Haitian Zombies and Puffer Fish Poison

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

VoodooPic

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

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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.

bellegunness

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

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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.

Memoirs_of_Sherlock_Holmes_1894_Burt_-_Illustration_4

 

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

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

buriedalive

 

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

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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.

Blood and Black Lace 5

 

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

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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.

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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.

Edgar Allan Poe and the Murder of Mary Rogers

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Poe

This is an article I wrote a while back about the real case that Poe used as an inspiration for his story, “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt.” The original article appeared here.

 

Tragic American scribe Edgar Allan Poe, while most popular today for his gruesome horror stories, in fact wrote successfully in many genres and is generally credited with pioneering the modern detective story through the invention of his fictional sleuth, C. Auguste Dupin.

Several of Poe’s stories were partly based on true events, but one of the most intriguing examples was the detective story “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt,” inspired by the brutal 1841 rape and murder of a pretty twenty-year-old woman in New York City. There has been rampant speculation as to what happened to Mary Cecilia Rogers, the “real” Marie Rogêt, but even now, almost 170 years after her death, her killer remains unidentified.

The Disappearance of Mary Rogers

It was on the morning of Sunday, July 25, 1841 that twenty-year-old Mary Cecilia Rogers told her fiancé Daniel Payne that she was going uptown to visit her aunt. Mary, by all accounts a stunningly beautiful young woman, was clad in a white dress with a black shawl and a blue silk scarf, her black hair tucked under a flowered hat. Daniel Payne agreed to meet Mary at the omnibus station when she returned from her aunt’s house later that evening. But Mary Rogers would never be coming back.

Payne, alarmed when Mary had not returned by Monday, placed a missing persons ad that ran in Tuesday’s New York Sun. Upon hearing of Mary’s disappearance, a former sweetheart named Alfred Crommelin also joined the search. It was Crommelin who, on Wednesday the 28th, saw the commotion around the Hudson river, where a woman’s body had been pulled from the water. Crommelin initially identified Mary by the presence of a birthmark on her arm — the face was too battered for easy recognition — and Mary’s mother later identified the clothing the girl had been wearing when she’d last been seen alive.

An Unlikely Drowning and a Range of Suspects

In the early stages of the investigation, it was thought that Mary Rogers had simply drowned, but even a peremptory examination of the body demonstrated that Mary had obviously been dead before going into the water, which of course pointed to murder. Payne and Crommelin were naturally questioned, though both had unimpeachable alibis, as did Mary’s former employer, tobacconist John Anderson, and all of her other friends and fellow residents at the boarding house where she lived. In the absence of a clear suspect, rumors began to circulate almost immediately.

A Clandestine Abortion

One of the most insidious of these was that Mary had died either during or shortly after a botched abortion, and had been disposed of to cover it up. This tenacious rumor was based on the alleged confession of a tavern keeper who had supposedly seen Mary in the presence of a physician and knew that the abortion had been performed in his tavern. The “confession” turned out to be completely fabricated, but the abortion story not only turned up in a later revision of Poe’s fictional account of the crime, “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt,” but continued to be repeated as truth in several books about the murder, right up into the modern day. It was also apparently a factor in abortion becoming criminalized in New York State in 1845.

The Suicide of Daniel Payne

Though Payne was quickly dismissed as a suspect, new stories began swirling about his involvement after he took his own life in October of 1841, by taking an overdose of laudanum. A cryptic suicide note was found in his pocket that some interpreted as a confession, but the note could also be read as simply a statement of grief, an unwillingness to go on living after Mary’s death. Indeed, Payne’s friends claimed he had been inconsolable after the murder, and were not terribly surprised that he would take such drastic action.

Who Really Killed Mary Rogers?

It was clear that someone had murdered the girl, but the mystery of who had done it was becoming murkier. In Poe’s story, the killer is thought to be a naval officer, perhaps the fictional counterpart to Mary’s real-life fellow boarder, sailor William Kiekuck, who was questioned about the crime but had a solid alibi. There was also speculation that Mary had been set upon by a gang; initial autopsy reports stated that Mary had been “violated by more than two or three persons,” though later investigation suggested otherwise.

In a recent article in Skeptical Inquirer, Joe Nickell analyzed the many books and articles written about the unsolved murder, and also went back to revisit contemporary news stories and police reports. His conclusion, also reached by other scholars, was that Mary was likely raped and killed by a single assailant, an unidentified “swarthy” man who a few witnesses saw walking with her shortly before her disappearance.

She was raped and then strangled with a piece of lace trim; her unknown murderer then tore a strip from her petticoat and used it to fashion a sort of sling which he used to drag the body to the river (this fact alone casts doubt on the gang-rape theory, as a group of men could have easily carried the body). Whoever he was, the man who killed Mary Rogers evidently got away with his crime. Mary herself lives on in the pages of Poe’s masterful fiction.

Source:

Nickell, Joe. “Historical Whodunit: Spiritualists, Poe, and the Real ‘Marie Rogêt'”. Skeptical Inquirer July/August 2010: 45-49.

 

Excerpt from “Bluebottle”

/ Jenny Ashford / Leave a comment

BluebottlePage

When the next day passed with no sign of The God Who Brings Rain, and then the next day, Monarch knew it was time for him and his subjects to take definitive action. The butterflies were growing weak from lack of water, and some of them could barely keep their heads up as Monarch addressed them from his flower. He knew that even if they chose to move to another garden now, some of them would not make it.

As he finished his speech, in which he outlined the plan for the exodus, Monarch happened to glance down into the soil. The beetles were gathered there in their numbers, carapaces shimmering in the sun. The head beetle, the one who had found the orphaned worm, stepped forward and spoke. “We would like to be included in any plans you have for relocation,” she said, her tiny voice almost lost, coming from so far below. “Surely there is another garden nearby where The God Who Brings Rain will see fit to be more generous.”

“You will only slow us down,” Monarch said, fluttering his wings as if to remind them of his superior attributes. “You can make your own way, if you wish to.”

“But you can scout farther ahead, tell us where to go,” the beetle protested, but already Monarch was tuning her out. He turned to the other butterflies and signaled them for takeoff.

But just at that moment, a curious buzzing was heard coming across the garden, from where The God Who Brings Rain had last been seen. Monarch looked around, confused and hopeful, but then he saw that it was just that creature, the horrid one he had raised, thinking it would be a princess someday. He couldn’t believe he’d ever actually thought anything good could have come from that detestable little grub. “What are you doing back here?” he shouted with all the scorn he could muster.

The little creature hovered, clear wings flapping so quickly that they were nearly invisible. “I don’t know where else to go,” came the plaintive reply. “I am not at home here, but all that I found beyond the garden was a lonely plain with none of my kind to be seen. Out there is only a large pale creature who lies on the grass, as still as death.”

“We have our own problems here, as you can see,” Monarch said testily.

The head beetle was waving frantically with her black legs as Monarch talked, as though trying to get his attention. When he finally deigned to give it, the beetle spoke with breathless rapidity. “The worms we saw crawling on The God Who Brings Rain were not his pets at all,” the beetle cried. “They killed him! Surely they did! Isn’t it true that The God Who Brings Rain has not been seen since we brought this creature here?”

“Yes, that’s true,” Monarch answered, glancing sidelong at the other butterflies.

“She and her kind killed The God Who Brings Rain, with the sole intention of ridding us of our water supply! It all makes sense!” The beetles around her were chattering their agreement, and some of the butterflies seemed to be picking up on the mood of the crowd.

“What have you to say for yourself?” Monarch asked the tiny creature pointedly.

“Please! I don’t know what you all are talking about,” the ugly outcast said. “All I remember is coming out of my cocoon and seeing all of you around me. I bear you no ill will.”

“Then what have you done to The God Who Brings Rain?” the beetle demanded.

“Nothing! I don’t know!” The little creature was frantic, her wings beating the air so hard that the flower petals around her danced crazily.

“We cannot let something like this go unpunished,” Monarch intoned. He signaled to the other butterflies, who immediately took to the air and surrounded the buzzing little murderer. They closed in, gripping her minuscule legs with their much larger ones, barring her escape with their massive and gaily colored wings. Monarch watched her as she struggled, eyes wild with fear. “We will take her to the sill, where we take all enemies of our kind,” he said. “Perhaps this act will purify the garden, and return us to favor with The God Who Brings Rain, so that we may remain in this place that has always been our home.”

The insects were all in agreement, and moving slowly as befitted the solemnity of the occasion, they began the short journey to the residence of The God Who Brings Rain, which was a wooden shed at the north edge of the garden, a shed with a large open window and a smooth white sill.