The Bizarre Murder of Pauline Amsel

"Indian Citizen," November 12. 1914, via Newspapers.com

A frightening and inexplicable tragedy hit the normally peaceful town of Durant, Oklahoma in 1914.  According to Jake and Celia Amsel, a well-to-do, respectable couple, at about one-thirty a.m. on the night of November 11, they were awakened by screams emanating from their home’s outdoor sleeping porch.  They were horrified to recognize the voice as that of their only child, fourteen year old Pauline.  Jake Amsel leaped out of bed, only to be confronted with an intruder.  The man took out a pistol and fired it into the floor, while pleading with Amsel to let him go.  After his gun jammed, the stranger pulled out a small knife, and began to stab at the father.  The two men struggled for several minutes before the stranger broke away and escaped.

While this fight was going on, Pauline walked into the bedroom and announced that she was sick.  While the mother called for help, the girl walked into her own room, and fell onto the floor.

As it happened, Pauline had good reason to be ill.  The entire right side of her throat had been deeply slashed.  She died half an hour later.

What followed was the usual depressing pattern seen in all hopelessly perplexing murders:  Searches were made for the killer, rewards were offered, private detectives hired, the usual suspects hauled in for questioning and quickly released, with no one left any closer to obtaining justice for the victim.  It probably did not help the inquiry that Pauline was buried before an autopsy could be performed.  (Her family was Jewish, compelling them to bury her before sundown.)

Pauline was buried in Corsicana, Texas, where her mother had family ties, and soon afterwards, her parents left Durant for good.

It is rare that such a violent murder provides so little information, or even speculation, to work with.  No valuables in the house appeared touched, so robbery was ruled out as a motive.  It was as if a phantom had picked a house at random, attacked the first person he saw, and disappeared into a permanent fog.  No one could guess who would have wished to harm the girl.

Well, no one guessed in public, at least.  In private, it was evidently a very different matter.  As is always the case with mysterious crimes, the local rumor mill went into overdrive.  Residents of Durant had little difficulty solving Pauline’s murder.  Chillingly, the top suspects were the only witnesses to the crime, the dead girl’s parents.  Melody Amsel-Arieli, an indirect descendant of Pauline's, began to research the case during the 1980s.  She contacted many locals who still had memories of the shocking crime.  According to some, Pauline had fallen in love with a certain boy, and this youthful romance horrified her parents.  The suggestion is that this family conflict somehow inspired her murder.

One hesitates to take such a theory seriously—if it is false, such claims are a cruel disservice to a couple who had surely suffered enough.  However, there is no getting away from it that the story they gave is decidedly odd.  First of all, why would Pauline be outdoors, in the middle of a frigid Oklahoma winter night?  If her throat was slashed so deeply that—according to some accounts—she was nearly decapitated, how could she walk upstairs, announce that she was “sick,” and then go off to her own room to die?  Didn’t the parents notice she was covered in blood?  And if this intruder had a gun, as well as a knife, why didn’t he use the more efficient weapon on the girl?  And why did it take thirty minutes for help to be summoned?  And would a man who had just fatally wounded a girl and was waving around a gun, ask her father to just let him go?  Why, after attacking Pauline, did the intruder go upstairs and do this pointless and ineffectual wrestling with her father, rather than immediately flee?

According to a doctor who examined Pauline’s corpse, her injuries were made with a razor.  So, this intruder came equipped with a gun, a knife, and a razor?  How could it be that blood was found on the sleeping porch and Pauline’s bedroom, but nowhere in between, assuming that she had actually summoned the superhuman strength to walk upstairs with a fatally slashed throat?

I give the Ansels the benefit of the doubt and assume they were incapable of murdering their own daughter.  But there is no question that what we are told about Pauline’s death is disturbingly illogical…which is undoubtedly why it haunts the town of Durant to this day.

Weekend Link Dump

 

Welcome to this week's Link Dump!

I'm sure our host this week needs no further introduction.  The caption says it all.

A medieval anti-war satire.

Mysterious meat shower?  Or vulture vomit?

The paranormal side of the Cold War.

Ernest Hemingway, boxing, and, uh, salad dressing.

The man who blew up a nuclear power station.

Mystery in a medieval tomb.

More proof that scientists have way too much spare time on their hands.  (Note to self:  When any scientist offers me bread, check the recipe very very carefully.)

An "impossible" sword from the Bronze Age.

A bizarre medical scandal.

The first viral crop circle.

A disappearance in Pennsylvania.

A brief history of Wonder Bread.

A brief history of "hand mnemonics."

George Washington's beer recipe.

A disgrace at sea.

The women of the American Revolution.

WWII's Operation Sea Lion.

Was there a Jack the Strangler?

The 19th century Grand Prix de Paris.

The ship that conquered the Northwest Passage.

Some fatal weddings.

A 12th century liturgical comb.

Mysterious airborne saboteurs in WWI.

One heck of a medieval barn.

That's all for this week!  See you on Monday, when we'll look at the bizarre murder of a teenage girl.  In the meantime, let's dance!

Newspaper Clipping of the Day

Via Newspapers.com

 

Proof of reincarnation--sort of--appeared in the “Ottawa Citizen," December 16, 1933:

LONDON (by mail).-Here is the man who has "died" three times in three years. He is Mr. Tim Sandell, of Templar street, Camberwell.

On the first occasion the report spread among his friends that he had met with a sudden and mysterious death, and that a post-mortem was to be made. His wife's friends called to console her.

A few months ago he was in hospital. Again the report went round that he had died.  Again the friends called to sympathize.

At five o'clock on a recent Monday morning a policeman knocked at the door to tell Mrs. Sandell that her husband had been knocked down by a motor car at Wandsworth and was dead.

Mr. Sandell answered the knock, and protested that he hadn't and wasn't.  The cause of the mistake was that the dead man had with him a pair of boxing gloves bearing Mr. Sandell's name and one-time address.

Mr. Sandell told the story of his latest "death" to a press representative.

"The police, in their efforts to trace me," he said, "first went to the address in Brixton marked on the gloves, and subsequently to every address at which we have lived since.

"All along the trail the news spread like wildfire that I had been killed.  A friend at Smithfield disgustedly informed me last night that they had whipped round for a wreath for me!

"A man I met that night turned deathly pale when he saw me. He took some time to recover.

"Then I attended the inquest on the still unidentified body.  I shall always think of it as my own inquest."

When Mr. Sandell finally did shuffle off this mortal coil for good and earnest, I assume everyone--including Mr. Sandell--was a bit surprised.

“Deserved A Better Fate”: The Misadventures of the “Great Eastern"

Brunel Standing Before the Launching Chains of the Great Eastern, by Robert Howlett

It would not be overly hyperbolic to describe Isambard Kingdom Brunel as the man who built the Victorian Era.  Brunel was not merely a brilliant engineer, he was a visionary.  His building projects such as massive dockyards, steamships, bridges, tunnels, and the Great Western Railway, were all tangible symbols of his age's optimism, drive, and fervent belief of humanity's limitless potential.

His magnum opus was the “Great Eastern,” one of the most remarkable engineering feats of the 19th century.  Sadly, his greatest achievement proved to be his biggest disaster.  "Great Eastern" is now often alluded to as a “cursed” ship.  While her history was certainly one of the most ill-starred in maritime history, this can largely be attributed to a combination of simple mismanagement, not the occult.  Brunel's creation was (if you will pardon the cliche) ahead of its time.

"Great Eastern" was designed to be not just a ship, but a thing of wonder, a floating palace that would travel the world in grand style.  It could hold up to 4,000 passengers.  The hull was 692 feet long.  Brunel designed a remarkable series of bulkheads that formed 16 watertight compartments, which he believed would make the ship virtually unsinkable.  The monster ship was held together by over three million inch-thick rivets--all of which were driven in by hand.  The ship weighed 22,500 tons, and looked it.  Brunel's "great babe," as he affectionately dubbed it, was six times bigger than any ship that had ever been seen before.  Its vast storage capability meant it was capable of sailing around the world without ever needing to stop to refuel.  (The vessel was originally christened "Leviathan," which would have been almost too appropriate.)

When the "Great Eastern" was finally completed, just launching it into the Thames was itself a herculean effort.  Ordinary chains and barges snapped and sank under the effort.  It took days just to move the ship a few inches.  Finally, on January 31, 1858, "Great Eastern" was afloat.  The effort of moving it the 330 feet down to the water had taken three months and cost an estimated £1,000 a foot.  

The total expenses that went into building the "Great Eastern" were over a million pounds.  The cost sent the company behind the ship into bankruptcy.  Undaunted, Brunel managed to raise more money under a new board of directors.

It was this new ownership that helped doom "Great Eastern."  Brunel had designed the ship for long ocean journeys to India and Australia.  Unfortunately, the new management decided they wanted a quicker return on their investment.  They abandoned these plans in favor of making shorter runs across the North Atlantic.  The day before the ship first set sail, Brunel himself came to give his masterpiece one last inspection.  It proved to be the last act of his illustrious career.  Just after posing for photographs in front of the ship, the 53-year-old engineer suddenly collapsed.  He had suffered a massive stroke which led to his death one week later.

Brunel breathed his last just as word came of the first great disaster to hit the "Great Eastern."  As the ship was making a trial run, through some unaccountable negligence, a steam valve had been left shut, causing an explosion.  Six men died in the accident, and the ship's luxurious grand salon was destroyed.  The planned maiden voyage to America had to be canceled.

While they waited for the ship to be repaired, its owners brought the "Great Eastern" to Holyhead, Wales, where they opened it to paying sightseers.  When the repairs were nearly finished, a massive gale wrenched the ship from its moorings and flung it out to sea.  Although Brunel's bulkheads kept the "Great Eastern" from sinking, by the time it was recovered, the newly-finished salon had been re-demolished.  Weeks later, the ship's captain, the coxswain, and the young son of the chief purser were drowned in a storm.

When news of this latest calamity reached London, the directors of the ship's managing company threw up their hands and resigned.  Word was spreading that Brunel's magnificent vessel was a massive iron-hulled hoodoo.

"Great Eastern's" maiden voyage had been scheduled for June 9, 1860, but various difficulties forced a week's delay.  Three hundred people had bought tickets for the 12-day journey, but most got tired of waiting and booked passage on a Cunard liner instead.  By the time "Great Eastern" finally set sail for New York on June 16, there were only 35 passengers.  They must have felt very small and lonely in the enormous surroundings.  Adding to the increasing aura of failure and unease was the fact that this would be the very first time the ship's new captain had ever crossed the Atlantic.

As a money-saving measure, the cheapest coal had been used to power the ship.  This proved to be yet another mistake.  It damaged the funnel casings, which made the dining room so hot as to be unusable.  Aside from that, the voyage was uneventful (a word one seldom gets to use when discussing the "Great Eastern,") and the ship arrived in New York to something of a hero's welcome.  So great was the interest in the amazing vessel that the owners charged the curious $1 a head to tour the ship.  (This high price so offended Gothamites that they chose to increase the return on their money by vandalizing the ship for souvenirs.)

While awaiting the return to England, a short two-day pleasure trip was planned.  The excursion attracted two thousand passengers, all of whom would very soon regret their decision.  It was only after they set sail that the paying guests learned there were only 300 beds available.  A burst pipe flooded the food supply, leaving nothing to eat but dried chicken, salt beef and biscuits that could have passed for the iron rivets holding the ship together.  And soon, even that wretched fare was gone.  When the passengers went on deck, the five funnels rained soot on them.  And there was no water available for them to clean up.  The first night out, a navigation error left the ship 100 miles off-course.  By the time the nightmare cruise finally ended, there were two thousand more people firmly convinced that the "Great Eastern" was a floating curse.  

New York had had enough of the ship.  When the "Great Eastern" left for Milford Haven with 90 passengers, it virtually slunk out in disgrace.  During the voyage, a screw shaft broke.  As the "Great Eastern" approached the harbor, it fouled the hawser of a small nearby boat, drowning two of its passengers.  As a sort of encore, it then rammed into a frigate.

After all this, the captain, not surprisingly, never wished to set eyes on the "Great Eastern" again.  The third captain had what were probably prudent second thoughts and quit before he had even set foot on the ship.  

The next voyage of the "Great Eastern" carried only 100 passengers.  Hundreds of would-be emigrants were willing to travel on it in steerage, but the board of directors, with remarkable short-sightedness, refused to invest the money to add third-class accommodation to the ship.  They wanted the "Great Eastern" to be solely a luxury cruise ship for rich passengers, ignoring the fact that the enormous vessel would have been uniquely well-suited for transporting large amounts of emigrants.  Instead, they dismissed what would surely have been an immensely lucrative enterprise in favor of trying to lure in the wealthy--most of whom had more alluring travel options than the slow, notoriously unlucky "Great Eastern."  The ship was too cold to cross the ocean during the winter, which only decreased its profitability.  Adding to the its problems was that there were no docks or harbors anywhere in the world fully capable of handling such an overwhelming vessel.

In September 1861 the "Great Eastern" was hit by a hurricane which caused £60,000 worth of damages.  The next year, it hit an uncharted rock that ripped its outer hull.  This latest escapade cost £70,000 to repair.

By 1864, the owners gave up on ever turning the "Great Eastern" into a luxury liner and sold it for £25,000.  It was to be used to lay cable across the ocean floors.  Typically, its first effort in this new role ended in disaster, when an accident caused the cable to slip and sink to the ocean floor.  The cable was never recovered.  However, the "Great Eastern" went on to have a successful run as a cable layer until 1874, when the debut of ships specially designed for cable made the "Great Eastern" obsolete.

The owners just did not know what to do with the ship after that.  They simply dumped it in the harbor at Milford Haven and left it to the rust and the barnacles.  By this point, the ghost of Isambard Brunel was undoubtedly weeping.

In 1886, the "Great Eastern" was sold for £20,000.  The new management towed it to Liverpool (it crashed into a tug along the way.)  It was used as a giant advertising banner.  The ship was plastered with slogans touting local stores and brands of tea. It was as if an aging, once-magnificent movie icon had been reduced to doing late-night infomercials.

The "Great Eastern" was finally sold to metal dealers in 1889.  The ship was so well-built it took 200 men two years to tear it apart.  Brunel's ambitious dream ended her days as a great heap of anonymous scrap parts. 

The final victim of the legendary "Curse of the Great Eastern" turned out to be the ship itself.  Sir Daniel Gooch, one of the engineers who sailed with the ship during its cable-laying days, wrote sadly, "Poor old ship; you deserved a better fate."

Let that be the "Great Eastern's" epitaph.

[Note:  Five people were killed while the "Great Eastern" was being built--not an overly high death rate for such a project--but the real source of the alleged "jinx" on the ship is believed to stem from another tragedy.  During the "Great Eastern's" construction, it is said that a riveter and his apprentice disappeared.  According to this legend, their fate remained a mystery until the ship was dismantled.  Inside the double hull, two skeletons were discovered.  They had accidentally been riveted inside the ship, with the noise of construction drowning out their desperate cries for help.  Popular belief has it that this dreadful incident, which in effect turned the "Great Eastern" into a floating graveyard, was responsible for the long run of bad luck that plagued the ship.

Accounts differ on whether or not this macabre tale is fact or imaginative fiction.  In either case, as I said at the beginning of this post, the true curse of the "Great Eastern" was human stupidity rather than spectral revenge.]

Weekend Link Dump

 

Welcome to this week's Link Dump!

It's a family affair!

How Napoleon took Malta.

Is consciousness everything?

Tesla's key to the universe.

The mystery of the Great Sheep Panic.

A whole lot of info about the Bayeux Tapestry.

Some popular medieval swear words.

A 108 year old female soldier.

If your laboratory is haunted, consider bringing a sword to work.

An ancient cosmic massacre.

A shipwreck that was turned into dresses.

The role of a Jewish Caribbean community in the American Revolution.

A very rare King Arthur manuscript is going up for auction.  Don't assume you'll be able to buy it with the spare change in your pocket, though.

The origins of the phrase "cutting corners."

The Great Airship Semi-Hoax.

The unsolved murder of Kate Scharn.

Two dueling steam warships.

The "psychic sensitive" and the apports.

The weather forecast that changed the course of WWII.

A freaking big fence that is one of those "It could only happen in the 1970s" stories.

The link between mushrooms and fairies.

Following the trail of Johnny Appleseed.

Ancient Roman backpacks for the win!

The "repulsive graft" of undertakers.

The strange patterns of Venus.

A serial rapist is killed by his victims.  Right in the courtroom.

The shipwreck at the top of the world.

3I/Atlas might have seeded some of its weirdness into our solar system.

The Year Without a Summer.

A little blue octopus is making scientists very happy.

How water affects our minds.

That's a wrap for this week!  See you on Monday, when we'll sail on an ill-fated ship.  In the meantime, here's some '70s country rock.

Newspaper Clipping of the Day

Via Newspapers.com

 

So, who’s ready for some walking extraterrestrial stumps?  The “Spokesman Review,” October 18, 1966:

NEWPORT, Ore. (AP)-People in this coastal logging area didn't believe 16-year-old Kathy Reeves when she told them about "the three little stumps that walked across the pasture."

Not only did they move, said Kathy, but they also were of different colors--orange, light blue, white, yellow and "watermelon-colored."

That was six months ago. 

Since then, 25 persons have seen the unidentified flying objects and 15 statements were taped by newsmen. They are from two deputy sheriffs and a chemist for Georgia-Pacific.  There are about 10,000 persons in the communities of Newport, Siletz, Toledo and Camp 12.

The latest reports were Friday.

Kathy's mother didn't believe her at first, either.

"One morning about 2," said Mrs. Reeves, "I woke up and my whole bedroom was a rosy glow so bright you could read a newspaper by it."

The Reeves family then moved out of its home on Pioneer Mountain. The new owner, Delbert Mapes, said he saw the lights before the Reeves moved out, but hasn't seen any since.

The chemist, Max W. Taylor. camped on the Reeves front lawn and saw two bluish lights on the Reeves' house, but he couldn't find the source of the light.

Taylor called Thomas Wayne Price, a deputy sheriff.

"I saw a flying object myself," said Price. "I don't know what it was, but it was orange and it was bigger than any star. I know it wasn't a meteor or a satellite because it was maneuvering. There was a noise like a giant spinning top.  It made the hair stand up on the back of my neck."

Kathy said her house was not surrounded by UFOs until one incident that happened while she and another girl were walking at night. They said they saw what appeared to be a flashlight with a cover over the end.

"I thought it was somebody playing a trick, so I threw a rock at the light," said Kathy. "A lot of big ones went on all around it and we ran home."

As far as I know, it’s still anyone’s guess what the heck was going on.

The Cursed Chest of Cornwall

"Western Morning News," January 8, 1949, via Newspapers.com

In late 1948, Trevor Ley of Stanbury Manor, Morwenstow, bought an old hand-carved, cedarwood chest from a Cornwall antique shop.  The woman who owned the shop let him have the chest for a low price, explaining that since she had acquired it, anything placed on the walls kept falling to the ground.  She thought that “some sort of ghost seemed to be attached to it.”

This purchase soon led Trevor to question his life choices.  As the shop owner had warned, wherever the chest was placed, the most damnable--literally--things began happening.  Six antique shotguns that were securely fastened to the wall suddenly smashed to the floor, even though the nails and wires that had held them were still intact.  A heavy painting leaped two feet from the wall, hitting Trevor on the head.  Two other large pictures which had been “hanging safely for generations” also propelled themselves into the center of the room.  In another bedroom, a painting did something even weirder--it somehow was pushed backwards through the paneling.  An electric light bulb which had been placed on a window sill hurled against the wall on the opposite side of the room.  

And so on.  The Leys were naturally curious why their ghost--which they had nicknamed “Old George”--had attached itself to the chest, but Trevor had a healthy distrust for self-proclaimed “mediums” and declined most of their offers to contact their “spirit.”

In January 1949, Trevor brought in the local vicar, the Rev. K. Rees, to try to exorcise “George.”  When Rees examined the chest, the men were bemused to find what appeared to be bloodstains on the object.  The red stains  were on carved figures on the outside of the chest.  One was on the arm of a woman holding a corpse. The other, three feet away, was on the body of a headless man.  Rees made the cheery remark that "The chest would make an ideal hiding-place for a body.”  When asked about conducting an exorcism, Rees demurred.  "I'm not well versed in exorcising,” he explained.  “I must look it up."

Finally, the Leys brought in a spiritualist from London to rid them of their poltergeist.  These efforts were apparently successful, as “George” subsequently ceased to bother them.  However, just to be on the safe side, the Leys put the now-famous chest up for auction.  This failed to find a buyer, and the chest was withdrawn from sale.  I have been unable to learn of its subsequent history.

Despite his efforts to trace the chest’s history, Trevor never learned for sure why the chest came to be haunted, but he did uncover one wonderfully M.R. James-ish clue.  He wrote to a psychic researcher named William H, Gilroy that he had received a letter from a Cornish curate who had recognized the chest from its photos in the newspapers.  

This curate told Trevor that “many years ago there were two sisters living in the Manor House, Newlyn, (he gave their names but I cannot find his letter at the moment, but will look it up if it is of interest to you). They had in their house quite a collection of antiques and among them was this chest which they kept in their bedroom. One time, after having been away for a few days, they returned late one night and being rather tired, placed their heavy baggage on the chest rather than unpack at such a late hour. Early the next morning their attention was drawn to the chest and as they went over to it the lid, although weighted down by the heavy baggage, slowly opened and they looked inside. What they saw they would never reveal, but it was so horrible that they were both struck stone deaf; and although they lived to an old age they never got their hearing back.

“When they died the house and furniture were sold at auction and all trace of the chest was lost until it turned up in the antique shop where I purchased it.”