s only ski area, Yawgoo Valley, along with one of the oldest indigenous peoples museums in the country, the Tomaquag Indigenous Museum. This rural town also happens to have two unique roadside attractions tucked away among the forest and farms.
If you love roadside oddities, then you can’t miss the scrap metal scorpion at Exeter Scrap Metal on Route 3. This giant, green and yellow scorpion statue is made out of engine parts, propane tanks, and other scrap metal, including a jet engine.
It guards the driveway of Exeter Scrap Metal, towering over the entrance to the scrap yard with its yellow claws and red eyes, as though to thwart would-be metal thieves. Weighing between 2-3 tons, this strange beast is worth stopping for.
Illness had swept through the Brown family in a short period of time, and Mercy was 19 years old when she died of what was probably tuberculosis. When her brother also became ill, the people of Exeter began to suspect that one of the deceased Browns was a vampire, leaving their grave each night to prey on the remaining family members. They exhumed Mercy’s body – and were shocked by what they found. Mercy’s body was strangely well-preserved, as though she had never truly died. Convinced she was a vampire, the citizens of Exeter cut out Mercy’s heart and burned it, then had Mercy’s brother drink the ashes. Unfortunately, he still passed away not long after that.
Mercy’s story may have helped to inspire Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and it certainly helped to inspire Rhode Island’s reputation as “the Vampire Capital of America.” You’ll find the grave, and the crypt where Mercy Brown’s body may have been stored, in Chestnut Hill Cemetery, a nondescript graveyard behind a small Baptist church on Ten Rod Road. Visitors often leave flowers and other offerings at the gravesite where Mercy now rests.
