Newspaper Clipping of the Day

Via Newspapers.com

Yet another “vision of murder” story, but this one sounded more plausible than most.  The “Chicago Inter Ocean,” December 1, 1907:

CAPETOWN, Nov. 30.--A little girl named Ellen Pinnock, returning home in Grahamstown from making purchases at a grocer's, disappeared recently, and no trace of her could be found. A detective at length picked up one of articles purchased by the girl near the Grahamstown golf links and took it back to the grocer, who suggested the calling in of a young man named Staples, a clairvoyant. 

Staples was placed in a hypnotic trance, and in the presence of two or three witnesses was asked if the child was dead. "She is dead--murdered." he replied, "and her body lies under the floor of a house."

“Can you see the house?" he was asked.

"I can." he replied, and proceeded to describe the murder in detail. He was roused from his trance, and. accompanied by the detective and a party of five other men, went to the golf links and indicated the caretaker's house as the house he had seen in his trance. The place was broken open, and in a cellar low the body of the murdered child was found.

It lay beneath the foundations of the house itself, and was covered with sacking soaked in iodoform. The body was found on the sixth day after the girl's disappearance. Suspicion fell at once on the caretaker, a man named Kerr. Previously it had been thought that the girl might have fallen into a large road pond on the golf links, and at the moment of the discovery of the corpse Kerr was engaged in dragging this pond. He had posed as a friend of the Pinnock family, and called on them to express his sympathy the day after the girl was lost.

Staples had never seen Kerr before. The clairvoyant was taken to the pond and asked if he could identify among the men at work there the murderer whom he saw in his trance. He pointed to Kerr, who was subsequently arrested. Much circumstantial evidence was produced against Kerr at the inquest, though the coroner refused to hear anything as to what the clairvoyant had done.  A verdict of willful murder against Kerr was returned.

Thomas Kerr was put on trial for the girl’s murder, but the jury was unable to reach a verdict.  Kerr was subsequently rearrested, this time for assault (it was decided that he could not be tried twice for murder.)  However, I’ve been unable to find what happened next, so I presume the authorities were eventually forced to set him free for a second time.  As far as I know, Ellen Pinnock’s murder remains officially unsolved.

The Fate of Mary Nicholson

Mary Nicholson was an orphan.  Strike One.  She was penniless.  Strike Two.  She was of limited intelligence, being described as "of very weak intellect."  In eighteenth century England, all of this generally amounted to "Strike Three, and you're out!"

Mary, however, at first seemed an exception to this grim rule.  She was given a position as a servant in the household of John Atkinson, a farmer in the village of Little Stainton.  The family was a prosperous and respectable one, and Mary proved to be a gentle-natured, industrious, and honest worker.  To any outside observer, all would appear to be very well.

The Atkinson household, unfortunately, harbored a very dark secret.  It later emerged that the head of the house had taken advantage of Mary's powerlessness by taking "great liberties" and behaving "very cruelly to her."  (It does not take much imagination to guess what these "liberties" might have been.)

Mary had no choice but to submit to Atkinson's abuse, and both of them knew it.  Someone in her position simply did not have the option of handing in her notice and finding work elsewhere.  Go to the local authorities?  What were the chances that they would take the side of a friendless servant over a leading member of the community?  And even if they did, the likely result would still be that Mary would find herself homeless and jobless, with few, if any, options.

After years of this emotional and physical abuse, something snapped in the mind of this hitherto exemplary young woman.  In April 1798, Mary went to Darlington to buy supplies for the household.  Unbeknownst to everyone in the Atkinson household, she also bought something not on her shopping list: a quantity of arsenic powder.  She told the shopkeepers it was needed for washing sheep.

When Mary returned home, she added the arsenic to the flour used to make puddings for John Atkinson--it was his favorite dish, and she knew he commonly asked for one to be prepared when his daily work around the farm was over.  However, on this particular day--just proving that some people have the devil's own luck--Atkinson lost his taste for pudding.  He said he was not hungry, and went straight to bed.

Rather than let the flour go unused, Atkinson's mother, Elizabeth, used it to bake a cake, which was shared by the family at dinner-time.  They all quickly became deathly ill.  The family doctor was able to save the lives of four of them, but Elizabeth Atkinson died two weeks later.

Nicholson was horrified by the dreadful way her murderous little plot had backfired.  She naively confessed to at least three people that she had poisoned the flour, with the intention of punishing John Atkinson for the many "bad deeds" she had suffered at his hands.  Naturally, the Atkinsons had little trouble ascertaining who was responsible for the tragic event.  However, John settled for telling Mary that if she left Little Stainton and never came back, the family would not pursue any charges against her.  (This ready willingness to ignore his mother's murder in return for Mary's silence says much about what the Atkinson patriarch must have done to her.)

Mary may have had her freedom, but there was little she could do with it.  Nicholson literally had no idea where to go or what to do.  For some days, she aimlessly wandered the countryside, surviving by begging or scavenging what food she could.  A Newfield family named Ord finally offered the starving, desperate girl shelter, but when they had heard her story, they insisted that she return to Little Stainton and face the music.  Feeling she had no other choice, Nicholson went back to the Atkinson home and begged for mercy.  They responded by having her arrested.

In the summer of 1798, Nicholson stood trial for murder at the Durham City assizes.  It was hard to imagine a more open-and-shut poisoning case than this one, leaving the jury no options other than to find Mary guilty and sentence her to death.  All very neat and tidy.

All that saved Nicholson from an immediate visit to the gallows was an irregularity in the official indictment.  Mary was charged with intentionally plotting to murder not John Atkinson, but the actual victim, Elizabeth.  This clearly was not the case.  Mary may have freely confessed to poisoning the flour with the expectation that it would kill John, but her actions ended there.  Nicholson had no intention of murdering anyone else in the household, and it was Elizabeth herself who prepared and served the fatal loaf of bread.  It could be argued that Elizabeth Atkinson's death was not premeditated murder, but an appallingly unlucky accident.  In short, a strong legal argument could be made for having the indictment thrown out of court, and the guilty verdict reversed.

Nicholson had no legal representative to make this case for her.  However, her sad story had won her a lot of sympathy, and court officials felt uneasy sending this pitiful girl to her death on dodgy legal grounds.  Her case was kicked upstairs to the Common Law Courts in Westminster to see what these judges made of the matter.

It was known that it would take weeks, probably months, for this higher court to make its ruling on Mary's fate.  In the meantime, Nicholson remained in custody in Durham's prison.

Durham prison, circa 1750

Ironically enough, this turned out to be possibly the happiest time in Mary's life. Her jailer became so fond of the unfortunate girl that he eventually entrusted her with the position of unofficial housekeeper for his family.  She soon impressed the household as amiable, capable and trustworthy.  Eventually, she was given the freedom to run errands throughout the city.  Her many dealings with Durham tradesmen and shopkeepers made her a well-known and popular figure throughout the town.  Mary never made any attempts to escape, and was evidently completely willing to accept her fate--whatever it might be.  The "Caledonian Mercury" reported that she behaved with "the utmost penitence and devotion."

Mary's legal limbo lasted for a full year, until the town's Summer Assizes met again.  The final ruling on Mary's case was the first one before the presiding judge.  The justices of the Common Law Courts had made their decision: Imperfect indictment be damned, Mary was to hang at Framwellgate Moor on the following week, July 22, 1799.

Durham was horrified, and not a little surprised, by this draconian verdict.  No one who knew Mary wanted to see her die.  However, there was no arguing with this higher court: if Westminster said Nicholson must be hanged, hanged she would be, no matter what anyone had to say about the matter.

On the morning of the 22nd, a large crowd gathered around the gallows, not to gawk, or mock, as was generally the case with public executions, but to show what support they could for a young woman they believed was being unjustly put to death.  Mary made a sad, but dignified farewell to her friends.  The last rites were read, the noose put about her neck, and Nicholson was left to hang.

Then something shocking happened.  The rope around her neck suddenly snapped, leaving the still-living woman to fall to the ground.  Everyone there thought this was as clear an example of divine intervention as one could ever hope to see.  They did not want Mary hanged, and now it was looking as if God opposed her execution, as well.

After conferring with each other over this unexpected development, the authorities present decided they had no choice but to carry on with execution.  Someone was sent back to the city to get another rope.  During the hour or so of waiting for this messenger of death to return, Mary, surrounded by her weeping friends, "prayed fervently" and remained calm.  She may have thought that, after all, there were worse things than the gallows: namely, the household of John Atkinson.

The replacement rope arrived, and the macabre performance was re-enacted.  Once again, Mary took her place on the cart and the rope was replaced on her neck.  The cart was pulled out from under her, and within a few minutes, Mary Nicholson's earthly sufferings were finally at an end.   The "Ipswich Journal" reported that the prisoner was "launched into eternity amidst the shrieks and cries of the surrounding spectators."  She would be the last woman hanged in the county of Durham.

Meanwhile, the real villain of our piece, John Atkinson, was left to live out his natural life, as free as a bird to strike terror into the hearts of other servant girls.

Just another day in this strange world of ours.

Weekend Link Dump

 

Welcome to this week's Link Dump!

It's all here, in black and white.

The Great Gallaudet Library Prank.

Possible proof that we have souls.

The artist who painted nightmares.

The life of a 15th century queen.

Vikings were probably not very healthy.

The birth of the "future Young King."

The Dover Straits earthquake of 1580.

The often alien nature of Early Modern humor.

The fire at Madame Tussaud's.

The partnership between Lord Nelson and Thomas Hardy.

One of those "unsolved" murders that probably isn't all that mysterious.

Some ancient treasure that's really out-of-this-world.

That time when New Jersey was graced not just by the Jersey Devil, but a Wild Man as well!

The book written by a Carolingian duchess.

A journal covering an 18th century voyage to China.

Bristol and the Romantic Poets.

"Indecent advertisements" in public toilets.

The world's most NSFW salad.

Edith Wharton's haunted house.

An exoplanet with extremely weird weather forecasts.

A visit to a Scottish Victorian prison.

The mysterious energy of Egypt's pyramids.

That time when NASA turned detective.

A Danish Stonehenge.

A brief history of double features.

A brief history of seances.

In 1893, if you didn't have the money to bury your dead, you had a problem.  

Why we think four-leaf clovers are lucky.

Yet more evidence that we don't know jack about ancient human history.

Norse mythology is pretty freaking old.

Mice perform first aid on each other.

Three Allied airmen who survived the unpleasant experience of falling to Earth without a parachute.

A 22,000 year old handcart?

Pretty much everything you need to know about the history of European personal hygiene.

Why it's called "Latin America."

The Monster of Headingley?  Or a squirrel?

That's all for this week!  See you on Monday, when we'll look at an 18th century tragedy.  In the meantime, here's another golden oldie.  This is one of those songs that has been covered by a million different people, but I think this was the original version.

Newspaper Clipping of the Day

Via Newspapers.com

A Texan Bigfoot?  The “Abilene Reporter News,” July 7, 1977:

HAWLEY - The forest of the Northwest has its Big Foot, the Himalayas have the Abominable Snowman, and as of Wednesday, this dusty Jones County town has the Hawley Him. The Him, a shaggy 7-foot monster with long dangling arms, reportedly attacked three youths Wednesday morning at Bob Scott's ranch. The youths, Tom Roberts, 14; Larry Suggs, 15; and Renee McFarland, 15, all reported seeing the beast and even tried to down the critter with a shot from a 30-30 rifle before the apparition made good his escape in the thick brush.

The reported attack started at approximately 10 a.m. while Roberts and Suggs were clearing brush for Scott. Both the boys live at the Abilene Boys' Ranch, of which Scott is superintendent. The boys said they were taking a break when they were startled by the breaking of tree limbs and a shower of rocks. Suggs said he was hit in the leg by one of the stony missiles and showed a bruise on his right calf in support of his claim.  Roberts said his head just barely missed being beaned by one of the projectiles. 

During the attack the boys dropped their tools and ran for the safety of the nearby home of Mr. and Mrs. Ed McFarland.

"We got three good glimpses of him," Suggs said. "I call it him--whatever it was.” 

"It was kind of an ape, but still a man," he added. "He had huge arms. They hung to his knees. You'd have to see it to believe it.” 

Roberts said one of the peculiar aspects of the attack, outside the fact a monster was heaving rocks at them, was that it made no sounds "except for the brush cracking." 

After recovering from the initial attack the boys went back to their worksite along with the McFarlands' daughter, Renee, and her 30-30. 

"It's a good gun. It's got a boom like a cannon and a kick like a horse," Renee said in praise of her armament. 

While at the site a rock was thrown at the McFarlands' van and the three youths said they saw Hawley Him approximately 40 yards away in a tangle of nettles. Suggs shot at the monster, but apparently missed his mark.

"She (Renee) was going to shoot it until she saw it. Then she crammed the gun at me and said, 'You shoot it'," Suggs said. 

The recoil from the shot floored Suggs and he never got off a second round as the Him "glided" through the brush, leaving foot-long footprints in the sandy soil. 

"That stuff (the brush) is so thick you have to know where you're going and he just glided through it," Roberts said. Roberts added that just prior to the attack he noticed a rotten smell in the area.

The area the boys were working in is near the site where Scott recently lost 21 penned goats without a trace, until several goat carcasses later were found in the brush. Scott said the Jones County Sheriff's Office said coyotes got the goats, but he is not convinced coyotes are to blame since no goat was killed in the immediate area of the pen. 

Wednesday was not the first time Hawley Him has been sighted. Renee said she and two of her girlfriends saw the monster in October during a slumber party. But when she told her parents of the strange creature creeping about the house they discounted it as a "trick of the night." 

Another area resident, Mike McQuagge, said he saw the footprint the youths claimed the monster had left, but he had never seen the creature which supposedly left the track. When asked if he believed a monster was roaming Jones County, McQuagge said he rather doubted it. Whether the Hawley Him is real or just another of the Big Country's list of imaginary monsters such as the infamous Caddo Critter and the Haskell Thang, there's little chance that Suggs and Roberts will be out there clearing brush without armed lookouts.

For some time afterwards, hunters roamed the area in search of “Him,” but as far as I can tell, the smelly rock-throwing whatsit was never identified.  In November, it was reported that a “squat, shaggy creature” had been mutilating animals in Merkel, a town about 20 miles from Hawley, but that mystery seems to have gone unresolved, as well.

In Which Edgar Allan Poe Meets a Murderer

[Note: I published this story on my World of Poe blog back in 2012--13 years ago, ye gods, where does the time go?!--but I thought it had enough of a Strange Company vibe to include it here.]

In October of 1845, the corpse of a prostitute named Maria (or Mary Ann) Bickford was found in her Boston boardinghouse lodgings, her throat gruesomely slashed. Her former lover, a wealthy, married man named Albert J. Tirrell, immediately became the prime suspect. Although he made attempts to flee the country, he was soon arrested and brought back for trial. The circumstantial evidence against him seemed overwhelming, and his own personal character had long been an object of public scandal (one observer noted that he and Bickford had, between them, accounted for “a rather high percentage of moral turpitude.”) However, Tirrell had two very important factors in his favor: A high-powered defense attorney, former U. S. Senator Rufus Choate, and a public who had decided the slain “fallen woman” was a mere Jezebel who brought doom upon herself.

Choate and the rest of Tirrell’s defense team, as all good attorneys do when faced with a seemingly hopeless client, did their best to put the jury into a state of utter discombobulation. First, they argued Bickford had committed suicide, the “natural death of persons of her character.” Then, they tried insinuating someone else in the boardinghouse was the true culprit. Finally, perhaps unable to convince even themselves of those possibilities, they brought on a parade of witnesses ready to testify that Tirrell had long suffered from somnambulism. If Tirrell killed Bickford, Choate declared, it was when he was in this hypnotic-like state, and thus could not be held accountable for the tragedy.

This was good enough for the judge. His instructions to the jury stressed the victim’s dubious character, and suggested that Tirrell’s alleged sleepwalking could be seen as a form of exculpatory insanity. Tirrell was duly acquitted of murder, although he was forced to spend three years in state prison for “adultery and lascivious cohabitation.” Choate, who subsequently became understandably popular with America’s criminal classes, went on to become the Attorney General of Massachusetts, but the Tirrell trial proved to be his real legacy. After his death, he was remembered as the lawyer who “made it safe to murder."

What does this sordid little story have to do with Edgar Allan Poe, you ask?

Not long before Bickford’s bloody demise, Tirrell was in New York City, nursing dreams of glory. Although he knew nothing of the publishing business, he wished to launch a periodical of national influence, one that would transform the American literary scene. Who better to help him realize this lofty goal, Tirrell reasoned, than Edgar Allan Poe? He called on the author and offered him “exclusive editorship and control” of his planned publication.

Poe has often been unkindly stereotyped as a feckless man with no head for business and little understanding of human nature, but he clearly could read people better than your average Boston juror. He failed to share his would-be colleague’s enthusiasm.

Tirrell’s biographer depicted him as urging the poet to accept his munificent offer, pleading, “The people want knowledge; they thirst for it as the heart [sic] panteth for the water brooks.” ("He seemed to be possessed of a belief that if he brought some doubled sheets of printed paper before the people, and the ladies in particular, an illumination as wonderful as the aurora borealis would be the consequence.")

Poe, after a “cautious and analytical survey of the gentleman,” “propounded divers queries which Tirrell had not the capacity to answer.” Finally, he told his caller, “engagements compel me to decline your generous offers; I have already promised to do more than I can possibly accomplish.” Poe suggested Tirrell bring his proposals to a Silas Estabrook, “a compositor of my acquaintance whose talents are so nearly like your own that he would prove the very person you are seeking.”

Unfortunately, Poe was right in his estimation of Estabrook’s compatibility with Tirrell. The two subsequently collaborated on “The Unexpected Letter: A Truthful Journal of News and Miscellany,” which proved an immediate disaster. The enormous, wildly ambitious initial costs of the venture, coupled with Tirrell’s chronic "rattle-headedness," sank the publication before it even began. (Estabrook, who saw himself as the dupe of his unconventional business partner, found consolation by publishing a tell-all booklet about Tirrell's crimes that included the anecdote above.) Tirrell and Poe apparently never met again while achieving, in their very different ways, memorable places in history.

Researcher Harry Koopman wrote, “[Tirrell’s] offer may be regarded as a tribute to Poe’s prominence in the literary world.” The encounter can also be regarded as even more eloquent tribute to Poe’s underrated prominence as an escape artist.

Weekend Link Dump

 

Welcome to the latest Link Dump!

Our host for this Friday's festivities is the one-and-only BABY.

Watch out for the Gown Man!

Two violent and puzzling deaths.

You know, "radioactive anomaly" are two words you'd rather not see together.

Ancient diet tips.

A widower's mourning gets...complicated.

The saloon cat and Theodore Roosevelt.

The CIA's psychic army.

There's a lot of ancient writing out there that has never been deciphered.

The Cat Lady of Spitalfields.

The queen who was the "King of Kings."

Two very different vessels collide at sea.

The Victorian "cat's meat men."

That time when Cleveland had a spot of bother with giant balloons.

How to eat like an ancient Egyptian.

A tribute to a very good dog.

D-Day's first American cemetery.

A Grand Duke's love at first sight.

If you've been longing to know what Egyptian mummies smell like, read on.

When "turtle feasts" were all the rage.

Some mysterious caves in the Amazon.

A scientist's mysterious death.

A German castle in Namibia.

A brief history of the Port of London.

The unmarked grave of a Revolutionary War spy.

The mysterious "Levantine Stonehenge."

A royal tomb has been discovered in Egypt.

The papers of an Indian civil servant.

Edward V's almost-parliament.

Remembering the Kentucky Meat Shower.

A beautiful little village where there are more cats than people.  I'm sold.

A hotel haunted by a "lady in blue."

Mourning jewelry that's "somber and sensible."

A "prodigal son" story that did not have a happy ending.

A policeman's murder of a teenage girl.

That's a wrap for this week!  See you on Monday, when we'll look at the meeting between Edgar Allan Poe and a notorious murderer.  In the meantime, here's a glorious blast from the pop music past.

Newspaper Clipping of the Day

Via Newspapers.com

A brief news item, but the headline was not to be resisted.  The “South Wales Argus,” June 14, 1950:

Bracquegnies, Belgium--A Belgian woman, on honeymoon here, said to-day that a ghost with a hair-do like Mistinguette, had torn her nightdress.

“It had a saucer eyes, a hooked nose, and a crooked chin,” said 20-year-old Madame Marie de Roeck-Bonvarlet.

Her husband, 22-year-old miner Hector de Roeck-Bonvarlet, added:  “I am going scatty.  I live in a constant sweat and change my pyjamas three times a night.”

The couple are not the only ones to have seen the ghost.

The village priest spent a night in the haunted house trying to solve the mystery, and said afterwards: "I was scratched by an invisible hand."

Monsieur Duret, Burgomaster of this town, is organizing ghost-hunts assisted by most of the 9,000 population.

Hector said the ghost walks from just after midnight until 4 a.m. It starts by grabbing people by the throat and kicking their bodies as they lie in bed. Tonight the young couple will go to bed with doors and windows barred while villagers mount guard outside.

This sounded like it had the potential to be a first-rate haunting, but, alas, the story seems to have quickly disappeared from my available newspapers.