No. 645
Crime, Eccentricity, and the Sporting Life in 19th Century America.
March 19, 2024

The Drama of Life,

September 1, 2014
...
...

Encountering a ghost may be a strange, possibly terrifying experience, but fortunately they are rarely harmful.  However, every now and then there is an account of a spirit that is not just malevolent, but physically dangerous.  One such story was told by folklorist Mary L. Lewes in the December 1912 issue of “Occult Review.”  It concerns a couple named Mr. and Mrs. Caxton. 
More...
Strange Company - 3/18/2024
`
HE DUEL IN ELLEN'S HONOR. Soapy Smith’s grandmotherOn Wednesday, August 9, 1820, an argument between 17-year-old, James Bowe Boisseau (1802-1820) and Robert C. Adams (unknown-1820) vying for the attention of 18-year-old Ellen Stimpson Peniston (1802-1860), took a terrible turn. The happy party in her honor took a tragic turn when the competition for Ellen’s affections ended in a deadly duel,
More...
Soapy Smith's Soap Box - 1/10/2024
Going to the theater has always been a beloved New York City pastime. But theater became even more thrilling with the advent of open-air rooftop gardens—which hit the scene in the late 1880s with the opening of the rooftop theater at the Casino on Broadway and 39th Street. It wasn’t just the cool breezes that […]
More...
Ephemeral New York - 3/18/2024
An article I recently wrote for the British online magazine, New Politic, is now available online. The article, “The Criminal Origins of the United States of America,” is about British convict transportation to America, which took place between the years 1718 and 1775, and is the subject of my book, Bound with an Iron Chain: […]
More...
Early American Crime - 12/17/2021
Dr. John W. Hughes. Dr. John W. Hughes was a restless, intemperate man whose life never ran smoothly. When his home life turned sour, he found love with a woman half his age. Then, he lost her through an act of deception, and in a fit of drunken rage, Dr. Hughes killed his one true love.Date:  August 9, 1865Location:   Bedford, OhioVictim:  Tamzen ParsonsCause of Death:&
More...
Murder By Gaslight - 3/16/2024
Included in yesterday’s trip to Fall River was a stop at Miss Lizzie’s Coffee shop and a visit to the cellar to see the scene of the tragic demise of the second Mrs. Lawdwick Borden and two of the three little children in 1848. I have been writing about this sad tale since 2010 and had made a previous trip to the cellar some years ago but was unable to get to the spot where the incident occured to get a clear photograph.  The tale of Eliza Borden is a very sad, but not uncommon story of post partum depression with a heartrending end. You feel this as you stand in the dark space behind the chimney where Eliza ended her life with a straight razor after dropping 6 month old Holder and his 3 year old sister Eliza Ann into the cellar cistern. Over the years I have found other similar cases, often involving wells and cisterns, and drownings of children followed by suicides of the mothers. These photos show the chimney, cistern pipe, back wall, dirt and brick floor, original floorboards forming the cellar ceiling and what appears to be an original door. To be in the place where this happened is a sobering experience. My thanks to Joe Pereira for allowing us to see and record the place where this sad occurrence unfolded in 1848. R.I.P. Holder, Eliza and Eliza Ann Borden. Visit our Articles section above for more on this story. The coffee shop has won its suit to retain its name and has plans to expand into the shop next door and extend its menu in the near future.
More...
Lizzie Borden: Warps and Wefts - 2/12/2024
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
More...
Executed Today - 11/13/2020
Take a Chance? | An Undertaker’s Assistant’s Mistake.

The Drama of Life,

Drama of life

Whose Strangest Tableau Was Played on the Bowery Sidewalk—The Chance Which Reunited Two Sister and Spoiled a Juvenile Target Party. [more]

There was a mob of urchins assembled in front of a Bowery groggery the other afternoon as a Gazette reporter traveled up town. They were filling the air with those hideous noises only boys and girls who go to school in the gutter, and are brought up by hand, with a club in it, know how to produce.

They were also loading the atmosphere with a miscellaneous assortment of missiles, comprising pretty nearly everything capable of being thrown, form a gob of mud or a putrid orange to the corpse of a cat which had tried to stop the wheels of some wagon and made a bad failure of it.

The object of these attentions was a woman.

She was a wretched, tattered, bloated, battered wreck, staggering even as she leaned against the wall with the fumes of the liquid poison she had been imbibing mounting into her brain.

She yet presented some traces of feminine beauty in her puffed and swollen face. Her eyes, bleared and bloodshot, were still large and shaded by ling silken lashes. Her skin, even under the grime that coated it, fine of texture. The unsteady had with which she strove to ward off the fusillade she was being made the target of, though unlashed and blackened, was as small and taper-fingered as the finest lady’s

There clung to all the shameful distortions of her womanhood, in fact, a subtle suggestion of some better past that an observant eye could not fail to discover.

The Gazette reporter had just insinuated to a red-headed boy with a decayed head of cabbage in his hand the he could find a better use for it than throwing it at a drunken woman, and the youth was rubbing the part that hurt him the most saying naughty words about the reporter, when there was a rustle of silken skirts and a voice cried sharply:

“You little wretches! How dare you! Stop at once or I’ll have you all arrested!”

For an instant the two stood looking at one another. No one but a blind man could have mistaken the resemblance between them, any more than any one could have mistaken the meaning of the simultaneous exclamations—

“Nellie!”

“Grace!”

In a moment more the outcast had staggered forward and was folded in her happier sister’s arms, with her foul rages sullying her skirts and her bruised face hidden on her bosom. Even the gutter brats looked on in awestruck quiet, and then the lady said sharply, “call a hack, somebody.”

The first to start at full speed, yelling after a passing coach was the red-headed boy, who had forgotten his injuries all at once, while a string of his comrades followed him, rending the air with shouts that made the hackman pull up with a suddenness that almost jerked his horse over his head. Before the crowd which had gathered with the suddenness that characterizes a street mob had really commenced to wonder what it was about, the coach door had slammed upon the strangely contrasted figures and the vehicle whirled away.

Five minutes later the tide of life that ebbs and flows in the great thoroughfare of the east side was in full progress again, little dreaming of the drama of real life whose strangest tableau had just been enacted on the busy pave.


Reprinted from The National Police Gazette, December 11, 1880.