Haunted Cemeteries Read online
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After Arlington’s interment, rumors started up that on certain nights, the statue in front of her tomb would slowly come to life and begin to move. Two of the cemetery’s grave-diggers, Mr. Todkins and Mr. Anthony, both claimed they saw the Maiden descend the steps in front of the mausoleum and walk out into the cemetery among the other crypts. When caretakers tried to approach the statue, it vanished right before their eyes, only to reappear back in position in front of the Arlington sepulcher.
Folklore grew up that Josie Arlington (and later, her ghost) somehow caused all the commotion.
Today, sightings are few and far between. Perhaps it’s because Josie is no longer inside. At some point her body was removed and reinterred in an unknown location elsewhere in the cemetery. The empty vault was purchased by the J. A. Morales family, and their name, not Arlington, is now engraved above the doors.
The remarkable tombs and stunning monuments make Metairie Cemetery well worth paying a call. If the spirits are willing—or if the light is just right—you may see the former Arlington mausoleum burst into flames. But beware if a silent young lady with a weathered greenish tint comes up behind you: It might be the mysterious Maiden making her rounds.
Chapter 15
Till Death Do You Part
Okay, so this one isn’t exactly a ghost story, but it’s a ghoulish, sordid tale that may haunt you long after the memories of the others in this book have faded. Put together a mad doctor, the corpse of his long-dead patient, a wedding dress, and what do you have? A shocking “marriage” unlike any other.
I’m not going to let you die. That’s all Carl Tanzler could tell himself. Ever since the striking woman with dark tresses walked into his clinic, he had not been able to get her out of his mind. He was obsessed, a man possessed.
Some say there is no such thing as love at first sight. But what if the match is fated, like he believed this one to be?
Carl Tanzler was born Karl Tänzler, or possibly Georg Karl Tänzler, in Dresden, Germany, on February 8, 1877. On his US citizenship papers, he is named Carl Tanzler von Cosel, and he was known to claim he was a count. Tanzler spent his youth in Germany, but he was living in Australia (possibly under Allied detention) during World War I. After the war he returned to Europe, then sailed from Rotterdam to Havana on February 6, 1926. By the end of the year he was near Tampa, Florida, in Zephyrhills, where his sister reportedly lived; before long, Tanzler’s wife, Doris, whom he had married around 1920, and two daughters joined him.
He abandoned them all in 1927 when he moved to Key West to begin work as a radiologist at the three-story Marine Hospital. It had been built on Front Street in 1845 in an area of Old Town now known as Truman Annex. Its original mission was to serve the Merchant Marines, but the clinic came to be utilized by sick seamen, military veterans, and local citizens alike. The facility, which would close in 1943, was at the forefront of treating early epidemics of yellow fever, smallpox, influenza, and tuberculosis as they spread across the Keys.
Touting itself as the “Southernmost City in the Continental United States,” Key West is located on a six-square-mile island of the same name at the end of US Highway 1. It lies 194 miles south of Miami and 94 miles north of Cuba. Since its inception, the town has always attracted a blend of the military, fishermen, and artists of all types—from John James Audubon, who visited in 1832, to Ernest Hemingway in the 1930s; Tennessee Williams, who bought a home there in the 1940s; and Jimmy Buffett, who moved there in the 1970s. Many of its newer inhabitants love its laid-back atmosphere and just want to get away from it all.
The city also once served as a gateway for many immigrants coming to the United States from Cuba and elsewhere in Latin America. In 1930, when Tanzler was there, Key West had a mere 12,831 inhabitants.
Among them was Maria Elena Milagro de Hoyos. Born in 1910, she was the Cuban-American daughter of a Key West cigar maker, Francisco, and his wife, Aurora Milagro. Elena had an older sister, Florinda, and a younger sister, Celia.
Known throughout Key West for her charm and good looks, Elena married Luis Mesa on February 18, 1926. When her first pregnancy resulted in a miscarriage, Luis left her and took off for Miami.
When Elena walked into Tanzler’s office on April 22, 1930, he recognized the stranger immediately. As a boy, then again while visiting Genoa, Italy, Tanzler had had a paranormal experience: Countess Anna Constantia von Cosel, a distant ancestor who had died in 1765, appeared in a dream to show him the face of a mystical raven-haired beauty who was destined to become his soul mate. That prescient vision was now standing before him: Elena Hoyos.
Her mother had brought the ailing twenty-year-old woman for an examination, and tests concluded what the doctor immediately suspected and feared: tuberculosis.
Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, there was no cure for the disease. It wasn’t until 1943 that streptomycin, the first effective antibiotic that could fight TB, was isolated in a laboratory.
In 1930, when the bald, bespectacled, bearded, and mustachioed Tanzler set eyes on Elena, contracting tuberculosis was still, for many, a death sentence. But Tanzler could not—would not—accept that. He personally took over her case, trying all sorts of unorthodox medications, including electrical and X-ray treatments, which he administered with equipment he snuck out of the hospital and took to her home.
At the same time, despite their both being married, Tanzler began to court Elena, bringing her jewelry and clothing. It’s unknown, however, whether he was ever explicit in his feelings for her, nor are there any reports that the young woman in any way encouraged or returned his favor.
Almost eighteen months to the day after they first met, Elena Hoyos died at her parents’ home on October 25, 1931. But Tanzler’s “generosity” did not end with her death. He convinced her family to let him build a mausoleum for Elena, and over the next two years he was a frequent visitor to the tomb. Then, in April 1933, under the cover of darkness, he secretly unlocked the vault and stole the body away.
Although the corpse had been dutifully embalmed, in the dank, humid confines of the sepulcher it had begun to decay. Tanzler took the fetid remains to a small cabin he had built behind the hospital where he worked and began to rebuild her. Using plaster of Paris, papier-mâché, and beeswax to reconstruct the her face and limbs, wire to hold together the skeleton, and glass eyes to fill the empty sockets in her skull, he molded and shaped the figure into a simulacrum of his lost love.
Tanzler was forced to relocate the candied cadaver twice: the first time to a shack on Rest Beach when a new administrator asked him to remove his unsightly hut from the hospital grounds, and then to a rundown house on Flagler Street.
Tanzler was not a trained mortician, and as the corpse’s skin continued to rot, he took more and more desperate measures to keep the body intact. He layered wax- permeated silk over the bones to fashion flesh. The major organs had been removed, so he stuffed rags into the empty torso to keep the body’s shape. He also created a wig using some of Elena’s own hair, which Aurora Hoyos had given Tanzler as a remembrance after her daughter’s death.
He clothed his inamorata in fancy dresses and kimonos, jewelry, stockings, and gloves; and he doused her with perfume and, no doubt, disinfectants. And at night he slept with her, side by side, in his bed.
For seven years he “lived” with her as husband and wife—in every sense that phrase might suggest. During his reconstruction efforts, Tanzler had used a tube to fashion a new set of genitalia for his beloved.
There are several versions of what led to the authorities’ discovery of the morbid arrangement. According to one story, local shopkeepers became suspicious because of the amount of women’s attire the unmarried and unattached man was purchasing. Another says the horror was revealed after a paperboy happened to peek inside a window, saw the deranged doctor dancing with what seemed to be a hideous mannequin, recognized the woman, and told the Hoyos family.
Most accounts tell of Florinda storming into the house in O
ctober 1940 after hearing the dreadful rumors and coming face-to-face with the gruesome remains of her little sister, dressed in a wedding gown.
Tanzler was arrested and charged with grave robbing and abuse of a corpse (technically, wanton and malicious destruction of a grave and removing a body without authorization). He was found mentally competent to stand trial, but at a preliminary hearing on October 9, it was determined that the statute of limitations for his crimes had run out. Tanzler was set free three days later.
Not only did Elena’s family receive no legal satisfaction, but they had to endure yet another indignity. After the body was officially autopsied and examined, a viewing for the public was held—to be more honest, the atrocity was put on display—at the Dean-Lopez Funeral Home. More than 6,500 people turned up at the ghastly wake. The innocent Elena Hoyos was finally returned to Key West Cemetery, where she apparently lies in an undisclosed, unmarked grave.
By the time the court proceedings were finished, Elena’s parents were both deceased. Her father had passed in 1934, her mother a few months before the hearing in 1940. Florinda would die four years later, also of tuberculosis.
That same year, in 1944, Tanzler moved back to central Florida, very close to his wife in Zephyrhills, and he became a US citizen in 1950. He died on or around July 3, 1952. (His body had lain undiscovered on the floor of his house for about three weeks.) Rumors spread that he was found in the arms of a new life-size sculpture of his precious paramour, its waxen body wrapped in silk and dressed in a robe, with a face molded from Elena’s death mask. (His obituary suggests that the effigy was in a metal cylinder on a shelf.)
As for the rest of the Tanzler family, Carl’s elder daughter, Crystal, died in 1934. His widow passed away on May 11, 1977, and his younger daughter, Ayesha, lived until 1998.
Because its location is unknown, you can’t mourn at the graveside of the poor Elena Hoyos. But the nameplate of her original tomb is in the Fort East Martello Museum & Gardens (also known as the East Martello Tower or the Martello Gallery– Key West Art and Historical Museum).
Key West is considered one of the most haunted towns in the United States. One of its earliest ghost legends surrounds the nineteen-acre Key West Cemetery. The graveyard is located in Old Town below Solares Hill, which, at eighteen feet above sea level, is the highest point of the island. It’s believed that approximately one hundred thousand people have been buried there in aboveground tombs, mausoleums, and, especially in the oldest part of the cemetery, earthen graves. In many places, family crypts have been built one on top of another.
An infamous tale of ghostly revenge from Beyond the Grave involves two of the town’s settlers in the 1890s, Robert Albury and Christopher Darvel. They had both emigrated from the Bahamas and were rival suitors for the hand of a young lady, Louisa Thomas. One night outside her home, their raucous dispute erupted into violence. During the altercation, Albury fell from the porch and hit his head on a coral rock. He died later that night, but not before cursing Darvel and all his descendants. Albury was buried, and Louisa Thomas seems to have left Key West soon after. The death was ruled accidental, and Darvel eventually married.
Following the hurricane of 1909, Elizabeth Camp, Darvel’s granddaughter, was leisurely walking through the cemetery with her beau, Dean Johnson, when the girl suddenly disappeared. One minute she was there; the next she was gone. For three days, people searched the graveyard until her lifeless body finally was discovered deep in a narrow chasm in the ground. The storm had washed away the soil under one of the broken tombs, and, out of sight of her boyfriend, the girl had fallen, fatally, into the sinkhole. The grave was that of Robert Albury.
A coincidence? Perhaps. But that’s not the end of this strange saga. Christopher Darvel was rushed to the site to identify his granddaughter, and while standing over the stagnant crypt he contracted cholera. He died just days later.
If you dare, the cemetery can be visited, but for safety’s sake be careful where you walk!
Chapter 16
Nevermore!
It would make sense for Edgar Allan Poe, who wrote so many tales of the macabre, to return as a phantom. And perhaps he does, at least now and then. If so, he’s far from the only ghoul to haunt the graveyard where he lies buried. And who’s that secretive Man in Black who turns up each year to lay flowers on the author’s grave? Is he among the living—or a fellow ghost?
Michael was on a pilgrimage. He had been a fan of crime fiction since he was a boy, and now he had sold his first short story to Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. That called for a celebration.
Nothing would be more appropriate, he figured, than a trip to see the man most people agree created the modern detective story: Edgar Allan Poe. Why, even the mystery writers’ top award was named for him.
The problem, of course, was that Poe had been dead for more than 150 years.
Fortunately for Michael, who lived near Philadelphia, Poe’s burial site was a mere ninety miles away in Baltimore. Quicker than you could say “Nevermore,” Michael was off.
The circumstances of Poe’s death are uncertain. He was living in Richmond, Virginia, at the time and was about to marry his childhood sweetheart, Sarah Elmira Royster. He had stopped over in Baltimore either on the way to or coming back from New York when fate intervened.
Reports vary regarding Poe’s final days. In most versions of the tale, the forty-year-old author was discovered drunk or delirious on the pavement outside Ryan’s Tavern on East Lombard Street on the night of October 3, 1849. (A few sources say that the man who found him, Joseph W. Walker, stumbled across Poe inside the pub, which was being used that night as a temporary polling place, not on the sidewalk.) Walker contacted a doctor at Washington College Hospital, and the incoherent, feverish author was rushed to one of its wards. Poe lay there confused and rambling for four days until five o’clock on the morning of October 7, 1849, when he gave up the ghost. The only understandable word he uttered the entire time was the unfamiliar name “Reynolds.” Poe never became lucid enough to explain what had happened to him—or why he was dressed in another man’s clothing.
It was presumed that Poe’s death had come as a result of his lifelong alcoholism, which newspapers gingerly referred to in obituaries with various euphemisms such as “congestion of the brain.” Poe’s death certificate and hospital records have disappeared, so speculation persists that the real cause could have been anything from epilepsy or meningitis to rabies.
Poe’s life had been no bed of roses. Far from it. Born Edgar Poe in Boston, he was orphaned when he was a young boy. He became the ward of a Richmond couple, John and Frances Allan, whose surname Poe took as a middle name, but they never officially adopted him.
Poe’s relationship with his de facto father soured during the young man’s brief matriculation at the University of Virginia, purportedly due to the boy’s running up gambling debts. By 1827, when Poe self-published his first collection of poetry, Tamerlane and Other Poems, he was living back in Boston.
The book, like most of Poe’s works, found little success during his lifetime. Trying to make a living solely from his writing, Poe struggled constantly for money and had to move continuously. In 1835, during his second stay in Baltimore with his widowed aunt, Maria Clemm, Poe married her daughter, his thirteen-year-old cousin, Virginia. Also residing in the house was his aunt’s mother, Elizabeth Cairnes Poe, and perhaps Maria’s son Henry. The author’s happiness was tragically cut short when Virginia died of tuberculosis two years later. Three years after that, Poe himself passed away.
Michael spent the morning touring the historic Clemm residence, now renamed the Edgar Allan Poe House and Museum. He climbed the winding staircase to the attic and squeezed through the door into the room where the writer had lived. It was tiny, all right, but for Poe it was preferable to the probable alternative—living on the street. “The Raven” may have made him famous, but Poe had only been paid nine dollars for it.
After buying a couple of souvenirs in
the small gift shop to remember his visit, Michael strolled the six long blocks from the Amity Street home over to the old Westminster Burying Ground at the corner of Fayette and Greene.
The graveyard, started in 1786, is one of the city’s oldest. The First Presbyterian Church, which was located downtown, was established in what were then the western outskirts of Baltimore. In 1852 the congregation erected a Gothic-style chapel, the Westminster Presbyterian Church, on the grounds. Part of the new house of worship was built on brick pylons over some of the graves, so people started referring to the area underneath, where tombs and vaults were accessible, as “the catacombs.”
Poe had already been in the ground for three years by the time Westminster was erected. He was originally buried in the family plot, which also held his paternal grandfather, Gen. David Poe Sr., and his brother, William Henry Leonard Poe.
In 1875 it was decided that the world-famous author deserved a larger memorial, so his remains were transferred to a highly visible location just inside the cemetery’s gate. A massive four-sided monument over ten feet tall was then set in place to mark the grave. Maria Clemm was reinterred to Poe’s right and Virginia to his left. (Poe’s grandfather and brother are still under their original headstones.)
In 1977 the church disbanded and sold its property to the University of Maryland School of Law. A trust was set up to maintain Westminster Hall, the Burying Ground, and the catacombs.
Michael entered the main gate of the cemetery and instantly saw Poe’s memorial to his immediate right. He stood there solemnly, quietly, thinking about the influence the great artist had had on American literature and, indeed, his own writing.