#husheduphistory

In the beginning of the 1900s many different aspects of America were changing alongside the start of the new century. New industries began to emerge, urban populations were growing, and the styles of the American people and their environments began to shift. Ushering in these new styles were artists, but some of them worked on pieces much larger than any canvas. In the early part of the 1900s American architecture began to shift, and one of the biggest names in the field was Frank Lloyd Wright. By the time Wright died in 1959 he was an icon of American architecture with landmark structures all over the world. He had a long and storied career, but one major event in Wright’s story does not involve style, bricks, and blueprints. In August 1914 Wright was in Illinois working on Chicago's Midway Gardens. He had no idea a bloodbath was unfolding back home.

By the time the calendar pages flipped to welcome in 1914 Frank Lloyd Wright was both famous, and controversial. The forty-seven-year-old architect was married to his wife Catherine and the pair had six children together, but for the last eleven years the Wright family had been broken. The rift unknowingly began within the Oak Park Women’s Club where Catherine Wright and Martha Cheney (also referred to as Mamah) were both members and the two women became close friends as did their husbands, Frank Lloyd Wright and Edwin Cheney. The Wrights and Cheneys were “neighbors and intimate friends” and as stated by the Fort Wayne Sentinel on February 26th 1912, “To the Cheneys the door to the Wrights always was open, and vice versa.” It only made sense that when Edwin Cheney was looking for a new home he approached his friend and in 1903 he commissioned Wright to build a house in Oak Park, Illinois. Edwin’s intent was to have a home for his family, but hiring Wright only tore it apart when the architect began an affair with his wife.

Frank Lloyd Wright circa 1953. Image via wikipedia.com.

By 1909 what may have started as a slow simmering secret in 1903 had transformed into a plan of action. Wright had made his way to Europe and was there on the day that Martha contacted her husband. She was in Colorado with the children when she reached out to Edwin requesting that he come get them from her, and when he arrived he was met by his children, but not Martha. Without his knowledge she had already left the country to meet Wright in Europe. The pair stayed overseas for approximately one year before Wright arrived back in the United States in 1910. Although Wright had returned to the States, Martha remained in Europe where she officially filed for divorce from Edwin on the grounds of abandonment. Edwin did not contest the divorce and while Martha was in Europe she resumed the use of her maiden name, Borthwick, and continued working on a project she had taken up translating the works of Swedish writer Ellen Key. With Borthwick still in Europe, Wright set his focus on another architectural project, but this was not for a client. This was to construct a home for himself and Borthwick, and he set his sights on Wisconsin.

By 1911 Wright may have believed everything was headed in the best direction. He had secured 600 acres of land near Spring Green, Wisconsin (signed for by his mother in order to not draw attention to the purchase), Martha had returned from Europe and after temporarily staying in Canada with her children, was back in the United States. In August of 1911 her divorce was finalized from her husband and it was in that same month she and Frank moved into Taliesin, a 75,000 sq foot estate that Frank built near Spring Green to serve as their new home. It was just before Christmas that year that the news of Frank and Martha living together made it to the surrounding village. The goal may have been to quietly start a new life, but the news of the two living together, especially since Wright’s wife never agreed to a divorce, reverberated loudly and the opinions on the two were harsh and unforgiving.

Wright may have named his new home “Taliesin” (meaning “shining brow” in Welsh) but the press referred to it as a “love cottage,” and “castle of love” both of which sounded far kinder than what the community had to say about it. The superintendent of Iowa County’s schools told a reporter “The scandal is bound to have a demoralizing effect on the school children of the community. It is an outrage to allow young men and women and boys and girls to grow up in the belief that a man and woman can go disregard the marriage bonds.” Threats were made, neighbors asked for the police to arrest Wright, and yet there was nothing that could be done. The construction on Taliesin continued and the pair went about their lives seemingly unbothered by the scathing opinions of them. The biggest question being asked was how Wright and Borthwick could possibly do this to their families. According to The Fort Wayne News and Sentinel published on February 26th 1912:

“More and more Mrs. Wright devoted herself to her home and her growing children. More and more Mr. Wright closeted himself with his work and gave himself up to his architectural dreams. When he sought recreation, diversion, communion of spirit, he found them less and less in the companionship of Mrs. Wright….Then he discovered that Mrs. Cheney was more nearly on his plane of thought, that she sympathized the closer with him, shared his dreams and ideals, appreciated his efforts, and gave him the inspiration for work which, he complained, he could not draw from the companionship at his own fireside. Thus, thought Mr. Wright both fate and the law were against him and his normal development.”

Clipping from The Washington Herald on December 31st 1911. Image via newspapers.com

Wright gave his own explanation, telling reporters that “Two women were necessary for a man of artistic mind—one to be the mother of his children and the other to be his mental companion, his inspiration and soul mate” and voicing his opinion that normal rules simply did not apply to him, saying “Laws and rules are made for the average. The ordinary man cannot live without rules to guide his conduct. It is infinitely more difficult to live without rules, but that is what the really honest, sincere, thinking man is compelled to do.”

Clipping from the Cincinnati Explorer on December 31st 1911. Image via newspapers.com.

Wright may have felt unstoppable, but his time with Mamah in their little paradise called Taliesin would not last long before it came crashing down.

On August 15th 1914 Frank Lloyd Wright was nearly two hundred miles from his new home, working in Chicago on the Chicago Midway Gardens. Back home in Taliesin, Martha and her two children eight-year-old Martha and twelve-year-old John, sat down on the porch for lunch. Also sitting down for lunch inside the main dining room was the construction crew still working on the home, settling in around a table and waiting to be served by Julian Carlton, a thirty-year-old man who worked at Taliesin as a servant and handyman. Carlton’s wife Gertrude prepared the food and after serving everyone soup, Carlton told his wife she had to leave the property.

It was shortly after that that Carlton went back onto the porch with a hatchet and brutally murdered Martha and her two children.

The crew seated in the dining room twenty-five feet away may not have even had time to process what was going on. Nineteen-year-old Herbert Fritz was among those seated at the table when he and the others heard loud swishing noises outside the door. Then they saw it, liquid pouring underneath the door and covering the floor. Even if the smell didn’t give it away first another man in the room, thirty-five year old carpenter William Weston knew what it was. Just before eating, Carlton had asked Weston permission to go get a canister of gasoline in order to clean some rugs. Weston said yes and now the gasoline was pouring into the room. The door was locked. Within moments the entire room was ablaze.

One of the first people to get out was Fritz, managing to break a window and escape the fire, rolling down a hill to extinguish the flames trying to devour him. Fritz’s timing was what may have saved him from a much crueler fate, as people from the dining room scrambled and broke through the barricaded door they were met with curtains of fire from Carlton spreading more gasoline along outside walls. Others rushed to broken windows believing they found an escape only to learn the horrible truth when they discovered Carlton waiting for them with the hatchet on the other side. Weston was one who fell right into the path of Carlton and was attacked with the hatchet but he was able to run, followed by Carlton, until he was again struck with the weapon. Believing him to be dead Carlton then returned to the home but Weston was in fact still alive, as was Fritz, and a third man who made it out of the house, landscape gardener David Lindblom. With an inferno of flames, shock, and confusion raging behind them the three men found each other and ran together to a home half a mile away to call for help.

Ciipping from Springfield News Sun August 23rd 1914. Image via newspapers.com.

When the smoke cleared the authorities were left with a horrifying scene. Multiple bodies were strewn both inside the home and outside, succumbing to either fire, a hatchet, or both. The building, intended to be a quiet place of peace and a starting point for new lives, was now a charred and silent tomb with Martha and her two children laying slaughtered in the remnants of the porch. Carlton was later found in the basement, hiding inside the furnace where he was alive, but barely conscious. Looking to exit this life alongside the horrors he created he had swallowed acid, severely damaging his throat and stomach but leaving him alive. However, Carlton’s still-breathing body would not bring any clarity to the situation. The former employee of Wright plead not guilty and refused to speak or give any explanation for his actions. When questioned, his wife Gertrude shed small glimmers of explanation, stating that Carlton had grown increasingly paranoid and hostile, even taking to sleeping with the hatchet next to him. She also confirmed that she and her husband were terminated by Wright and they were due to take a train back to Chicago the night of the attack. For seven long weeks Carlton remained in prison before dying of starvation, unable to consume anything due to the damage from the acid he swallowed.

Taliesen after the fire. Image via wikipedia.com.

When Wright received the note in Chicago it scarcely conveyed the tragedy that had unfolded in his home nearly two hundred miles away. Reading simply “Taliesin destroyed by fire” he would not learn until later that the loss was more than a house. Seven people were killed in Carlton’s rampage (David Lindblom, one of the men who ran for help later died from his burns) and with no definite explanation to the reason and his new family suddenly ripped from his life Wright now had to decide how to move ahead after the tragedy. He wrote a lengthy letter to his neighbors, an essay that sang the praises of Martha, addressed how their relationship was covered by the press, and thanking them for any and all courtesy extended to her while living in Taliesin. He also revealed two, probably surprising, actions. For one, Martha was buried in an unmarked grave in a small chapel cemetery near the home. And second, that he fully intended to rebuild Taliesin as a memorial to her, while also still continuing to live there as his permanent home.

Clipping from the Ogden Standard Examiner on September 5th 1914. Image via newspapers.com.

Wright rebuilt the home, now referred to as “Taliesin II,” and he did not stay there alone. After his wife finally agreed to a divorce Wright married again in 1923, to a woman named Maude Noel, who wrote him a condolence letter after the tragedy at Taliesin. But, the house was not done with him and in April of 1925 the home was gutted by an electrical fire. Like the first fire, he set out to rebuild it, finishing it later that year only to lose it to foreclosure in 1927, the same year he and Maude divorced. With some financial assistance he was able to re-purchase it back the following year ushering in the era of “Taliesin III.”

Wright used Taliesin III as his primary home and studio until the end of his life, sharing it with his third wife Olga (Olgivanna) Lazovich, establishing a fellowship for architectural students, and designing some of his most famous works there including Fallingwater and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Upon his death in 1959 the home was left to the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation who conducted renovations until 1990 when a nonprofit organization known as Taliesin Preservation Inc. (TPI) took over the location. The site was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1976 and in 2019 it was listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Taliesen in 2024. Image via Warren LeMay from Chicago, IL, United States, CC BY-SA 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Today, Taliesin still stands in Spring Green, Wisconsin and is visited by tens of thousands of people every year looking to walk the halls that were not only crafted by, but called home, by one of the world’s most prolific, influential, and important pioneers of architecture. The website for Taliesin welcomes the viewers with the words “take a stroll through paradise” and it’s easy to see how it earns that name. With its open floor plan, dramatic spaces, stone, ample natural light, and its integration into the natural landscape around it, the home is a picture of tranquility. It is hard to picture that beneath this air of artistic peace lies a tormented history filled with controversy, turmoil, and the horrific and bloody loss of eight lives that for a period of time marked it as the site of the deadliest mass murder in Wisconsin’s history.

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Sources:

Conradt, Stacy. “The Terrible Crime at Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin.” Mental Floss, 5 Dec. 2017, www.mentalfloss.com/article/28519/taliesin-tragedy.

Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation. “About Frank Lloyd Wright.” Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, 2019, franklloydwright.org/frank-lloyd-wright/.

Klein, Christopher. “The Massacre at Frank Lloyd Wright’s “Love Cottage” | HISTORY.” HISTORY, 8 June 2017, www.history.com/articles/the-massacre-at-frank-lloyd-wrights-love-cottage.

“Mystery of the Murders at Taliesin.” Bbc.co.uk, 14 Jan. 2001, news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/wales/1110359.stm.

“Take Queer View of Marital Life.” Newspapers.com, 26 Feb. 1912, www.newspapers.com/image/29239543/?match=1&terms=Frank%20Lloyd%20Wright%20.

“Taliesin History.” Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin, www.taliesinpreservation.org/taliesin-history/.

Walking through Mobile, Alabama visitors can shop in some of the many specialty boutiques, visit historic homes and museums, or perhaps take part in some of the many festivals held in the city such as the Gulf Coast Chinese Lantern Festival or Mobile’s own Mardi Gras celebration being celebrated where it originated in 1703. Mobile has a lot of history, but on Bayou Street many visitors walk past a bizarre story hidden in plain sight.

In November 1833 Charles R. S. Boyington was adjusting to his new home. A printer by trade and poet by heart, the nineteen-year-old moved to Mobile from the northeast and was living in a boarding house while waiting to find his fortune in the cotton boom that brought him down south. Sharing a room with Boyington was Nathaniel Frost, and the two friends tried to fit into the high society of Mobile despite each of them fighting their own battles. Boyington was an uprooted gambler, and Frost was riddled with tuberculosis that he expected would eventually take his life.

Map of Mobile, Alabama circa 1838. Image is public domain via University of Alabama Department of Geography.

It was not unusual to see Boyington and Frost walking together so when the pair were seen near the Church Street Graveyard on the afternoon of May 10th 1834 there was no cause for suspicion. That changed when Boyington returned home alone. When asked where Frost was he allegedly became agitated saying he didn’t know and he couldn’t wait for him. He was in a hurry to get to the river and board a steamboat headed for Montgomery, Alabama but not before stopping at a store to buy a knife and two guns.

The scene found the next morning stunned the residents of Mobile. Nathaniel Frost was found brutally beaten, bloodied, and stabbed, his body found just outside the Church Street Graveyard with some reports stating his body was hanging from a tree. Amid all the questions swirling through the minds of Mobile there was one certainty, the last person to be seen with Nathaniel Frost was Charles Boyington and he was on a boat taking him far from the crime.

Horses raced out to stop the steamship and when officials found Boyington on board he had his hands full of playing cards. He was taken back to Mobile and imprisoned at the Conde Charlotte Jail to await his fate. The evidence against him was thin and Boyington was adamant that he was innocent, what proof was there other than they were seen together? He may have been sure a pardon was coming but one never came, and when it was revealed that Frost owed Boyington money it convinced the court that the gambler took his payment in the form of his terminally ill friend’s life.

When Boyington left the Conde Charlotte Jail on February 20th 1835 people lined the streets to watch his last walk to the gallows. He maintained his innocence and made a promise to the people of Mobile, that they would know the truth because after his burial an oak tree would grow above his grave as a sign of his innocence. He was buried in the potter’s field section of the same graveyard where he and Frost were last seen together.

Today along portions of Government Street lay the many dead of the Church Street Graveyard. Closed since 1898, at some point the walls of the graveyard were moved inward leaving some of the departed to now lay just outside the graveyard walls. According to records, one of them now at rest outside the walls is Charles R.S. Boyington, his grave only marked by the sixty-foot-tall oak tree that grew over his body as he promised. Arborists have determined the tree to be over 150 years old.

The Boyington Oak. Image via Wikimedia Commons Altairisfar, CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0

When Charles R.S. Boyington faced death he promised that an oak tree would grow from his grave to prove he was innocent. A tree did grow, and what the tree could not speak others did when years later two men revealed on their deathbeds that they were Nicholas Frost’s killers.

Today the oak tree, now referred to as The Boyington Oak, stands over the body of Charles Boyington and a nearby red sign tells his tale with an inscription reading:

“THE BOYINGTON OAK

IN 1835, CHARLES BOYINGTON

UNJUSTLY HANGED FOR FRIEND’S

MURDER. PREDICTED AN OAK

WOULD GROW FROM HIS HEART

TO PROVE HIS INNOCENCE.

ALABAMA FOLKLIFE ASSOCIATION

WILLIAM G. POMEROY FOUNDATION 2020”

The Boyington Oak historic marker. Image via William G. Pomeroy Foundation https://www.wgpfoundation.org/historic-markers/the-boyington-oak/

As is the case with many tragic tales, stories have grown and taken root just as firmly as the tree they focus on. According to some of the many visitor accounts involving The Boyington Oak people standing in the shade of its branches are hit with sudden cold spots, whispers and sobs can be heard, and a general feeling of sadness permeates the air under the 100-foot-long branches.

Whether affected by the sadness of the story or by the unresolved sadness of Charles Boyington, the tree stands today as a natural memorial to an innocent man accused of murder who promised that nature would speak his truth for him well after his voice was silenced.

Piece about the Boyington Oak printed in The Anniston Star, Anniston Alabama on February 20th 1935.

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Sources:

Andrews, Chris. “Haunted History of Mobile - the Boyington Oak.” Bienville Bites Food Tour, 2024, bienvillebitesfoodtour.com/blog/haunted-history-of-mobile-the-boyington-oak/.

Collins, Kimber. “The Science and the Story of the Boyington Oak.” WKRG News 5, 29 Oct. 2019, www.wkrg.com/haunted-history/the-science-and-the-story-of-the-boyington-oak/.

Kleen, Michael. “Church Street Graveyard’s Boyington Oak.” M.A. Kleen, 5 Apr. 2017, michaelkleen.com/2017/04/05/church-street-graveyards-boyington-oak/.

Founded in 1670, the town of Wallingford, Connecticut has witnessed centuries of change. Once connected to multiple influential figures in Colonial history and the American Revolution, by the 1800s the town became an industrial hub and in the later part of the 19th century Wallingford found itself featured across headlines all over the country. Unfortunately for the residents of the town, this new notoriety had nothing to do with Wallingford’s industry and everything to do with a horrible discovery.

On the morning of August 8th 1886 brothers Edward and Joseph Terrell, their friend Giles Sommers, and Edward’s dog were walking along an isolated dirt road looking for berries when they noticed something out of place. Hidden under some bushes was an 18” X 30” wooden crate with lettering on the outside claiming it was holding a “dozen pairs of finely stitched men’s shoes.” It seemed innocent enough, but when the dog approached the box its curiosity quickly turned to barking and whines of warning. Then there was the stench. The men left the scene, later returning with crowbars. When they pried open the box there were no shoes. There was straw, soaked in blood and packed around a headless human torso wrapped in tar paper.

The news of the horrific discovery sent shockwaves through Wallingford and beyond. The medical examiners estimated the torso belonged to a man between twenty-five and forty years old, weighing anywhere from 150 to 175 pounds, and that they had been dead between five and ten days before being discovered packed into the shoebox. Interestingly, the stomach was removed by the medical examiner and they discovered that there was a large amount of arsenic present in the victim’s system before he died. While this was all valuable information, it was the only information and the hope for answers quickly faded with authorities openly admitting there was very little to go on. As stated by the coroner, “This is the most mysterious case I have had since I was appointed coroner. With one exception, I have found out exactly what caused death, but this case puzzles me more than any yet. I can’t say whether or not I have obtained any clues.”

Newspaper headline about the body in the box. Image via newenglandhistoricalsiciety.com

The torso had no other bruises or injuries and it appeared the limbs and head were severed haphazardly with a knife or similar dull object. It was buried the next day but the questions continued to permeate headlines and conversations. One of the first suspected victims was Arthur J. Cooley, a Civil War veteran with very well known problems with drinking. Cooley worked at a local slaughterhouse for two decades before abruptly retiring and collecting a pension of $1,500 and his family had recently reported him missing after he was seen leaving a tavern but never returning home. But, Cooley eventually reappeared after an extended time away drinking and the mystery resumed. The next theory was more of a stretch and asked the people of Wallingford to look back to a series of fires that destroyed multiple buildings in town. Three years earlier Frank H. Morse Jr. was accused of setting two buildings ablaze that his father, Frank H. Morse Sr., was using for glass production. There was no question that it was arson, the guard was drugged prior to the fires breaking out and the charges were that Morse had his son intentionally set the blaze in order to collect insurance money. The trial of Frank H. Morse Jr. was recent, taking place only five months before the torso was found but due to a lack of evidence and Morse Jr. having an alibi that he was home the night of the fires, the charges were dropped. If Morse was truly home the night of the fires, did his father have someone else commit the crime for them and did they end up in the box as a punishment for not covering up their tracks well enough to prevent the suspicion of arson? When the torso was discovered the arson case was still open and people wondered if there was a connection. Others wondered if the murder was not an isolated incident. Only a few weeks before finding the torso in the box Edward Terrell was walking in the same area with his dog when he found the body of a deceased woman. Medical schools were questioned, rosters of missing persons were scoured, and there was no answer to who met their grisly end with a stomach full of arsenic but without their limbs and head.

With no human connections being made, authorities looked to the box for answers. The torso was packed into a wooden crate that was manufactured for a shoe factory located over 100 miles away in Fall River, Massachusetts. From there the box was filled with shoes and shipped to a wholesale boot and shoe dealer in Chicago, Illinois who then sent it to a local shoe shop. Once the crate was unpacked it was thrown in the back of one of these shops before it was sold to a man who was never identified. While this was the fairly normal lifecycle of these types of shipping cartons, the fact that it was in Chicago raised some more suspicions. Only a few months earlier in May 1886 Chicago was the site of the bloody Haymarket Riot where striking laborers fighting for workers’ rights clashed with police in Haymarket Square. A bomb was thrown into the crowd killing multiple people leading to the arrest of eight labor leaders and the eventual execution of half of them. With the riot fresh in their minds, the crate’s ties to Chicago, and no other leads, people began to wonder if the crate was shipped back home from Chicago containing the body of someone involved in the riot that fell to a different form of  justice.

The absence of answers left a lot of room for speculation to thrive. One story claimed that a mysterious bag was seen at the bottom of a well that disappeared before it could be recovered and a young man claimed that he saw the box sitting in the bushes for over a week before it was found. Rumors and theories swirled but in the weeks following the discovery there were some random, but very real additions to the story. Early in the investigation pieces of scalp were found near the site of the body in the box but they provided no groundbreaking information other than the pieces pointing to the victim having dark hair. While these pieces of scalp could not be proven to be from the same victim, another discovery had a connection that was hard to ignore. On September 26th a farmer found a pair of arms and legs near the site where the bloody box was found. The limbs were not at the site when the box was originally discovered and they were wrapped in the same tar paper as the torso.

With these seemingly connected, terrible finds people began speaking up. A local Wallingford woman came forward and told the authorities that in early August a disheveled, bearded man knocked on her door asking for directions to a nearby pond. He was carrying a sack and was wearing a shirt covered in blood but she assumed he was homeless and directed him to the water. She stated that later on she saw him again, walking past her house without the sack and wearing a clean shirt. With the first real lead finally coming out the police prepared for a manhunt, but only a few days later the woman totally recanted her story stopping any progress. Another woman named Mabel Preston claimed at first to know everything regarding the murder and was subpoenaed by the court but once she was under oath she changed her story, saying she knew absolutely nothing about the crime. She didn’t have much time to change her mind again, two years later Mabel committed suicide.

With the only two possible leads revoking their information the case was left floating in limbo until it gradually began to fade from the headlines and public memory. Major news about the case would not appear again until 1926 when the former police chief of Wallingford came forward with a shocking claim. Dan O’Reilly was chief of police when the bloody box was discovered in 1886 and four decades later he spoke exclusively to The Journal, not to discuss his opinions of the case, but to say that he knew exactly who the murderer was. According to O’Reilly, he had “several reasons” for never disclosing the truth about the killing including: “…the fact that the perpetrator of the crime, that is the actual killer, has now been dead nearly twenty years and I know of no good reasons why the descendants or relatives of the murderer should be made to bear the ignominy which revelation of his identity would impose on them.” But who were these descendants that would be so affected? O’Reilly told the paper that contrary to opinions, this murderer was not some rogue bloodthirsty madman or a cold-blooded predator, he stated the killer “was no outcast beyond the pale of society, but the scion of one of New England’s oldest families, a native of New Haven county, whose ancestry traces directly back to the Mayflower.” He also revealed details about the victim, that he was a resident of Fairfield county and that he was brutally murdered to silence him because he was aware of people involved in a “serious crime” committed against the state of Connecticut. Despite these salacious claims and the decades gone bye he reiterated that he would not change his mind on his secrecy, stating: “…I shall carry this secret, already locked in my heart for twenty years, to the grave with me.” O’Reilly kept his promise, never disclosing the name of the killer.

Story printed by The Journal where former chief Dan O'Reilly claimed to know the killer. Image via newspapers.com.

The “Wallingford Shoebox Murder” was never solved and is still considered an open case despite the trail going cold nearly 140 years ago. Today the most prominent remnant of the crime stands silent, but in plain sight with the road where the box was discovered now being officially named Shoebox Road.

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Sources:

Kilianski, Michael. “The Connecticut Shoebox Murder Mystery: America’s Oldest Cold Case.” Blogspot.com, 23 May 2021, creativehistorystories.blogspot.com/2021/05/the-connecticut-shoebox-murder-mystery.html.

Landrigan, Leslie. “The Mystery of the Wallingford Shoebox Murder.” New England Historical Society, 8 Aug. 2015, newenglandhistoricalsociety.com/the-mystery-of-the-wallingford-shoebox-murder/.

Mangan, Gregg. “The Shoe Box Murder Mystery.” ConnecticutHistory.org, 8 Aug. 2020, connecticuthistory.org/the-shoebox-murder-mystery/.

Strolling through the city of Richmond, Virginia means taking a walk through one of the oldest cities in America and being able to visit sights and structures that saw countless chapters of the earliest parts of American history. Visiting Jefferson Park, located on Union Hill, offers visitors walking paths, a playground, and a picturesque view of the modern city skyline. It’s a pleasant scene, and one that does not at all hint at what lay hidden underneath the earth of Jefferson Park.

Skyline of Richmond, Virginia. Image via Bruce Emmerling, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

The Church Hill Tunnel of Richmond, Virginia was built with a purpose of advancement, looking to leave behind the aftermath of the Civil War and bring in new progress. Completed in 1872 by the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway (C&O), the railway was built as an extension in order to reach a new coal pier located in the city of Newport News, bringing a new logistical connection to the exportation of coal from the area. The plan sounded good, and upon completion the tunnel was one of the longest in the country at nearly 4,000 feet in length, but the initial victory of completing the tunnel came after multiple problems that should have been seen as a warning.

The first issue with the Church Hill Tunnel was the very earth it was being constructed from. Unlike other tunnels carved through bedrock, Church Hill was created through layers of limestone and soft clay, deeply unstable soil that would shift and swell up when exposed to any moisture and shrink back again when dried. With the volatile soil structure there was no way to ensure the safety of the tunnel and during construction there were multiple instances of portions of it collapsing, taking the lives of the men working inside. Land around the work area began to react to the construction and in one instance the ground gave way, toppling the house of a minister and breaking a gas line. The marvel was also a menace and upon the completion of a new viaduct in 1901 the Church Hill Tunnel was closed and fell into disuse. It should have stayed that way.

While the city of Richmond grew and flourished in the early part of the twentieth century the Church Hill Tunnel lay dormant, looming like a great void out of the earth. That is, until 1925 when after over twenty years of non-use the city decided it was a monster worth bringing back to life.

Given that the tunnel had been left dormant for decades there were extensive repairs that needed to be completed before it could be used once again. These repairs were underway on October 2nd 1925, a cold and rainy day in Richmond that seemed ordinary before the Church Hill Tunnel experienced something that was both unthinkable, but also tragically familiar. The tunnel was bustling with activity and engineer Tom Mason was guiding a train with ten additional flat cars into the west entrance of the tunnel on his first day as an engineer. Then, the bricks began to fall. The collapse of the tunnel was as fast as it was terrible with bricks, debris, and clay falling all around the workers and the train, burying it under the weight of the earth. Electric wires were cut plunging everyone into darkness and some of the trapped men took out their knives and started slashing wildly into the dark, trying to cut through anyone who stood in their way of getting out. Workers scrambled to escape, most miraculously making it to the eastern entrance a mile away and walking from the site with their lives. But others were not as lucky, 190 feet of the tunnel had fallen in on itself and the entire train was buried along with the bodies of Tom Mason and at least two other workers. Fireman Benjamin F. Mosby was hard at work shoveling coal when the locomotive was crushed. He was able to escape but when he staggered out of the east entrance he was horrifically scalded from the steam from the engine and his teeth were broken. He died later that night at Grace Hospital.

The Richmond Times Dispatch reporting on the tunnel collapse.

In the aftermath of the tunnel collapse there were questions, but unfortunately the reason why it happened was known, the tunnel’s history was marred by multiple collapses, and this was not even the first time it claimed human lives. The bigger question now was how to proceed. The body of engineer Mason was able to be recovered but finding the other workers, later identified as Richard Lewis and H. Smith, was impossible. After nine days of efforts to recover their bodies (and after more sections collapsed) it was determined that any further activity in the Church Hill Tunnel was simply too dangerous. The next year the entrances of the tunnel were sealed off, with a giant “1926” inscribed on the mossy, wet stone covering the western entrance. The train and bodies remained entombed inside.

Over the decades since the collapse the tunnel has continued to cause problems, in 1962 another collapse swallowed a house and another worker lost their life to the tunnel. There have been multiple plans to recover the train and the bodies, but the continuing collapses and state of utter disrepair halted further efforts. In 2006 the Virginia Historical Society proposed trying to get into the tunnel once again, but upon drilling a hole in the seal and peering at the inside with a camera it became clear that it would not be possible. The tunnel is filled with water and sand and manipulating it in any way could result in further collapses and severe damage to homes currently standing on Church Hill. Any recovery plans are indefinitely on hold.

Plans for recovery of the train and the bodies of those still entombed inside the Church Hill Tunnel is not the only thing that brings the collapse into present-day conversation. Then there is the vampire.

When twenty-eight-year old Benjamin F. Mosby staggered out of the east end of the tunnel he was the picture of pain and suffering. His teeth were broken, he was bloody, and according to people at the scene his flesh was hanging in ribbons, torn from his body after being blasted by the scalding steam from the locomotive. As the stories of the collapse spread one stated that a “creature” covered in blood and with a mouth of sharp teeth ran from the tunnel, eventually making it to the nearby Hollywood Cemetery where it disappeared into the mausoleum of W.W. Pool, a striking structure with a metal gate and an inscription only reading “W.W. Pool 1913.”

Article in the Richmond Times Dispatch about a tribute to Mosby after his death.

This “creature” which has become known as the Richmond Vampire, is a popular story, but the background is a messy jigsaw of events, rumors, and innocent people denied their eternal resting place. It is almost certain that the figure described as bloody and ghastly with a mouth of sharp teeth emerging from the tunnel was Mosby, moving away from the horror in a state of shock before other people at the scene lay him down on an embankment and began to pour water on him to try and soothe some of his pain. He was reportedly calm, asking that someone let his wife know he was alive and ok. As for the connection to the final resting place of W.W. Pool, there is a rumor that Pool found himself in the United States after being run out of England for practicing vampirism. This rumor is purely that. Pool was born in Mississippi in the 1840s, moved to the Richmond region in the 1860s, died in 1922 (on the same day as one of his closest friends) and had an elaborate funeral including Masonic rites given his membership to the Freemasons. So is the origin of the Richmond Vampire a case of tragic proximity? There are the accounts of seeing a creature emerging from the tunnel and the rumor of Pool and vampirism but the two became intertwined over time, carried into the future by word of mouth and sensationalist storytelling. It is a story of wildly convoluted origins, but it is a persistent one. Visitors to the Hollywood Cemetery regularly ask if there is a vampire buried there and more disturbingly, the remains of W.W. Pool and his wife were removed from the mausoleum due to vandals breaking in, drawing symbols on the walls, and allegedly trying to steal parts of their bodies.

Hundreds of people visit the Hollywood Cemetery of Richmond looking for the tomb of a monster, the physical remains of a real-life horror story. The true tale of terror though, can be found three miles away where a large stone wall inscribed with only “1926” stands between the visitor and a tragic scene where a train and at least two bodies lay frozen in the moment when the earth caved in and took their last breath from them.

The sealed western entrance of the Church Hill Tunnel. Image via Eli Christman from Richmond, VA, USA, CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

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Sources:

Branch, Ashley. “Starting with the Church Hill Tunnel Collapse, a Filmmaker Is Uncovering Virginia’s Buried History.” VPM, Virginia’s home for Public Media, 30 Sept. 2021, www.vpm.org/2021-09-30/starting-with-the-church-hill-tunnel-collapse-a-filmmaker-is-uncovering-virginias.

Castleton, David. “The Richmond Vampire - Virginia’s Tunnel-Haunting Nosferatu - David Castleton Blog - the Serpent’s Pen.” David Castleton Blog - the Serpent’s Pen, 21 Apr. 2021, www.davidcastleton.net/richmond-vampire-hollywood-cemetery-w-w-pool-church-hill-tunnel-virginia/.

Feather, Lauren. “This Richmond Park Is Home to a Sealed Tunnel (with an Unusual History).” TheTravel, 10 Dec. 2022, www.thetravel.com/church-hill-tunnel-in-richmond-virginia-history/.

Nestled into the southwestern region of Vermont lies an expanse of wilderness stretching approximately 100 square miles. Thick with forest and natural wonders including the Glastenbury Mountain this region, roughly bordered by the towns of Glastenbury, Woodford, and Bennington, has deep rooted history including the first town created in Vermont and significant chapters in the American Revolution. It is scenic, it is historic, and to many it’s also terrifying.

 The chilling stories of Glastenbury Mountain began centuries ago when the Native American population regarded the space as sacred, but also cursed. Being the place “where the four winds meet” they used the area only for the burial of their dead and warned people not to travel the region. They also told the tale of a large and malicious stone that would swallow up anyone who stood on it.  If a curse placed by nature, a revered-but-feared burial ground, and a rock that could consume a human was not enough, there were also the tales of the wild men, large hairy human-like creatures that roamed the dense woods alongside other beasts.

Postcard showing Glastenbury Mountain. Image via legendsofamerica.com.

These tales were known but in the decades after the Civil War the old warnings faded and people now living in the region looked to transform their town. In 1872 the town began its first metamorphosis, becoming a logging community fed by the ample and seemingly endless supply of lumber surrounding them.  A train line was built extending nine miles to Bennington and three coal kilns supplied coal that would be shipped down the mountain on the rails. The operations were a success and by 1880 the little town had a school, post office, and a population of 241 people. It looked promising but in the 1890s a black cloud seemed to take a firm residency over the region.

The first strike came on April 4th 1892 when Glastenbury residents Henry McDowell and John Crowley had a confrontation. It is unknown what words were exchanged, but McDowell felt they were strong enough to warrant grabbing a rock and bludgeoning Crowley to death before escaping into the woods. He was eventually caught in Connecticut, convicted, and sent to Waterbury State Hospital. After some time though, the guards felt he could be trusted to spend some time out in the yard. Once outside he saw his moment and hid in a coal cart before making his escape. He was never seen again. Five years later in October 1897 John Harbour of nearby Woodford was found dead, killed by a single gunshot wound. His killer was never found.

It was in that same year that Glastenbury came face to face with a big problem. They were a lumber town, but they were running out of trees to cut. Given that they already had cleared land, created pathways, and had a number of silent buildings from the now-extinct lumber industry, they decided to take an entirely different turn and transform the area into a resort town with a trolley, hotel, and casino. The hopes were high, but after one season the dreams were decimated when massive flooding ravaged the town. With no trees or root systems to help alleviate the impact of the water, it ran over with nothing in its path, destroying the railways leading to the resort that was going to save the town. The flood was the death blow to Glastenbury and with seemingly no other option, the residents moved on leaving the town nearly abandoned with less than ten residents remaining. This low population was one of the reasons that in 1937 the town was disincorporated, putting it in place to officially become a ghost town.

Image showing the repurposed buildings and trolley meant to transform Glastenbury. Image via obscurevermont.com.

The region sat quietly while the wilderness reclaimed it, largely remaining out of the public eye until November 12th 1945 when it became the focus of search parties and newspaper headlines. The man they were searching for was Middie Rivers, an outdoorsman who had become closely acquainted with these woods in his almost seventy-five years. An avid hunter and fisherman, Rivers was spending the day hunting with a small party including his son-in-law. While the group was stopped near Bickford Hollow, Rivers decided to move ahead of the party. By the time the clock struck 4pm he had not returned, and the concerned hunting party went out to find him. When the group saw no sign of Rivers they traveled down to Bennington and asked Fire Chief Wallace Mattison to help them search. The search went on for days and grew to include hundreds of people and soldiers from Fort Devens in Massachusetts. Hours marched on, the sun rose and set multiple times, and the hope that Rivers was fine out in the woods that he knew so well and that he would just show back up one day quickly faded when the snow began to fall. Rivers was never found and the only thing ever recovered was a single rifle cartridge from his gun.

The tragic disappearance of Middie Rivers might have slipped away into time, but instead it unfortunately became “the first one.” 

In December 1946 eighteen-year-old Paula Jean Welden was a sophomore at Bennington College where she studied art, had an interest in botany, and worked at the college cafeteria. After her shift on December 1st she told her roommate she was going to do some hiking on the Long Trail, a 272-mile footpath that follows Vermont’s Green Mountains up to the border of Canada. She was dressed in sneakers, blue jeans, and a red parka, clothing that was fine for that afternoon but would offer no protection for the kind of cold that settled in after dark. She left just before 3pm and she was seen several times that afternoon. One owner of a gas station claims he saw a woman matching her description near a gravel pit, she began hitchhiking and was picked up by a local contractor who took her as far as his house which was about 2.5 miles from the beginning of the Long Trail. Once she began walking on the trail she encountered a group of hikers who answered some questions she had before they moved on in the opposite direction of Welden. According to some reports a local man named Ernest Whitman may have had one of the last encounters with Welden when she stopped to speak to him at his cabin. She asked how long she could go on the trail and he informed her it was four miles to a fork. He warned her that she was not dressed for the weather but she went on her way anyway.

When Welden’s roommate didn’t see her return that night she was not worried, she assumed she was just in another part of the college or in the library studying late. But, when she realized the next morning that Welden was still gone she went to the faculty. The president of the college called her parents in Connecticut and asked if their daughter was home with them. She was not. And when Welden’s mother was informed her daughter was also not at school she fainted on the spot.

Missing person flyer used for Paula Welden. Image via wikipedia.com.

The search for Paula Welden had one huge roadblock from the start, the structure of the search itself. At the time of her disappearance Vermont did not have its own state police force so the search was assembled and conducted by the president of Bennington College and Welden’s father. A group of 370 students and faculty went out to search for her, splitting into groups and throwing confetti on areas that were already searched so other groups knew that that area had already been looked at. In time both the Connecticut and New York state police were brought in to assist and a reward of $5,000 was offered. It was no use, no trace of Paula Welden was ever found.

Image used in the search of Paula Welden. Image via wikipedia.com.

It is easy to say that both Middie Rivers and Paula Welden were probably unfortunate victims of the elements in the wooded expanse that includes Bennington and Glastenbury, but the story of James Tedford is much more difficult to explain away.

It was late into 1949 and James Tedford was supposed to be back home, but he was not. The sixty-eight-year-old World War II veteran had been spending some time visiting his wife and family in Fraklin, Vermont before boarding a bus in St. Albans to return back home to the Vermont Soldiers’ Home where he lived in Bennington.

Along the way back there was a stop in Burlington where Tedford ran into an old friend and the pair chatted a bit before he once again boarded the bus on the final stretch of his ride home. When the bus stopped back in Bennington it was discovered that the veteran was nowhere to be found. His last known whereabouts was on the bus on December 1st at approximately 4pm, almost exactly three years after the last known sighting of Paula Welden in the same region. There was no question that Tedford boarded the bus, not only was he seen getting back on but his suitcase, unfolded map, and unchecked bus ticket were still sitting on his seat. He was simply gone. Shockingly, it took days for anyone to put the pieces together that Tedford never returned home and a search for the man did not take place for over a week after he was last seen. No trace of James Tedford was ever found.

Newspaper clipping about the disappearance of James Tedford. Image via vermontdailychronicle.com.

The disappearances already seen in the region were unsettling but with the end of 1950 came a string of incidents that made some people genuinely begin to question what was going on in the wilderness around Glastenbury Mountain. The first took place on October 12th 1950 when eight-year-old Paul Jepson went missing under some eerily similar circumstances. The eight-year-old was out with his mother, some report that he was with her at the local dump that they maintained, and others state he was helping her tend to the pigs near their Glastenbury farmhouse. Allegedly he was in the family pickup truck and his mother walked away to do some work before returning to the truck and finding the child missing. Like Welden he was also wearing red and his time of disappearance was between 3 and 4pm, approximately the same timeframe that Fisher, Welden, and Tedford also all vanished. A search was launched for Jepson and hundreds of people from the local region combed through the dump, the town, and went into the mountains with no success. Bloodhounds were brought in from the New Hampshire State Police and they did pick up the scent of the boy, but it was lost at an intersection near where Welden was last seen. In the days and weeks that followed Jepson’s disappearance there were reports of motorists seeing a young boy walking along a road but subsequent searches came up empty. Paul Jepson was never seen again.

Newspaper clipping about the disappearance of Paul Jepson. Image via vermontdailychronicle.com.

With the disappearance of Jepson still fresh in the minds of the locals, they very quickly found themselves facing a growingly familiar story when two weeks later on October 28th fifty-three-year-old Freida Langer also walked into the woods and seemingly vanished. Like Middie Fisher, Langer was extremely familiar with the woods so there was nothing to be concerned about when she left her family’s camp cabin for a hike with her cousin. During their walk Langer fell into a stream near the Somerset Reservoir and rather than continue on in her wet clothes she decided to walk the half mile back to the camp where she and her husband had spent every weekend for the last decade, change clothes, and meet her cousin back in the woods to resume their walk. When Langer did not return the concerned cousin went back to the family campsite and was horrified to learn that Langer had never even made it back the half mile to change her clothes. Once again a search was launched, and once again there was no sign of Langer. But, unlike all the previous disappearances, the Langer case would have closure.

Nearly six months after Langer walked into the woods two fishermen were out on the Deerfield River when they made the gruesome discovery of human remains. They had been out that morning but were not having any luck where they were so they decided to move downstream in hopes to find more fish, instead as they moved through the water something caught their eye under the grass hanging over a large water-filled hole at the bank of the river. Langer’s body was found three miles from where she left to walk back to her cabin and it took the pair of fishermen nearly three hours to hike the three miles through intensely thick forest to Somerset Road where they hitchhiked to a home to call for help. The body was badly decomposed but there was no question that the remains were Langer, on the skull was a metal plate, the result of brain surgery that she had five years earlier. It was the surgery that led to the official conclusion that Langer must have suffered a seizure, fallen in the water, and died of accidental drowning. How the experienced hiker who was so well versed in the woods ended up two and a half miles away from her familiar destination remained unknown.

Image of Freida Langer. Image via legendsofamerica.com.

Before 1950 came to a close there was one more name that would join the unfortunate ranks of souls last seen in the wilderness of southwestern Vermont. On November 29th 1950 sixteen-year-old Martha Jeanette Jones was reported missing by her parents. But, at the time she was reported gone Jones had already been missing for an entire month. She was last known to be hitchhiking to school in Manchester and traveling through the infamous region when she too disappeared. The school was under the impression that she was home while her parents assumed she was at the school. Like so many others, Jones was never seen or heard from again.

With the number of mysterious occurrences in the Glastenbury-Bennington region there are bound to be theories about what happened to the missing. There are purely logical ones, Langer may have had a seizure and drowned, the young Paul Jepson or Paula Welden may have been kidnapped, James Tedford may have decided he no longer wanted to live at the Vermont Soldiers’ Home and silently left the bus with no one noticing, one of more of the missing may have simply succumbed to the ruthless wilderness and elements. There are these theories, and there are others that believe that there is something very abnormal going on in the woods of southwestern Vermont.

The stories go back to the Native American tales of the land being cursed and a human-swallowing rock, but there was something else they spoke of, that being the “wild men” of the woods. The idea of large, hairy creatures roaming the woods is easy to dismiss as Native American legend, but there is an account of many others seeing a similar creature in the late 1800s. According to the story a stagecoach full of people were traveling through the mountains near Glastenbury during a torrential downpour that made progress nearly impossible. The stagecoach driver came to a halt and when he climbed down with lantern in hand he noticed a large set of footprints in the mud in front of them. The tale continues that people started to come out of the stagecoach to look at the footprints when the horses began to get extremely restless. Then, something hit the stagecoach with tremendous force and everyone inside scrambled out. According to their accounts whatever was hitting the coach finally hit it with a blow strong enough to knock it on its side and through the pelting rain they saw a massive human shape, covered with hair, and two huge eyes in the darkness that turned and ran back into the woods.

The creature dubbed The Bennington Monster became yet another mystery of the region, but it was looked at a little stronger in November 1943. Before the “first” disappearance of Middie Fisher in November 1945 there was the story of Carol Herrick. Herrick was also an outdoorsman and an avid hunter who went out hunting one day with his cousin Henry. Allegedly, the two men got separated and Henry contacted authorities to try and find his cousin. Carol Herrick was found days later laying near his gun that had not been fired. The cause of death was equally confusing and disturbing, it was said that his lungs were punctured by his ribs and it appeared that he had been “squeezed” to death.

Since its earliest days the forests of southwestern Vermont have been surrounded by unsettling stories. The Native American tales of the land being cursed, man-eating rocks, and wild men live in the collective memory alongside tales of beasts attacking stagecoaches, inexplicable sounds coming from the woods, and even reports of mysterious lights and flying objects being seen over the treetops. It is the disappearances though that earned the region the name “The Bennington Triangle”, coined by author Joseph Citro in 1992. When it comes to The Bennington Triangle the years between 1945 and 1950 will forever be synonymous with the disappearances of Middie Rivers, Paula Welden, James Tedford, Paul Jepson, Freida Langer, and Martha Jeanette Jones, but these names reflect only a small sliver of the strange occurrences in the woods.

The terrifying truth is that we may never fully know the extent of the unexplained that already has, and continues to unfold, in the region of The Bennington Triangle of Vermont.

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Sources:

Abramovich, Chad. “The Vanished Town of Glastenbury and the Bennington Triangle.” Obscure Vermont, 31 Mar. 2020, urbanpostmortem.wordpress.com/2015/04/07/the-vanished-town-of-glastenbury-and-the-bennington-triangle/.

Alexander, Kathy. “Bennington Triangle, Vermont.” Legends of America, Oct. 2023, www.legendsofamerica.com/bennington-triangle-vermont/.

Dailey, Eva. “The Bennington Triangle: The Ghost Town of Glastenbury Vermont.” The Looking Glass, 17 Oct. 2018, svclookingglass.com/4299/art/writing/the-bennington-triangle-the-ghost-town-of-glastenbury-vermont/.

Fair, Bethany. “History Space: Tale of Two VT Ghost Towns.” Burlington Free Press, 29 Oct. 2018, www.burlingtonfreepress.com/story/news/2018/10/29/history-space-tale-two-vt-ghost-towns/38202243/.

Leahey, Maynard. “Verdict of Accidental Drowning Closes Freida Langer Mystery.” The North Adams Transcript, May 14th 1951, https://www.newspapers.com/image/545381347/?terms=%22Frieda%20Langer%22&match=1

“Missing Jepson Youngster Makes Fourth Disappearance of Local Persons in 5 Years” The Bennington Evening Banner, October 24th 1950, https://www.newspapers.com/image/546025887/ 

“Missing Schoolgirl, 16, Brings To 6 Numbers of Persons Lost in Southern Vt.” The Burlington Free Press, December 13th 1950, https://www.newspapers.com/image/198069883/?terms=%22Paul%20Jepson%22&match=1

Page, Timothy. “Secrets of the Bennington Triangle - Vermont Daily Chronicle.” Vermont Daily Chronicle - News & Commentary for Vermont, 29 Sept. 2023, vermontdailychronicle.com/secrets-of-the-bennington-triangle/.

“74 Year Old Hunter Lost For Two Days.” The Bennington Evening Banner, November 14th 1945, https://archives.library.wcsu.edu/omeka/files/original/Michael_C._Dooling_Collection_MS_062/5262/ms062_01_18_middieRivers.pdf

The townspeople all loved Josef, he was courteous, kind, and generous with all his neighbors. The children delighted in seeing him ride into town and loved hearing his stories. The only thing that could be better was visiting his home, filled with all manner of unique items with tales of their own that Josef was more than happy to tell. Josef Mencik was a historian, but he immersed himself in the past in ways that went far deeper than paper and ink. He may have been born in a more modern age but in his daily life Mencik was the last of the medieval knights.

As dedicated as Mencik was to history, he was extremely secretive of his own and there is almost nothing known about his early days. He never shared the names of any family members, his birthdate is a mystery, and there is no known record of where he was born with historians only able to narrow down that he was most likely born in the Böhmerwald region of Czechoslovakia. In approximately 1911 he ventured out into the world and set his sights on an aged castle in Dobrš. He decided to make it his own, but this was not going to be an easy task. The castle had been standing since the 14th century and when Mencik purchased it it was a ruin, severely damaged by a fire and countless rainstorms that left it a shell of its former self. But in this broken structure Mencik saw his ideal home and after purchasing it he began the long road to rebuilding it.

Böhmerwald region of Czechoslovakia via 1930s. Image via Wikipedia Commons.

Mencik’s idea of bringing his castle back to its glory days was meant in the most literal sense. He lived with no electricity, no plumbing, absolutely nothing representing the comforts available to him in the early 1900s. Where modernity was absent, it was replaced with beauty. The halls were lit with candles and torches and as time went on Mencik filled his home with rare antiques turning it into a literal living history museum, a time capsule of the days long past that he happily shared with anyone who wanted to see the collection of treasures. This full embrace of the medieval age extended far beyond a refurbished home and an extensive antique collection. Mencik lived his life as closely as he could to a knight, traveling on his beloved thoroughbred horse and wearing fine suits of armor crafted in France. Some accounts state that he even had a moat around his castle….filled with wooden alligator sculptures.

Josef Mencik in full armor. Image via DannyDutch.com.

Like so many parts of his past, it is unclear if he ruled his private kingdom alone. According to some accounts Mencik was married to a woman named Ema Mencikova and that they may have had two children, but this has not been proven. What is well known is that everyone who knew Mencik thought very highly of him. By all accounts he treated everyone with respect, was always willing to help anyone in any way he could, and he enjoyed spending time with his friends and neighbors. He was a regular patron of the local taverns where he would socialize with everyone, ending every visit with his personal ritual “to swallow a whole herringbone, which he then drank with a good glass of rum and then shouted menacingly."

Everyone who knew Mencik personally knew of his genuine character, but his actions on one particular day in 1938 would make sure his story was told for generations.

Images of Josef Mencik on his horse. Image via DannyDutch.com.

In an early act of aggression, in 1938 Nazi Germany moved to invade Czechoslovakia in order to annex the predominantly German region of Sudetenland. As the Germans crossed the border through Bučina they were not anticipating any resistance, but what they were met with was more stunning and confusing than they could have imagined. As they crossed they were met by Josef Mencik, seated high upon his horse, dressed in full armor, and holding a very large halberd. He met them standing strong, ready, and defiant, but he also met them alone. As the crushing, modern machines of war rolled closer to the knight he did not flinch and he stood taller as they became more confused as to what exactly they were all seeing. Unfortunately, there is no written account to tell us about the words exchanged between the knight and the Nazis, but what is known is that instead of engaging or attacking Mencik, they all simply hesitated for a short while before continuing to march past him. As they went by some Nazi soldiers tapped their helmets at him, a signal that said they believed that Mencik was simply a delusional man not to be bothered with. As they moved past Mencik they walked into an early chapter of a war that would tear the world apart.  

There are many differing opinions about the actions of Mencik against the Nazis with some feeling it was an act of pure bravery while others feel it was foolish. Regardless of opinions, it is technically true that he did successfully defend his castle home which was never taken during the war. In 1945 though, the fortress that Mencik brought back to life and made into a home where he welcomed everyone with open arms, was removed from his hands when the structure became part of the nationalization by the new Communist government. The last medieval knight Josef Mencik died only a few days later in November 1945 and was estimated to be in his late seventies.

For all his living days Mencik sought to bring the past back to life, not just for himself but also for the present to learn from and enjoy. Although he was probably heartbroken by his home becoming nationalized, today his castle is open to the public and serves as a museum, welcoming curious visitors just as he did. Josef Mencik, the last knight, passed away nearly eight decades ago but his private kingdom, his history lessons, and his story of bravery in the face of danger have withstood the test of time far longer than he could have dreamed.

The remnants of Mencik's castle and more recent additions. Image via Michal Klajban / Wikimedia Commons CC BY-SA 3.0

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Sources:

Josef Mencik: The Last Knight Who Stood Up to the Germans In WWII by Samantha Franco. War History Online. January 11th 2023. https://www.warhistoryonline.com/world-war-ii/josef-mencik.html

Josef Mencik – History’s Last Knight Stood Against the Nazis by Travis Pike. Sandboxx.us. November 14th 2022. https://www.sandboxx.us/news/josef-mencik-the-last-knight/

The 1600s was a difficult chapter for human life. All over the world wars tore at the seams of land and families, and those that did not fall in battle found themselves vulnerable to falling from disease and plague brought on by forces that could not yet be understood. Many things that could not be explained resulted in further violence, fanaticism, death, and destruction dealt from one hand only to be horrifically felt by the other. Breakthroughs in science, exploration, and the arts collided with religious extremism and prejudice as humanity as a whole spun on, seemingly with chaos in every corner.

The Netherlands were one part of the world with turmoils erupting within their borders. In 1672 the country formerly known as the Dutch Republic was seeing the end of the “Dutch Golden Age” with simultaneous wars with England, France, and two German cities. The year 1672 would enter the history books as the Rampjaar, The Disaster Year. The Dutch people coined a phrase to describe this most unfortunate time: “The people were irrational, the government helpless, and the country beyond salvation.”

Allegory of the Disaster Year by Jan van Wijckersloot (1673). Image via Wikipedia.

Although it was obvious there were multiple problems facing the Dutch Republic in the 1672, some believed the problems took root decades earlier. William II Prince of Orange died of smallpox in 1650 leaving the Dutch with no official leader (referred to as a Stadholder.) It was this same year that Johan De Witt began to make his mark in the politics of the region. Johan’s family were bitter rivals of the Oranges and as De Witt began to move up the political ladder he allegedly (with the help of his powerful father who spent time in prison for his involvement in a coup d'etat of William II) quietly made moves and had words written into political documents to keep the young William III or any member of the Orange family from ruling. This allowed wheels to be set in motion to form a fully Republican regime with De Witt at the helm. After holding a number of high-standing positions he was elected to the role of Grand Pensionary of Holland in 1653, essentially making him the ruler of all Dutch provinces.

By the time the 1672 Year of Disaster loomed over the Dutch Republic the people had already endured enough war and horror to last a lifetime under the eye of Johan De Witt. There were the Anglo-Dutch Wars which threatened the land, but De Witt remained focused on the sea, taking every step possible to protect the economic interests in shipping and trading that filled his pockets while paying little mind to the forces surrounding the Dutch at their front doors. He also made it a point to delay the appointment of William III as captain general. The stubbornness of De Witt would have deep consequences when in May 1672 Louis XIV invaded the Dutch Republic, thus beginning the third Anglo-Dutch War.

Portrait of Johan De Witt by Adriaen Hanneman (1652). Image via Wikipedia.

As troops moved straight into the heart of their homeland the exhausted Dutch people felt betrayed by their leadership and all eyes turned to Johan De Witt. Some were content to simply, but loudly, voice their opinions that the House of Orange should take back their power by any means necessary. Others showed their feelings of anger and betrayal in much more aggressive ways. On June 21st 1672 Johan De Witt was attacked by a man who was armed with a knife and an intent to kill. The assailant did succeed in brutally stabbing him, but he survived. Johan’s brother Cornelis was also feeling the pressure of the simmering public and on July 24th he was arrested under charges of treason against the House of Orange. He was brought to prison in The Hauge where he was tortured in order to obtain a confession. While his brother was recovering from being nearly assassinated, Cornelis was refusing to confess to any wrongdoing and was eventually sentenced to exile.

Being attacked with a malicious blade changed De Witt and after a lengthy recovery he resigned from his position on August 4th 1672. At the time of his resignation his brother Cornelis was still wallowing in prison with his exile looming. On August 20th Johan visited his brother at the prison to assist him and see him off on what was supposed to be his date of forever departure from his homeland. It is unknown what the pair discussed that day, but it is almost certain they had no clue what was about to happen. Yes, Johan resigned and Cornelis was exiled, but the Dutch people were not ready to let the brothers walk peacefully away into a new chapter while they were left with suffering and debt that could follow them for generations. As the brothers talked in the prison they were attacked by a mob that were set on tearing them limb from limb.

The Murder of the de Witt Brothers by Pieter Fris. Image via Wikipedia.

What unfolded was a scene that was feral, ferocious, and that has gone down in history through eyewitness accounts and multiple pieces of art. The mob ravaged the De Witt brothers. They were dragged into the street, shot, stripped of their clothing, and taken to the public gallows. If the brothers thought their end would be found in a broken neck at the end of a hangman’s noose they were terribly wrong. Once strung up the mob began to take souvenirs. Some accounts report that their eyes were stolen, others say they were later cut into pieces and distributed to the masses, and while that is up for debate one thing that is certain is that their bodies were sliced open, their livers stolen, and the organs were then roasted and consumed by those in attendance. After a lifetime of prestige and twenty years in power, Johan De Witt departed life alongside his brother after being mutilated and cannibalized by his own countrymen.

The Corpses of the De Witt Brothers by Jan de Baen. Image via Wikipedia.

With De Witt gone power went to William III of Orange, the same man who had his appointment as captain general stalled by De Witt and the son of William II whose death was used by De Witt and his father to make the turn to the Republican force that they hoped would keep the House of Orange out of power for good.

Whether William III had a hand in planning the attack and death of the De Witt brothers is debated to this day with answers unknown.

Today the prison where the De Witt brothers spent their last moments on earth still stands and has been repurposed as a history and art museum.

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Sources:

That Time the Dutch ate their Prime Minister by Vlad Moca-Grama. DutchReview.com, March 3rd 2023. https://dutchreview.com/culture/dutch-history-crowds-ate-prime-minister/

A Dark and Stormy Bite: That Time a Bunch of Dutch People ate Their Prime Minister by Lillian Stone. TheTakeout.com, January 15th 2021. https://thetakeout.com/a-dark-and-stormy-bite-that-time-a-bunch-of-dutch-peop-1846044366

History and folklore live in the same neighborhood. They are spoken, documented, passed down, and sometimes they cross paths and give each other a knowing nod, the weight of which only they fully understand. Fort Mountain State Park in Chatsworth, Georgia is one of those places where history and folklore meet. The story is a strange one and it covers a lot of miles, stretching from Alabama all the way up to Delaware. But in Murphy, North Carolina the words are allegedly given a shape. Enclosed in a case inside the Cherokee County Historical Museum they rest, standing upright, with their eyes gazing out and inviting visitors to stare back just as intently. They look unlike any other ancient form of art found in the Southeast and their story is just as unusual as their appearance. They are an alleged stone representation of the ancient Appalachian Moon-Eyed People.

The Appalachian Mountains of North Carolina. Image via Wikipedia Commons.

The Cherokee people have a vibrant culture that is filled with deeply cherished myths, legends, and histories of their people and their ancestral home in the mountains of Southern Appalachia. According to the Cherokee, the Smokey Mountains were formed by a giant buzzard after the giant flood. The exhausted bird fell to the earth and the mountains erupted up from where the massive wings impacted the ground. In the years since the creation of the mountains the Cherokee interacted with many spirits, many creatures, and according to their oral tradition, a civilizations of people that was there before them with extremely pale white skin, fine hair, and eyes that were so sensitive to the sun that they spent the daylight hours living underground.

The first written account of these people comes from European botanist Benjamin Smith Burton (sometimes written as Barton) who wrote in 1797 that he learned about these people from the firsthand account of Colonel Leonard Marbury, an intermediary between the American government and the Cherokee tribe. Burton writes:

“…the Cheerake tell us, that when they first arrived in the country which they inhabit, they found it possessed by certain 'moon-eyed-people,'who could not see in the day-time.”

The Cherokee people had a strong belief in things most people today would consider supernatural, but in their stories of the Moon-Eyed People they were never referred to as something otherworldly. They were considered and spoken about as another culture of human beings, ones that were living in Appalachia before the Cherokee arrived. John Haywood was one of America’s earliest historians and he collected the stories that were passed down through generations of the Cherokee people. Among the stories he documented, some were similar to accounts reported by Burton, that the Cherokee arrived at the mountains and along the Tennessee River they encountered “white people” and fortifications that contained “hoes, axes, guns, and other metallic utensils.” Then there were the fortifications themselves, made of precisely arranged stone, and stretching all the way from the Tennessee River down to the Chickamauga Creek. Were these fortifications created for protection from nature or people?

The Cherokee stories do not mention finding any other civilizations of people along their travels and when these two groups met, they clashed. The text from Burton states “These wretches they expelled” and in his 1823 book Natural And Aboriginal History of Tennessee Haywood writes of “white people, who were extirpated in part, and in part were driven from Kentucky, and probably also from West Tennessee.” Writer James Mooney was familiar with the works of Burton and Hayward as well as the Cherokee oral traditions having collected stories from two Cherokee elders who told that when they first came to the region they encountered people who were “very small and perfectly white” that were then driven from the area and fled west. The story continues that the conflict took both groups of people to Big Chickamauga where an agreement was made that these “very small and perfectly white” people were not permitted back to their land and fortifications, but they were permitted to flee in peace.

The fortifications of Fort Mountain as they appear in modern day. Image via Wikimedia Commons user  Thomsonmg2000.

Descriptions of the “Moon-Eyed People” continue to appear in multiple accounts collected from the Cherokee with slight variations. Some describe them as being extremely small, others say they could only see during certain phases of the moon and that they lived underground, another version describes them as tall with light-colored hair and speaking a strange language. While many historians question if these people even existed, those who believe they did have another question to answer. Who were these people? Where did they come from? A popular theory says that that answer can be found by tracing a line that stretches from Georgia across the Atlantic Ocean to Wales.

When the governor of Tennessee John Sevier visited Fort Mountain, Georgia in 1782 he met with the Cherokee’s Chief Ocotosota. At the time of their meeting Chief Ocotosota was ninety years old and when discussing the large stone fortifications standing at Fort Mountain he told the governor that his forefathers "told of the fort being built by white men from across the great water." The accounts from Chief Ocotosota were enough to convince Sevier. There was another story that claimed to tell the origin of those in the Appalachia before the Cherokee and based on the accounts of Chief Ocotosota he believed the tale to be the truth. According to this version of events the mysterious Moon-Eyed People were the descendants of a Welsh prince.

Oconostota, Cherokee chief  from a painting entitled "The Great Warrior, Chief Oconostota-Cunne Shote" by Francis Parsons, 1762. Image and caption credit: Tennessee State Library and Archives

The story of Prince Madoc ab Owain Gwynedd is intriguing, but also murky. The story tells of the prince and his brother Riryd fleeing violence in his homeland and landing in North America in approximately 1170, over 300 years before the voyage of Columbus. Allegedly, they landed in what is now Mobile Bay, Alabama and made their way up the Alabama River and into the mainland where they decided to make their new home. Riryd stayed behind while Madoc returned to Wales where he amassed a fleet of ten ships filled with Welsh people who sailed away from their home and were never heard from again. When speaking about the fortifications with Chief Ocotosota, Governor Sevier was told these stone fortresses were built by those Welsh immigrants and they were all that remained of them after the Cherokee took control of the land.

There was a reason that Governor Sevier was familiar with the story of Prince Madoc and the theory of the Welsh in Appalachia, and that is because Chief Ocotosota was not the only person to speak about these early and mysterious fair-skinned inhabitants. In 1608 a crew member sailing under Captain Christopher Newport wrote a letter describing their interactions with a group of people who spoke a language that was so like his native Welsh that he served as an interpreter between the crew and tribe. Also noted was how different the customs and appearances were of these people compared to other Native Americans. Years later in 1699 the Reverend Morgan Jones reported that while he was traveling through the Carolinas he encountered and spent several months with a tribe called the Doeg who spoke and understood a variation of Welsh. Tennessee governor John Sevier took the “proof” far beyond spoken language and claimed that in 1799 a discovery was made far inland of six skeletons buried in brass armor containing the Welsh coat of arms. This claim was referenced years later by author and historian Thomas Hinde who wrote in an 1824 letter that six skeletons had “been dug up near Jeffersonville, Indiana, on the Ohio River with breastplates that contained Welsh coats-of-arms.” In another part of the country, closer to present-day North Dakota than the mountains of Appalachia, it was reported that instead of canoes the Mandan people used an ancient type of boat that originated in Wales called coracles.

The claim of a prince fleeing Wales, arriving in Alabama, and ushering in generations of Native Americans with Welsh backgrounds persisted but there was also evidence to disprove this theory. Welsh explorer John Evans spent the winter of 1796-97 living with the Mandan people who allegedly spoke Welsh and followed customs passed down through the generations after the Welsh arrived in Alabama. But, in July of 1797 he wrote to Dr. Samuel Jones “Thus having explored and charted the Missurie for 1,800 miles and by my Communications with the Indians this side of the Pacific Ocean from 35 to 49 degrees of Latitude, I am able to inform you that there is no such People as the Welsh Indians.” The argument for or against the existence of Native Americans with Welsh roots had far reaching repercussions. During territorial struggles this idea of Welsh inhabitants in the new world was proposed as a reason that England should have claim to it instead of Spain.

The problem that England had with this claim is the same problem faced today in that proving Prince Madoc arrived in Alabama all those years ago and began a Welsh settlement is a very difficult task. There is a large amount of spoken word and secondhand accounts, but the whereabouts of the skeletons encased in Welsh armor is unknown and the coracles of the Mandan people have disappeared. Tragically, the waves of disease that swept through the land with the arrival of the Europeans took a countless number of accounts with them. In 1837 alone the Mandan people were almost completely wiped out by smallpox brought in by traders.

If the theory of Welsh travelers arriving in North America and living in the Appalachian mountains before the Cherokee is false, than who were these “very small and perfectly white” people with fair hair that could not see in sunlight that were spoken of by so many different people? Another theory is that these people were not new to the land, that they were actually Native Americans with albinism. Albinism appeared among the Hopi people of the Southwest and can be seen in photographs from the 1800s showing children with light skin and hair.

Image of a Hopi child with albinism. 

Image originally via The Huntington Library Museum and Botanical Gardens. Hopi Indians, Arizona. Albino in center. Hopi girls, Oraibi, Arizona. There are many Albinos among the Hopi Indians, photCL 312 (172), The Frederick Monsen Ethnographic Indian Photographs, The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

 Although the Hopi lived in an entirely different region than the people spoken about by the Cherokee, some believe that the mysterious Moon-Eyed People may have been another community of people that also lived with albinism at that time. In 1699 Welsh explorer Lionel Wafer wrote about his experience with a tribe of people living in Panama:

“There is one Complexion so singular, among a sort of People in this Country, I never saw nor heard of any like them in any part of the World. [...] They are White, and there are of them of both Sexes; They differ from the other Indians chiefly in respect of Colour, tho' not in that only. Their Skins are not of such a White as those of fair People among Europeans, [...] but 'tis rather a Milk-white, lighter than the Colour of any Europeans, and much like that of a white Horse. For there is this further remarkable in them, that their Bodies are beset all over, more or less, with a fine short Milk-white Down, which adds to the whiteness of their Skins. The Men would probably have white Bristles for Beards, did they not prevent them by their Custom of plucking the young Beard up by the Roots continually. Their Eye-brows are Milk-white also, and so is the Hair of their Heads, and very fine withal, about the length of six or eight inches, and inclining to a Curl. And what is yet more strange, their Eye-lids bend and open in an oblong Figure, pointing downward at the Corners, and forming an Arch or Figure of a Crescent with the Points downwards. From hence, and from seeing so clear as they do in a Moon-shiny night, we us'd to call them Moon-ey'd. For they see not very well in the Sun, poring in the clearest Day; their Eyes being but weak, and running with Water if the Sun shine towards them; so that in the Day-time they care not to go abroad, unless it be a cloudy dark Day. But notwithstanding their being thus sluggish and dull and restive in the Day-time, yet when Moon-shiny nights come, they are all Life and Activity, running abroad, and into the Woods, skipping about like Wild-Bucks; and running as fast as Moon-light, even in the Gloom and Shade of the Woods, as the other Indians by Day, being as nimble as they, tho' not so strong and lusty. The Copper-colour'd Indians seem not to respect these so much as those of their own Complexion, looking on them as somewhat monstrous.”

Although there may never be solid proof of Prince Madoc’s involvement in the early days of North America there are locations that firmly believe this version of events. At Fort Mountain there are multiple markers that tell the story of the Moon-Eyed People and the arrival of the prince. This is the very place where Chief Ocotosota and Governor John Sevier discussed “the fort being built by white men from across the great water” and it is one of few places that can claim to have a physical remnant of this tale. The forts and wall spoken of by Chief Ocotosota are still standing here, stretching for 855 feet and varying between two and six feet tall at different points. Archaeological estimates state that the wall was constructed between 500 –1500 BCE and those who steadfastly believe the Prince Madoc theory quickly point out that the construction of one of the fortifications located in Alabama resembles those built in Wales during the same timeframe.

Marker in Fort Mountain State Park that tells the legend of the Moon-Eyed People. Image via Wikimedia Commons.

Although Fort Mountain claims to have the fortifications left behind by the Moon-Eyed People, the Cherokee County Historical Museum claims to have a representation of the Moon-Eyed People themselves. Standing together inside a glass case are two figures, standing three feet tall and carved from soapstone, with no hair and eyes gazing. In 1838 North Carolina Senator Archibald Murphy began selling off parcels of land in the place that would become the town of Murphy, North Carolina. A man named Felix Ashley bought a piece of land and while digging in 1841 he discovered the incredibly strange statue that now sits inside the museum. The road from dirt to display was not a fast one though, Ashley took the statue home and leaned it up against one of his buildings until it eventually made its way to the museum where it sat in storage up until 2015 when it finally saw the light of day.  

The figures of the alleged Moon-Eyed People. Image via Strange Carolinas.

Like so many aspects of the story, the statue of the two figures are said to represent the Moon-Eyed People, but there is no absolute proof of this. And, like the Moon-Eyed People themselves, there are multiple stories circulating about the origin of the statue with theories ranging from it being a simple sculpture of two people to some believing the Moon-Eyed People were extraterrestrials and this statue was carved as a tribute to them. Museum Director Wanda Stalcup acknowledges the theory of the Moon-Eyed People and the statue’s alleged connection, stating “They were a legend of the Cherokee…The Moon-Eyed People were supposed to be people who only came out at night. They were light-skinned and had big blue eyes." However, Stalcup keeps the door open to all ideas, saying simply that everyone is entitled to their opinion because no one knows what they are.

The Moon-Eyed People have been appearing in spoken word accounts and theories for hundreds of years and despite centuries of speculation as to who they are and where they came from they remain a mystery, unable to be proven or disproven. Perhaps they were Native Americans living with albinism. Perhaps they were descendants of a Welsh prince whose legitimacy has disappeared along with the many years since his arrival. Many people and locations stand strongly by their opinion, but over all the years there is one thing we can say for certain about the Moon-Eyed People.

No one knows who or what they are.

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Sources:

David Tibbs. Legends of Fort Mountain The Moon-Eyed People / Prince Madoc of Wales. The Historical Marker Database, 2008. https://www.hmdb.org/m.asp?m=11590

The Moon-Eyed People. North Carolina Ghosts. https://northcarolinaghosts.com/mountains/moon-eyed-people/

Exploring the Mysterious North American Moon-Eyed People. Ancient Origins Reconstructing the Story of Humanity’s Past. 2022. https://www.ancient-origins.net/myths-legends-americas/moon-eyed-people-0016334

Vicky Verma. Moon-Eyed People From Ancient America With Pale Skin Were Afraid Of Daylight, Why? Journal News Online. 2022. https://journalnews.com.ph/moon-eyed-people-from-ancient-america-with-pale-skin-were-afraid-of-daylight-why/

Beth Lawrence. Appalachia’s Lost Colony The mystery of the Moon Eyed settlers. The Sylva Herald and Ruralite. 2020. http://www.thesylvaherald.com/news/article_63be7a46-193a-11eb-bcb1-9b6452791b80.html

Ben Johnson. The discovery of America… by a Welsh Prince? Historic UK. https://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofWales/The-discovery-of-America-by-Welsh-Prince/