Via Newspapers.comThis week, we visit a haunted house that has a bit of Mystery Blood thrown in. The "Glen Elder Sentinel," August 20, 1903:A remarkable ghost sensation is disturbing the serenity of St. Peter Port, Guernsey, where a local photographer has just vacated his residence on the ground that he and members of his family have been terrified by supernatural visitations. The photographer
When Patrick H. Doherty joined the Fall River Police Department in 1885, he might have been astounded to learn that he would be involved one day in two notorious murder cases- both involving hatchets and axes. Patrick Doherty was born in Peoria, Illinois on August 10, 1859 to John and Mary Walsh Doherty. Later the family moved east to Fall River, and we find Patrick Doherty living at 104 Columbia St. (off South Main) and working as a laborer for a time employed by Fall River Iron Works and the Fall River Line steamboat company. He married Honora (Nora) E. Coughlin on April 25, 1887 at the age of 28, when he was employed at the Fall River Police Department as a patrolman. The couple would have seven children: Charles T., Frank., Grace, Robert, Helene, Margaret (called Marguerite), and John. Doherty, (as were several other patrolmen), was promoted to the rank of captain after their work in the case of the century, the Borden Murders of 1892. Doherty had arrived at #92 after George Allen on the morning of the murders, and was very quickly in the thick of the action, questioning Lizzie upstairs, looking at the bodies with Dr. Dolan, running down to Smith’s pharmacy with Officer Harrington to question Eli Bence, prowling the cellar for weapons with Medley, Fleet and Dr. Bowen, and making note of Lizzie’s dress. Doherty stayed on the job on watch at the Borden house until he was relieved at 9 p.m. When it came time for the inquest, it was Doherty who slipped down to 95 Division St. to collect Bridget, who had been staying with her cousin, Patrick Harrington after the murders. He would testify at the Preliminary and the 1893 trial in New Bedford. In the midst of the excitement in New Bedford as Lizzie’s trial was about to get underway, yet another hatchet killing took over the front page, the murder of Bertha Manchester on May 30th. It was a brutal attack to rival the Borden’s with the weapon being most likely a short-handled axe or possibly a hatchet. Doherty went out to the Manchester place with Marshal Hilliard, Captains Desmond, and Connors and Inspector Perron on June 6th with the suspect, Jose Correa de Mello, who revealed his hiding place for the stolen watch taken from the victim and her purse at that time. De Mello served time and then was sent back to the Azores, banned from stepping upon U.S. soil again. The Dohertys moved to 1007 Rock St. in 1897 and Patrick was pleased to walk his daughter Margaret (Marguerite) down the aisle in 1913. Patrick Doherty retired from the force in 1915 and succumbed to interstitial nephritis on June 28, 1915.. He, and some of his children are buried in St. Patrick’s Cemetery in Fall River. Resources: Ancestry.com, Parallel Lives,: A Social History of Lizzie A. Borden and her Fall River, Find-a-Grave.com. and Yesterday in Old Fall River: A Lizzie Borden Companion Fall River Globe June 28, 1915
Bernard Gussow was born in Russia in 1881. But by 1900 he’d made it to the Lower East Side, where he was described as an “East Side artist” in a New York Times article about paintings he displayed at an art show at the Educational Alliance settlement house on East Broadway. [“Subway Steps”] Gussow would […]
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: […]
17-year-old James E. Nowlin murdered George Codman in a Massachusetts stable in January 1887. Then he took an axe and chopped Codman’s body into pieces. As he traveled home in a sleigh, he threw the pieces into the snow along the road.Read the full story here: Massachusetts Butchery.
Roped-inOmaha Daily BeeJune 25, 1884(Click image to enlarge)
OSSIBLE VICTIM OF THE JEFFERSON R. SMITH GANG. Omaha Daily Bee
June 25, 1884
COLORADO.
Col. Fletcher, a tourist from Boston, was roped-in by the bunko men of Denver and relieved of $1,000.
NOTES:
$1,000.00 in 1884 is the equivalent of $33,472.95 in 2023. According to the Rocky Mountain News there were at least two,
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 engaged as a carrier of wine, because he and his brother, with the help of […]
A Growing Metropolitan Evil.—Scene in an opium den in Pell Street, frequented by working–girls. [more]
Lessons in Opium-Smoking.
How Young Girls Become Victims of the Dreamy Drug.
“What makes you tremble so?” “Opium-smoking.” “How long have you been so”” “Three or four years, sir. Those Chinamen give girls opium in candy and all sorts of things, until we can’t do without it. I have to go every day to smoke. I got into trouble with Mrs. Ching King because I saw her dosing children.”
Such was the statement made by Emma Pool, a young woman, eighteen years of age, before Justice Kilbreth, in the Tombs Police Court, a few days since.
“That testimony is rather startling if true,” said an artist of Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper to an officer of the Sixth Precinct, while walking up Mott Street, on the opposite sides of which avenue dwell two discordant factions of Chinadom, headed respectively by Tom Lee and Sam Kee.
“I am inclined to doubt that story about little children being dosed,” replied the officer, “but there’s no denying the fact the opium dens in this neighborhood are frequented by a good many people besides Chinese. You’d scarcely expect to find women and young girls visiting such places, but they do.”
“What kind of women and girls?”
“Well, the kind that—that you see mostly about this neighborhood. Two or three years ago it was no uncommon thing to see carriages form up-town stop in these out-of-the-way lanes and alleys, and richly-dressed ladies, in thick fails, alight at some dingy rookery known to everybody hereabouts as an opium resort. But that is all done away with—that is to say, such people do their smoking up-town nowadays. Come along, and you can have a peep at the inside of some of these places, thought I don’t know that you’ll be able to see anything out of the common at this time of day.”
We turned up Pell Street, a narrow, squalid, disreputable lane between Chatham Square and Mott Street. The dirty strip of sidewalk, choked up with garbage, was thronged with Chinese and Italians, as low and ferocious-looking types of humanity as one would care to meet, even in daytime.
A laundry and a Chinese grocery store were first visited, but the occupants were discovered innocently eating boiled rice with red chop-sticks, which was not what we had “come out for to see.”
Presently we entered a low, dingy doorway, over which swung a green sign, bordered with scarlet, and bearing a Chinese inscription in gilt characters. A wrinkled old Chinaman conducted us through a bare, dark passageway to an inner apartment. A door suddenly opened, and disclosed as scene which more than realizes any preconceived idea of a Chinese opium den, whether drawn from picture, description, or a disordered imagination.
One pale shaft of sunlight, entering through a small window, dimly illuminated a narrow room, the walls of which were decorated in a semi-barbaric manner with vases, colored prints, mirrors and Chinese inscriptions. Along one side of this apartment extended two broad shelves, or divans, the upper about six feet above the floor, the lower less than two feet high. These were covered with bamboo matting, and on the side next to the wall were provided a low ridge or pillow—for upon these “bunks” the opium-smoker reclines whilst inhaling the drowsy fumes, and perhaps vainly courting those luxurious languors of which DeQuincy wrote. A peculiar, sickening order pervaded the place.
Our eyes having adapted themselves to the glimmering dusk, we peered through a vail of blue smoke down into the further end o the den. There reclined four or five young women, of good appearance, though rather flashily dressed, each holding over the flicker flame of a lamp the clumsy bamboo opium-pipe, which a Chinese attendant from time to time replenished by means a of a knitting-needle, with which a morsel of the drug was dipped for a tiny box and punched into the tiny aperture of the read earthen bowl. A few puffs would exhaust the supply, when another “dip: would be furnished. All of the unfortunate creatures seemed more or less under the spell of the intoxicating fumes. In one or two instances the eyes were close, and the flushed faces wore a vacant, dreamy smile. Some of the girls chatted in languid murmurs, and one, having shaken off the opium spell, had arisen form the matting, and in a dazed way was arranging her hat before a looking-glass, preparatory to quitting the place.
The mysterious gloom, the flickering opium-lamps, the barbaric colors on the walls, the trace-like appearance of the smokers, and the deathly stillness, scarce broken save by the sickening gurgle of the pipe—all contributed to make the scene a weird and impressive one, which fascinated even while it disgusted the unaccustomed gaze.
The old Chinaman muttered ominously as the artist began dashing of a rough sketch on a apiece of loose paper; and, taking one more survey of the den, we went out form the ghastly gloom and reeking atmosphere into the now strangely brilliant light of day, and in five minutes found ourselves in busy Printing-house Square, mingling again with that civilized half of the world which knows not, nor could ever dream, how the other half lives.
Reprinted from Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper 12 May 1883.
"We follow vice and folly where a police officer dare not show his head, as the small, but intrepid weasel pursues vermin in paths which the licensed cat or dog cannot enter."
The Sunday Flash 1841