Excerpt from “Understanding the Reanimated”

6 Jul 201419 May 2016 / Jenny Ashford / Leave a comment

The full short story appears in my 2011 book, The Associated Villainies.

Daisy swayed back and forth in her chair, a thin stream of drool hanging from the corner of her mouth. She appeared not to notice it, and she appeared not to have heard Dr. Jenner’s question, so he gently repeated it.

“Why do you want to eat human flesh, Daisy?”

Her eyes seemed to meet his for a moment, and he drew in his breath, for he swore he’d seen a spark there, though of what he couldn’t be sure. Was it simply hunger? Or the effects of the drug the nurses came to inject every four hours? Or could it have been something else, perhaps nothing as profound as intelligence, no, but maybe a kind of rudimentary understanding at least… He didn’t want to get too excited; it had only been a flash, a second, but he couldn’t help his palms moistening.

“Daisy? Can you hear me? Do you understand?” He was leaning toward her now, closer than he should have really—the reanimated were still dangerous, despite the medication, and it never paid to be careless around them. But Daisy seemed far more responsive than any of the other patients he’d interviewed in the clinic. He realized that wasn’t saying much, but in this case he’d take what he could get.

She was swaying endlessly, like a snake looking for a place to strike. All of them did that, and he assumed it was simply a manifestation of their condition, filtered through the pharmaceuticals they were forced to take by law. She still didn’t speak—none of them did, or at least they never had when live humans were around—but her strange eyes were fixed on his again, and this time they didn’t simply drift away but held there, seeming to focus sharply behind their milky lenses. Dr. Jenner felt his pulse beginning to race.

“You do understand me, don’t you,” he said, whispering as if the two of them were sharing some delicious secret. “This could change everything.”

He sat there for another hour, firing questions at her and still getting no answers, but becoming more and more certain that he was getting through to her on some level, which was far more than he could say about any of the others. When he finally left the clinic, he called out a musical goodbye to Vera at the nurse’s station. “Any luck today, Doc?” she asked him.

“Yes, Vera, I think my luck is improving. You will call me immediately if any of them say a single word, won’t you?”

“You know I will. Have a good one.”

“Indeed. Good day, Vera.” Dr. Jenner left the clinic, not noticing the way Vera smiled indulgently and shook her head at his receding back.

Mary Mallon, the Original Typhoid Mary

5 Jul 201419 May 2016 / Jenny Ashford / Leave a comment

The Irish cook was responsible for infecting dozens of people in early 20th-century New York City. The original article I wrote can he found here.

Today, the term “Typhoid Mary” is used to denote someone who deliberately acts as a carrier of disease, or rather is aware that she is a carrier but does nothing to prevent infecting others. Urban legends about such people are quite common, and the phrase has even made the leap to tech jargon, describing a person who unwittingly spreads computer viruses. But the original Typhoid Mary was a real person whose life and death raised still-controversial issues about the trade-off between individual liberty and public health.

Typhoid Mary Arrives in America

Mary Mallon was born in September of 1869 in County Tyrone, Ireland, and in 1884 became one of the millions of Irish immigrants flooding into New York to seek a better life. She discovered she had a natural talent for cooking, and learned the skill to such an extent that she was very rarely out of work over the next several years. Although she was not financially secure by any means, working as a cook in a household was far better paid and more prestigious than other positions like maid or laundress. Mary Mallon even worked for some wealthy families, including that of the Vanderbilt’s banker.

The study of infectious disease was still rather rudimentary in those days, so Mary Mallon was able to work in several households between 1900 and 1907 before anyone began to discern a pattern. But pattern there was: The first house she worked in saw its residents infected with typhoid within two weeks of Mary securing employment there. At the next house, several family members contracted typhoid, and a member of the household staff died of it. All told, Mary Mallon is credited with spreading typhoid to at least 53 people and causing three deaths as she moved from household to household for employment.

Typhoid Spreads

At the time, the concept of a healthy carrier of disease was not widely known, so it’s probable Mary was not spreading the disease on purpose, at least at first. It was likely that Mary had suffered a bout of typhoid when she was younger and had recovered, but retained the bacteria in her body. The bacteria would have been present in her urine and feces, and unless she scrubbed her hands vigorously before touching anything, Mary could have easily spread the disease through her handling of food, or ironically through trying to care for family members who had contracted typhoid.

Scientist and typhoid expert George Soper was the first to see the trail of infection Mary was leaving in her wake, and in 1907 he tracked her down to ask for urine and stool samples to confirm his suspicions. Mary refused, insisting she was healthy and had never had typhoid. Soper’s next attempt was also a failure. Even when he offered Mary royalties if she would let him write a book about her, she furiously turned him away.

Forced Quarantine

Finally, drastic measures were taken. Dr. Sara Josephine Baker of the New York City Health Department went to the house where Mary was working, police officers in tow, and forcibly took Mary into custody, claiming she was a danger to public health. Mary Mallon was taken to a clinic on North Brother Island and quarantined for three years against her will. At the end of this period, she was offered freedom, provided she no longer worked as a cook; unsurprisingly, Mary readily agreed.

Perhaps also unsurprisingly, Mary didn’t stick to the agreement. Clinic authorities secured her a job as a laundress, but the wages were significantly less than what she was used to, so using the pseudonym Mary Brown, Mallon got work as a cook again, going on to infect 25 people with typhoid. She was taken into custody again in 1915, and stayed in quarantine until she died of pneumonia in 1938. A post-mortem examination indeed found typhoid bacteria in her gall bladder. Though other “healthy carriers” were identified later, Mary Mallon was the first and most famous “Typhoid Mary,” a symbol of the constant struggle between an individual’s personal freedoms and the health of the community at large.

Sources:

Brunvand, Jan Harold. Curses, Broiled Again!: The Hottest Urban Legends Going. New York: Norton, 1990. Print.

Stradling, Jan. Bad Girls: The Most Powerful, Shocking, Amazing, Thrilling and Dangerous Women of All Time. New York: Metro, 2008. Print.

The Theft of Joseph Haydn’s Skull

3 Jul 201419 May 2016 / Jenny Ashford / Leave a comment

In the midst of royal intrigue and pseudo-scientific machinations, Haydn’s head spent many years traveling outside of his gravesite. The original article I wrote can be found here.

On May 11, 1809, Joseph Haydn slipped quietly into death at the age of 77. War was raging outside as the French laid siege to Vienna, but Napoleon had posted guards at Haydn’s home to spare the composer any danger. A French officer had even come to honor Haydn by singing an aria from The Creation. The relative tranquility that surrounded the composer on his final day, however, gave no hint of the bizarre events in store for Haydn’s remains.

Joseph Rosenbaum and Phrenology

The early 19th century was the heyday of phrenology, a “new science” whose practitioners claimed to measure intelligence and character by examining the size and placement of bumps on the human head. Doctors were becoming increasingly interested in collecting and studying skulls, and particularly liked to get their hands on the skulls of eminent persons, like great philosophers and artists of genius.

Joseph Rosenbaum managed the accounts of the stables belonging to the powerful Esterhazy family of Eisenstadt, Austria. Rosenbaum was a friend of the much older Haydn, and was also keenly interested in phrenology. He never made a great secret of the fact that he wished to study Haydn’s skull, and as he knew his friend was nearing death, Rosenbaum began to make plans to obtain the composer’s head after burial. Since he didn’t want to botch the job when the time came, he decided to do a trial run.

Practice Grave-Robbing

A well-known actress on the Vienna stage, Elizabeth Roose died in childbirth in October 1808. Rosenbaum had not planned to steal her head specifically, but when the opportunity arose, he grabbed it. About a week after Roose’s death, Rosenbaum and friend Johann Peter bribed a gravedigger to exhume the actress’s body and cut off her head.

The friends took their reeking prize to Peter’s home, where they and a Dr. Weiss proceeded to scrape the skin and muscle off the bone, scoop out the rotting brain, and bleach the skull clean by submerging it in quicklime. The experiment was only partly successful; the smell and mess had been far more horrible than Rosenbaum had expected, and lengthy immersion in the quicklime solution left the skull brittle and moldy. Rosenbaum decided that when it came time to swipe Haydn’s head, he would turn to the experts.

Taking Haydn’s Head

Less than a year after the Roose experiment, Haydn died. Shortly after the composer was buried in Hundsthurmer Cemetery, Rosenbaum paid the same gravedigger to purloin the head, which he then handed over to his trusted friend Dr. Eckhart and a team of “corpse bearers” at Vienna General Hospital. Their work on the skull was impeccable, and Rosenbaum could hardly contain his excitement. He had a fancy case made to hold Haydn’s skull; it was black with a glass front, and topped with a golden lyre.

The Prince and the Missing Skull

Rosenbaum and Peter kept possession of the skull for the next eleven years. But in 1820, Nicholas II of the Esterhazy clan, who had been Haydn’s patrons, belatedly decided to honor a family promise to move the composer’s remains from their modest digs at Hundsthurmer to a more spectacular tomb in Eisenstadt. The only problem was that when the body was exhumed, it was, of course, missing its skull.

The prince called in the Vienna police; their investigation turned up Johann Peter’s name. When interviewed, Peter claimed the skull had been given to him by the now-dead Dr. Eckhart, who had told him it was Haydn’s but had not told him how he had procured it. Peter apologized, telling police that had he known Eckhart had obtained the skull illegally, he would have turned it over to authorities immediately. Then he handed the officers a skull. When Rosenbaum was questioned, he gave police the exact same story, and for a time, the police were satisfied.

Haydn Skull Switcheroo

Later examination of the skull that Peter handed over showed that it could not have been Haydn’s, as it was the skull of a young man. Rosenbaum’s house was searched, but police turned up nothing. Prince Nicholas, embarrassed by the bad press the whole affair was causing, offered Rosenbaum a bribe to turn over the real skull. Rosenbaum did hand over another skull, which seemed to be that of a man Haydn’s age, and this skull was shipped to Eisenstadt and interred with the rest of Haydn’s remains.

The Real Skull Makes the Rounds

But the skull buried in Eisenstadt was not the one Haydn had possessed in life. Rosenbaum had in fact stashed the real skull in a mattress when the police came to search, and then had his wife Therese lay on it, knowing the officers would never ask a lady to get out of bed. Rosenbaum kept the skull until his own death was approaching, when he turned it over to Peter with the wish that it eventually be given to the Society for the Friends of Music. When Peter died, his wife tried to give the skull to the Esterhazy family, but ironically the family would not take it, as they thought Haydn’s skull was already in its tomb.

The skull of Joseph Haydn passed to Peter’s physician Karl Haller, who gave it to his mentor, famed pathologist Carl von Rokitansky. In the 1890s, the skull finally made its way to the Society for the Friends of Music. In 1946, another attempt was made to return the skull to Eisenstadt, but it wasn’t until 1954 that Haydn’s wandering skull was finally reunited with the rest of the composer’s mortal remains.

Source:

Dickey, Colin (2009). Cranioklepty: Grave Robbing and the Search for Genius. Unbridled Books. ISBN: 9781932961867.

Caravaggio’s Criminal History

2 Jul 2014 / Jenny Ashford / Leave a comment

Caravaggio is considered one of the greatest and most influential artists in history, but his genius had an extremely dark side. The original article I wrote can be found here, and be sure to check out my graphic novel, The Tenebrist, a fictionalized account of Caravaggio’s tragic life and death.

Michelangelo Merisi was likely born in Milan in 1571, and later took the name Caravaggio after the small town where he grew up. During his short life he produced little more than forty paintings that survived, but what he lacked in quantity he more than made up for in spectacular skill, which brought him great fame and the admiration of many wealthy patrons. After his rather ignominious death, the groundbreaking techniques he applied in his work would inspire and influence artists for years to come. But Caravaggio’s great intelligence and limitless talent was undercut by a fiery temperament that often landed him on the wrong side of the law.

Caravaggio’s Early Life (and Crimes?)

The artist grew up in a middle-class family, and was apprenticed to Milanese painter Simone Peterzano in 1584, where he learned the craft of painting in oils, along with drawing and anatomy. At this point Caravaggio was a young teenager, but there is some hint that a taste for the low life was already starting to develop; though nothing appears in police records of the time, one of Caravaggio’s early biographers claims that some unknown crime was responsible for the artist fleeing Milan.

Caravaggio in Rome

Caravaggio finished his apprenticeship when he was seventeen, and spent some time back in his hometown over the next three years. When his mother died in 1592, he inherited a tidy sum, and used some of it to move to Rome later that year. He lived in poverty at first, but slowly his reputation grew, and by 1594 he was beginning to attract wealthy patrons. By the end of the 1590s, Caravaggio had become quite rich and famous, and was one of the most sought-after artists in Rome.

The ensuing years also saw the buildup of Caravaggio’s extensive rap sheet. Between 1600 and 1606, he appeared in police records fourteen times, and was jailed on at least six occasions. Most of these were minor offenses—insulting police, carrying a sword without permission, tossing a plate of artichokes at a waiter—but a few involved serious violence. While the Rome of the early 17th century was not the most law-abiding of cities, Caravaggio’s penchant for troublemaking was notable, especially in one so feted. His fame and powerful friends often came in handy, vouching for him and springing him from jail, but in 1606 he would drastically raise the stakes.

Caravaggio Commits Murder

It was May, and a friendly tennis game was about to turn ugly. Caravaggio lost money to his opponent, Ranuccio Tomassoni, and started an argument that soon escalated into a brawl, as both men began hitting each other with their tennis rackets. A challenge was issued, and later that evening Caravaggio and Tomassoni turned up armed for a duel. Caravaggio wounded Tomassoni on the thigh, and when Tomassoni fell to the ground, Caravaggio ran him through with the sword. Wounded himself, Caravaggio immediately went on the lam, spending several months in surrounding fiefdoms that fell outside the jurisdiction of Roman papal authority. He later turned up in Naples and continued painting commissions.

Caravaggio in Malta

In 1607, Caravaggio received news that the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem, based on the island of Malta, had offered him a knighthood and some lucrative commissions. Caravaggio seized the opportunity, and was soon enjoying the patronage of the powerful Knights, and producing several major works over the next year. But even here, trouble found him; after causing some unspecified “insult” to one of the Knights, he was thrown into prison. With no wealthy patrons to bail him out, Caravaggio took matters into his own hands and escaped, fleeing to Sicily. The Knights subsequently stripped him of his knighthood, and there is evidence they set out in pursuit of their absconded jailbird.

Caravaggio’s Last Years

Weary and paranoid, Caravaggio still managed to complete three large altarpieces in Sicily before moving on to Messina in early 1609, where his temper caused more minor problems. Back in Naples later that year, he was nearly killed in a bar fight, but still managed to finish at least one painting in his nine months there.

Proving that he still had connections in high places, in 1610 Cardinal Gonzaga absolved Caravaggio of Tomassoni’s murder, thus allowing the artist to return to Rome without fear of prosecution. Taking a circuitous sea route back to Rome for reasons known only to him, Caravaggio landed in southern Tuscany and was immediately jailed, this time simply because he was mistaken for someone else.

Upon his release two days later, all his possessions had disappeared, and he seemed to have contracted an unknown illness, possibly malaria. He set off walking along the beach, and made it as far as Porto Ercole before collapsing, feverish and delusional. He was found and taken to a hospital, but only lived another two days, dying on July 18, 1610 at the age of 38. Fortunately for him, subsequent centuries have seen his artistic genius overshadow his troubled life.

Sources:

Moir, Alfred (1989). Caravaggio. Harry N. Abrams Inc. ISBN: 0810931508.

Robb, Peter (2001). M: The Man Who Became Caravaggio. Picador. ISBN: 0312274742.

Haitian Zombies and Puffer Fish Poison

1 Jul 201419 May 2016 / Jenny Ashford / Leave a comment

Do voodoo priests make “real” zombies using a powder containing tetrodotoxin? The original article I wrote can be found here.

In 1985, ethnobotanist Wade Davis published The Serpent and the Rainbow, a book in which he described his immersion into the world of Haitian culture, voodoo, and specifically the supposed manufacture of “real” zombies.

The book was partly fictionalized in a 1988 horror film of the same name, starring Bill Pullman. Both book and film chronicle Davis’ quest to discover the secrets of the mysterious powder that voodoo priests allegedly used to produce zombies, and ever since then the existence of a real-life zombification powder has almost been taken for granted. But is it possible to make a zombie in such a fashion? Or was Wade Davis the victim (or perpetrator) of a hoax?

Traditional Haitian Vodou

The traditional Haitian practice of Vodou (or voodoo) is an amalgam of Catholicism and certain West African animist religions that were carried over to the North American/Caribbean region by the slave trade. To some extent, it is a religion that’s greatly misunderstood by foreigners, who tend to focus on the lurid aspects of animal sacrifice and zombification in detriment to the more mundane aspects of worship. Perhaps for this reason, tourists visiting Haiti will often be entertained by supposedly “authentic” voodoo ceremonies that are in fact put on solely for their benefit and entertainment.

In a 2008 article in Skeptical Inquirer, professor of psychology and neurology Terence Hines argued that it was just such a situation that may have led Wade Davis to his questionable ideas about voodoo and the zombie powder. In The Serpent and the Rainbow, for example, Davis writes of witnessing a ceremony performed for tourists in which a woman apparently went into a trance and put hot coals into her mouth without injury; he immediately described this feat in terms of the supernatural, even though similar tricks are performed in circus sideshows the world over.

Tetrodotoxin Zombie Powder

The fulcrum of The Serpent and the Rainbow, however, was Davis’ hunt for the formula of the elusive zombie powder that houngans (voodoo priests) were supposedly using to produce “undead” slaves to work their plantations.

Davis claimed to have witnessed (and participated in) such a ceremony, and seems to have taken the results at face value. According to Davis, the powder was administered to a victim, who would then enter a state of catalepsy that was indistinguishable from death, and be buried alive. Later, the houngan would visit the victim’s grave and “awaken” the person, after which the victim would remain in a zombified state under the complete control of the houngan.

Davis was eventually able to procure some samples of the zombie powder, and he wrote that the main ingredient in the formula was the poison tetrodotoxin, or TTX, found most infamously in some species of puffer fish native to the Caribbean and the waters around Asia. Tetrodotoxin is the same substance responsible for fugu poisoning, a rare but regular occurrence in Japan where it’s most often caused by eating incorrectly prepared raw puffer fish.

Could TTX Create Zombies?

When Wade Davis’s zombie powder samples were analyzed, however, only one contained any significant amount of TTX, casting doubt on his entire hypothesis. And as Terence Hines points out in his Skeptical Inquirer article, even if the powder had contained TTX in large amounts, the effects of the poison on the body are not consistent with the reports of zombie plantation workers that had been taken so seriously by Davis.

Tetrodotoxin works by blocking sodium channels on the neural membrane, affecting the peripheral nervous system. At low doses, TTX causes nausea and numbness around the mouth, but as the amount ingested increases, victims may suffer motor difficulties, respiratory failure, and possibly cardiac arrest, followed by death. If medical intervention occurs in time, victims can generally recover in about a week.

Hines points out that the main symptoms of tetrodotoxin poisoning — namely total muscular flaccidity and inability to move, breathing difficulties, and lack of oxygen to the brain — would seem inconsistent with the image of the shambling zombie slave toiling on a plantation from sunrise to sunset. In his view, Wade Davis was taken in by trickery, or perhaps simply saw in Haiti what he wished to see.

Sources:

Davis, Wade. The Serpent and the Rainbow. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985.

Hines, Terence. “Zombies and Tetrodotoxin”. Skeptical Inquirer May/June 2008: 60-62.

Female Serial Killer Belle Gunness

30 Jun 201419 May 2016 / Jenny Ashford / Leave a comment

In the early 1900’s, Belle Gunness murdered dozens of men and children for insurance money, and may have faked her own death in a fire. The original article I wrote can be found here.

Though female serial killers are far rarer than their male counterparts, history provides a handful of startling examples that women are capable of the same callous viciousness as men who kill. Perhaps one of the earliest and most horrific examples is that of Belle Gunness, a Norwegian immigrant who was suspected in the deaths of more than 40 people.

Belle Gunness’s Early Crimes

Born Brynhild Paulsdatter Størseth in Norway in 1859, Belle came to America in 1881. Three years later she married Mads Sorensen; the pair bought and ran a candy store. The business later burned down, as did the couple’s Austin home; though there were rumors of arson, the insurance company paid the claim. In 1900 Sorensen died, supposedly of a heart condition, though the first doctor to examine him suspected strychnine poisoning. Sorensen’s family accused Belle of murder, and there was an inquest, but evidently nothing came to light to prevent Belle from collecting on the $8,500 life insurance policy.

Belle’s Farm in La Porte, Indiana

With the proceeds from her husband’s death, Belle bought a farm in La Porte, Indiana and moved there with her two daughters (two other children had died in infancy, either from poisoning or acute colitis). Shortly after Belle took up residence, the boat and carriage houses burned to the ground, bringing another insurance payout. In April 1902 Belle married Peter Gunness, whose baby daughter died of unknown causes a week after the wedding. Peter only lasted until December, dying when a piece of machinery supposedly fell from a shelf and smashed his skull. A coroner’s jury was convened, but Belle maintained her innocence, and escaped prosecution. She then cashed in to the tune of $3,000.

Belle Gunness’s Personal Ads

In 1906 Belle began running ads in Midwestern area newspapers, seeking “a gentleman equally well provided, with view of joining fortunes.” First to reply was John Moo of Minnesota, who arrived with $1,000 and vanished within the week. Bachelor number two was George Anderson, who awoke one night to find Belle looming over his bed with a frightening expression on her face. He grabbed his things and bolted from the house, never to return. He was apparently the only suitor to escape the farm at La Porte.

More men and disappearances followed: Ole Budbsurg, last seen withdrawing a large sum from a La Porte bank in 1907; Andrew Helgelien, who vanished after cashing a check for $2,900; Thomas Lindboe, who Belle had hired as a handyman. But the one man who was always present was farmhand Ray Lamphere, who claimed to love Belle. He became jealous of Belle’s steady stream of suitors, so Belle fired him in early 1908, claiming he had threatened to kill her and burn her house down. In fact, the house did go up in flames that April; the bodies of three children and a headless woman were found in the smoking ruins. Investigators speculated that the woman was not Belle, who was much taller and heavier than the body found. However, a piece of bridgework found later was identified as Belle’s by her dentist, so the corpse was laid to rest under Belle’s name. In the meantime, the sister of Andrew Helgelien had arrived in La Porte, and at her insistence the police dug up the yard around Belle’s home. There they found the remains of more than forty men and children, including Helgelien, Belle’s adopted daughter Jennie Olson, John Moo, and two unidentified children.

Ray Lamphere Confesses

Ray Lamphere was put on trial for murdering Belle and burning her house. He was convicted of the arson charge and sent to prison, where he died of consumption less than a year later. Before his death, he claimed that Belle was still alive, and that the headless woman found after the fire was a housekeeper that Belle had dressed in her clothes; she then planted her own bridgework next to the body to throw off police. Lamphere said that Belle had murdered 42 people, either by poisoning them or hitting them in the head with a cleaver. She then cut up the bodies and buried the pieces, or fed them to her hogs. It was estimated that Belle had netted more than $250,000 from her crimes.

Belle Gunness’s Legacy

There were sightings of Belle for years after her crimes were discovered, and there were even ballads written about her. In 1931 a woman called Esther Carlson was arrested in Los Angeles for poisoning a man for money, and though two witnesses claimed the woman was Belle, their story was never proven, and Esther Carlson died awaiting trial.

In late 2007, the headless body was exhumed for DNA testing to see if Lamphere’s tale was true. The Chicago Tribune reported that the bodies of three children were found in the grave with the supposed body of Belle Gunness, but the exhumation yielded too little DNA to definitively identify any of the remains.

The Mysterious Death of a Sherlock Holmes Scholar

28 Jun 201419 May 2016 / Jenny Ashford / Leave a comment

A renowned expert on Arthur Conan Doyle and his fictional sleuth was himself at the center of a bizarre detective tale. The original article I wrote can be found here.

British-born Richard Lancelyn Green became obsessed with Sherlock Holmes at a very young age, at one point even building a replica of Holmes’s apartment in the attic of his family’s rambling mansion. When he grew to adulthood, his obsession blossomed, encompassing not only the famous fictional detective, but also the man who had created him, Arthur Conan Doyle.

Green amassed a huge collection of Holmes and Doyle memorabilia, and was planning to write the ultimate biography of the beloved author by gaining access to Doyle’s private papers. But it was during this quest that he turned up dead, and to this day no one is certain whether his death was an elaborately staged suicide or a devious murder plot worthy of the evil Moriarty.

Dame Jean and Doyle’s Private Papers

Green, a well-regarded scholar and author of several books of Sherlock Holmes lore, befriended Dame Jean Conan Doyle in the mid-1990s; she was the author’s only daughter, though he also had four sons. At some point during their friendship, Dame Jean evidently trusted Green enough to show him a collection of her father’s papers, which up until then had been believed lost.

Green was ecstatic that the papers were safe and sound, and became even more so when Dame Jean told him that she was planning to donate the papers to the British Library after her death so that scholars would be able to have access to them for the first time. Green felt that these papers would be crucial to the success of the definitive biography of Doyle he planned on writing.

An Unwelcome Auction

Dame Jean died in 1997, and Green began looking forward to poring through the papers when they arrived at the British Library. But years passed, and then, in 2004, some of the same papers turned up in an auction at Christie’s in London.

Fearful that the papers would be dispersed into private hands, Green and a few other Holmes scholars tried to block the auction, claiming that the distant Doyle relations who were auctioning off the papers had no legal right to them, since Dame Jean had supposedly left the papers to the British Library in her will.

A Mysterious American

It was around this time that Green’s friends began to notice that Green’s behavior was becoming paranoid and a little irrational. He claimed he was being followed, that his phone had been bugged, and that an American was trying to “bring him down.” He even told at least one friend that he feared for his life. He became convinced that his actions to block the auction of the Doyle papers had made someone angry enough to kill him.

A Very Sherlockian Puzzle

It seemed as if Green’s paranoia was justified, for on March 27, 2004, he was found face down on his bed, a crude garrotte made out of a black shoelace fastened around his neck. A wooden spoon lay near his hand, and his dead body was surrounded by books, posters, and other Sherlock Holmes memorabilia.

The greeting message on his answering machine had also been replaced with a terse message in an American voice. It appeared that there was no forced entry, and nothing seemed to have been stolen. An investigation yielded little evidence to distinguish between murder and suicide, and the coroner left the verdict open on cause of death.

Murder or Suicide?

Several facts emerged later on that could shed more light on what happened to Richard Lancelyn Green. The American voice on his answering machine turned out to be the standard recorded message that came pre-loaded on the machine, and the American that Green claimed was trying to “bring him down” was simply another Holmes scholar who claimed to bear Green no ill will.

Additionally, the presence of the wooden spoon at the scene would seem to suggest suicide. Green might have used the spoon to tighten the garrotte, whereas a murderer could have just tightened it with his hands. There was also the matter of a Sherlock Holmes story called “The Problem of Thor Bridge,” in which a woman commits suicide in a way that makes it look as though she was murdered by a rival. Friends speculate that Green might have become irrational and sought to frame someone he felt was undermining him.

And the auction of the Doyle papers, as it turned out, was perfectly legal; Dame Jean had changed her will to leave the papers to three of her sister-in-law’s children, who then decided to auction the papers. In the end, most of the papers ended up in the British Library after all. Green’s own enormous collection was eventually bequeathed to the Portsmouth Library Service.

Source:

Grann, David (2010). The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession. Doubleday. ISBN: 9780385517928.

Germany’s Waiting Mortuaries

27 Jun 201419 May 2016 / Jenny Ashford / Leave a comment

Fears of premature burial prompted the construction of these strange institutions in the 19th Century. The original article I wrote can be found here.

The idea of being interred alive is one of humans’ most primal and unspeakable fears, though its common recurrence in legend and literature betrays a helpless fascination as well. There is probably no way to ever discern how many unfortunate people throughout history have fallen victim to this gruesome fate; it’s likely that the numbers swelled during plagues and other epidemics of disease, as bodies were hurriedly placed into mass graves to forestall contagion. Whatever the actual numbers, it is certain that the problem was clearly widespread enough to cause some societies to take unusual precautions.

Bruhier and the Uncertainty of Death

Debates about the exact moment when a person made the transition between life and death had been raging at least since the days of Pliny, with many criteria being used to determine the difference between a dead body and a living one. But the possibility that fallible medical professionals or family members might mistakenly bury someone who was still alive didn’t fully capture the public’s imagination until the 1745 publication of a book called Dissertation sur l’incertitude des signes de la mort by Jean-Jacques Bruhier.

The book was a translation and expansion upon the work of a Dutch anatomist named Jacob Winsløw, who recommended a series of tests on supposed corpses — blowing pepper into the nostrils, shoving red-hot pokers up the anus, slicing the soles of the feet with a razor — to ensure death before burial. Bruhier’s book repeated these ideas, but also added scores of grim, sordid accounts of premature burials — some well-documented, some repetitions of long-lived folk tales. Additionally, Bruhier took Winsløw’s calls for burial reform even further, arguing that putrefaction was the only sure sign of death, and advocating for a system of “waiting morgues” where bodies could be kept above ground until they began to rot.

The Germans Build the Morgues

Though Bruhier’s ideas were never implemented in France for one reason or another, the massive success of the book ensured a series of translations, including a German one in 1754. This book, along with a similarly themed tome by another Frenchman, François Thiérry, was taken very seriously, discussed at length among German doctors and intellectuals. Beginning in the early 1790s in Weimar, at the behest of influential physician Christoph Wilhelm Hufeland, plans began to percolate to construct a Totenhaus, or house for the dead, in every German town.

These first waiting mortuaries were large, stately affairs. Corpses (or supposed corpses) were laid out in their shrouds, watched over by attendants who stared through windows, waiting for any signs of life. The attendants often worked 12-hour shifts amid the pungent stench of rotting flesh, and were not allowed to move from their posts. In addition, each corpse was fitted with a series of strings attached to fingers and toes; the strings all led to a central alarm bell which would ring at the slightest movement. Unfortunately the gases from the putrefying bodies were often sufficient to set off the bell, and there were countless false alarms.

Waiting Morgues Spread Throughout Germany

Throughout the following decades, interest in premature burial was high, and more of these waiting mortuaries were built around the country — Ansbach, Munich, Frankfurt, Berlin. Their architecture became ever more elaborate, with classical columns and marble façades that would rival any church or mausoleum. Many of the mortuaries had separate, fancier chambers for the wealthier corpses, and later morgues upgraded their alarms with ingenious clockwork mechanisms and electric buzzers. The morgues also became something of an odd tourist attraction, even visited by literary luminaries like Wilkie Collins and Mark Twain.

The Heyday for Waiting Morgues Passes

Though similar institutions were established in Copenhagen, Prague, Lisbon, and New York, and though a few of the morgues were still operating in Brussels and Amsterdam as late as the 1870s, Germany remained the center of the waiting mortuary phenomenon. But even there the enthusiasm soon began to wane. For one thing, though the morgues were applauded for their philanthropic aspects, the fact was that few citizens actually wanted to install their loved ones in such places, and some morgues had to close for lack of “customers.” In addition, there was never any solid evidence that any corpse had ever revived after a stint in the mortuary; critics questioned the tremendous expense on something which seemed so unnecessary.

Finally, by the mid-nineteenth century, better medical instruments like the stethoscope were coming into common use, making determination of death easier. Besides that, there was also a slowly evolving movement away from unsanitary “communal” death houses and toward more individualistic inventions like “security coffins” outfitted with air tubes, lock-and-key mechanisms, firecrackers, bells, flags, and sirens.

Source:

Bondeson, Jan (2001). Buried Alive: The Terrifying History of Our Most Primal Fear. W.W. Norton & Co., Inc. ISBN: 039332222X.

A Brief History of the Giallo Film

26 Jun 201419 May 2016 / Jenny Ashford / 1 Comment

Born of the pulp crime novels of the 1930s, the giallo came into its own on screen, culminating in classic films from legendary Italian directors. The original article I wrote can be found here.

An American writer is walking the streets of Rome one night when he passes an art gallery with enormous glass doors. Peering inside, he is shocked to see a woman struggling with a black-clad figure holding a knife. The writer rushes to help, but when he passes through the first door of the gallery, it closes and locks behind him, while the second glass door before him will not open at all. Trapped in the space between the glass panels, he can only watch in helpless horror as the black-gloved killer plunges the knife into the woman’s body.

This opening scene is taken from an early example of the giallo film genre, Dario Argento’s The Bird With the Crystal Plumage (1970), which was loosely based on Frederic Brown’s 1950 pulp novel The Screaming Mimi. Giallo as a film style began roughly around 1963; though aspects of the stories and themes emerged from pulp novels, filmmakers were quick to add their own ingredients to the mix.

The Origins of the Giallo

Giallo is the Italian word for yellow, which was the predominant color on the covers of the pulp crime novels published by Mondadori, starting in 1929. Following their success, other publishing houses began getting into the act, starting their own lines of cheap mystery novels with yellow covers. These were so popular during the 1930s that the word ‘giallo’ became synonymous with crime and mystery fiction.

The First Giallo Films

It soon became apparent that the medium of film could be used to add interesting elements to the straightforward crime stories from the novels. Taking several pages from Alfred Hitchcock’s playbook and spicing things up with elements of eroticism, horror, and madness, legendary director Mario Bava made what is generally considered the first giallo film, 1963’s The Girl Who Knew Too Much. The plot revolves around a murder witness who is tormented by an important detail that she can’t quite remember. The following year, Bava followed with the now-classic giallo, Blood and Black Lace (known in Italy as Sei Donne Per L’Assassino, or Six Women for an Assassin), which featured a masked and gloved killer stalking the catty and underdressed models at an upscale fashion house. By this point, the particular tropes of the giallo were becoming de rigueur, and the early 1970s saw a flood of films that displayed variations on the theme.

Conventions of the Giallo Film

Films designated as giallo are usually murder mysteries, but they have many features that distinguish them from straightforward crime stories or police procedurals (which are known in Italy by a different name, Poliziotteschi). First of all, the murders that occur in gialli are often grotesque and horrific, and are filmed in artful, operatic, or even disturbingly erotic ways, with much spilling of blood. The killer in the 1972 film What Have You Done to Solange?, for example, dispatches his usually nude victims by plunging knives into their vaginas.

In addition, the structure of the films is often baroque, and sometimes contains dreamlike imagery. The killer almost always wears black leather gloves and usually a black trenchcoat or raincoat. The weapon of choice is nearly always a shiny and suitably phallic knife. A giallo’s plot often deals with an unlucky person who witnesses a crime and then spends the remainder of the film struggling to remember some aspect of the scene that they have forgotten or cannot make sense of. The psychological motivations of the killer nearly always have to do with madness or revenge triggered by childhood traumas, lending gialli a hint of gothic horror in juxtaposition to the more modern slasher-type violence that is usually featured. Finally, the films generally have a Grand Guignol feel, and tend to have bombastic or unusual film scores containing free jazz or prog-rock, for example.

Examples of the Giallo Genre

Genre pioneer Mario Bava, in addition to his first two gialli, made two other films in this line, 1970’s Five Dolls for an August Moon and the 1971 classic Twitch of the Death Nerve. Dario Argento has returned to giallo perhaps more than any other director, turning out films like The Cat O’Nine Tails (1971), Four Flies on Grey Velvet (1971), Deep Red (aka Profondo Rosso, 1975), Tenebrae (1982), and Giallo (2010).

Lucio Fulci, a cult figure in America for his grisly zombie films, made movies in nearly every imaginable genre, and giallo was no exception; his psychedelic Lizard in a Woman’s Skin was released in 1971, and was followed by 1972’s Don’t Torture a Duckling, the understated mystery The Psychic (aka Murder to the Tune of Seven Black Notes, 1977), and 1982’s New York Ripper. Other directors who tried their hand include Umberto Lenzi (Knife of Ice, 1972; Eyeball, 1974), Michele Soavi (Deliria, 1987), and Pupi Avati (The House With Laughing Windows, 1976).

Sources:

Palmerini, Luca M. & Gaetano Mistretta (1996). Spaghetti Nightmares: Italian Fantasy-Horrors As Seen Through the Eyes of Their Protagonists. Fantasma Books. ISBN: 0963498274.

McDonagh, Maitland (1991). Broken Mirrors Broken Minds: The Dark Dreams of Dario Argento. Sun Tavern Fields. ISBN: 095170124x

Victorian Spirit Photography

25 Jun 201419 May 2016 / Jenny Ashford / Leave a comment

To a public entranced by the seeming magic of photography, capturing ghosts on film was par for the course. The original article I wrote is here.

It seems hard to imagine in this modern era of ubiquitous digital photography and cheap photo manipulation software, when creating a picture of a ghost (or anything else) is as simple as clicking a mouse; but to the Victorians, the realism of the photographic image seemed incredible and, somewhat ironically, rather mystical. The art of photography was to them a way to miraculously stop time, to forever embed memory in concrete form. Given this perception, it was probably inevitable that people of the era would initiate not only a demand for photographs of corpses, but also a brisk trade in supposed pictures of the spirits of the dead.

Louis Daguerre and Early Photography

Photography as a medium grew out of scientific experimentation in optics and chemistry. The earliest photographic images were made by placing objects (such as plants or fossils) onto light sensitive paper and then exposing the paper to the sun. William Henry Fox Talbot produced the first examples of these, and later Louis J.M. Daguerre experimented with similar images before going on to develop the “daguerreotype,” the forerunner of the modern photograph.

Because of the nature of early photography — passive camera operators, long exposure times — it was widely felt that a photographic image was a completely objective record, untainted by human bias. Additionally, Eadweard Muybridge’s famous photographic series of a galloping horse demonstrated that the flat, uninvolved gaze of the camera could capture things the human eye could not see; in the case of the horse, this proved to be the fact that all four of the horse’s hooves were off the ground simultaneously at some point during the gallop. These two aspects of the new technology — both its supposed scientific inviolability and its ability to freeze images invisible to the human eye — contributed to its use in the sciences as well as among adherents of the new religion of Spiritualism.

Spiritualism, Seances, and Photographing Ghosts

The rise of Spiritualism in the 19th century coincided with the waning of traditional religious belief and the flowering of the Enlightenment, when people began to realize that science could be used as a tool to solve problems that had vexed humanity for millennia. Spiritualists, even while they attempted to speak to the dead at seances and shrouded themselves in paranormal trappings, saw themselves in a decidedly scientific light. They reasoned that since science had uncovered and explained invisible “forces” animating the universe — electricity, magnetism — science would also soon explain “life forces” that survived the body after death. Photography played a large part in their supposed “experiments” aiming to prove the existence of ghosts.

Early photographers were of course aware of the faint ghostly images produced when the subject of the photograph moved while the plate was being exposed. It isn’t clear who was the first photographer to use this quirk as a means to make spirit photographs, but one of the most famous was William Mumler, who in 1861 began producing spirit photographs in his Boston studio. Likely using double exposures and various other tricks, Mumler made quite a comfortable living taking pictures of grieving sitters with ethereal friends and relatives hovering nearby. He even took the infamous photograph of Mary Todd Lincoln in which the supposed spirit of her assassinated husband stands behind her with his hands resting on her shoulders.

Mumler’s fame was so widespread that he soon came under scrutiny from authorities, who eventually charged him with fraud — not because his pictures were not really of ghosts, which of course they weren’t, but because the blurred images of the “spirits” in the photographs were not usually recognizable as the friend or relative of the living sitter.

Photographic Fakes and the Culture of Mourning

While the Victorians were quick to accept the reality of the spirits in the photographs, believing as they did that photography was resistant to human manipulation, the truth is that the pictures were fakes, in most cases rather clumsy fakes. Like that other Spiritualist trope, the seance, which was performed through cunning trickery and hidden accomplices, spirit photography stood as a testament to creative fraud, an attempt to bolster people’s deeply held beliefs through managing their perceptions of reality. The culture of death and mourning prevalent in the Victorian era combined with a new attachment to the objectivity of the scientific method produced a strange hybrid of materialism and metaphysics whose reverberations can still be felt to the present day.

Source:

Firenze, Paul. “Spirit Photography: How Early Spiritualists Tried to Save Religion by Using Science.” Skeptic. Vol 11 No 2. 2004: 70-78.