Podcast Episode 156: The Marblehead Smallpox Riot: Smallpox Blankie, or Why Are My Neighbors Bumpy?

Podcast Episode 147: The Greenbrier Ghost: Meatless Mondays are Murder!, or Ghosts Make My Head Spin:

true story of the only known legal case where a ghost testified about her own murder

followup entry: Postmortem Photography: includes a premortem photography story about my great-grandfather

Podcast Episode 145: Squirrel Tooth Alice: No pithy Bullwinkle title because there are vintage nudes, yes sir you are welcome

Podcast Episode 126: RA Cunningham and Tambo: Nickels in the Dime Museum, or How to Buy Other People for Fun and Profit!

and, Resources: American Crime Story (and a personal fable, boogeyman and all): relates back to several episodes and ties them all together:

• Episode 39: LAPD: The Beginning
• Episode 40: LAPD 2: The James Davis Years
• Episode 42: LAPD 3: SWAT
• Episode 44: LAPD 4: Rampart

All of thedollop.net entries has the mp3 of the corresponding podcast episode embedded in the beginning of the blog entry, so you can easily listen as well as read. Also, all of the entries have many, many more suggested books to read than I have highlighted here. Because it's me.

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It started by trying to look up the Tichborne case, which if you've never read about it you might have heard of offhand. There's a missing heir, a guy that randomly shows up and claims to be the man (much changed by the years of course), and then many years and lawyers pass while everyone tries to figure out if he's really the baronet. Lady Tichborne thought he was, other family members didn't. And, drama. You can see why everyone gossiped about this for 20+ years and many contemporary authors worked it into various plots or conversations in their books, plays, you name it. And oh spoiler, the man wasn't really the heir. That wikipedia link above gives you a good rundown and images, plus references.

So what I bumped into while googling for the case using the word "heir" (I never remember the name Tichborne), was Edward Mordake. (Which is an excellent "use this in a novel" kind of name.) Let me post the first sentence of the wikipedia page to show you why that gave me a "wait, what" moment:

Edward Mordake (sometimes spelled Edward Mordrake) was reportedly an heir to an English peerage who had an extra face on the back of his head. The duplicate face could neither eat nor speak out loud but was seen to "smile and sneer while Mordake was weeping." Mordake reportedly begged doctors to have his "Demon face" removed, claiming that it whispered to him at night, but no doctor would attempt it. He committed suicide when he was 23 years old.

There's a melodramatic quote of his story from 1896's Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine - and a link to the text in Google books. 

Happily there's always a good site to check for stuff like this (wikipedia includes a link to it): The Museum of Hoaxes: Edward Mordake. Apparently this story gets circulated online a lot (no surprise there, huh) and there's a sample image that's shown - which isn't a photo at all:

However, this isn't a photograph of the actual Mordake. Instead, it's a photo of a wax replica created by an artist to show what Mordake might have looked like. Where this wax figure was displayed, or by whom it was created, I'm not sure, but various replicas of Mordake have been created over the years for wax museums around the world. 

[Off tangent! Refraining from a rant here about circulating Real History! or Amazing and True! sorts of stories, tumblrites. I'm on tumblr too, btw. But almost all the biographies I've seen in the mini-summary-plus-photo are badly done if not badly fact checked. Believe them only when they care enough to cite a source. Because pointing someone to a full biography website or a book means you care about history more than how many likes and shares you'll get with a graphic.]

Read the rest of that page for more on how the website author Alex Boese proposes that Edward Mordake and his story were a fictional creation. And he backs up his theory with what the site does well - research and citation:

I did a keyword search of the archive of 19th-century American papers at newspapers.com (which requires a subscription) and discovered that Mordake's story appeared in an article written by the poet Charles Lotin Hildreth that ran in American papers in 1895, approximately a year before the publication of Gould and Pyle's book.

And if you want a more lighthearted story after that - check out his blog post on Cheeseburger Oreos. Which thankfully do not exist. Blearg.

[I became a fan of the Museum of Hoaxes for its coverage of The Great Moon Hoax. It even has the original text of the New York Sun's articles in an easy to read format -compared to trying to read the original tiny print in the papers of 1835.]

Which actually has the wonderful full title of "The Sun and the Moon: The Remarkable True Account of Hoaxers, Showmen, Dueling Journalists, and Lunar Man-Bats in Nineteenth-Century New York"

This is the second Matthew Goodman book I've read, having read his Nellie Bly book before I could get hold of this one. And I don't know what to make of it, or even if I liked it. Actually I think I quite liked it, but it isn't exactly what it says on the jar - I was expecting something entirely focussed on the Moon Hoax as published in the Sun Newspaper (hence the title), but instead it's also a biography of the newspaper industry in 1830's New York, including several famous editors and other luminaries. Which kind of makes sense, because such a thing as a multi-day hoax as a feature in a newspaper really makes sense in the time and place given, and the reactions of the other papers are quite germane. But it's also a biography of P.T. Barnum, who wasn't actually connected other than being another inveterate huckster of the time, of Edgar Allan Poe, who also wasn't actually connected other than he was upset because he thought it plagiarised a story of his. And Joice Heth, one of Barnum's early exploits in humbuggery. And Richard Adam Locke, who actually did write the Moon story as it came to be known. And Sir John Herschel, who wasn't involved either, although the Moon story was attributed to him.

There's a LOT of competing biographies going on in here, and while they are all fascinating people, Goodman has a tendency to jump around timeline-wise, and to repeat himself a little. So we hear about Joice Heth not actually being 160 years old in the first chapter... and in the fourth, and the seventh, and the eighth, and the eleventh and you get the idea. 

There's also a ton of fascinating little side trips into utterly unrelated things going on at the same time, and some of the throwaway lines were enough to send me off into a rabbithole of further research - yay internet. 

Take this snippet for instance, regarding an earlier hard news story that Richard Adam Locke was known for:

In the upstate farmhouse he had dubbed Mount Zion, Matthias had apparently established for himself a community of seven wives--a 'harem,' Locke called it--six of them wealthy white women and the seventh a black servant by the name of Isabella Van Wagenen, and had one appointed to each working day in the week, and the black one consecrated for Sundays. (Isabella Van Wagenen was a former slave who would later join the abolition movement, changing her name to the one by which she would be forever remembered: Sojourner Truth.)

 

Well isn't that fascinating. What it doesn't mention anywhere in the book is that Isabella Van Wagenen / Sojourner Truth was a co-defendant in the Matthias murder trial, which makes it even more interesting. I have so many notes now of interesting things to go find a book about, it's a little ridiculous (luckily this book has some 20% of it's pages taken up with references and citations, so with any luck I will actually be able to find many of those books - I just don't know when I'll have time to read them all.)

Another fun quote, this time quoting from the Moon story itself: 

"It did not take David Brewster long to grasp the import of the idea and when he did the effect was extraordinary: "Sir David sprung from his chair in an ecstacy of conviction," reported the Supplement, "and leaping half-way to the ceiling, exclaimed, 'Thou art the man!'"

Which made me laugh. An 1835 early example of "you the man" :)

There's a great deal of material also on Poe, and I think he's pretty much worth a good biography of his own, rather than being shoehorned into this one. Poe and Locke met only once, to anyone's knowledge, and although Poe was deeply upset over the Moon hoax, having published a version of just such a story a month or two earlier to little acclaim, he was in fact a fan of Richard Adam Locke himself. So it seems odd that he's pitched as an adversary for most of the book, only to find out at the very end that Locke said he'd never seen Poe's story, and Poe publicly stated he believed him. 

And I never quite understood why there's so much space given to Barnum, and particularly Barnum and Joice Heth (which is a tale that makes me distinctly uncomfortable). And I would have liked more quotes out of the moon story, which actually only gets a few pages dedicated to it in the middle of the book.

Still, Goodman is an engaging writer, and the characters are vivid and larger than life. But as much as I like meandering into side tracks, I kept finding myself thinking "Why is this stuff in this book". 

Recommended for: Poe fans, History and Hoaxes fans, Barnum fans

Not recommended for: anyone who likes authors, even NF ones, to get to the point and sooner rather than later

This is sort of a reblog of myself, because I have a habit of making up reading lists like this - and this one has been sitting since last September in my GR writing area.

While I like the Booklikes' list idea, what I can't figure out is whether I can add any annotations or writing on this list - I'm thinking no? Because here's the thing - a reading list doesn't make much sense with only a single title to pull it together. You need to have a little bit of context before you'll understand the purpose, if it has a specific theme that is. Or alternately you could make a really, really long title, I suppose

My "new" Reading list:

Media Hoaxes and History

Under the page break is the long list of those books that I posted in my GR writing area, explaining what some of those books are and why I started the list in the first place. Some of the specifics are important - and here's a great example of why - because some of the hoax stories are short stories found only within a collection, you'll not be able to figure out the hoax just by looking at the books.

One of the few times Cracked has an article of interest. I figured book readers here would enjoy this piece. Learn how James Frey was not Oprah's first mistake at picking a bullshit book for her lists. Also featured in the article is Greg Mortenson, who by the way, was invited to speak at UT Tyler in 2010 back when I was still employed there. Mortenson was one serious disappointment and outright liar. For me, it is interesting and a bit sad to look over my notes for that speech, which I listened to before the expose blew up. Reminds me I probably should add a small update note on my blog to reflect later events.