The Sordid History of Edgar Allen Poe’s Grave

 

   After my last issue visiting the 1980s with the death of John Belushi, I wanted to step back to my roots, the Victorian era, and talk about one of the most famous graveyards in Baltimore at Westminster Hall. This 18^th Century church and graveyard used to be the First Presbyterian Church of Baltimore and is the burial site of one of the best authors in American literature, Edgar Allen Poe. He has two burial sites and four headstones, but we’ll get to that.

   Edgar Allen Poe died October 7, 1849. He was found next to a tavern in clothes that was not his own and talking deliriously, as though in an alcoholic stupor. He was then hospitalized and after several days, he perished. By being a lesser-known author at the time of his death, he died as many artists do, poor.  He was then laid to rest behind the church in an unmarked grave. Eventually a man by the name of George W Spence placed a small gravestone carved of sandstone, inscribed with the number 80. After Maria Clemm, Edgar’s mother-in-law, started talking about the lack of upkeep of Edgar’s grave in newspapers, Nielson Poe, Edgar’s cousin, took matters in his own hand.  Nielson contacted a tombstone maker by the name of Hugh Sisson in 1860. A worthy tombstone was made and was getting ready to be transported to the cemetery the following week, until disaster struck. According to a magazine that was published a few years later, Sisson told his story:

    “That tablet was finished and standing in my yard. It was to be erected in the cemetery the following week and would have been but [for] a most extraordinary accident on the Friday or Saturday preceding. My yard adjoins the tracks of the Northern Central Railroad. A freight-train ran off the track, broke down the fence, and did more or less damage to other work; but the only irreparable damage was done to Poe’s tablet. That was smashed to pieces, beyond all power of restoration”

    Only a sketch of the tombstone remains. The inscription place upon it was this: “Hic Tandem Felicis Conduntur Reliquae (translated as “Here, at last, he is happy”). Edgar Allan Poe, Obiit Oct. VII 1849. The reverse side of the stone read “Jam parce sepulto” (translated as “Spare these remains”).

    It would not be until 1875 that another monument would be started. Collections were started under the leadership of Miss Sara Sigourney Rice for this new monument but a goodly chunk of the money with come from a single Poe admirer, a Philadelphia resident by the name of George Childs. George Frederick, the famous architect who designed Baltimore City Hall, started work on the monument shortly after. After it was finished, it was found too big for the original gravesite so it would be placed in the corner of the churchyard. After the exhumation of Edgar Allen Poe as well as his wife, Virginia Clemm Poe, and his mother-in-law, Maria Clemm, they were reburied, and the monument was put in its place. The dedication of the monument took place on November 17, 1875 and was attended by Nelson Poe and Walt Whitman. Letters from H. W. Longfellow, John G. Whittier, William C. Bryant and Alfred Tennyson were read, telling of Poe’s genius as a poet and author

    In 1913, a final tombstone would be installed at the original gravesite for the famous author. The benefactor of this was Orrin C. Painter. First the tombstone was placed well outside the Poe family plot, and then it was moved to a more reasonable location. But in the words of the Edgar Allen Poe Society in Baltimore, “Perhaps in part due to this confusion, but mostly because people simply love a good mystery, a strange rumor has persisted that the memorial committee failed to exhume Poe’s remains, instead moving those of some other poor soul. The improbability of this notion is obvious when one realizes that the exhumation in 1875 was supervised by George W. Spence, the man who buried Poe in 1849, and Poe’s cousin Neilson Poe, who attended the original funeral”. In the end, people are drawn to the original gravesite of Poe, with its realistic raven chiseled at the top of the stone. That’s where pennies and flowers are placed, and as for one, the Poe Toaster, will leave on Poe’s birthday, three red roses and a bottle of cognac.

    If you are visiting Baltimore, there are many things to see there. But if you can have only one day, visit the Edgar Allen Poe House Museum as well as the churchyard where the famous author is interred, which is in walking distance.

The Death of John Belushi

 

    In this article, I wanted to write about a piece of history that affected me when I was a teenager, the death of John Belushi. For someone who basically writes about antiquarian stuff and my knowledge based on history stops around the 1950s, this was a huge stretch for me, but I will try to do the subject justice. John Belushi was a comic legend. Growing up in Chicago is where he met his most famous costar, Dan Ackroyd at the Second City comedy club, famous for producing great comedic talent. They will be part of the inaugural season of Saturday Night Live, and they will put together the iconic band The Blues Brothers. Belushi was a comic genius, which means he had a dark side as well, drugs. And that would be his downfall that would lead to his death in Los Angeles at the Chateau Marmont Hotel on the Sunset Strip on March 5^th, 1982.

    This article isn’t just about the death of John Belushi, but the life of Cathy Smith, the drug dealer who gave Belushi the lethal mixture of heroin and cocaine. Cathy Smith isn’t an enigmatic character, nor is she a person on the streets dealing drugs. Smith, who was born in Toronto, Canada first came into the music scene with her relationship with Levon Helm of The Band in 1963. There she dated several members of the musical group and even became pregnant, and they called the baby “The band baby” because the paternity of the child wasn’t clear.

    In the early 1970s she met Canadian songwriter and singer Gordon Lightfoot. I rather like Gordon Lightfoot and if you have never heard “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” stop reading now and take a listen. Lightfoot’s haunting voice and his ability to tell a story made him an icon of music. Cathy Smith became an employee of Lightfoot, and later his lover.  Their relationship was tempestuous at best, and his love affair with Smith lasted three years. The 1974 song “Sundown” was released as a single and became another hit for Gordon Lightfoot. The song was, of course, about Cathy Smith.

    In the 1970s Cathy Smith became addicted to heroin and became a dealer for such bands as the Rolling Stones. Smith was running all across music circles during this time, as both a back-up singer and drug dealer. In 1976 she first met John Belushi when a band that she was touring with performed on Saturday Night Live. She would not meet him again until March 1982 when he came to Los Angeles after a film shoot. There Smith gave to Belushi the drugs that killed him.

    Belushi checked in to the Chateau Marmont on February 28, 1982. He was then seen at local nightclubs along Sunset Strip. Soon, he was looking for money, so he visited his longtime manager, Bernie Brillstein. At first Brillstein would deny his request for money but would eventually give in. It was in the early morning hours of March 5^th when Belushi had several visitors at his bungalow including Robert De Niro, Robin Williams, and Cathy Smith. After Robert De Niro left for his own bungalow at the hotel, Smith and Belushi continued to do “speedballs” which is an injection of cocaine and heroin. Breakfast was delivered in the morning and Smith signed for it. Belushi was sleeping after he complained about some chest congestion. Around 10:15 am Smith looked in on Belushi and went out to run errands. She took her syringe and her spoon that was used for the injections just in case the maids wanted to clean the room.

    Around noon that day Bill Wallace, a former kickboxing champion and personal trainer, came to the bungalow to drop off a typewriter and a tape recorder that Belushi had asked for the day before. He let himself in with a key that Belushi had given him and he found Belushi on the bed. He tried to resuscitate him but he was dead. Law enforcement and the city coroner did not reveal anything about the case for several days. John Belushi was dead at the age of 33.

   Cathy Smith was arrested for possession of narcotics on March 5^th. Later in 1982, Rolling Stones magazine gave details of the arrest, “On the afternoon of March 5th, Cathy Evelyn Smith had appeared driving the wrong way into the one-way exit of the Chateau Marmont Hotel on Sunset Strip behind the wheel of John Belushi's rented red Mercedes … At that moment, a hundred feet away, Belushi lay naked and dead on the floor of his $200-a-day bungalow. The police who had cordoned off the area were reflexively insisting it had been 'death from natural causes'.” Smith plead no contest to involuntary manslaughter, and she served fifteen months in Chino at the California Institute for Woman, which I drive by almost every day on my way to work.

Belushi is buried at Abel's Hill Cemetery in Chilmark, Massachusetts, on Martha's Vineyard

The Shark Attack of 1916

 

   Growing up in San Diego I spent a lot of time in the water and one of the things that used to frighten me when I was a young man was what surfers called the Man in the Grey Suit also known as a shark.   Sharks have a been a primal fear ever since man took to the water, and today they are still misunderstood. A lot of the fear comes from fiction, from popular stories such as Peter Benchley’s Jaws and Steven Alten’s Meg and their stories being turned into blockbuster movies. Where does this fear come from? It comes from history.

   This is the age of beachside resorts, World War I is still going on, and polio is an epidemic. The year was 1916 and a great heat wave gripped the east coast and so people look to solace in the cool water of the beaches of New Jersey. On July 1st, at a resort town known as Beach Haven, the first victim was struck. Charles Epting Vansant, age 28, was swimming alongside his Chesapeake Retriever when people heard Vansant calling for help. Onlookers on the beach believed that Vasant was calling to his dog, but instead he was being attacked by a shark. Vansant was retrieved by lifeguards, but his wounds were most severe, one of his thighs had been ripped to ribbons, and he bled out on the manager’s desk at the Engleside Hotel shortly after the attack.   

   The next major attack happened on July 6^th.   A Bell Captain of the Essex and Sussex Hotel, by the name of Charles Bruder, 27, was swimming about 130 meters from the shore when he was attacked. Bruder was bitten on the abdomen and both of his legs were bitten off above the knees.   People on the beach heard his anguished screams and a team of lifeguards paddled out to him in a small canoe, but it was too late to do anything and Bruder died on the boat.

    The next two victims were at a place called Matawan Creek, not far from Keyport, New Jersey on July 12th. One of the reasons this is more tragic is that Matawan Creek is freshwater and is an inlet to Raritan Bay and shouldn’t be a location for a shark to be found.   A group of young boys were playing in the creek next to an area known as "Wyckoff Dock".  Amongst them was a boy by the name of Lester Stillwell, 11. The boys saw the dorsal fin of a shark and made their way to the dock.  Stillwell trying to keep up with his friends, was almost out of the creek as he was pulled underwater. The boys ran for help and several men came to the rescue of Lester Stillwell. One of these men was Watson Stanley Fisher, 24, who dove into the creek looking for the boy. After locating Stillwell’s body, Fisher started making his way back to the shore when he was also attacked by the predator.  His right thigh was bitten and he died shortly after in the hospital due to his injuries. Stillwell’s body was finally recovered about 150 yards upstream from where the attack occurred.

   The fifth attack came right after the attack of Stillwell and Fisher, when Joseph Dunn, 14, was attacked nearby. Dunn was bit in the leg but was saved by his brother. The bite was not fatal and Dunn was treated at Saint Peter's University Hospital where he would be released on September 15, 1916.

   News spread throughout the country as journalists ran headlines such as “Shark Kills Bather Off Jersey Beach".  There was panic amongst the beach resort industry and led to the former director of the Philadelphia Aquarium downplaying the threat of sharks.  He made the following statement in the newspaper the Philadelphia Public Ledger. 

“Despite the death of Charles Vansant and the report [of] two sharks having been caught in that vicinity recently, I do not believe there is any reason why people should hesitate to go in swimming at the beaches for fear of man-eaters. The information in regard to the sharks is indefinite and I hardly believe that Vansant was bitten by a man-eater. Vansant was in the surf playing with a dog and it may be that a small shark had drifted in at high water, and was marooned by the tide. Being unable to move quickly and without food, he had come in to bite the dog and snapped at the man in passing.”

   The hunt was on for the “Jersey Man-Eater” as fishermen came from all over to catch the predator. One was Michael Schleisser, the lion tamer for the Barnum and Bailey’s circus. In all honesty, the story is quite outlandish. Schleisser, who was fishing off Raritan Bay, came across a large 7.5-foot Great White shark.  The shark nearly destroyed his boat before Schleissier was able to kill the shark with a broken oar. When they cut open the shark’s belly, they retrieved a “suspicious fleshy material”. Schleissier had the shark mounted and put on display in Manhattan for several years, but unfortunately the shark became lost in history and no one knows where it is now.

   By October, 1916, Scientific American Magazine became involved and added to the public panic.   Robert Murphy and John Nichols wrote in October 1916:

There is something peculiarly sinister in the shark's make-up. The sight of his dark, lean [dorsal] fin lazily cutting zig-zags in the surface of some quiet, sparkling summer sea, and then slipping out of sight not to appear again, suggests an evil spirit. His leering, chinless face, his great mouth with its rows of knife-like teeth, which he knows too well to use on the fisherman's gear; the relentless fury with which, when his last hour has come, he thrashes on deck and snaps at his enemies; his toughness, his brutal, nerveless vitality and insensibility to physical injury, fail to elicit the admiration one feels for the dashing, brilliant, destructive, gastronomic bluefish, tunny, or salmon.

   The shark attacks of 1916 became one of the inspirations for Peter Benchley’s book, Jaws. Jaws became a bestseller in 1974 and would become the first summer Blockbuster movie in 1975 when millions of people became scared of going into the water. In Matawan Creek today there is an eerie reminder of what took place over almost 107 years ago. A train bridge that crosses the area between Raritan Bay and the Creek itself has a mural of a giant shark head looking as if it is ripping through the surface of the water with its mouth open to the still calm sea.

 

 

 

Nightmare Alley

 

I want to tell you of an unusual man with an unusual book. William Lindsay Gresham wrote a novel in 1946, a novel about carnival workers and wannabe prophets that are hustlers and femme fatales. It was a noir literature with a spin on it. The book was Nightmare Alley and was later made into a movie with Tyron Power in 1947 and then a remake in 2021 with Bradley Cooper.

Gresham was born in Baltimore and when he was a child the family moved to New York City and that is where he became fascinated with the sideshows at Coney Island. After high school he drifted from job to job, and after a series of bad relationships that ended with a divorce, Gresham made his way to Spain. He served with the Loyalist forces in the Spanish Civil War as a medic. While there, Gresham would hang out with other Americans who also signed up for service. One of them was a former sideshow employee by the name of Joseph Daniel “Doc” Halliday who inspired Gresham to write his most famous work.

When he came home from Spain, he had a stay at a tuberculosis ward, which lead to an attempted suicide. Eventually, Gresham got a job working as an editor for a “true crime” magazine. In 1942, Gresham will marry Joy Davidman, a poet. They will have two children together, David and Douglas. It will be Joy who inspires Gresham to write the nonfiction Midway Monster as well as Nightmare Alley.  Nightmare Alley portrays a character named Stanton Carlisle who starts to work at a carnival and will become a mentalist and will eventually leave the carnival to become a psychic. This hustle gets Stanton in hot water and he will later become a hobo and do Tarot cards readings. The book has a self-prophecy ending, of course. Gresham sells the rights to Nightmare Alley for $60,000 dollars that would then become the 1947 movie.

This money, almost a million in today’s money, will land Gresham and Davidman in a beautiful mansion in Staatsburg, New York. Things were alright for a while, but tensions arose in the marriage because of Gresham’s unfaithful ways and his alcoholism. Gresham will then become interested in Dianetics, a book written in 1950 by L. Ron Hubbard, but after a couple of years he will denounce it as a “another type of spook racket”.  Davidman, who was an atheist as well a member of the American Communist Party, was a fan of C.S Lewis, and his works became the factor of her becoming a Christian. Davidman will eventually divorce Gresham and make her way to England with their two sons. Before Davidman left, she invited her cousin, Renee Rodriguez, to come to their house while she went to England. Rodriguez and Gresham soon began an affair.

Joy Davidson will become friends with C.S. Lewis and she will write her best-known work Smoke on the Mountain: An Interpretation of the Ten Commandments with a preface from C.S. Lewis in 1954. C.S. Lewis and Joy Davidman will then marry in 1956. Unfortunately, their wedding bliss would end with Davidman cancer diagnosis.  She will pass in 1960. The relationship between Lewis and Davidman became a BBC film, stage play, and a theatrical film Shadowlands. Lewis was struck by grief and under a pseudonym, will publish A Grief Observed in 1961. Lewis will write this of Joy:

“Getting over it so soon? But the words are ambiguous. To say the patient is getting over it after an operation for appendicitis is one thing; after he’s had his leg off is quite another. After that operation either the wounded stump heals or the man dies. If it heals, the fierce, continuous pain will stop. Presently he’ll get back his strength and be able to stump about on his wooden leg. He has ‘got over it.’ But he will probably have recurrent pains in the stump all his life, and perhaps pretty bad ones; and he will always be a one-legged man. There will be hardly any moment when he forgets it. Bathing, dressing, sitting down and getting up again, even lying in bed, will all be different. His whole way of life will be changed. All sorts of pleasures and activities that he once took for granted will have to be simply written off. Duties too. At present I am learning to get about on crutches. Perhaps I shall presently be given a wooden leg. But I shall never be a biped again.”

   After Davidman’s death, Gresham went to England to see his sons. When he saw that they were well taken care of, he left them in the care of Lewis. Gresham then joined Alcoholics Anonymous and became interested in Spiritualism, and the debunking of mediums. He then wrote a book about Houdini with the assistance of James Randi, a magician turned skeptic paranormal investigator.

In 1962, Gresham’s health took a turn for the worse. He was diagnosed with tongue cancer and checked into the Dixie Hotel in Manhattan, which he frequently visited while writing Nightmare Alley. There, the 53-year-old author took his own life by an overdose of sleeping pills.

 

 

G. J. Griffith

 

One of the most recognizable areas in Los Angeles is Griffith Park. This 4,300-acre park is home of the Autry Museum of the American West, The Los Angeles Zoo, The Griffith Observatory, as well as the Hollywood sign. It is a massive park in the middle of Los Angeles, which varies in geography from flat, green athletic fields to rugged trails that lead into the hills peppered with native plants. This magnificent park was once part of the Rancho Los Feliz, the ranch owned by Griffith Jenkins Griffith.

Griffith was born in South Wales on January 4^th, 1850. As a young boy, he was taken to America by his uncle and spent part of his youth in Pennsylvania where he became a journalist. His journalism career brought him to San Francisco in the 1870s, where he reported on the mining beat in Early California. This experience made him an expert on the mining business, at least he thought so. He used this expertise to get a small fortune from the mine owners who employed him. In 1882, Griffith came to Los Angeles, which at this time was mostly ranch lands and farms but was beginning to become more industrial with a bustling downtown area. He soon bought the Rancho Los Feliz from Thomas Bell. Griffith spent tons of money on sheep and cattle and horses to try to make it a productive rancho, but to no avail.

In 1887, Griffith married Miss Mary Agnes Christina Mesmer in a beautiful society wedding. A Los Angeles Times reporter commented, “By this marriage two immense estates were united. The large possessions of G.J. Griffith and a vast amount of Los Angeles property owned by the charming bride, Miss Mary Agnes Christina Mesmer, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Louis Mesmer, familiarly known among her most intimate society friends as ‘Tina.’”   This marriage was a sham. Tina and he sister Lucy, were the heiresses to a quarter of a million-dollar fortune left for them by a family friend, Andre Briswalter. A quarter of a million doesn’t sound like much but that is 8.2 million in today’s money. Griffith thought that Tina was the sole heir, and when he found out that Lucy got half, he called off the wedding and Mesmer family, who feared the shame that would come to the family agreed that if Griffith married her, Tina would be given the whole fortune. Griffith demanded that the money come to him, rather than Tina, in order to “protect” her from swindlers. At their wedding breakfast, Griffith told his new family that he was going to say goodbye to his friends that came to the wedding. Instead of saying his goodbyes, Griffith went to the courthouse that was right across the street and within six minutes he transferred 250,000 dollars from Tina to himself and then went back to the breakfast.  

Soon After the marriage, Tina gave birth to their only child, a son, named Vandall. Griffith himself had injected himself into Los Angeles society. He gave himself the rank of Colonel even though he never was in the military, only the reserves, where his rank was Major. 

Giffith survived an assassination attempt in October 1891. One of his tenants ran an ostrich farm that was doing poorly. and after falling behind in rent, he became deranged.  He ambushed Griffith and his wife and her sister in their carriage on their way to bring flowers to the grave of Tina and Lucy’s mother who had passed earlier that year. The would-be assassin shot at Griffith, grazing his head with buckshot, then the tenant rode away. Upon realizing that the assassination attempt failed, the tenant drew a revolver from his pocket and placed the gun behind his left ear and took off the back of his head. Griffith himself was only mildly injured.

In December 1896, Griffith and his wife gave a goodly portion of the Rancho Los Feliz to the city as a “princely gift”. His enemies such as Horace Bell, actually thought the reason for the gifting of the land was because Griffith’s ranch had failed, and he was donating the land for tax purposes. The 3,015-acre allotment of land to be used as a park for “the plain-people” of Los Angeles as Griffith described the populace of the city. It was called a Christmas gift to the city.  

Griffith came across as a teetotaler and even gave money to the temperance movement in Los Angeles, but he was actually a secret alcoholic. As Tina later told, “He never left the house without taking a drink, and he never came into the house without taking one, and, of course, I don’t know how many he took in between.” In May 1903, Griffith in a drunken rage threatened Tina with a gun at the Hotel Freemont. Their marriage was in shambles, but they kept up appearances because Griffith himself was a very proud man and didn’t want the public to know that he was a drunk and a wife abuser. During the summer of the same year, the family took a trip to Santa Monica and stayed in a suite at the Hotel Arcadia. Griffith himself was on an alcoholic bender and he became paranoid and thought that people were out to kill him.  He even went as far as to have the soup changed at the last minute in the hotel dining room because Griffith feared that he could be poisoned. On September 4^th, Tina was packing their belongings to return home from the hotel when Griffith stumbled into the room, carrying a revolver in one hand and his Prayer book in the other. He made Tina kneel down before him and he asked her to swear upon the prayer book, as if it was the Bible, if she had heard anything about Briswalter (the person who gave Tina and Lucy their fortune) being poisoned. He then asked her if she or anyone she knew was trying to poison him. He then asked the coup de grace of questions, had she always been faithful to her wedding vows.  And she said, according to her court documents, “As God is my Judge, I have, and you know that I have.” At that, he shot her.

The bullet split into two pieces upon impact. One half went into the bone next to her frontal lobe, the other half went downward and tore out her right eye. Tina then ran to a window and plummeted out onto the roof and was found by a couple staying in another suite below. Tina would spend a month in the hospital recovering, but the damage to her eye and face was extensive.  Shortly after the shooting Griffith was arrested for trying to kill his wife.

If Griffith could be called the OJ Simpson of the time, his lawyer, Earl Rogers, would be Johnnie Cochran. Rogers had defended 77 accused murderers and had lost only 3 of the trials. Rogers would go on to defend Clarence Darrow when he was accused of jury tampering in the case of the LA Times bombing. Earl Rogers was a genius, and an alcoholic, just like Griffith, so his defense against the charges of attempted murder was that Griffith had a bout of “alcoholic insanity”, so he was not responsible for his actions. Witnesses were called in about his alcoholism and paranoid delusions. Finally, on November 3, 1903, Tina gave her testimony. She wore a veil and tinted glasses, because of the injuries to her face and her ruined eye. She was questioned for several hours before she fainted on the stand, then after she rested in a nearby office, she regained her strength to continue the testimony. In the end, the jury pronounced an acquittal for the charge of attempted murder, but they got Griffith on a lesser charge of assault with a deadly weapon. For that he got two years in San Quentin. Tina was awarded some cash, a divorce and custody of their son.

After 20 months Griffith was released, and he claimed that he was a new, humbler man and began trying to restore his name. He demanded to know why the city hasn’t done more with the land he donated as a park, even though the fledging Los Angeles was having money issues of its own. In 1908, Griffith went to Mt Wilson observatory, and he became fascinated with the heavenly bodies. Griffith later wrote, "If all mankind could look through that telescope, it would change the world." Out of that experience, Griffith knew what he wanted at the top of Griffith Park.

In 1912, Griffith offered money to the city of Los Angeles to build an observatory at Griffith Park and in 1913, he offered money to build a public theater, the Greek. But the city fathers turned down the offers because of Griffith’s past. Finally, Griffith Jenkins Griffith died of liver disease in 1919. In his will, Griffith gave the city the money in a trust for the building of the observatory as well as the theater. Even though the city was not fond of the idea, the trust made sure that the money was used only for the creation of these two structures. 

Charles Dickens and the Staplehurst Train Incident

 

   Charles Dickens is most notable for his work A Christmas Carol, but that tale wasn’t the only Christmas ghost story that he wrote. The Signal-Man was published in the Christmas edition of All the Year Around in 1866. It is a fantastical ghost story and full of foreshadowing. Not only is it the kind of tale that Victorians would have loved, but the author had very intimate knowledge of the subject for he was in a train accident, the Staplehurst rail crash in June of 1865.

   It was the 9^th of June, it was midafternoon, and the train was crossing the viaduct at Staplehurst, Kent. A signal man was dispatched by the railroad company to warn the train that a small length of track was being repaired. In the Board of Trade report, the signal man was 554 yards away from the track being installed, instead of the 1000 yards that was the regulation standard, so by the time that train engineer saw the signal man, it was too close to stop in time. No 199 locomotive, along with the brake van and the second-class carriage, made it across the viaduct when it derailed, the rest of the carriages, seven in all, wound up in the muddy riverbed. One of the witnesses said of the incident "two terrible jolts and in an instant ... all became darkness ... and chaos".  Victims who were able help those who were trapped inside the derailed train cars, would talk about the violent screaming coming from the carriages as the seriously wounded were hauled away from the train. These people were treated on scene until carriages and wagons could get them to a doctor. In all 10 people were killed and 40 people were injured. One of these brave souls who helped the wounded and dying was 53-year-old Charles Dickens. Dickens recalled a scene from the tragedy including seeing a man covered in blood, who he gave water to and helped him lie on the grass, where he died. He later wrote about the incident as, “No Imagination Can Conceive the Ruin”. Dickens worked all throughout the afternoon and into the evening carrying water from the river in his top hat and giving brandy to shocked passengers from his flask. Before leaving, he remembered the unfinished manuscript for Our Mutual Friend, and he returned to his carriage to retrieve it.

   Out of all of this, Charles Dickens will write the Signal-Man in during the summer of 1866. The story, a first-person narrative, is a stroke of genius. It involved an unnamed narrator and his meeting with a signal-man in his office, which was basically a telegraph and signal bells on a table located in a cutting, which was a hill that was cut into two for the tracks to be placed. During their brief time together, the signal-man relates that he is haunted by an apparition that always appears right before a tragedy.  During the conversation between the signal-man and the narrator, only the signal-man hears the warning bells go off periodically. The narrator, a skeptical man who doesn’t believe in the supernatural, believes his new friend is overtaxed and needs to see a doctor. The next day, the narrator comes to see the signal-man, but he sees what he first thinks is a ghost, but it is just a railroad official; investigating the newest accident on the track, the death of the signal-man. The signal-man was struck by an oncoming train. The train operator said he was standing in the middle of the tracks and staring at something. The train operator then called out to him, "Below there! Look out! For God’s sake, clear the way!" The story ends with the narrator contemplating the last words of the engineer and the last words of the apparition that the signal-man related to the narrator.

   It is a weird tale that is part horror, part mystery. A tale that I would be more inclined to attribute to Poe or his ilk, but not Charles Dickens. But what is more shocking than the tale itself is who Charles Dickens was travelling with. Her name was Ellen Ternan, an actress of minor repute, and her mother who was traveling with Dickens on a tour. They met in 1857, when Dicken was 45 and Tenan 18. She was hired for a play that Dickens wrote with Wilkie Collins called The Frozen Deep. Dickens’ marriage to Catherine Dickens was on the rocks for many years and he, according to some, sought to have her institutionalized, which of course failed, and they eventually became separated. In 1860, Dickens made a bonfire behind his home, where he burned all of his correspondence, saving only his financial letters. Ellen in her home did the same, which makes the relationship between the two speculative, at best. Was Ellen the mistress of famed writer Charles Dickens, or was she something else, an illegitimate daughter? There was always the scandalous writing of their contemporaries who say that Dickens and Ternan has a child together but the child died in infancy. But this is only hearsay and very little is known about the relationship between them. On his death, Dickens settled an annuity for Terran which made her financially independent. Which he would have done for his mistress, or his daughter.

    After the incident, Dickens became very nervous when he traveled by train, and he sought many ways to avoid it. In 1866, Dickens wrote, “have sudden vague rushes of terror, even when riding in a hansom cab, which are perfectly unreasonable but quite insurmountable." Dickens would take his son, Henry, on some book tours. Henry recalled, “I have seen him sometimes in a railway carriage when there was a slight jolt. When this happened, he was almost in a state of panic and gripped the seat with both hands." The Staplehurst incident affected Charles Dickens for his remaining years. He continued to write and did a final tour to the United States in 1868, making sure he visited American writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. He then returned to England and he did a tour of “farewell readings” and when he was on that tour, he suffered a stroke which took place in April 1869. The tour was cancelled. It was June 8, 1870, and he was working all day on the manuscript of Edwin Drood, he suffered another stroke, and he never regained consciousness. He died the next day, June 9^th, which was the five-year anniversary of the Staplehurst incident.

Maelzel’s Chess Payer or How Edgar Allen Poe Set the Literary World Ablaze with a New Genre, Mystery

 

 

   Before Poe made a name for himself as the author of The Raven, The Mask of the Red Death and others, he was a journalist and a literary critic. How he got the assignment covering the Turk when it came to America remains a mystery, but it had a lifelong impression on him and his approach to writing.

   The Mechanical Turk was invented in 1770 by Wolfgang von Kempelen to impress the Empress Maria Theresa of Austria.  The Turk was an automaton that could play chess against a human opponent as well as perform the Knight’s Tour, a puzzle that requires the player to occupy every square on a chessboard exactly once. Was this machine even possible? And did this machine beat both Benjamin Franklin and Napoleon (more than one paper I read stated that the Turk caught Napoleon cheating)? But what if it was not a thinking machine at all, but instead a mechanical illusion that allows a human chess player to be inside the cabinet, and it took the world by storm. After the death of the creator in 1804, it was purchased by Johann Nepomuk Maelzel, who took it on tours including Europe and America. Eventually it made its way to John Kearsley Mitchell of Philadelphia, a physician. For over 84 years, it played chess until its unfortunate demise on July 5^th 1854, when a fire that started at the National Theater in Philadelphia reached the museum where the Turk was on display and destroyed this piece of mechanical magic. Mitchell’s son, Silas, believed that he heard through the flames “The last words of our departed friend, the sternly whispered, oft repeated syllables, ‘echec! echec!’” (French for check).

   But we now must backtrack to April 1826 when the Mechanical Turk came to America. The debut was in New York, and it was all the rage and had many reviews in New York newspapers. But it wasn’t just the idea of a chess playing robot that made the people interested in it, it was the idea of the Industrial Age that was blossoming and the idea that machines like the Turk could become commonplace. Many people thought that The Turk was a fake, but it inspired people to dream. A writer for The Evening Post commented on it, “Nothing of a similar nature has ever been seen in this city, that will bear the smallest comparison with it.” Poe also wrote about this technological wonder in the Southern Literary Messenger published in 1836.

   His essay on the Turk was true to Poe’s form, ruthless and discriminating. He read many articles and essays on the automaton, before examining it himself, including Letters on Natural Magic by Sir David Brewster.  Poe came up with many theories on how the machine worked and although some of them were wrong, they showed where his mind was going and how he would use that train of thought in his later fiction. I included this one portion to show the workings of his mind on the matter of the Turk, “When the question is demanded explicitly of Maelzel — “Is the Automaton a pure machine or not?” his reply is invariably the same — “I will say nothing about it.” Now the notoriety of the Automaton, and the great curiosity it has everywhere excited, are owing more especially to the prevalent opinion that it is a pure machine, than to any other circumstance. Of course, then, it is the interest of the proprietor to represent it as a pure machine. And what more obvious, and more effectual method could there be of impressing the spectators with this desired idea, than a positive and explicit declaration to that effect? On the other hand, what more obvious and effectual method could there be of exciting a disbelief in the Automaton's being a pure machine, than by withholding such explicit declaration? For, people will naturally reason thus, — It is Maelzel's interest to represent this thing a pure machine — he refuses to do so, directly, in words, although he does not scruple, and is evidently anxious to do so, indirectly by actions — were it actually what he wishes to represent it by actions, he would gladly avail himself of the more direct testimony of words — the inference is, that a consciousness of its not being a pure machine, is the reason of his silence — his actions cannot implicate him in a falsehood — his words may.” This sounds like Poe’s fictional character C. Auguste Dupin more than Edgar Allen Poe himself doing what the author called “ratiocination.”

    In the end, Poe thought that it was a hoax, yet his theory on how it was done was wrong. Close, but no cigar. Eventually it was the son of the last owner, Silas Mitchell who revealed the secret of the Turk. I came across this explanation from the Museum of Hoaxes, that probably explains it best:

A series of sliding panels and a rolling chair allowed the automaton's operator to hide while the interior of the machine was being displayed. The operator then controlled the Turk by means of a 'pantograph' device that synchronized his arm movements with those of the wooden Turk. Magnetic chess pieces allowed him to know what pieces were being moved on the board above his head.

   If it was not for the Turk, Poe may not have come up with his characters such as Dupin, and the beginnings of the earliest form of the detective genre. His literary career might have taken off in a different direction, and the world would have been a sadder place for it. Because without the work of Poe, we would not have Lovecraft, and King, and a multitude of authors that read his work as children.

   A lot of times, I get some inspiration for my posts. The inspiration for this came when I was out a couple of weeks ago with another magician, Vince Wilson. I was showing him around Hollywood, and we were having lunch at the Roosevelt Hotel, when his phone rang. He got us permission to visit the workshop of John Gaughan, master of props and other magic devices. Gaughan has built the only copy of the Turk using the most detailed drawings available.  His reproduction even has the original chessboard, which was not with the Automaton at the time of the fire. Gaughan spent $120,00 dollars in 1984 and took over 5 years to complete the copy. Vince wanted to see the Turk because he runs Poe’s Magic Theatre and the Poe’s Magic Conference each year.   He is on the board of directors of the Poe Museum in Baltimore. I could see his passion and so I needed to see it for myself. Gaughan was a gracious host, as we toured a room that includes several antique pieces of magic. And then we saw the Turk, and I was floored. The details and intricacies of the reproduction were magnificent. We spoke about the Turk for awhile and we talked about other automatons as well as magic itself. As we concluded our tour and walked through his workshop I noticed several boxes that included magic wands in various stages of completion. There were two young men were working on them. Their eye for detail uncompromising as they made these precious gifts. And gifts they were, but they were also trophies, as these were the wands that were to be handed out to the winners of the AMA (American Magician Award) award ceremony that next week.

   But what is my impression of seeing the Turk? It is a fraud? No, it’s not a fraud. It’s magic and illusion. Yes, I suppose all magic is in essence fraud. But magic lets you see what your conscious mind cannot believe. It allows you to dream while you are still awake. And that dream that happened in 1770 possibly gave us the intellectual fiction of Poe, and the first detective story, The Murders in the Rue Morgue.