Newspaper Clipping of the Day

Via Newspapers.com

On this blog, we’ve met mysterious Women in Black.  Not to mention the occasional Women in White.  So, who’s up for making the acquaintance of a Welsh Woman in Yellow?  The “Bradford Weekly Telegraph,” February 18, 1905:

A silent woman, shimmering in a bright yellow light, with gleaming eyes and up-lifted knife, is the latest ghostly form to be reported from South Wales. She has taken up her abode in a large building at Rhymney, now used as a Salvation Army barracks. The silent apparition, it is claimed, had been seen by many members of the corps, and, at the request of the Salvationists the local Wesleyan minister remained in the building through Friday night in order to investigate.

He was accompanied by two or three friends and a lady, the Salvationist Army lieutenant, and other Salvationists. The minister certainly did not see anything like what some of the others aver they saw, but he did see in the passage a body of very bright light moving to and fro. The party hoard many things during the night, such as the noisy walking and of a lady's dress rustling. 

“About half-past three," continued the minister, in describing his experiences, "my attention was called by one of the members of the Army to a face in the broken pane of the pantry window. I could not see the form of a face, but I saw something like a body of light.

“The lieutenant declared about that time that she saw apparition in the form of a woman dressed in yellow standing by my side, with a terrible look in its eyes and a knife in its band. I did not see  my undesirable companion. The Salvationist shouted out, ‘Oh, look at the knife!' and then fainted. 

“Coming to herself again, she appeared to follow the apparition with her eyes until they rested on the doorway, then she made a dash towards it, and was prevented by force from descending the cellar. 

“It occurs to me from what I saw,” adds the minister, that some enemy is using undue influence upon the Salvationists,such as hypnotism.  If it were not so, then it must be the hand of God revealing past events to the Salvationists, as well as to the world." 

In a conversation, the lieutenant informed the minister that she had been supernaturally informed that events had taken place in the house years ago, and that they would shortly be revealed to her and another lady Salvationist. The rev. gentleman has advised the Salvationists to close up the building for the present, and suggests that an exhaustive search should be made.

After a number of other sightings of the knife-wielding yellow lady, the Salvationists decided that they wished to gather someplace where life was less exciting, and cleared out of the barracks.  After that, as far as I know, the story disappeared from the newspapers.

The Case of the Parlous Parlor

"Owensboro Messenger," January 29, 1911, via Newspapers.com

Early in 1910, American newspapers breathlessly carried the story of what appeared to be a particularly shocking double homicide.  This account comes from the "Republican News Item" for January 6:

The mystery of the death of Miss Grace Elosser, of Cumberland, Md., and Charles E. Twigg, of Keyser, W. Va. her fiance, appears as deep as it did shortly after the bodies of the couple were found on the settee in the parlor of the Elosser residence on Saturday, when the mother of the dead girl went in to speak to her.

Twigg and Miss Elosser were to have been married Sunday night. It is suspected that a jealous woman rival was the poisoner, carrying out her plot in a most crafty way.

The mystery begun with the discovery on Saturday afternoon of the pretty girl and her fiance sitting together, hand in hand, on a sofa in the parlor of their home—both dead.

So swift, so instantaneous had been the action of the poison upon them that they sat as if in life.

The girl's mother went into the room, wondering only at the very long silence that she had noted between the couple. She saw her daughter and the young man sitting in apparently the most natural fashion. They were holding hands and looking into each other's eyes.

Then the mother suddenly gasped and stepped back. There was something uncanny, she saw, in the intentness of the gaze the young man and woman had fixed upon each other. There was that which gave a silent, vague alarm in the fixedness of their pose. She spoke to them. They did not answer. She went over to them. She spoke again and received no reply.  Then she put a hand on her daughter's head and spoke again.

"Grace —Grace," she said. And there was still no reply, so she gently shook her daughter by the shoulder. The mother screamed then and ran from the room. The girl's head had lolled to a side and the other woman had seen that the girl's jaw was dropped and her eyes fixed in the piteous gaping of death.

Then when others came it was found that the man, too, was dead; that both had been suddenly and absolutely stricken. The deadliest of poisons had been the medium.

This was established by the autopsy of the coroner's physician, Dr. Thomas W. Koon. They had both taken cyanide of potassium. The man had more of the poison in his system than the girl.  In the holiday season there had been several boxes of candy in the house.  But the medical examination showed conclusively that neither Miss Elosser or her fiance had eaten candy.  He had, however, in his mouth a stick of chewing gum. He had taken scarcely more than two or three bites on it. It had not been masticated into a pulp. In Miss Elosser's mouth was no chewing gum.

The strange likelihood is being considered by the authorities that the stick of chewing gum contained the deadly cyanide. Also that the young man, with the gum in his mouth, had leaned forward to kiss his sweetheart and that the kiss communicated the poison to her lips--a kiss offered in love that was deadly—the kiss of whose tragic character the ardent bestower was in all ignorance.

This is the only evidence that the authorities have so far secured to aid them in the way of solving the amazing mystery.  It has been by no means proven that the chewing gum contained the deadly poison. But it seems to be the only possible source from which the young man and his sweetheart could have taken into their systems the deadly chemical. The candy that was in the Elosser home had been partaken of by all the members of the family without ill effect. Moreover, chemical analysis showed all this confectionery to be harmless.

The tips of the tongues of both Twigg and the girl who was to have been his bride were red and inflamed, quite as if they had been burned or bitten. Cyanide, of course, takes immediate action. The mere touching of a grain of it to the tip of the tongue will cause death instantly.

The newspapers did a great deal of speculating about the tragedy.  Twigg had initially courted the dead woman's sister May before transferring his affections to Grace.  A third sister admitted that May had been "terribly broken up" about losing Charles--so much so that she stopped speaking to Grace.  Could the "scorned woman" have taken this rejection so hard that she poisoned, not just her ex-flame, but her own sister?  The first doctor at the scene of the deaths testified that he also found May Elosser unconscious with "decided symptoms of cyanide poisoning."  It took him fifteen minutes of work to revive her.  Was this evidence that she had planned the deaths of all three members of this love triangle?

Or could Charles Twigg, for some as-yet-unknown reason, have poisoned himself and the woman he was about to marry? Or was it a double suicide?

The police finally decided that there was not enough evidence to arrest anyone.  At the inquest, May admitted that she had been jealous of her sister, but vehemently denied that she could even consider murdering her.  There was no evidence of her buying poison.  The coroner's jury returned a verdict that the couple had died from cyanide poisoning, but they could not say how it had been administered.  This ambiguous verdict meant that May Elosser--the only known person with any conceivable motive to kill the pair--was left with a grim cloud of suspicion over her head.  It was looking like she would have to live with it for the rest of her life.

It was a local physician, a Dr. Littlefield, who finally provided a resolution to the case.  He had closely examined the parlor where Twigg and Elosser died.  He noted that there was a small crack in the glass of a gas stove in the room.  He also saw that when all the doors and windows were closed--as they had been when couple died—the parlor had very little air circulation.  He theorized that the couple had died of carbon monoxide poisoning, and he decided to try an experiment.  He placed a cat in the parlor, made sure all the doors and windows were shut, and left the animal there overnight.

By the time he returned the next morning, the cat was dead.  An autopsy found that an accumulation of leaking gas had killed it.  A second cat was left in the room overnight.  This cat also died.  Littlefield pointed out that certain foods create hydrocyanic acid in the stomach, meaning that the traces of "poison" found in Twigg and Elosser's system could have come from natural causes.  The couple's bodies were exhumed, and the subsequent autopsy established that they had indeed died from carbon monoxide, the result of the flue of the parlor stove being choked with an over-accumulation of soot.  He felt that he had proved their deaths were simply a catastrophic accident.

Many townspeople, still stubbornly convinced of May Elosser's guilt, refused to accept that the tragedy could have such a prosaic explanation.  However, in 1913, two women living in the Elosser home were found unconscious from carbon monoxide poisoning in that same parlor.  Fortunately, they were found in time to revive them.  Examination showed that they too had allowed the flue to become choked with soot.

It looked like Littlefield had been vindicated--no one had been murdered, after all.

Except those poor cats, of course.

Weekend Link Dump

 

Welcome to this week's Link Dump!

Oh, God, the Strange Company staffers are bar-hopping again.

A case of avenged honor.

The most famous dog of the Middle Ages.

The legend of King Arthur in Greenland.

A Welsh village that became a casualty of WWII.

The rise and fall of masquerade balls.

In which science proves that stolen french fries taste better.

Two newly-discovered sermons by St. Augustine.

Ireland's "famine roads."

London's execution broadsides.

The social life of ancient Roman...latrines.

That time when Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope, and John Gay were roomies.

The enigma of Vermeer.

A ditch full of ancient headless human skeletons have been discovered, and archaeologists haven't a clue.

A lost WWI battalion.

A tale of a 19th century deathbed.

How America's 150th birthday party went sideways.

The mystery of the origins of language.

The folklore of "corpse roads."

Celebrating the 100th birthday of Route 66.

The Mob's arrival in Hollywood.

The stories behind two coffins.

HMS Dolphin captures a slave ship.

That's all for this week!  See you on Monday, when we'll look at a murder case...that wasn't.  In the meantime, here's one of those pop songs where the original version is less well known than the covers.

Newspaper Clipping of the Day

Via Newspapers.com

It’s time for some Mystery Blood!  The “Sacramento Bee,” August 16, 1870:

At the Juapa, at the residence of Mr. John Baldwin, one of those phenomena occurred for which it is so difficult to account. On the 15th instant, a shower of blood fell at the dwelling of Mr. B., spattering the doorstep and the surrounding grounds. There had been only an instant before a perfect calm, without a cloud in the horizon, when suddenly a whirlwind arose, scattering everything in all directions, and leaving as the result, large clots of blood in the immediate vicinity of the house. The question arises, where did this blood come from. The circumstances are altogether different from that which occurred a few months ago at Los Nietos, where it was finally agreed that it was made by vultures who had been preying upon dead carcasses upon the plains, and from the ratification of the air, in passing over that place, gave up their gorged repast.

The First Mrs. Bennett

William Bell Scott, Woman Startled by the Ghost of a Girl by a Mirror

Second marriages can be awkward, especially when the ex-spouse has issues with their former partner entering into a new union.  If said ex-spouse happens to be dead, you know your domestic life has well and truly entered Strange Company territory.

In her 1974 book “Haunted East Anglia,” Joan Forman described an unsettling episode in the life of an acquaintance of hers to whom she gave the pseudonym “Mrs. June Bennett.”  At the time our story opens, June had recently married a widower, after which the couple settled into the Wroxam home Mr. Bennett had shared with his first wife.  The late Mrs. Bennett had greatly loved the home and had been very possessive of it--as it happened, she had even died there.  June knew of all this, but felt no superstitious unease at becoming the house’s new mistress.

However, as soon as June took up residence, she noticed odd things going on around her.  She would hear phantom footsteps walking up and down the stairs, and she began noticing strange odors in some of the rooms.  The smells were like nothing she had ever noticed before--she could only describe them to Forman as “like incense, and yet unlike.”

The Bennetts employed a cleaning woman, who had also worked for the first Mrs. B.  She too heard the mysterious footsteps and smelled the strange odors.  However, what really frightened her was that she began hearing an invisible figure calling her name.  It was the voice of the first Mrs. Bennett.  The woman was so unnerved by this that she visited the grave of her late employer and begged to be left alone.  Unfortunately, this had no effect.  Oddly, Mr. Bennett heard and saw nothing unusual.

As unpleasant as all this was, June did not start to become seriously alarmed until she had been living in the house for about a year.  The Bennetts had just arrived back home from a holiday, when June heard both doorbells ring simultaneously.  By this point, she was not particularly surprised to find no one at either door.  A few nights later, June woke up to feel some substance clinging to her face.  She tried brushing it off, to no avail.  She told Forman “It was unlike material, but resembled cobwebs, and was certainly sticky.”  June got up to get something to drink, and by the time she went back to bed, the strange sensation had gone.

The most frightening incident of all came a short time later.  June was putting on makeup in front of the mirror on her dressing table.  Then, the mirror began to mist over.  When she tried to wipe it clean, she saw a reflection of a woman…that was not her.  It was the face of a stranger.  When she later described the woman to her husband, he said it must have been the face of his first wife.  June never used that mirror again.  Soon after this incident, she persuaded her husband to sell the home, and they moved to Norwich.  The home’s new owners reported no unusual occurrences, which seems logical.  The late Mrs. Bennett had no reason to feel jealous of them.

Even after moving away, June was not completely free of her predecessor.  One room in the new house contained furniture that had belonged to the first Mrs. Bennett.  The new cleaner who worked for June told her that this room often smelled strangely:  “Not quite like baking bread, but very near it.”

Pro tip:  If you plan to marry a widow/widower, always clear things with the ghost of the previous spouse first.  It could prevent a lot of uncomfortable situations.

Weekend Link Dump

 

Welcome to this week's Link Dump, where the Strange Company staff is off on an early summer road trip!

Daniel Webster prosecutes an "extraordinary case."

Is there a planet hidden behind Neptune?

A woman's unsolved disappearance.

A medieval domestic violence case.

"London characters" of the early 20th century.

Exploring some fairy caves.

The actor and the crisis apparition.

A bride returns from the grave.

The earliest known domesticated dogs.

Percy Fawcett and the "lost city of Z."

The landscapes of John Constable.

Why we toss coins in fountains.

The busboy who witnessed RFK's assassination.

Bees are mighty darn smart.

A very ancient whale graveyard.

The efforts to reconcile Britain and the American colonies.

A mysterious castle in Wyoming.

Some facts about the Black Death.

The "strangers burial ground."

Ancient humans may have used fire a lot earlier than we thought.

Instructions for medieval monks.

The "Wizard of Oz" curse.

A "most hateful decision" during WWII.

The many alter egos of Benjamin Franklin.

A "coal cracker" makes good.

A Galileo forgery.

A betting tip from the past.

A terrifying UFO in Costa Rica.

Some medieval warrior women.

That's it for this week!  See you on Monday, when we'll look at a dead wife stirring up trouble.  In the meantime, here's Merle.

Newspaper Clipping of the Day

Via Newspapers.com

This tale of strange goings-on in a seemingly unremarkable apartment was told in the “Western Mail,” March 10, 1927:

An extraordinary story of queer happenings in an unoccupied Fulham (England) flat was told recently by a foreman and two workmen who have been decorating it (declares the "London Daily News").

One of the men mentioned to the foreman some days ago that when working in the flat he received a severe blow on the head, seemingly from nowhere. On the foreman's going to investigate he, too, so he says, heard mysterious thuds, saw a cup wobble along the floor, matches vanish, candles appear from nowhere, and so on.

The climax came when one of the workmen also vanished, and was found lying unconscious on the floor of another room.

The three men all tell the same story, but unfortunately no one else has been inconvenienced in the same way in the flat. Tenants in the neighbouring flats have heard nothing.

Most unfortunately, I was unable to find out any more about this intriguing bit of weirdness.