How Daniel Murdock Saved On Funeral Expenses

Antoine Joseph Wiertz, “The Premature Burial”

I’ve covered a number of cases where people inexplicably disappear forever.  Such stories are sadly common.  However, examples of corpses suddenly and mysteriously vanishing are, I fancy, probably new to you. 

And, yes, I’m just the blogger to introduce you to one. 

Some time in the early 1850s, a man named Daniel Murdock quietly arrived in Stockholm, a farming town in Northern New York state.  He took out a three-year lease on an old farmhouse owned by an extensive landowner named Dowd.  It was on an isolated ridge, surrounded by rugged surroundings, so the house was usually left empty. The farmhouse’s new tenant was a good match for such forbidding surroundings.  Murdock was a morose, unfriendly man, who made it clear to his neighbors that he simply wanted to be left alone.  Stockholmites were happy to oblige.  No one had any idea where he had come from or why he settled in Stockholm, and nobody was terribly inclined to try to find out.  His speech and dress suggested he was Canadian, but aside from that the man was a mystery.

Murdock’s only visitor--and that only on rare occasions--was his twin brother David.  The two were so indistinguishable that the only way to tell them apart was by the large scarlet birthmark covering Daniel’s throat.  From what others had been able to overhear of their conversations, it seems that the brothers had been among those seeking gold in California, and that Daniel still held mining claims which David wanted made over to him as security for money he had loaned Daniel.

For three seasons, Daniel lived his lonely farming existence.  He disdained the usual local practice of “swapping work” with a neighbor, choosing the arduous task of reaping hay and grains on his own.  At night--never by the light of day--he could occasionally be seen bringing sledloads of his crops in the direction of the Canadian border.

On the third April after Murdock’s arrival in Stockholm, it was noted that he was not putting in a crop.  Rumors spread that his team and few farm tools had vanished.  One day, a neighbor named Aaron Fortune walked across Murdock’s property.  When he went past the open barn doors, he saw something dangling beside the hay mow.  When he took a closer look, he realized it was the body of Daniel Murdock, hanging by a rope attached to a purlin plate.  Fortune cut down the corpse and spread word of his gruesome find.  When Murdock’s landlord heard what had happened, Doud tried to track down the dead man’s twin, but having failed to do so, gave instructions that Murdock be buried in the nearby graveyard.

A local carpenter made a pine coffin, and neighbors prepared the body for burial.  They were unnerved to see that the vivid scarlet birthmark around Daniel’s throat had completely vanished.

Aaron Fortune and a young schoolmaster named Eli Jones reluctantly accepted the grim task of “setting up with the corpse” the night before the funeral.  Just before midnight, a neighbor came with news that Fortune’s wife had been taken ill.  Jones, who proudly proclaimed that he feared no ghosts, agreed to finish the vigil over the body alone.  Every two hours, as was the custom in that time, a cloth soaked in a saltpeter solution was freshly spread over the corpse’s face.  Around 2 a.m., Jones, who had understandably preferred lounging outside the house, went indoors to perform this unpleasant ritual.  When he removed the cloth, he saw that Murdock’s fiery birthmark had suddenly returned.  Jones was so frightened by the sight, he ran screaming from the house, not stopping until he reached the Fortune home.

When dawn came, Fortune, Jones, and a third man crept cautiously back to the dead man’s home.  The candles were still flickering around the sheet-draped table on which Murdock had been placed, but the corpse itself had vanished, never to be seen again.

The old farmhouse was henceforth shunned as if the Devil himself lived there, and no doubt some in Stockholm thought that just might be the case.  A few years later, it burned down, “in that mysterious way that such old unoccupied buildings generally do.”

For decades afterward, the locals struggled to find answers to the mystery.  Perhaps Murdock had not been dead after all, but in a state of “suspended animation.”  According to this theory, when the “corpse” was roused by Jones’ screams, Murdock fled to the river to redo his botched suicide.  Or perhaps David Murdock had arrived at the home after Jones fled, and took his twin away for burial elsewhere.  Or did body-snatchers take the unattended corpse for sale to some medical school?

All one can say is that the strange exit of Daniel Murdock gave residents of Stockholm many, many sleepless nights.

[A caveat:  the earliest published source I can find for this story is from 1917, so I have no idea how much--if any--of it is true.  However, it’s such a fine “fireside tale” that I felt it worthy of the hallowed halls of Strange Company HQ.]