No. 866
Crime, Eccentricity, and the Sporting Life in 19th Century America.
May 19, 2026

Dreams a Likeness of her Future Husband.

A Young Lady in Atchison, Kansas, Eats Four Pounds of Wedding-Cake, and in Her Dreams Sees a Likeness of her Future Husband
May 19, 2026
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Tag: Theatre

A Bevy of Stage Beauties.

Five footlight fairies, whose faces and forms charm audiences in London, Paris and New York.

2/22/2022

A Wine-Inspired Wager.

A Female Who Was Not Allowed to Exhibit Her Terpsichorean Abilities.

5/28/2018

A Scene not on the Bills.

Actor Ricardo’s bluff jump from the stage to the audience at the Grand Opera House, Columbus, Ohio.

10/17/2016

Floating Circus.

Spaulding & Rogers’s Floating Circus Palace.

4/11/2016

She Swallowed Her Teeth.

Mrs. Dunsford, of Reading, Pa., meets with a mishap in a theatre.

2/15/2016

Chorus Girls Fight.

Two of the charming girls who pose as "living pictures" in Rice's "1492" have a wordy war, which ends in a hand-to-hand conflict.

5/18/2015

New Years in the Wings.

The fairy of the enchanted realm entertains her subjects in an earthly way.

12/29/2014

Scenes from “In the Tenderloin.”

6/16/2014

Naughty Anthony.

10/23/2012

Spectacular Scenes & Sights Down on the Jersey Coast

Poster for the 1898 Broadway show "Have You Seen Smith?"

7/17/2012

Trixie Got the Best of It.

Two Little Gem Theatre, Buffalo, N. Y., Soubrettes have a scrap on account of a man.

10/8/2011

The Astor Place Riot

8/15/2011
Via Newspapers.comThis tale of strange goings-on in a seemingly unremarkable apartment was told in the “Western Mail,” March 10, 1927:An extraordinary story of queer happenings in an unoccupied Fulham (England) flat was told recently by a foreman and two workmen who have been decorating it (declares the "London Daily News").One of the men mentioned to the foreman some days ago that when working
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Strange Company - 6/10/2026
"As his son I am proud of hisefforts to succeed in life"Jefferson Randolph Smith IIIArtifact #93-2Jeff Smith collection(Click image to enlarge) oapy's son hires a legal firm to stop the defamation of his father's name. At age 30, Jefferson Randolph Smith III, Soapy and Mary's oldest son, was protecting his father's legacy and his mother's reputation from "libel" and scandal. He was also
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Soapy Smith's Soap Box - 10/13/2025
You can see it peeking out from the Harlem River Drive or through the chain-link fence of the Third Avenue Bridge: a five-story red brick building almost buried behind glass and steel apartment towers. The towers are newish luxury rental residences built on the Bronx side of the Harlem River. Shiny and modern, they bring […]
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Ephemeral New York - 6/8/2026
Youth With Executioner by Nuremberg native Albrecht Dürer … although it’s dated to 1493, which was during a period of several years when Dürer worked abroad. November 13 [1617]. Burnt alive here a miller of Manberna, who however was lately … Continue reading
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Executed Today - 11/13/2020
In 1830, Joseph Knapp conspired with his brother, John Francis Knapp, to hire a local criminal, Richard Crowninshield, to murder their great uncle, Captain Joseph White, in Salem, Massachusetts. They believed that if the captain died without a will, they stood to inherit a sizable fortune.Read the full story here: "A Most Extraordinary Case"
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Murder By Gaslight - 6/6/2026
As Mr. Moody for the Prosecution dramatically expounds on hatchets and grisly details, and a glimpse of two skulls in a leather case, Lizzie slumps over in her chair. Was it the heat or the ghastly descriptions?
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Lizzie Borden: Warps and Wefts - 6/7/2026
  [Editor’s note: Guest writer, Peter Dickson, lives in West Sussex, England and has been working with microfilm copies of The Duncan Campbell Papers from the State Library of NSW, Sydney, Australia. The following are some of his analyses of what he has discovered from reading these papers. Dickson has contributed many transcriptions to the Jamaica […]
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Early American Crime - 2/7/2019
Rip Roaring Fun. | Sights and Sounds of Spring.

Dreams a Likeness of her Future Husband.

cake-dream

A Young Lady in Atchison, Kansas, Eats Four Pounds of Wedding-Cake, and in Her Dreams Sees a Likeness of her Future Husband

The old saying that by partaking of wedding-cake overnight, a girl is sure to dream of her future husband, induced a young lady at Atchison, Kansas, to try whether there is any truth in it, and in order to make a sure thing, she ate four pounds of wedding-cake on going to bed. She did dream of some being, but she had no amount of money that could ever induce her to marry him. Served her fight; what businesses had she to eat so much wedding-cake? Those Kansas girls are always overdoing whatever they attempt.


Illustrated Police News, May 20, 1875.