Newspaper Clipping of the Day

Via Newspapers.com

Introduce me to a ghostly hamster who looks out for her favorite sports team, and you have pretty much made my day.  The “Reading Evening Post,” May 3, 1996:

Forget Uri Geller, Reading Football Club were saved from relegation by a dead hamster buried in the goal mouth. 

Royals fan Vicky Lowe is convinced the spirit of her heroic pet played a part in Reading's 3-0 hammering of Wolverhampton Wanderers at Elm Park on Tuesday night. Vicky, 23, a barmaid at the Royals Rendezvous, was left heartbroken last month when her three-and-a-half-year-old hamster, Miss Effie, died. To add to her grief, Vicky had nowhere to lay her pet to rest--until Reading groundsman Gordon Neate heard of her plight. 

Vicky said: "I haven't really got a back garden, it's more like a yard, so I couldn't bury Miss Effie there.

"I then thought of Prospect Park, but although it is very beautiful it didn't really seem fitting. 

"Gordon then offered to bury her in the goalmouth at Elm Park which was perfect. It was a wonderful gesture and it really means something to know she is buried on the pitch. 

"Unfortunately, I couldn't attend the burial but Gordon said that as he laid her to rest. at noon, the church bells started ringing and the sun came out."

 

And Vicky added that the spirit of Miss Effie lives on.

"I believe her ghost distracted the opposition and helped Reading stay in the First Division."

Groundsman Gordon, a former full-back for the Royals in the 1950s and 1960s, said he was only too happy to save the day after hearing of Vicky's plight. 

He explained: "Vicky was telling me she had nowhere to bury her hamster and certainly didn't want to throw her in the dustbin.

"I thought it would be nice to rest in the goalmouth which Vicky was more than happy with. We put her in the goal in at the Tilehurst Road end." 

Miss Effie is not alone at Elm Park. The ashes of several supporters and an ex-chairman have been buried at Elm Park.

Although the club is expected to be at Elm Park for only another year, Gordon is still receiving requests to bury ashes on the pitch.

He said: "We do stress to relatives that we probably won't be here much longer but as it may be someone's last request we still do it." 

Too Many Clues: The Puzzling Death of Elias Purcell

"Chicago Tribune," December 1, 1935, via Newspapers.com

Many murders go forever unsolved due to a complete lack of clues.  On certain rare occasions, the opposite happens: the victim left behind so many clues--many of them either contradictory or just plain incomprehensible--that it is impossible to make enough sense out of them to conduct a successful investigation.  Anyone who tries winds up feeling like they are spinning in a room of funhouse mirrors.

With a few cases--such as the one we will examine in this week's post--it even remains uncertain if the dearly departed was murdered at all.

Elias H. Purcell had a varied, and largely successful career.  In the late 1800s, he toured America with the Schubert Concert Company, where he was both director and pianist.  The company included Purcell’s wife Lavinia, who was a singer, and their son Thomas, a precociously talented banjoist and violinist.  In 1899, the family, which by then included a daughter, Virginia, settled in Hibbing, Minnesota.  Thanks to an iron range, the local real estate market was booming, and Purcell invested in land to such a profitable degree that by the time WWI broke out, he was worth an estimated $75,000.  (Approximately $1.5 million in today’s money.)  After the children grew up and began their own lives (Virginia married one John Sheehy and Thomas became the leader of a touring jazz orchestra,) Purcell sold most of his holdings in Hibbings, and in 1918, he and Lavinia moved to Chicago.  The pair moved into an apartment building Purcell owned.

Life for the Purcells appeared to roll on quietly enough until Monday, September 22, 1919.  Purcell was temporarily on his own, as Lavinia was visiting friends in Sterling, Illinois.  That morning, the building’s janitor, Henry Van Vaerender, asked his wife and another tenant, a Mrs. Wegener, to accompany him to Purcell’s apartment.  He said he had a feeling that “something funny” was going on with their landlord.  He explained that Purcell was a man of very regular habits, but the day before, all his curtains had remained down, and Purcell failed to take his usual early morning walk.  In short, Vaerender felt uneasy about going in search of Purcell alone.

When the trio approached the door of Purcell’s kitchen, they found that it was closed, but the key hung on the outside.  When they cautiously peered through a window, the women began screaming.  Purcell was sitting bound to a kitchen chair, very unmistakably dead.

When police arrived on the scene, they noted that the body was rigid, suggesting that Purcell had died some hours before.  A shattered glass was on the floor about two feet away from him.  His wrists were bound to the sides of the chair, but very loosely and carelessly.  Over his head was a towel spotted with dark stains.  When this towel was removed, everyone was further unnerved to see that the dead man’s eyes were wide and staring, as if he had passed away while looking at some horrifying sight.  Stranger still, there were no marks of violence anywhere on the body.

The entire house had been completely ransacked.  Furniture had been displaced.  The beds were stripped of their blankets.  Drawers had been pulled out of dressers, with the contents dumped on the floor.  Despite all this chaos, nothing appeared to be missing from the apartment.

In the dining room, the table had been set for three.  Fingerprints on the dishes did not belong to Purcell or any members of his family.  One egg--and one egg only--had been boiled and distributed in three pieces.  One slice of toast was also cut into three pieces and put on separate plates.  There was a bit of coffee in each of three cups, and on three knives was a small lump of butter.  There was something oddly staged about everything that was found in the apartment--including Purcell’s corpse.  But who did the staging, and why?

Although police were able to establish that Purcell’s wife and children were not in Chicago at the time of his death, there were indications that he had not been in the apartment alone.  A milkman named William Hornung told police that around 4 a.m. the previous day, he was walking to the back porches behind Purcell’s building when he saw a shadow cross the curtain of a rear bedroom in Purcell’s flat.  He heard a noise that he thought was either a groan or a snore.  Then, the curtain was pulled aside, revealing the head of a man wearing an officer’s army cap.  The police took particular interest in this detail, as among the items found in Purcell’s apartment was an officer’s cap belonging to Purcell’s son-in-law, who was a lieutenant in the army.  A neighbor of Purcell’s stated that some time around 2 a.m. that same Sunday, she had heard footsteps either in the backyard or the passageway.  Another neighbor said that early Sunday, she had heard a woman’s voice in Purcell’s flat, along with the sounds of a piano and a violin being played.  Yet another tenant heard voices and saw a light from the Purcell bedroom around that same time.

Meanwhile, ten days after Purcell’s body was discovered, the coroner finally learned what had killed him: nicotine.  There was enough of the poison in his system to “kill half a dozen men.”  The dose was so high, it would have ended his life within just a few minutes.  This just added to the puzzle, as deliberate nicotine poisoning was extremely rare.  It would have been hard for anyone to get hold of enough to kill someone, and only a chemist or someone who was an expert in poisons would even think of using it.  Also, nicotine poisoning would cause extreme convulsions before death, but Purcell’s bound body showed no sign of any such seizures.  Could he have already been dead when he was tied to the chair?

The sheer weirdness of the whole death scene led some investigators to propose that Purcell had committed a suicide elaborately faked to look like murder.  They believed Purcell’s hands were tied loosely enough to enable him to drink the poison from a glass and then throw it to the ground, shattering it.  It was pointed out that Purcell had recently lost a good part of his fortune in the stock market, and that he had recently purchased $15,000 worth of life insurance, which would have been invalidated if his death was ruled a suicide.

This theory brought a storm of criticism, not least from Purcell’s family.  They declared that despite his financial losses, he still had a good deal of money, leaving him with no reason to kill himself.  And what about all the witnesses who saw and heard other people in his flat?  In short, both the suicide and murder advocates had enough material to make a plausible case.

The inquest jurors tasked with making some sense of the whole mess delivered the only reasonable verdict:  

"Elias H. Purcell came to his death in the kitchen of his home at 661 Roscoe street from cardiac and respiratory failure due to nicotine poisoning.  From the evidence presented we are unable to determine how or in what manner or by whom said nicotine was ingested.

“We recommend that the state’s attorney and the police make further inquiry into this mysterious case.”

If any “further inquiry” was made, it proved to be utterly useless.  Elias Purcell either committed suicide in a manner worthy of the cleverest detective fiction, or he was murdered in one of the most brilliantly baffling ways imaginable.

In 1920, the insurance company paid Purcell’s widow the full $15,000.  And everyone moved on.

Weekend Link Dump

 

Welcome to this week's Link Dump!

We have tea!

A haunted historic cabin.

A haunted historic inn.

The life of a 15th century Duchess of Milan.

The saga of the Los Angeles Breakfast Club.

The legacy of Flannery O'Connor.

The debate over "recovered memories."  I know someone who once went under hypnosis, and "recovered" memories of things that I know for a fact never ever happened.  The whole experience screwed up her mind big time, and, incidentally, caused a heck of a lot of trouble within my family.  Just saying.

The auriculas of Spitalfields.

Winston Churchill and the witch hunt.

A French submarine disaster.

A late-Georgian era country doctor.

A dangerous quack medicine.

America's worst dust storm.

The medieval holiday of Hocktide.

What we can learn from ancient kitchens.

A one-legged man attacked a one-armed man, and things got complicated.

Archaeologists are looking for Buddha.

An early mass extinction event.

A mechanical dog from ancient Egypt.

An "unprecedented" hoard from the Ice Age.

An "experimental" weaving station from early 20th century India.

Dessert recipes from the days of WWII rationing.

The politics of pedestrianism.

The photo gallery at the New York morgue.

Medieval castles were cleaner than you might think.

A brief history of Monaco.

AI discovers an ancient civilization.

The airman who fell 18,000 feet and lived to tell the tale.

The mystery of why we don't remember our babyhood.

A secret from King Tut's tomb.

Picturing an ice-free Antarctica.

The final years of former social queen Caroline Astor.

When French Indochina went to war.

Was Michelangelo an art forger?

Why they're called "soap operas."

In which we learn that Mona Lisa is a vampire.

That's it for this week!  See you on Monday, when we'll look at a death that was either an unusually elaborate suicide or a bizarre murder.  In the meantime, here's Nessie!

Newspaper Clipping of the Day

Via Newspapers.com

Unfortunately, the following is all I could find about what was potentially an intriguing poltergeist case, but I thought it was still worth sharing.  The “New York Daily News,” April 21, 1962:

St. Brieuc, France, April 20-Police and church officials today were investigating reports of a "ghost" in two Brittany villages who is said to have "attacked" people's clothing. 

A man at Landebia recently found himself practically undressed in the market place after seams in his clothing had given away, the reports said. 

Large acid-like burns were said to have appeared on the clothes of a family in Henabbihen--while they were wearing them. The "ghost" slit all the bed-sheets of another family.

The Child of Mystery

Henry John “Johnny” Brophy was, to all outward appearances, a perfectly ordinary little boy.  Although described as “slightly crippled” (as a toddler, he had been run over by a carriage) he managed to lead a normal life.  His mother was still alive, and living in Madison, Wisconsin, but since the age of two Henry lived with his grandparents, Mr. and Mrs. Kaut Lund, in nearby Mt. Horeb.  (It seems to be unrecorded why he wasn’t living with his mother, who had remarried after Henry’s father died.)  Until he was eleven years old, Henry gave no indication that he was about to get a brief nationwide fame as the “Child of Mystery.”

Young Henry’s descent into The Weird began on March 9, 1909.  As the boy was entering a side door of his home, he was hit in the back with a snowball.  The impact was so fierce, he was knocked to the ground.  Once he picked himself up, he looked outside for his attacker.  He saw nobody.

The next day, another large snowball hit him.  His grandparents joined him in the hunt for this phantom practical joker, but again, no one was in the vicinity.  The three of them shrugged--hey, life does funny things sometimes--and dismissed the mystery from their minds.

On March 11, as the trio sat down for dinner, things suddenly happened which were impossible to ignore.  Various objects--cups, bars of soap, spools of thread--began being hurled throughout the room by invisible hands, quite thoroughly terrifying the family, and, I presume, really ruining their meal.

The following day, Henry’s mother was in town in order to attend a funeral.  That evening, as they were all in the sitting room, the spectral Hurler of Inanimate Objects made another appearance.  Various household items suddenly flew through the air, and the furniture began moving itself around.  The sight was so shocking that Henry’s grandfather feared he would have a heart attack.  The family, not knowing what else to do, called in their minister, the Reverend Mostrom.  Mostrom soon arrived at the home, accompanied by a family friend, Sam Thompson.  The two men were greeted by a Bible, which threw itself off a table and landed at the Reverend’s feet.

When Mostrom, in an effort to calm the group, began playing a hymn on the organ, their invisible guest seemed to take offense.  A carving knife flew past him, embedding itself in the floor in front of Thompson.  This was soon followed by a hatpin.

"San Francisco Examiner," August 22, 1909, via Newspapers.com

The clergyman’s visit just seemed to accelerate the eerie assaults.  Lamps would suddenly and mysteriously shatter.  The hinges of doors would unaccountably lose their screws, causing them to fall to the floor.  Out of nowhere, the family would be pelted with coal.  It was noted that these frightening occurrences only happened when Henry was in the house, leaving many to conclude that he was somehow responsible.  However, others asked, how could an eleven-year-old of only average intelligence somehow fool all the adults around him?  

Some speculated that the household objects were moving because the house had both electricity and phone service.  Perhaps this was causing items to become literally electrified?  The Lunds were skeptical about this theory, choosing instead to believe that Henry had somehow been secretly hypnotized, and his trance state was somehow causing the uproar.  

In an effort to settle the question of whether Henry was--consciously or not--responsible for what was happening, he was sent to visit his uncle Andrew in Springfield.  The minute Henry walked through his uncle’s front door, a pail of water began spinning, dashing its contents on the floor.  A mirror crashed to the ground, shattering into fragments.

That question was being clearly answered.

Poor Henry was rapidly becoming unpopular among the other children, as it was impossible to play with him without things going right off the rails.  When he and another boy tried a game of marbles, the marbles not only kept disappearing, the ones that remained insisted on moving themselves.  The terrified boys both fled.  When Henry tried racing the other children, invisible hands pelted him with rocks and dirt clods.  Storekeepers refused to allow him into their shops, because whenever Henry came in, jars would fall off the shelves and break.  Even the family cat refused to go near him.

When Andrew brought the boy back to his grandparents, he included a present: a basket of eggs.  When he placed the basket on a table, he was unnerved to see an egg shoot out and shatter on Henry’s face.

The frazzled family decided to seek medical help.  Henry was examined by a number of doctors, who reported that he was physically normal.  These physicians said the boy must, in some unknown fashion, be playing a gigantic prank on everybody.  The Lunds then held a prayer meeting in their home, which just seemed to make matters worse.  One George Kingsley, who was both a doctor and a spiritualist, told the family that Henry was obviously a talented medium.  The strange events they were experiencing were merely due to the boy not having the training to control his psychic powers.  Another spiritualist claimed that Henry was surrounded by three spirits: two women and a man.  The publicity the boy was unwillingly attracting became so intense that the Lunds posted an announcement in the local paper, begging the crowds and reporters to leave them in peace.

Fortunately for the family, Henry’s “wild talents”--whatever may have been their source--soon faded away.  By the time of his marriage in 1917, he had long returned to being a perfectly ordinary mortal who, one hopes, spent the rest of his days in peaceful obscurity.

Weekend Link Dump

 

Welcome to this week's Link Dump!

And dance party!

A family's mysterious disappearance is finally solved.  

The library that employs bats.

An old church in a new light.

The secret trials of Nazi POWs.

An 18th century royal scandal.

The artistic legacy of Eleanor of Aquitaine.

A Los Angeles man who may have been part hero, part villain.

An "affair of honour" in the Crimean War.

That beloved tradition of hating Henry Symeonis.

The fall of Thomas Cromwell.

A brief history of haunted televisions.

Yet another "pushing back human history" discovery.

The Steerage Act of 1819.

A brief history of the pork taboo.

A chat between professional mourners.

Do we owe human evolution to...handbags?

A visit to Chiswick House.

A sailor and his slush fund.

When iguanas sailed the world.

How Moses might have parted the Red Sea.

Why you might want to rethink your ambition to live on a base in Antarctica.

The "hag" of our nightmares.

St. Patrick's Day wasn't always green.

The tomb of an unknown pharaoh has just been discovered.

The Dakota Uprising of 1862.

Ancient humans around the world simultaneously invented farming, and we have no idea how that happened.

The woman who restored the faces of WWI veterans.

Yet another marriage ends in murder.

A brief history of air conditioning.

That's all for this week!  See you on Monday, when we'll look at a child with some weird talents.  In the meantime, here's a typical banger from Rockpile.  I loved that band back in the day.

Newspaper Clipping of the Day

Via Newspapers.com

This is another of what I classify as “mini mysteries”--cold cases where very little information is available.  The “Scranton Tribune,” July 14, 1936:

William Lynch, 50-year-old WPA foreman who was shot to death Sunday night in Pittston, may have been a victim of mistaken identity, according to a theory advanced by police last night. The possibility that he may have been mistaken for another man also was advanced by the widow of the man whom many termed "a man without an enemy in the world."

Mrs. Lynch, who was with. her husband when he was shot, unable to give a detailed description of the murderer.

Investigating authorities today began a checkup of the WPA employees who worked under Lynch on the grading of the Suscon Highway. WPA officials declared that Lynch, in his capacity as foreman, had no authority to hire or fire any workmen, and that such orders came through Wilkes-Barre.  

“It’s just a terrible mistake,” said the widow, Mrs. Anna O’Boyle Lynch, last night.

She explained that she and her husband had been visiting his sister and later attended the wake of a friend.  As they neared their home, a man crept up behind the couple and fired two shots in quick succession into Lynch's back.

Mrs. Lynch said that her husband cried, "Oh, Anna, I'm shot." and sank to the sidewalk. She bent over him in an attempt to lift him and at the same time saw a man running down the street. 

"After we left the wake we walked straight home, stopping for ice cream," she said.  "We passed no one after turning off Main Street with the exception of four men talking by the church. (The church is three blocks from the Lynch home). The street was awfully dark and I remarked this to Billie, saying that only one house was lighted. Everything seemed so quiet. 

"No one was in back of us or we would have heard him as we crossed the cement street.  Suddenly I heard a shot which sounded like a firecracker. Then there was another one. Billie cried out and I screamed. As I bent over Billie I saw a man running straight down the street--he didn't turn off, he ran straight. He was a heavily-built man about six feet two and he weighed quite a lot.  He wore a white shirt. I didn't notice anything else, I was too excited. 

"We were coming straight home, but we had to go to the hospital instead."

Mrs. Lynch seemed to lose her composure for a minute and then went on, almost as though she were talking to herself, "He might have dropped from the clouds. Some people on the porch of a house down the street saw him cross behind us. He must have had on soft shoes for we heard nothing.  It was so quiet we would have noticed it. Billie never had an enemy in his life. Everyone used to say he was a swell fellow. The man didn't say a word to either of us.  He shot and then he ran. And we were just a couple of doors Mrs. William Lynch from home--it would have been alright but we didn't get here. We had to go to the hospital instead." 

The widow insisted she had no idea who could have committed the crime. She was emphatic in saying that her husband never had an enemy in his life.

She said that it was a terrible shock and that Mr. Lynch had been mistaken for some one else. Friends and police agreed with her in this supposition. A post mortem conducted at the Pittston Hospital yesterday by Dr. R.S. Bierly showed that Lynch was shot with a .32 calibre revolver. One of the bullets penetrated his spine and penetrated the lower part of his heart. The bullets showed that the gun was rusted and had not been discharged in some time.

William Lynch is originally from Hughestown.  For many years he was employed at Butler's and No 6 as a blacksmith and for two months acted as janitor of the City Hall, Pittston, during the illness of an uncle, Mr. Conners. The deceased leaves besides his widow, one brother, Charles, Pittston, and two sisters, Ann, Pittston, and Mrs. Mary Dougherty, Detroit, Mich. The funeral will be held Thursday morning at 9 o'clock.

A requiem mass will be sung at the St. John's Church at 9:30 o'clock. Interment will be in the church cemetery.

Believe it or not, the investigation into Lynch’s murder never progressed an inch beyond this point.  Police finally shrugged, concluded that the dead man must have been the victim of one of the worst cases of mistaken identity on record, and moved on to more explicable crimes.