No. 604
Crime, Eccentricity, and the Sporting Life in 19th Century America.
November 30, 2021

Her Striped Stockings.

November 30, 2021
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The 1883 book “Shropshire Folk-lore: A Sheaf of Gleanings” included a story about what we today would call a “poltergeist” which appeared to center around an enigmatic farm servant.  While the tale purports to be true, at this distance of time it is impossible to say how much of it is fact, and how much is legend.  Still, it’s such a quaintly charming little curiosity that I wanted to
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  [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
"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
(Illustrated Police News, April 3, 1886.)Agnes Anastasia Long moved out of her parents’ home in East Attleboro, Massachusetts, in April 1882. With her many male suiters, she was considered the black sheep of the family. Her father had enough of her bad behavior and, according to the Boston Herald, “refused to permit her to darken the threshold of his humble home.”She took a job at Streeter
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Murder By Gaslight - 8/22/2026
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
The “Prisoners’ March.” | Illicit Distilleries.

Her Striped Stockings.

Striped-Stockings

The other day a groceryman at Vallejo, Cal., gave a large party, at which the daughter of the carriage painter who lived next door created a decided sensation. It was not that she was more handsomely attired than the other ladies present, but that when she gyrated in the "dance of death" she was observed to display the only pair of pink silk stockings in the room. She left the house for a few minutes at the expiration of the dance, and in the next waltz exhibited a pair of light blue dittoes. An hour later her crushed and exasperated female friends beheld' these supplemented by further hose of a delicate chocolate shade. And so it went on, until her miserable rivals determined to follow her the next time she disappeared. They traced her to her father's paint-shop in the backyard, where she was discovered brush in hand and about ornamenting her nether extremities with a final artistic coat of light salmon. The exulting spies rushed back with the damaging news, but it was too late. The men were all too tight to understand, the music had gone home and the lights were being put out. Thus it is that fraud and duplicity triumph, honest simplicity walks around with a darn on its calf and a hole in its heel.

 

Illustrated Police News, November 3, 1877.