The Troubles At Euston Square

"Illustrated Police News," June 7, 1879, via Newspapers.com

Evil and depravity can have a certain fascination if they are cloaked in a benign or attractive exterior.  It is doubtful that true-crime researchers would still be talking about Ted Bundy if not for the fact that those who knew him thought he was perfectly normal.  And there is a reason why the Devil is often depicted as a handsome man.  Similarly, the following Victorian-era scandal would probably be long-forgotten if it had not happened in a seemingly respectable middle-class household blighted by one or two small oddities, like corpses turning up when least expected.

Matilda Hacker of Canterbury, England, embodied a classic Victorian stereotype:  a rich but miserly, highly eccentric spinster.  In August 1877, Miss Hacker took affront at the rates Canterbury charged her.  In protest, she split town--leaving the rates unpaid--took on the surname of “Huish,” (presumably to avoid the tax authorities,) and engaged a room in a lodging house owned by Mr. and Mrs. Severin Bastindoff at No. 4 Euston Square, London.

So far as is known, life at No. 4 went on quietly enough until Sunday, October 14.  The Bastindoffs were away for the day, leaving Matilda alone in the house with the maid, 24-year-old Hannah Dobbs.  That day, something very terrible happened within the walls of the lodging house, although we are fated to never know exactly what that was.  The following morning, Severin sent Hannah to Matilda’s room to collect her rent.  The maid returned with a five-pound note that she said “Miss Huish” had just given her.  Two days later, Hannah informed the Bastindoffs that their lodger had moved out.

Well, people do abruptly come and go out of rooming houses.  Mrs. Bastindoff dismissed the old lady from her mind and went to clean the room for their next tenant.  She noticed there was a large stain on the carpet that someone had done an inexpert job of trying to wash away.  It looked a bit like blood.  Odd, that.  (Before you ask, much later in our story, when life began getting pretty interesting for the Bastindoffs, it was proven that the stain was blood.)

Life went on.  Miss Huish/Hacker was completely forgotten by the world until May 9, 1879, when  the cellar at No. 4 was cleared so a lodger could store coal there.  The workmen were surprised to find that the cellar contained something more than the usual junk and debris:  a human body, with a rope around the neck.  Police soon determined that the corpse was that of the former lodger, Matilda Hacker.

It did not take Hercule Poirot to immediately focus on Hannah Dobbs as the chief suspect, and she was swiftly arrested and charged with murder.  She was the last person known to have seen the victim alive.  Soon after Hacker “moved out,” (which, in the spiritual sense, I suppose she did,) Hannah gave one of the Bastindoff children the former lodger’s now-empty cash-box.  The maid began wearing a watch and some jewelry her employers had never seen before.  She said they had been bequeathed to her by an uncle who had recently died.

Investigators easily determined that Hannah had no uncle, alive or dead.  The same watch and jewelry were later found in a pawn shop.  The shop’s owner identified Hannah as the person who had pledged the items.  All in all, it was looking like as pretty a case of circumstantial, but conclusive, evidence as any detective would like to see.

Hannah stood trial at the Old Bailey in July 1879.  Her defense relied almost solely on the unlikelihood that a slender young woman could single-handedly, in a relatively brief time, kill a grown adult, hide the body in the cellar, and tidy up the crime scene.  (The implication was that some unknown stranger had sneaked into the house, murdered Hacker, carried the corpse to the cellar, and exited without Hannah having a clue that anything was amiss.  Very Lizzie-Bordenish.)  As a side note, the proceedings were considerably enlivened by testimony suggesting that Severin and Hannah’s relationship had been much more than mere master and servant--something, naturally, that Mr. Bastindoff stoutly denied.

At the end of the trial, the judge, perhaps surprisingly, summed up for acquittal, and the jury obliged.  Hannah was given her freedom, and it looked like Matilda Hacker’s murder was destined to become a mystery that would be quickly forgotten.

Well, not forgotten by everyone.  George Purkiss, proprietor of the “Illustrated Police News,” published a pamphlet about the case that was a defamation lawyer’s dream.  Not only was Hannah Dobbs described as a murderer who had, no doubt, committed other crimes, but Purkiss alleged that she had been Severin’s mistress both before and after becoming his household’s maid.  Severin wasted no time applying for an injunction against further distribution of the pamphlet and suing Purkiss for libel.  Just to show that life is full of odd coincidences, the libel suit took place in the same courtroom, and before the same judge, that Hannah Dobbs had recently faced.

Unfortunately for Mr. Bastindoff, his experience at the Old Bailey was not as fortunate as his maid’s had been.  When Hannah was cross-examined, she was forced to admit that she had previous convictions for theft, as well as other peccadillos that caused the judge to call her “a most infamous person.”  She also confessed to having been Severin’s mistress.  It was demonstrated in court that Severin and Hannah had stayed together at a Redill, Surrey, inn, posing as man and wife.  (Severin argued unconvincingly that the man who had been with Hannah was actually his brother Peter.)  Insinuations were made that Severin was the real murderer, with Hannah being merely his accessory.  In short, Bastindoff came off as such a sordid figure that not only was Purkiss acquitted, Severin was found guilty of perjury and sentenced to a year of hard labor.  

Sadly for the ghost of Matilda Hacker, this was the last word on her murder, but you could say she at least got some small measure of revenge.

Weekend Link Dump

 

Welcome to this week's Link Dump!

Featuring music from the Strange Company Orchestra!

The forgotten Fifth Crusade.

The gangs of 1970s Brooklyn.

A visit to Waltham Abbey.

A memorial to a murdered postmaster.

How ancient humans regarded eclipses.

How new technology is finding old cities.

U-Boat action off the coast of Gaza, 1917.

Ancient Egyptian princesses were probably damn good archers.

The rise and fall of Salisbury steak.

The legend of a Roman legion in China.

The difficulties of getting a decent photo of a funeral procession.

800 million years ago, our solar system may have seen one damn big kaboom.

Because I know you can't get enough of Viking hygiene.

A mysterious ancient culture.

The Witch of Great Paxton.

The strange case of the "Beast of Gevaudan,"

Researching the survivors of Pompeii.

The hotel that was born from a family feud.

The Indian maharaja who saved Polish orphans. 

The electricity of moss.

Tales of phantom airplanes.

A "tell-tale skull."

This may be the greatest true-crime case ever.

The ghost of King Tut may well be wishing that archaeologists had never found him.

The world's oldest post office.

Moon landing conspiracies a go-go.

The mystery of the "Baghdad Battery."

A look at the letters of Heloise.

A wooden structure from half-a-million years ago.

A murder mystery is finally solved.  However, since it took place in the 16th century and the culprits were mosquitoes, don't count on an arrest.

A suicide at a Junior High School.

An "asteroid" turns out to be something that's really puzzling astronomers.

That's it for this week!  See you on Monday, when we'll talk Victorian murder.  In the meantime, let's follow the science!

Newspaper Clipping of the Day

Via Newspapers.com

This account of a strange figure that seemed to take fashion tips from the Ku Klux Klan appeared in the “Syracuse Post Standard,” December 8, 1901:

CAZENOVIA, Dec. 7.-The usual calm of this quiet village has given way to unwonted excitement.

Strong men do not venture out at night unarmed, and even the most daring urchins have suddenly discovered a new charm in an evening at home. The cause of this state of things is the advent of some apparently unearthly object which wanders at will about the streets frightening men. women and children. The apparition is variously described as ranging in height from five to six feet. By some it is said to have a slight figure, while others, who claim to have good reason to know of what they are talking, declare it to be of much greater dimensions.

It sulks behind hedges, in the shadow of buildings and glides between the lofty elms for which Cazenovia is noted. Its head is described as enclosed in a white hood which terminates in a point which sways backward and forward as the ghost glides over the ground. The figure below the head is robed in a long flowing mantle of snowy whiteness. Several times on its nightly errands it has been seen to display threateningly a long. rusty knife and a revolver which glistens in the moonlight.

Its favorite haunts seem to be about the old skating rink, the Inhigh Valley Station, and Sullivan street. A few nights ago several boys were chased into a house by the strange object, but that same night it also was pursued through a vacant lot by three men, when it suddenly disappeared.

One evening some sash factory hands were wending their way homeward along the railroad tracks, boasting of the heroic deeds they would do if the apparition should appear to them, when on rounding a curve they were surprised by the subject of their conversation.  Without a moment's hesitation they took to their heels and did not once stop for breath until they burst excitedly into their own homes. 

Some insist that it is simply some boy out for a little fun. Others say it is merely a delusion. Still others believe it to be a sick man slightly demented. Another theory is that it is someone having the interest of the village at heart and is trying to do the young lads a service by frightening them off the streets at night.

As far as I can tell, the mystery of this armed-to-the-teeth apparition remained unsolved.

The Great Eater of Kent

Some people make it into the history books by becoming world leaders.  Some do so through acts of daring or heroism.  Some do so by creating immortal works of art.  And some, like the hero of today’s post, do so by eating an entire sheep in one sitting.

It’s a funny old world.

About all we know for sure about Nicholas Wood of Harrietsham, Kent, England, is that he would have been a devil at today’s “all you can eat” buffets.  Virtually all of our information about him comes from a 1630 pamphlet, “The Great Eater of Kent,” written by a poet named John Taylor, who was Wood’s self-appointed impresario.  Taylor was more interested in promoting his protege’s gastronomical feats than providing personal information, with the result that his work is less a biography and more of a 17th century infomercial.

Wood was born circa 1585.  He was a farmer who owned a reasonably large amount of land, and he was said to be a strongly-built man capable of great physical labor.  Some time around 1610, he began marketing his prodigious appetite, taking on a variety of wagers about how much he could eat.  According to Taylor, Wood “did eat a whole sheep, of 16 shillings price, and raw at that, at one meal.  Another time he eat 30 dozen of pigeons.  At Sir William Sedley’s he eat as much as would have sufficed 30 men.  At the Lord Wottons in Kent, he eat at one meal four-score and four rabbits…He made an end of a whole hog at once and after it swallowed three pecks of damsons.”

Impressive, if a bit monotonous.

One of the few times that Wood lost a bet was, it must be said, a bit of a cheat.  A man named John Dale asserted that he could fill the Great Eater to satiety for the cost of just two shillings.  After Wood took the bet, Dale bought 12 loaves of bread which he soaked in a “mighty ale.”  Halfway through this bibulous meal, Wood fell into a drunken stupor which lasted for nine hours, enabling Dale to win the wager.  Another defeat came at the hands of Sir William Sedley, who had the resources to compile such an enormous feast that it sent Wood toppling to the floor, literally knocked out by food.  His stomach was so distended it looked like it might burst.  Sedley’s alarmed servants, fearing the meal would be Wood’s last, carried him to the fireside and smeared his torso with fat, in the hope that it would make his belly more flexible.

By the next day, Wood had revived, but Sir William decided to add insult to injury by having the poor man dragged outside and put in the stocks as an object of public mockery.  (One hopes that Sedley’s peculiar ideas about hospitality earned him a lot of rejected dinner invitations.)  Happily, Wood afterwards regained his pride through his rabbit feast at the castle of Lord Wotton.

Taylor and Wood first met in 1630, when Taylor was visiting an inn in Kent.  There, Taylor observed Wood polishing off a light breakfast of a leg of mutton, sixty eggs, three pies, and a huge black pudding.  Wood was still hungry afterwards, and as the inn was now swept clean of food, a waiter ran out to grab a live duck from a nearby pond.  Wood devoured the bird, leaving nothing but the beak and quills.

Taylor was deeply impressed by the nauseating display.  He gave Wood twenty shillings to come up to London to perform at the Bankside bear garden.  Taylor pictured an extravaganza where his new friend would devour a wheelbarrow full of tripe, and as an encore, eat “as many puddings as would reach over the Thames.”  In later shows, he would wow the crowds by eating a fat calf and twenty sets of sheeps’ innards.  To entice Londoners to the spectacle, Taylor wrote his pamphlet describing Wood’s “admirable teeth and stomacks exploits.”   Wood’s belly was lyrically extolled as the “rendez-vous or meeting place for the Beasts of the Fields, the Fowles of the Ayre, and Fishes of the Sea.”

Wood did indeed travel to London, but, sadly, right before his debut, the Great Eater came down with a bad case of nerves.  Londoners were a notoriously brutal lot, and he feared dealing with some embarrassing--and dangerous--practical joke, such as the one he had suffered at the hands of John Dale.  Besides, he had recently lost all but one of his teeth, as the result of eating a shoulder of mutton--bones and all.  You might say the thought of facing a London crowd caused Wood to lose his appetite.  Without saying a word to anyone, Wood did a runner.  Taylor never saw him again.  It is said that Wood died in poverty soon afterwards, having sold everything he possessed to satisfy his tragically large appetite.

Taylor--no doubt muttering, “Ah, what might have been!”--had to settle for extolling Wood’s gastronomical feats in verse:

Thou that putst down the Mault below the wheat,

That dost not eate to liue, but liue to eate:

Thou that the Sea-Whale, and Land Wolfe excels:

A foe to Bachus, Champion of god Bels:

I wish if any foreine foes intend

Our famous Ile of Britaine to offend,

That each of them had Stomacks like to thee,

That of each other they deuour'd might bee.

Some haue drunke healths at once (to purchase fames)

As there are letters in their Mistris names,

Others there are, that drinke by rub and square,

And sound round drinkers there aboundance are,

These barely goe with making Barly deare,

And cunningly transforme themselues to Beere,

Or potent Ale, or Iuice of French or Spanish,

Or Smoake, (which Time and Coyne doth banish:)

These are the sleights that halfe the world inchants,

These are the principles of woes and wants:

But thou art free from drinking by the great,

Meat is for men, and thou wer't made to eate.

Though Maximinus, Romes great Emperour,

Did forty pound of flesh each day deuoure,

Albinus th'Emperour did him surpasse,

Fiue hundred Figges by him downe swallow'd was,

Of Peaches he consum'd one hundred more,

Of great Musckmellons also halfe a score,

One hundred Birds, all at one meale he cast

Into his paunch, at breaking of his fast.

Pago surpassed both these two together,

A Bore, a hundred loaues, a Pigge, a Weather,

All this the Rascall swallow'd at a meale,

(If Writers in their writing, true doe deale.)

But sure I am, that what of thee is writ,

Is sure (although not all the truth, or halfe of it:)

Thou dost exceed all that our age e're saw,

Thou potent, high, and mighty men of maw.

FINIS

Weekend Link Dump

 

Welcome to this week's Link Dump!

And greetings from the Strange Company mail room!

A teenager who died in the American Revolution has finally been identified.

An ancient Roman fossil collector.

The strange case of the "Leavenworth Look-Alikes."

The legend of what may have been the first underwater tunnel.

Casual snapshots of the Romanovs.

The strange case of the Beale Ciphers.

A diplomat's widow with murder on her mind.  Lots of murder.

A tour of Icelandic turf houses.

A mysterious death in a toilet.  Yeah, definitely not how you want to go.

If it's time for the Link Dump, that means it's time to rewrite human history again.

The murder of a "squeeze fiend."

Hard times for body-snatchers.

Earl of Bolingbroke, disappointed father.

Let's talk Viking hygiene.

How to hold a medieval tournament.

A human "sixth sense."

A visit to an "island full of idiots."

Football culture in Early Modern Britain.

An ancient Maya scientist.

A giant bird in Kentucky?

A real-life inspiration for "Les Miserables."

The medieval custom of "proxy marriages."

A case of matricide.

Some influential medieval women.

How trees are archives.

A Brooklyn Bigfoot.

That's a wrap for this week!  See you on Monday, when we'll meet a man who gained brief fame for being anything but a picky eater.  In the meantime, here's some vintage Cyndi Lauper.

Newspaper Clipping of the Day

Via Newspapers.com

A ghost that was, you might say, all things to all people was reported in the “Moncton Transcript,” February 1, 1922:

London, Jan. 30-Eastbourne is being troubled, or entertained, by a "ghost" mystery.

A strange apparition has been seen several times gliding along the Crumbles, near the fishermen's huts, and across Fishermen's Green. As the place is within 800 yards of the spot on which Irene Munro was murdered, some of the local residents accept the theory that the spirit of the murdered girl is abroad by night; but one of those who has seen the "ghost" says it was a male figure.

It was first seen in the half-light of a December morning by Mг. Richard Prodger, a fisherman, who says he was walking towards the huts when an apparition, clothed in a long black gown, suddenly rosе from the ground in front of him. As he moved forward the ghostly figure went ahead some distance. When he stopped the ghost stopped also.

"It was wearing a thing like an ulster cape, that reached down to the ground," he says. "It did not walk: it glided along. It wore also a big round hat.

"Three times I stopped, and the ghost stopped, too. It continued in front of me right across Fishermen's Green, and then suddenly sank into the ground and disappeared. I walked to the spot but saw no signs of the ghost. If I had not been loaded down with beat-hooks I should have gone for it."

The same apparition has been seen by Mrs. Goldsmith, caretaker of the Fishermen's Institute, adjoining Fishermen's Green. She says the ghost was white and luminous. She was walking near the huts when the strange figure emerged from between two of them like a white cloud. She stopped, trembling with fright, when, just as suddenly, the apparition disappeared--"vanished into nothing."

Bolder spirits are making nightly visits to the spot in an effort to run the strange visitor to earth.

Mr. Prodger is certain that the figure looked like a man who hanged himself in a house close to the huts, and thinks it is only natural that he should return to his old home at Christmas time.

On the other hand, Mrs. Goldsmith is equally sure that Irene Munro walks The Crumbles every night, while a girl who saw the ghost on her way home one night said she could "see right through it" as it glided along and vanished through the side of a hut.

More superstitious people dare not face the desolate waste after dark.

What the Monks Saw: A Medieval Mystery

Just to show that life is full of unexpected turns, on June 18, 1178, a group of medieval English monks threw a fine puzzle in the laps of astronomers that lingers to this day.

On that day, shortly after sunset, five monks at the abbey of the Christ Church of Canterbury (on the site of Canterbury Cathedral,) noticed that something very odd was happening in the sky.  Gervase, who was Canterbury’s chronicler, provided the eyewitness record:

“The upper horn of the Moon split in two. From the midpoint of the division a flaming torch sprang up, spewing out, over a considerable distance, fire, hot coals and sparks. Meanwhile the body of the Moon which was below writhed, as it were in anxiety, and to put it in the words of those who reported it to me and saw it with their own eyes, the Moon throbbed like a wounded snake. Afterwards it resumed its proper state. This phenomenon was repeated a dozen times or more, the flame assuming various twisting shapes at random and then returning to normal.  Then, after these transformations, the Moon from horn to horn, that is along its whole length, took on a blackish appearance.”

I am sure you are about to bring up the obvious question:  What the hell happened?  Go ahead and ask, but the answer you are likely to get from scientists is “Dunno.”  In 1976, geologist Jack Hartung suggested that the monks observed a meteor impact on the Moon so massive that it caused molten matter (the “flaming torch”) to rise into space.  Hartung pointed out that the Moon has a crater (named after Giordano Bruno,) that is possibly relatively young--perhaps young enough to date from June 18, 1178.  

Alas for this delightfully brief and tidy answer, it is far from universally accepted.  Other scientists have pointed out that an impact that huge would have had dramatic and impossible to ignore effects on Earth.  It likely would have caused one of the biggest meteor showers in human history, observable all over the world for days afterwards.  As far as we know, such spectacular showers were not recorded by the Canterbury monks, or anyone else on our planet for that matter.  Additionally, in 2008 high-resolution images obtained by a Japanese satellite were used to give the Giordano Bruno crater an age of about 4 to 6 million years, which would obviously negate Hartung’s theory.

In 2001, a University of Arizona student named Paul Withers came up with a more elaborate scenario.  He proposed that if, on that June night in 1178, a meteor came down to Earth and exploded right in front of the rising Moon, it could conceivably have appeared to the Canterbury witnesses that the Moon itself was erupting.  This would be a rather remarkable astronomical coincidence, but not an impossible one.  Unfortunately, this hypothesis can neither be proved or disproved.

So, what did those Canterbury monks observe?  We’ll likely never know for sure, which is what charms me about our little historical footnote.

Weekend Link Dump

 

Welcome to this week's Link Dump, which is so action-packed, not one, but four hosts were required!

Two ships from the "dawn of naval aviation."

It turns out that wild chimpanzees are pretty good drummers.

If you're planning to visit the Grand Canyon, maybe think twice about that.

I was in a happier frame of mind before I learned that there is a spider that can outrun humans.

A really confusing place in Canada.

Weird lights off the coast of Greenland.

JMW Turner's "matchless vale."

So maybe "witches' marks"...weren't witches' marks.  Bummer.

In case you were wondering, being a 19th century sailor generally wasn't much fun.

The tradition of "bedding ceremonies."

Daniel Defoe, government spy.

Newly discovered medieval shipwrecks.

Snake the Bigfoot Hunter is claiming victory.

Once again, it's "let's rewrite human history time!"

Mark Twain as a "local industry."

The oldest evidence of mourning rituals.

The modern "faerie phenomenon."

So, you ship a dead human and a live dog.  Hilarity ensues.

"Little House on the Prairie"-style recipes.

Butterflies remember being caterpillars.

A look at medieval pilgrimages.

Evidence for a "lost" ancient Egyptian city.

The days when Americans paid good money to see a "Man-Bear."

Manhattan's last farm.

The mystery of the Pied Piper.

How Coolidge became "Silent Cal."

A ballad inspired by a once-notorious murder.

That's all for this week!  See you on Monday, when we'll look at a lunar mystery.  In the meantime, here's Sam & Dave.

Newspaper Clipping of the Day

Via Newspapers.com

 

This account of an extremely weird cloud (?) appeared in the “Caledonian Mercury,” January 18, 1821:

COSENZA. On the 29th Nov. last, about half-past six in the evening, there suddenly appeared, on the west of the horizon, a luminous body, more brilliant than the moon at its full. This body had the figure of a dragon. After passing with great velocity across the horizon, it changed into a dark and thick cloud. After three or four minutes several violent flashes of lightning burst from the cloud, which, after playing awhile through the air, died away. In the moment of their disappearance a long and loud peal of thunder was heard, and a considerable motion was felt in the air. The cloud then took a triangular figure, and rolling rapidly to the east, disappeared. On the following morning the mountains to the east were found covered with snow. Where it exploded there remained a long via lattea near the cloud.  

My opinion is that it was a meteor composed of the same materials as in lightning: Neither it nor its precipitations fell in direct lines, because their specific gravity was less than that of the air. On the tops of the mountains it was met by winds which dissolved it into snow. 

This luminous body was visible at Naples, but none of its characteristics were observed; in some parts of Calabria and on the part of Sicily opposite, we have heard that its appearances were more singular than those described in the foregoing letter.

The Goat Head of Strumpshaw

"Norwich Evening News," February 3, 1970, via Newspapers.com

If you’re at all familiar with my Twitter/X or Facebook feeds, you know that I periodically share old newspaper reports about the seemingly endless varieties of mayhem carried out by goats.  (Why do I do this?  It’s just how I roll, I guess.)  So, you can imagine how delighted I was to learn of the following story, which just may be the peak World of Goats tale ever.

For about two hundred years, a pub called The Goat Inn stood in the Norfolk, England, village of Strumpshaw.  (It is now known as “The Huntsman.”)  It was an ordinary little British pub until an unwise purchase gained the place a certain eternal fame among those of us who like our locally-brewed ale and cider with The Weird for a chaser.

One day in 1908, the wife of The Goat’s landlord, a Mrs. Newton, took a fancy to the large, handsome white goat belonging to a traveling peddler, and bought it for a half-crown.  She then showed her esteem for the animal by having it butchered.  The body was transformed into a supply of goat meat for the pub’s kitchen, while the head was taxidermied, after which it occupied pride of place behind the pub bar.  

I can’t say this is my idea of how to drum up clientele, but perhaps that’s just me.

For the next sixty years, the unfortunate goat--who was soon nicknamed “Old Capricorn”--gazed down at patrons while they sipped their drinks, and, possibly, silently wished that Strumpshaw had a better class of pubs.

Those six decades were not uneventful around the pub.  Regular patrons of The Goat, as well as its owners, began noticing that they had become a particularly unlucky lot.  They suffered strange illnesses, financial misfortunes, domestic troubles, and more.  Many attributed their miseries to the pub’s resident goat head.  Was “Old Capricorn,” justifiably irritated at being slaughtered and then used as pub bric-a-brac, getting his revenge?  Over the years, the head--now universally seen as a curse--was stolen from the pub, but it always seemed to find its way back.  Presumably the thieves learned that actually possessing the thing just increased their troubles.

In 1967, the pub was purchased by one Frank Walpole.  He soon realized that he bought more than he had bargained for.  An uncanny force seemed to haunt the place.  Mirrors mysteriously flew off walls, the pub’s piano would play by itself, water would unaccountably drip from the ceiling.  Walpole and his wife and daughter began seeing shadowy figures walking around at night.  The tragic climax came when a teenage boy, apparently wanting to defy the alleged “curse,” grabbed the goat’s head in a very disrespectful manner.

The next day, the youth was killed in a car accident.

That was enough for Frank Walpole.  Ignoring the protests of some of the pub regulars, he removed Old Capricorn from public view.  However, two years later, public sentiment persuaded him to reinstall the head behind the bar.  No sooner had he done so that his family pets--birds, monkeys, dogs--began dropping dead or running away.  This convinced Walpole that the goat must go…for good.  In February 1972, he weighed down the head and threw it in the River Yare.  He hoped this would “drown” the evil forces.

Unfortunately, in every good horror movie, the villain just plain refuses to die.  Less than a month later, one Alfred Stone found the head in a dyke five miles from where it had been submerged.  It was, Stone noted, “looking more malevolent than ever.”  For reasons best known to Stone, he fished out the head and presented it to a Mr. Loades.  Loades’ son Dennis wanted it to “start his own museum.”  Well, he started something, all right.  The dogs on the family farm began turning angry and violent.  Mr. Loades’ mother had to be hospitalized.  The family finally got the message and returned the head to The Goat.  “I was pleased to see it go,” Loades commented.  Several months later the head again vanished.  It was found in a shallow grave in Strumpshaw’s gravel pit, the eyes staring up in an evil glare, “as if it was alive.”

It will not surprise you to learn that all this ill-treatment made Old Capricorn crabbier than ever.  The digger used to dig out the head blew a tire in the effort.  The mechanic who came to replace the tire was mysteriously shot in the arm from someone--it was never learned who--wielding a pellet gun.  When a dog belonging to one of the pit workers was confronted with the head, he ran to a shed, cowering in terror.

After that final bit of supernatural mayhem, the trail of the cursed goat head went cold.  When Paul Cornwall bought The Goat in 1984, he expressed interest in finding the head and returning it to its old home.  He cheerfully called himself a “glutton for punishment.”  However, his efforts to track down Old Capricorn were unsuccessful.

My opinion?  If you should ever be in that part of England, and you happen to see in a deserted barn or a junk shop, a very old, bedraggled goat’s head with a sinister expression on its face, leave the damned thing for someone else.

Weekend Link Dump

 

Welcome to this week's Link Dump, where we wish our fellow Americans a happy 250th birthday!

The unveiling of the Victoria Cross.

A handy reminder that Robin Hood was no hero.

One really freaking long tennis match.

The motivations of Richard, Duke of York.

"Somebody's father" at the battle of Gettysburg.

Why we call it a "honeymoon."

The dog who loved trains.

Now that all other problems on Earth have been solved, scientists are busy building diving suits for cyborg cockroaches.

Life on 19th century Paris boulevards.

Photos of a vanished London.

Lois Marshall's last leap.

A look at America's 150th birthday.

Politics and theology in the Byzantine Empire.

The adventures of a 13th century couple.

How AI is helping decipher ancient scrolls.

An obituary that really speaks ill of the dead.

The "biggest book giveaway in history."

In search of Poe's "Tamerlane."

The disappearing public benches.

The journal of an American POW.

An "impossible" Assyrian artifact.

Ancient Roman UFOs.

Orangutan, heal thyself.

"Honeymoon Row" in Brooklyn Heights.

In 2020, something weird happened in the Milky Way.

The time has come, the walrus said, to talk of Lewis Carroll and biscuit tins.

What is an acronym, anyway?

The inspiration for "Save the Last Dance For Me."

The "Moon Hoax" of 1835.

Yet another murder-for-insurance.

Some fantastic images of the Universe.

The world's weirdest mushroom.

The fire-tamers of France.

The many lives of a ghost town.

That's all for this week!  See you on Monday, when we'll look at a very troublesome goat's head.  In the meantime, even though this song wasn't written for the Bicentennial, I'm old enough to remember this banger being everywhere during the summer of '76.  It takes me back...

 

Newspaper Clipping of the Day

Via Newspapers.com

This unnerving account of the mysterious deaths of two sisters appeared in the “Patriot News,” March 24, 1968:

A soft sigh, a stare of horror, a piercing scream and death that as yet is unexplained…that was the fate of Beverly Stephens and her sister, Patricia, who died in almost identical circumstances five years apart. Neither girl uttered a word before she died. Neither gave any sign that anything was wrong before the seizure. The only sound either made was a scream. In both cases, mouth-to-mouth resuscitation failed.

Death came almost instantly. Neither girl had a medical history of serious ailments or emotional upsets. Exhaustive autopsies that included microorganisms tests revealed no clue to what killed either girl. Their death certificates read: "Sudden death, natural." Natural, perhaps, but inexplicable. 

Beverly Stephens died in August, 1963.  She had just stepped from a swimming pool in Porterville, Calif., when she sighed, looked about her with horror, uttered a single, high-pitched scream and collapsed. She was 17. Equally inexplicable was the death of Patricia Stephens Rush, who succumbed in her home in Santa Monica, Calif. Suddenly she sat bolt upright in bed ... then came the sigh, the look of fear, the scream and death.

She was 23. What haunts the girls' parents, Everett and Ruth Stephens, who live in San Luis Obispo, Calif., is the thought that whatever killed the sisters might be a hereditary disorder afflicting the female side of the family. The Stephenses have two other daughters, Barbara, 17, and Diana, 11, in addition to sons Larry and Robert. 

The same thought weighs heavily on Staff Sgt. Robert Rush, an Army combat engineer, who had been home from Vietnam just four days when his wife, Patricia, died, leaving him with two girls, Kristen, 1, and Kimberly, 6. 

The family made appointments with Los Angeles heart specialists for the surviving girls. The parents can shed little light on the deaths of the sisters, and neither does their personal background provide a clue. The family moved to California from St. Louis shortly after World War II. By 1954, Everett Stephens was working as a correctional officer for the state, first in Salinas, then in Porterville. He now works in San Luis Obispo at the California Men's Colony. 

The Stephenses were living in Porterville when Beverly, a high school senior, died. Although the autopsy showed nothing, her parents recall that a week before her fatal seizure, Beverly had survived a similar attack.  This occurred at a dance one warm August night. The girl uttered one short, piercing scream and collapsed. Two registered nurses, who happened to be at the dance, said she wasn't breathing when they began giving her mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. She regained consciousness in a short time.

Doctors at the Porterville hospital could find nothing wrong with her. Suspecting that she was suffering from fatigue, they sent her home to bed. Beverly didn't remember a thing about what her mother still calls "the fainting spell." 

"She was perfectly normal the next day, and she went to a ball game that night," her mother recalled. "In fact, she went shopping with me the day after that." 

If Beverly had any premonition of death, she gave no sign to her family or friends. She went swimming with her younger brother, Robert, who was 13 at the time, a few days after the incident at the dance. It was Robert, now a high school senior, who described what happened to his sister at Porterville's Sunnyside Pool--the sigh, the terror-stricken look, the scream, and the frantic attempts to revive her. 

Dr. James Sargent, Tulare County autopsy surgeon, said he could find no marks on the body, no heart damage, no brain injury, nothing. Since the couple's other children seemed healthy enough, Beverly's strange death attracted little attention. There wasn't even a story about it in the local paper. All that changed recently when her sister died in almost identical circumstances. Patricia's death freshened coroner Sargent's memory of the original case: 

"Actually, you know as much about what caused the girl to die as we do," he said.  "I'm not satisfied with the explanations that were conjectured at the time. There simply was and is no theory on the subject that makes medical sense." 

One theory was that a sinus reflex had slowed the girl's heart action and ultimately killed her, but Sargent rejected that with the observation that such an explanation is a popular "medical dumping ground." 

Now the conjecture has started all over again. Like Beverly's brother, Patricia's husband, a 10-year army veteran, can't provide a clue even though he, too, was an eyewitness. Rush said he awoke about 6 a.m. to find his wife sitting upright, staring straight ahead and screaming.

He said he had the feeling that the scream was involuntary, that she was unconscious. Rush could detect no pulse. He called for an ambulance and began mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, but it was too late. Patricia was dead when she reached Valley Community Hospital 27 minutes later.

Again there were tests, the autopsy, the funeral. Her badly shaken father said: "They'll never find out what caused it." 

And Dr. John P. Blanchard, the Santa Barbara coroner, as baffled as Dr. Sargent had been, was forced to agree. "In all probability," he said, "the girl's father is right." 

Dr. Blanchard's autopsy report mentioned "pulmonary edema," a sudden accumulation of fluid in the lungs. "But in truth," the doctor said, "we just don't know what happened to her.  It's an unexplained natural death. I don't even have any theories." 

Dr. Blanchard has said he would continue his post mortem studies into Patricia's death and consult the pathologist who sought to find the cause of her sister’s death.  "Obviously, there is a medical reason for both deaths," he said, "but our science isn't sophisticated enough to find the answers."

Doctors at the Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation in Oklahoma City, where a foundation grant is financing studies of inexplicable sudden death, may look into the cases of the Stephens sisters. Although their experiments have involved laboratory animals and not humans, a team led by Dr. Stewart Woll is convinced that panic can literally switch off a healthy heart and cause sudden death.

Wolf says that many drowning victims are often found without enough water in their lungs to have drowned them, and snake bite victims are known to have succumbed to an amount of venom that ordinarily would not have been fatal. 

"In such cases, the patient just dies of a turned-off heart as a result of panic," he said. Other members of the research team mentioned the possibility that Patricia might have had a particular vivid nightmare that produced death-dealing panic. But that explanation would not account for the death of her younger sister five years earlier at the swimming pool. The Stephenses have about reconciled themselves to the conviction that the deaths of their daughters will remain a mystery.

"Naturally, we're very concerned now about our older daughters, but we're not going to dwell on it. We can't let it ruin our lives," the father said.

I don’t know what happened to the other Stephens girls, but hopefully they were more fortunate than their sisters.  Still, their lives must have been very very uneasy.

The Pilot's Return

During the 1950s, Martin Caidin was the official historian for America’s Fifth Air Force during his stint in A-2 military intelligence.  In that capacity, he had full access to military combat files.  In his book “Ghosts of the Air,” he described a story he found in one of those files that was reported from air force operations in North Africa during WWII--a story that he admitted was “flatly impossible” but that was nevertheless “witnessed, and attested to, by several hundred officers and men of the U.S. Army, and Army Air Forces, who were there.”

Unfortunately, at the time he discovered this record, it was still classified, meaning he could take notes from the document, but not remove it from the vault.  In later visits to this vault, that particular file could not be found.  In other words, there is nothing to corroborate Caidin’s incredible yarn, leaving him to sigh, “Take it as it is, because that’s what you’re going to get.”

So, the caveat is duly noted.  However, it’s such a bloody good yarn, I decided to “take it.”

Our story begins with a day of standard combat operations in the Mediterranean Sea.  Among that day’s missions was a long-range patrol of Lockheed P-38 Lightnings, which set off along the North African coast into airspace that was then controlled by the Germans.  The Lightnings encountered some of the enemy, and, inevitably, a fierce air battle ensued.  When the fighting was finally over, the Americans realized that one P-38 was not accounted for.  They were unable to make radio contact with the missing pilot.  A search found no trace of the plane in the water.  It was as if the P-38 and its pilot had simply vanished into air.  Finally, as the other Lightnings began to run low on fuel, the group was forced to return to their home base.  The one absent pilot was simply listed as “missing in action.”  They still held hope that he had just become separated from the others and would eventually return safely.

However, as the hours went on with no word from the missing fighter, everyone accepted that the worst had happened.  Just another casualty of war.  Then, the air-raid alert suddenly blasted through the base.  Radar had picked up an unknown aircraft heading toward the field.  Soon, a P-38 came into view, getting ready to land.

The defense system radioed the plane.  No answer.  Flares were sent up, as a signal for the pilot to give some response.  The plane took no notice of them.  When the P-38 was over the center of the airfield, it suddenly began shaking, and to the shock of all observers, the plane suddenly, inexplicably, began to disintegrate mid-air.

The men saw the pilot fall free from the wreck, and they frantically shouted to him to open his chute.  The parachute indeed opened, and the pilot fell gently to the ground.  As ambulances--and everyone else on the base--frantically drove to the site, it was noted that the man was not moving.

The base’s medical team reached the pilot first.  As soon as they saw the body up-close, they could only stand there in stunned disbelief.  It was impossible enough to realize that the P-38 somehow approached the base with no fuel left in its tanks, but with both engines running.  But when it was found that the pilot had flown the plane and parachuted to the ground with a bullet hole in his forehead…

The man had been killed by German fire hours before.

A report had to be made about the incident, but it was marked “Secret,” hidden away in the most obscure file possible, and everyone involved did their best to persuade themselves that what they had just seen happen…did not happen.

What else could they do?  What else could you do?

Weekend Link Dump

 

Welcome to this week's Link Dump!  Our hosts for this Friday are Goldie and Brownie!

Because why not.

A plague outbreak from over 5,000 years ago.

A case of explosive revenge.

A medieval communication network.

How angry fishermen saved the American Revolution.

A remarkable amber pendant.

The liver-eating cannibal of the Old West.

Catherine Crowe's ghost hunt.

That time when humans nearly became extinct.

A dispute over camels in British India.

Disaster hits HMS Vanguard.

A newly-discovered Etruscan burial chamber.

The underwater ruins of a medieval city.

Restoring the Cotton Genesis.

Why we blow out birthday candles.

Warnings from dead aviators.

The life of Catherine of Egmont.

A look at 18th century painter William Williams.

That time when Elvis shot up a Cadillac.

Witches!  On broomsticks!  In 1982!

The mysterious death of a Renaissance muse.

Some ancient Egyptian inscriptions have really thrown archaeologists for a loop.

Wedding pranks that did not go well at all.

A new discovery regarding Sutton Hoo.

A strange medieval burial.

The oldest building in Spitalfields.

3I/Atlas is not only very weird, it's probably very very old.

The mysteries of Custer's Last Stand.

A Polish historical symbolism painter.

The mystery of how our planet got water.

A "Delilah" gets her revenge.

That's all for this week!  See you on Monday, when we'll look at a very eerie story from WWII.  In the meantime, let's welcome in Summer, medieval English style.

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.