In Which Senator Sharon Makes Some Poor Romantic Decisions

Sarah Althea Hill

That old, old story:  “Boy meets girl, boy loves girl, boy dumps girl.”  Whenever I encounter it, I usually shrug and move on.  However, present me with a sequel that says, “Girl takes boy to court, practices voodoo curses, with everything ending in a shootout,” and I start to take an interest in the situation.

During the 1860s, William Sharon was lucky enough to make a tidy fortune from Virginia City, Nevada, silver mines, wealth that he augmented through shrewd investments in California and Nevada railroads and real estate.  Before too many years had passed, Sharon was a multimillionaire.  In 1875, he was elected to the U.S. Senate.  On a darker note, in that same year, Sharon’s business partner William C. Ralston was found floating in the bay off the coast of San Francisco.  Ralston had recently suffered catastrophic business losses, which led his death to be ruled a suicide.

Soon after this tragedy, Sharon moved to San Francisco, taking a suite in the Palace Hotel which he had co-owned with Ralston.  By this point, Sharon felt he had enough money to ignore business and devote himself to pleasure.  The personable widower became one of the city’s most notorious womanizers and general men-about-town.

William Sharon

At some point in his social whirl, Sharon met Sarah Althea Hill, a beautiful Southern socialite.  Although she had inherited a handsome fortune from her rich father, it did not take her long to squander it on San Francisco’s many opportunities to enjoy the high life.  When a pretty, pleasure-loving woman in need of cash meets an older, stinking rich man with an eye for the ladies, it is not hard to guess what usually happens next.  Sarah soon became Senator Sharon’s maîtresse-en-titre.  Sarah was gifted with luxurious clothes, exquisite jewelry, and access to the most elite circles in California.  Sharon often introduced her to acquaintances as “my little wife.”

This last habit of Sharon’s was to get him into a good deal of trouble.  After three years together, Sarah found out that Sharon was cheating on her, and indignantly filed for divorce.  How could she do that if they were not married, you ask?  It’s simple:  Sarah presented the court with a handwritten marriage contract, dated August 25, 1880, that she claimed Sharon had dictated to her.  Although the bulk of the document was in her handwriting, Sharon’s signature was at the bottom.  She also produced a number of letters Sharon had written to her where he addressed her as “My Dear Wife.”  Sharon countered with the claim that the letters and his signature on the marriage contract were all forgeries, and the lawyers were off to the races.

The “Sharon v. Hill” trial opened in 1884.  Sordid brawls between wealthy and glamorous elites are always catnip for the public, and the newspapers had an excellent time giving readers every embarrassing detail about the legal battles between the former lovers.  The courtroom arguments went on for years.  Sharon’s lawyers declared that not only had Sarah forged all the relevant papers, but her whole story about their irregular “marriage” was a giant fantasy.  Unfortunately for the Senator, Sarah was able to present a parade of witnesses testifying that on numerous occasions, he had referred to her as “Mrs. Sharon.”

Despite the fact that Sarah had a plausible case, she had a hard time finding lawyers willing to fight a wealthy and influential man.  Enter David S. Terry, an attorney bold--or, perhaps, insane--enough to do just that.

David Terry

Terry, a former justice of the California Supreme Court, was, to put it most politely, not a man who feared trouble.  In 1856, he stabbed a member of a vigilante group.  Even more notoriously, in 1859 he fought a duel with California Senator David Broderick over the issue of slavery.  Terry had wanted the state’s Southern Democrats to be allowed to own slaves, while Broderick advocated for California to remain antislavery.  The two men were so bitterly opposed on the issue that they finally resorted to pistols at dawn.  The duel left Broderick fatally wounded.  Many believed that his pistol had been secretly disabled in order for Terry to win an unfair fight.  Ironically for Terry and his pro-slavery allies, the public wrath over the allegedly rigged duel did much to ensure that California remained a free state.

Terry won the case for Sarah.  Although their relations had started as strictly attorney/client, by the time the trial was over, the pair had fallen in love.  In the meantime, Sharon--who had announced that he would sooner throw everything he had into San Francisco Bay than give another nickel of it to Sarah--prepared to contest the court’s decision.

As a side note, when I was reading about this case, you can imagine how delighted I was to encounter the name of my old pal Mary Ellen Pleasant, a woman who clearly attracted dysfunctional relationships the way a magnet attracts iron filings.  Sarah and Mary Ellen were long-time friends.  Pleasant bankrolled Sarah's lawsuit, and appeared in court with her nearly every day.  The newspapers enjoyed spreading assertions that San Francisco’s notorious “Voodoo Queen” had also been providing more unorthodox legal assistance in the form of various unpleasant-sounding spells and rituals.  Sarah denied most of the more lurid details, but she did finally have to admit to bribing a gravedigger to bury a pair of Sharon’s socks in a freshly-dug grave.  Apparently, once the socks rotted, the Senator would die.  Everyone laughed at this story…until Sharon suddenly and unexpectedly dropped dead not long afterwards.  

So.

Sarah and Terry married just weeks after Sharon was socked, so to speak.  Meanwhile, the late Senator’s appeal of the case carried on.  Justice Stephen Johnson Fields of San Francisco’s U.S. Circuit Court eventually overturned the lower courts’ ruling.  Fields, blithely ignoring the fact that several handwriting experts had testified that Sharon’s signature on the “marriage contract” was genuine, took it upon himself to declare that it was a forgery.  After Sharon had died, Sarah had produced a will she claimed he had written, in which he left everything to her.  Not surprisingly, Fields said that was fraudulent, as well.

Sarah did not take the ruling well.  When Fields’ verdict was read in the courthouse, she stood up, yelled some very unladylike epithets at the judge, and wailed that Fields had been bribed by Sharon’s son.  She opened her purse, and reached for the revolver she always carried with her.  When security guards began hustling the outraged woman from the room, Terry pulled out a knife and ordered the guards to release his wife.  He hit one of them, knocking out a tooth.  This bit of misplaced gallantry got Terry arrested and imprisoned for six months.  Sarah got thirty days for contempt of court.  Later, the pair’s courtroom antics also caused them to be indicted by a federal grand jury.  The California Supreme Court upheld Fields’ verdict, also stating that Sarah and Sharon had never been legally married.

After their release from prison, Mr. and Mrs. Terry retreated to their Fresno ranch in apparent defeat.  However, the tragedies were just getting started.  On the morning of August 14, 1889, the couple boarded a train in Fresno.  Through a stroke of appallingly bad luck, Justice Fields happened to be on that same train, accompanied by Marshal David Neagle, whom the court had appointed as Fields’ bodyguard.  At 7 am, the train paused in Lathrop, and the passengers disembarked to eat breakfast at the railroad station’s dining room.

When Sarah and her husband entered the dining room, they immediately spotted Fields.  Sarah dashed back to the train, apparently to get her trusty revolver.  Meanwhile, Terry menacingly approached Fields from behind, raising his hand to slap the justice.  Neagle stood up and yelled, “Stop that!  I am an officer!”  Neagle then drew his gun and shot Terry through the heart.  He died almost instantly.

Neagle was arrested at the scene, but was soon released thanks to a writ of habeas corpus.  The courts eventually ruled his actions had been within the scope of his authority as a Marshal.

After Terry’s shocking death, Sarah--who does not seem to have been the most stable personality even at the best of times--went completely to pieces.  She became obsessed with hiring mediums in an effort to contact her dead husband.  She took to aimlessly wandering the San Francisco streets, convinced that she was being hypnotically attacked.  There were periods when she would physically assault anyone within range.  Finally, Mary Ellen Pleasant--one of the very few people who had stuck by Sarah--felt she had no choice but to have her friend committed.  After a brief hearing in front of the Insanity Commission, where she was diagnosed with “dementia praecox” (what we now call “schizophrenia,”) 41-year-old Sarah was committed to the Stockton State Hospital on March 11, 1892.  It would be her home for the rest of her long life.

During her first few years in the institution, Sarah was often so violent that she had to be restrained, but she eventually settled down, buoyed by the delusion that the hospital was her grand mansion, and the staff and other patients were her servants.  She died of pneumonia at the age of 86, on February 14, 1937.  Compared to Sarah’s fate, the two men in her life got off pretty easily.

Weekend Link Dump

 

Welcome to this week's Link Dump!

Just watch out for Strange Company HQ's resident flirt.

How the California Gold Rush birthed the modern world.

The sound of King Tut's trumpets.

I suppose the moral here is, if you're going to commit murder, make sure that the victim is someone nobody will mourn.

"Enigmatic tablets" from the Bronze Age.

How a kitten joined an Ohio construction crew.

19th century Yankee adventurers in the Pacific.

The shame of beardlessness.

Cyborg cockroaches.  With syringes!

Those wicked Amazonian dolphins.

The complexities of ancient cave art.

The women of the Crusades.

The execution of an alchemist.

D-Day in contemporary newspapers.

The latest in the search for Noah's Ark.

The Vegetable Marrow Riots.

One man's obsession with a jar of spicy mustard.

The queen who used King Arthur as a marketing tool.

The disappearances of two elderly women.

Letters from medieval students who could use a little cash.

The "desire paths" of the East End.

Pro tip: Never take a cookie from a scientist.

Medieval animals on trial.

The haunted Cariboo Trail.

A 1900 visit to London's dog cemetery.

An ancient cave sanctuary and "the Lady."

18th century Jesuits meet Chilean UFOs.

That's all for this week!  See you on Monday, when we'll look at a very bad romantic breakup.  "Bad" as in "lawsuits, voodoo curses, and shootings."  In the meantime, speaking of breakups...

Newspaper Clipping of the Day

Via Newspapers.com

The following story goes in that bulging file known as “restless ghosts of murder victims.”  The “Ithaca Journal,” August 12, 1922:

Painesville, Ohio, Aug. 12--A "ghost" which farmers living near Paines Hollow say has been haunting them for seven years, is "at rest" today. It disappeared several days ago with the burial of the body of Henry Lipenstick, found in an abandoned well on a farm. Lipenstick, a farm hand, disappeared seven years ago. Since then the farm is said to have had poor crops.

A farm house burned down and the "ghost" was blamed for that. Owner after owner has come and gone. Carl Logies purchased the farm about a year ago. Whenever he went to his barn at night, Logies said today, he would see "a white wraithlike figure" walking about. At times he declared, he followed it with his gun in hand and it always disappeared in the direction of the well. Determined to find out what caused the apparition, Logies cleaned out the old well, which had been filled with stones.

He came upon the body of Lipenstick. Sheriff Spink was called and he and his deputies suspected murder. The next day the sheriff ordered the body buried and now the "ghost"' is gone. Frank Loerman, who owned the farm at the time Lipenstick disappeared, is in Lake County Jail. He was bound over to the grand jury on charges of murder.

The actual evidence against Loerman (his name was most often given as “Lerman” in contemporary accounts) proved to be virtually nonexistent, and he was soon freed.  Lipenstick’s murder was never solved, but the ghost apparently vanished for good.  Perhaps just seeing the body given a decent burial was enough to satisfy his spirit.

The Welsh Servant

The 1883 book “Shropshire Folk-lore: A Sheaf of Gleanings” included a story about what we today would call a “poltergeist” which appeared to center around an enigmatic farm servant.  While the tale purports to be true, at this distance of time it is impossible to say how much of it is fact, and how much is legend.  Still, it’s such a quaintly charming little curiosity that I wanted to bring it under the Strange Company tent.

It is perhaps a hundred years or more since a certain Mr. Nichols lived at Yockleton Park, some miles west of Shrewsbury, farming his land and bringing up a large family of sons and daughters. One summer he engaged a Welshman to help in the harvest, and as he proved industrious and a good workman, he was allowed by his own wish to stay on through the winter, till the usual West Shropshire “changing time,” in May. He was lodged and boarded in the house, of course. “The men”—i.e. the unmarried farm-labourers—were an important part of every homely country household in those days. Well, time went on; the Welshman continued to give satisfaction, and nothing unusual occurred during his stay, till one night during “the Christmas,” the whole family were suddenly aroused just after midnight by an extraordinary noise downstairs, something like heavy chains being dragged about, clanking and rumbling. Hours were early in those days, every one had long been in bed, and they were perplexed and frightened. The farmer’s sons got up and called the men, and all went down in a body to see what was the matter. Everything was perfectly quiet; the furniture was all in its place, no one was about, nothing was to be seen or heard. Then the Welshman proposed to go out-of-doors; but his masters, unnerved by finding it impossible to account for the mysterious noise, refused to allow the door to be opened. Still the man persisted. “I must go out,” he said, “I cannot rest in!” He urged his request with so much earnestness and anxiety, that at last, impressed by his excited manner, they opened the door. Out went the man at once into the black darkness, all alone. The door was shut and barred behind him—the awe-stricken watchers waited and listened — 

He never came back!

What became of him no one ever knew; his wages lay unclaimed in his master’s hands, put carefully aside in readiness for his return: but alive or dead, the Welsh servant was never seen nor heard of more, 

This story was long afterwards related by one of the daughters of the house to her grand-daughter, now an old lady, from whom we have it. She gave it as a narrative of facts, believed in the family to be perfectly true, with no hint of any supernatural character attaching to the Welsh servant; yet I cannot but regard him as a modern rationalized version of the trusty “drudging goblin,” who takes service with an earthly master, and generally vanishes mysteriously at last.

Weekend Link Dump

 

Welcome to the Link Dump, where this week, our Strange Company HQ staffers give a shout-out to Clarence, Iowa!

Well, why not.  I'm sure it's a charming place.

Where the hell is the Pedro Mountain Mummy?

The tomb of King Midas' father.

Graham Greene in Mexico.

A look at supernatural smells.

A German liner goes to war.

A woman accused of murdering her sister.

A mysterious object named Phoebe is zipping around the galaxy.

A reminder that it's really not a good idea to steal cursed rocks.

An appreciation of Washington Irving.

The enigma of the Tartaria Empire.

A visit to Volvo Island.

Two aristocratic New York cats.

A successful 18th century silk designer.

The strange case of the Burning Boarder.

A 3,000 year old gold ceremonial headdress.

A history of the UK's "marriage franchise."

The Canadian town with a gopher museum.

The "hard and sorrowful" job of photographing the dead.

Some newly discovered ancient standing stones.

The medieval version of Artificial Intelligence.

America's deadliest maritime disaster.

Leopold II, the King of Terror.

The homes that inspired "Rebecca."

The latest news from Gobekli Tepe.

Some decisive medieval battles.

The most remote spot on Earth is--not really surprisingly--a rather odd place.

WWII's worst civilian air disaster.

A technological revolution from 146,000 years ago.

Rewriting history in the Amazon.

A teenager who was a spy during the American Revolution.

A brief history of the smorgasbord.

Someone finally figured out what the Civil War needed:  More cats.

That's all for this week!  See you on Monday, when we'll look at a very strange servant.  In the meantime, wind your way down to Baker Street.

Newspaper Clipping of the Day

Via Newspapers.com

On this blog, I’ve covered what many Fortean experts like to call “Anomalous Falls From the Sky,” but this is a new one for me.  Lousy actors and criminals in the stocks used to get pelted with tomatoes, but it’s a bit unusual for modern-day suburbanites to get such treatment.  The following is from a syndicated 1998 Dave Barry column which summarizes the incident.  Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to find the original story, which appeared in the “Calvert County Recorder” on August 27, 1997.

This article states that on Aug. 25, Gloria Daniels, 68, of Lusby, Md., was working in her garden with a young neighbor boy when she was hit by a falling tomato. Then the boy was hit by a tomato. Then tomatoes--more than 30 of them--began raining down all over her yard.

Friends, neighbors and the media were called in to investigate, but nobody could figure out where the tomatoes--which appeared to be falling straight down out of the sky--were coming from. Rob Terry, the reporter who wrote the story for The Recorder, states that, while on the scene, he personally was struck by a tomato, and although he quickly investigated, he could find no evidence that it was hurled by pranksters. 

I called Gloria Daniels recently and asked her if anybody had come up with an explanation for the falling tomatoes, and she said nobody had. 

"It's a mystery," she said. 

I asked her if she had been in touch with anybody at "The X-Files," and she said she'd never heard of it.

The Mystery of "Mary Anderson"

"Kitsap Sun," February 18, 1997, via Newspapers.com

Every suicide is a tragedy, of course.  However, among the most poignant ones are where the person remains unidentified.  Did they leave behind loved ones who suffered the agony of never knowing what happened to them?  Or--possibly even sadder--did this person have no one in the world who cared if they lived or died?  The following case could fall into either category.

On October 9, 1996, a neatly-dressed, well-groomed woman took a cab to the posh Hotel Vintage Park in Seattle, Washington.  She had phoned earlier in the day to reserve a room.  She paid $350 in cash for a two-night stay, and signed the register, “Mary A. Anderson.”

Her stay in Room 214 was eerily quiet.  She made no phone calls, ordered nothing from room service.  She merely put out a “Do Not Disturb” sign, and made her very private plans.  At some point, the woman reapplied her lipstick, tidied her hair, wrote a brief note on hotel stationary, took up a Bible, and in a glass, mixed together Metamucil, water, and cyanide.  She drank the liquid down, and lay down on the bed to die.  She obviously researched her method of death very carefully.  Although cyanide on its own is a very nasty way to go, mixed with Metamucil, potassium cyanide turns into hydrogen cyanide, which ensures an equally quick, but fairly painless end.

When the guest in Room 214 failed to check out by noon on October 11th, the front-desk manager sent the bellman to speak to her.  There was no answer to his knock on the door, and a deadbolt prevented him from entering the room.  A passkey was used to open the door.  When they finally were able to enter the room, they found “Mary Anderson” lying on her back on her bed, with the Bible clasped to her chest, open to the 23rd Psalm.  At first glance, she appeared to be sleeping peacefully, but a quick check of her pulse confirmed that she was very dead.  The note she had written was on the desk.  It read, “To whom it may concern:  I have decided to end my life and no one is responsible for my death.”  She added, “I have no relatives.  You can use my body as you choose.”

At first, police felt they had little to investigate.  The room was in perfect order.  The dead woman’s expensive clothes were hanging neatly in the closet.  Her purse contained $36.78 in cash, but no ID, credit cards, or anything else to identify her.  There were no signs of foul play.  A remarkable number of people choose to commit suicide in hotel rooms--if you live alone, it’s a way of insuring that your body is quickly found--and this seemed to be just another in that grim list.  Sad, but hardly unusual.

Then things began to get weird.  The New York address she gave the hotel did not exist.  Neither did the phone number.  Later analysis of her signature on the hotel register found signs of hesitation which strongly suggested that “Mary Anderson” was a name she made up on the spot.  Investigators ran her fingerprints through the FBI’s identification system.  They checked missing-person records in the U.S. and Canada.  They checked with Interpol.  They checked with manufacturers of cyanide.  They spread the story to the media, hoping that someone would come forward to identify her.  And they wound up with absolutely nothing.  In short, the dead woman wanted to ensure that she could not be identified, and she did a damned good job of it.  

This unusual suicide gave investigators a few clues into her personality: she was clearly an intelligent and meticulous woman.  She appeared to have been prosperous.  Her ability to procure cyanide--not something you can just pick up at a local drugstore--and her expertise about mixing it with Metamucil suggested she might have had a background in the mining or chemical industries.  Her ability to erase any clues to her identity made some wonder if she had been connected to intelligence services.

The dead woman’s body provided a bit more information about her.  She had a copper IUD in her uterus, but the serial number on the device was too worn away to allow it to be traced.  At some point, she had cosmetic surgery done on her breasts.  She was 5’8” and weighed 240 pounds.  She had short auburn hair and brown eyes.  Her age was estimated at between 35 and 45.  She had never given birth.  She had been in good health.  Her plucked eyebrows, expensive Estee Lauder makeup, perfect teeth, and manicured nails suggested that she had been in the habit of taking care of herself.  Many years later, DNA testing determined that “Mary” likely had genealogical roots in Eastern Iran or Afghanistan, with Persian heritage.  Unfortunately, none of this explained who she was, and why she had taken her own life in such a mysterious manner.  M. Arly of the King County Medical Examiner’s Office sighed, "She did one of the most thorough jobs of obliterating her ID that I have ever seen in my career.  She could have taught the FBI tricks."  Arly’s comments highlight the question that has kept this case alive:  Why was this woman so determined not to be identified?

To date, all efforts to discover the true name of “Mary Anderson” have continued to hit a brick wall.  The county paid $479 for her “Jane Doe” burial in Crown Hill Cemetery, where she rests in the anonymity she so obviously craved.  One almost wants to congratulate her for outwitting us all.