2020 Year in Review (or, I Survived)

Hello! I’ve been meaning to blog about some recent writings, but you know how it is: There’s a pandemic raging, you’re working in a corner of the living room trying to tune out the sirens and police helicopters, your nation’s democracy seems to be hanging on by a thread, and … what’s that smell? Did I leave the stove on? Nope, it’s just the forests burning because of a gender reveal party.

(The fact-checker in me feels compelled to point out that the gender reveal party only torched about 45,000 acres, give or take. The rest was climate change and people who had never gone outside before.)

Anyway, among all that I somehow did some writing. Much of it was in forms that were new for me, or at least new in terms of publishing. A larger portion than usual was in print and not at all online, which means you’ll need to buy the magazines and books below if you want to read the pieces. Sorry, but print is good for your brain.

The Nondescript (fiction) // The Ghastling

I’m back to writing short fiction again. Sometimes it has elements of horror, although I think “suburban surreal” may be a more appropriate name for the place where my imagination dwells. This story sprung from a series of prompts I laid out for myself circa 2017 that were all about islands. (I have a lot of notes on strange islands from world history.) One of the prompts was “the island of deaccessioned artifacts.” Deaccessioning is the process by which museums sell or give away items they no longer want, whether because they no longer fit the curatorial purview in some way or the institution has run out space. I wasn’t thinking about it directly, but I’m sure this prompt was also informed by my interest around human remains in museums and how the ethical standards on those have shifted. But the artifact I write about here is not a part of a human. (OR IS IT???)

I was over the moon when I got word The Ghastling had accepted my submission. They were the first place I tried—indeed the first place I’ve sent pure fiction in well over a decade—because I like their sensibility, particularly the focus on quiet horror and folk horror. The magazine is one of the few things I’ve been able to read during the pandemic where I feel completely enveloped by the fictional worlds, where I can shut out the sirens and the wildfires and the death counts and everything for just.two.seconds.

Thank you so much to Rebecca Parfitt for picking me out of the slush pile! You can buy Book 12 of The Ghastling here.

Possessed (fiction-essay hybrid) // The Happy Reader

One of the things I’d hoped to do in 2020 was return to New Orleans and work on a research project. Of course, I didn’t get to physically travel to New Orleans this cursed year, but I jumped on the opportunity to research the writer Lafcadio Hearn’s time in that great city for The Happy Reader. Who is Lafcadio Hearn? Let’s just say that if you enjoy Western retellings of Japanese ghost stories or ideas about New Orleans as a “haunted” locale, you’re following in his footsteps. I’d say more, but if his name is new to you, read Andrei Codrescu in The Paris Review. Then, of course, buy issue 15 of The Happy Reader (here), which has a number of articles and essays all about Hearn’s life (see table of contents above). All of the pieces are great, but I particularly recommend “Resurrected” by Moeko Fujii.

My piece is also about an imagined meeting between Hearn and Marie Laveau. I relied heavily on the scholarship of Carolyn Morrow Long for my account of Laveau, particularly the book A New Orleans Voudou Priestess: The Legend and Reality of Marie Laveau. Of course, no one knows if Hearn and Laveau ever met, but their time seems to have briefly overlapped—Hearn in the early days of the city he likened to “a dead bride crowned with orange flowers,” and Laveau at the very end of her famous life.

Writing a fiction-essay hybrid is risky. So let me say this: all of the details at the start of the piece are real, but when Hearn starts out on those long nocturnal walks, that’s where it becomes fiction-informed-by-research. Thanks so much to Seb Emina for inviting me to contribute to this very special project.

Gray (essay) // Wildsam Field Guides, Seattle edition

The wildfire smoke was at its worst when this was taken. It wasn’t the kind of gray I had in mind.

Here’s a little fact about me: I’m fascinated by colors. Not so much wearing or surrounding myself with them (I only like to wear about three colors), but their natural and cultural history; how we learned to make them from animals and minerals and plants, why we call them the names we do, what they’ve been supposed to mean at various places and times. I think of them like stones that can skip across the waters of history. (This is also how I think about words, which is maybe the better analogy).

Several years ago I started thinking about gray as a non-color, and its many cultural associations—gray zones and gray hair and Gray Ladies and Grey Gardens and even gray aliens. I started writing something that was partly about gray in cultural history and partly about my experience of it in the Pacific Northwest, but I was in Brooklyn then, and I wasn’t quite sure where I wanted the essay to go. Fast forward a few years and the wonderful editor James Ross Gardener was helping to put together the Seattle edition of the travel guides-miscellanies-anthologies known as Wildsam. With his encouragement, I wrote more in the essay about Seattle history and Seattle gray, and explored my thesis that we need gray—we need its subtlety and nuance, its liminality, its sometimes lunar shimmer. I’ve admired the Wildsam guides for years and I’m so glad the essay found a home there. You can buy the Seattle edition of Wildsam here. I still have a lot to say about gray, so I may return to it, and other colors, down the road.

Uncertainty Bootcamp (essay) // Seattle Met Magazine

What to say about this one? My illness is by far the most frustrating experience of my life, and one that continually tests my will to survive. But I think I can say I’m doing significantly better than I was a year ago, so that’s something. (Please do not email me with your miracle cures.)

I wrote this essay toward the start of outbreak in the Northwest. As I saw the able-bodied folks around me freak out about their lives upended and plans derailed, I thought about what it meant for me to have lived with such variable health for the past six years or so. Basically, a lot of the illusions of control healthy folks enjoy have been punctured for me. I’m sure that my interest in mortality awareness has helped soften the blows of this, just a little.

This one was a bit of a balancing act: I didn’t want to lean in to the treacly illness-as-teacher metaphor, which can become very problematic very quickly. I’m not at peace with my illness, but I am grateful for how it’s made me a more compassionate—and yes, better—person. I don’t take anything for granted anymore. And I wonder if a number of us will come through the pandemic having had a similar experience. I know that after all this I will never take peaceful neighborhood strolls, clean air, or my lungs for granted again.

This one you CAN read online! It’s very short—I initially wrote much more—but that’s probably for the best. Thanks so much to Stefan Milne for his patient editorial work on this one.

**

I also wrote many other things this year, a good deal of it unbylined content in the trivia and education space, which is how I survived. I’m grateful to work with wonderful editors, and very grateful to have flexible work. I also researched for a whole stack of podcasts, some of which you may be hearing more about in 2021. I’m cautiously hoping for a much better year. But of course, years are not magical units of time with some kind of inherent essence; they take the flavor and hue of the events that the humans alive during that year lend them. It is always up to us, together and singularly, to work for a better future for everyone.

Visiting Mother Damnable Conklin’s Grave

Back in April and May, I spent a lot of time in Seattle’s Lake View Cemetery. If you’ve heard of it, chances are it’s as the place where Bruce and Brandon Lee are buried. But it’s also home to the remains of many of Seattle’s pioneers, and it’s a stunning hilltop from which you can see both the Cascades and Olympics on a clear day. Aside from the fact that a beautiful cemetery is an ideal place to practice social distancing in a pandemic, I went because I wanted to find the grave of Mother Damnable.

Mother Damnable, born Mary Ann Boyer in 1821, ran Seattle’s first hotel, the Felker House. Among other guests, she hosted the territorial government—and, by many accounts, ran a brothel. She supposedly earned her sobriquet because of her fondness for cursing (in multiple languages!), although there’s also a tradition of witches and madams named “Mother Damnable” elsewhere. But our local Damnable really earned her place in weird Seattle history because of a story about her corpse. When she was dug up and moved out of the old Seattle Cemetery in 1884, the papers said her still-smiling body had turned to stone. I wrote up the whole tale for The Stranger, America’s hometown newspaper, back in 2013 under the headline “The Madam Who Turned to Stone.”

Undertaker Oliver C. Shorey’s contract for moving the bodies from Seattle Cemetery, courtesy John LaMont at SPL

Now that we live just a few blocks away, it seemed rude not to visit the lady (skeleton) I’d read so much about. But Damnable proved surprisingly hard to find. The cemetery isn’t terribly big, but after five or six fruitless “maybe she’s over here!”-style wanders, I gave up and emailed Lake View. They were kind enough to send me a plot map with the relevant grave highlighted, and after a few missteps we found her!

Bess Lovejoy, CC BY-NC 4.0

Sorry the lettering is so faded—it’s clearer if you visit. This is actually Mama Damnable’s second headstone at Lake View. The first was also quite plain, and said “Mother Damnable Conklin, died 1887”). You can see it on HistoryLink. That death date is incorrect—she died in 1873, the date listed above. The name Conklin comes from her first husband, a sea captain who abandoned her in Port Townsend. I believe is actually her third resting place, after she was moved from the old Seattle Cemetery downtown (now Denny Park) to Washelli cemetery (today’s Volunteer Park) and then to Lake View. May she rest in peace, free of irritating hotel guests and bad husbands forever.

 

Announcing “The Eye of the Beholder: Julia Pastrana’s Long Journey Home”

New book alert: The Eye of the Beholder: Julia Pastrana’s Long Journey Home, edited by Laura Anderson Barbata and Donna Wingate, with contributions by me, Jan Bondeson, Grant Hester, and others, is out now.

Julia Pastrana was a 19th century indigenous Mexican woman and a gifted singer and dancer who toured Europe and the United States billed as “The Ugliest Woman in the World.” She was born with what we now call generalized hypertrichosis terminalis and severe gingival hyperplasia, conditions that covered her body in thick hair and gave her an overdeveloped jaw. Several prominent doctors of her day testified that she was part-woman, part beast (although others were well aware of the truth—she was entirely human). After her death due to complications from childbirth in 1860, Pastrana’s embalmed body and that of her infant son were exhibited off and on for over a century, appearing as late as 1972 in United States fairgrounds. They later spent decades in storage in Oslo, where they were vandalized and her son’s body destroyed.

In 2013, after nearly a decade of efforts, artist Laura Anderson Barbata succeeded in having Pastrana’s body retrieved from storage in the Schreiner Collection at the University of Oslo and repatriated to a cemetery near her birthplace in Sinaloa, Mexico. There, Pastrana was buried in a secure tomb amid a Catholic ceremony and thousands of flowers sent from all over the world.

Our new book covers Julia’s story from a variety of angles, including what we know of Julia’s life and discovery in storage (Jan Bondeson), what she has to tell us about our responsibility to the dead (Grant Hester), the ethical dilemmas stories like hers present for museums today (Nicholas Marquez-Grant), her story as viewed through the lens of feminist and disability studies (Rosemarie Garland-Thomson), how the repatriation was accomplished (Barbata), and other bodies with similar tales still stored in museums today (me).

While Pastrana’s story may seem like an isolated case, I believe it has important things to say about how far we’ve come—and how far we have to go—in terms of viewing all members of the human family as equally worthy of respect. I hope you’ll check it out.

2016 Year in Review

Here are my favorite Mental Floss stories from 2016, at least the ones from my watch. Producing well-researched, well-crafted stories on internet time isn’t always easy, and I’m hugely grateful to all my wonderful writers, not to mention the rest of the team over at MF. Working on stories that connect people to history and place continues to be the thing that gets me out of bed every day. (Well, that and coffee.)

Anonymous engraving of the Mademoiselle de Beaumont, or The Chevalier D’Eon. Orig. in the London Magazine, via Library of Congress, Public Domain

The Chevalier d’Eon, a.k.a. Mademoiselle de Beaumont, was a big star in 18th century France and England who served as a diplomat, spy, pamphleteer, and fencer. D’Eon also lived the first half of life as a man, and the second half as a woman. By Stassa Edwards. (Part of our Show & Tell column highlighting interesting objects in museums and archives.)

Robert Peary has been celebrated as the first man to reach the North Pole, but it was probably Matthew Henson, his assistant, who deserves that distinction. Here’s a retrobituary, as we call them, in honor of the 150th anniversary of his birth. By Michele Debczak.

Canada’s longest-serving prime minister, William Lyon Mackenzie, took advice from dead people, his dogs, and the patterns in his shaving cream. By Don Rauf, in celebration of Canada Day.

The dangerous and highly competitive world of Victorian orchid hunting included violent deaths, peeing on competitors’ specimens, and blooms growing out of human bones. By Claire Cock-Starkey.

Odontoglossum harryanum, Frederick Sander via Wikipedia, Public Domain

The Delano grape strike has been heralded as one of the nation’s most important labor struggles, but the Filipinos who started the strike, especially leader Larry Itliong, have long been overlooked. By Kyla Cathey.

On a kayak swamp tour near NOLA in June, I heard the legend of a voodoo priestess whose wrath supposedly destroyed a whole town. I dug into her tale (with the help of mental_floss researcher Jocelyn Sears) to find out the real story, which was just as dark as I imagined—although a little less supernatural.

Rasputin via Wikimedia, Public Domain

100 years after Rasputin died, the story of how—and why—he died is still more myth than reality. At this point, I doubt we’ll ever know the whole truth. By Andrew Lenoir.

Le Karnice was the Victorian “safety coffin” designed by Count Michel de Karnice-Karnicki to save lives at a time when fear of premature burial was at an all-time high. By Claire Voon.

This ancient 20-sided die looks like it could have been used for Egyptian D&D, but its possible function as an alphabet oracle might be even more interesting. By Erin Blakemore.

Tintype portrait of Olive Oatman. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library via Wikimedia, Public Domain

Olive Oatman was a mid-19th-century Mormon teenager who lived with the Mohave tribe for several years before being “freed” by the federal government. She spent the rest of her life a marked woman. By Meg van Huygen.

The ravens at the Tower of London get a lullaby every night. That’s one of the 13 behind-the-scenes “secrets” Christine Colby gathered from the Ravenmaster at the Tower of London.

Les Waas, writer of the Mister Softee jingle, was a perennial prankster. He died in 2016, but I’ll always remember the ice cream truck song as his longest-lasting joke. By Michele Debczak.

Operation Cone of Power, also known as the time British Witches tried to attack Adolf Hitler. By Tom Metcalfe.

The story behind a conman with multiple fake identities, and the Alabama tombstone that reads DAMN THE STATE DEPT. By Meg van Huygen.

One of the nutshell studies of unexplained death. Via the Maryland Office of the Chief Medical Examiner.

Despite not being allowed to attend college, Frances Glessner Lee was a forensic science pioneer whose intricate doll houses helped revolutionize police training. By Christine Colby.

Mount Everest, and summits like it, are home to a surprising number of spooky stories: mysterious figures, phantom radio transmissions, and more. Jane Rose rounded up some ghost stories from the world’s tallest peaks.

Here’s the delicious history of the nation’s oldest Chinese-American restaurant—in Butte, Montana. By Kirstin Fawcett.

In June 1945, a group of kids playing on a Liverpool street discovered a skeleton inside a metal cylinder. Some think the body belonged to a disgraced paint manufacturer, but the case has never been solved. By Luke Bather.

In the 1960s, Yetta Bronstein was an imaginary Jewish housewife who ran for president. One of her slogans: “Vote for Yetta and things will get Betta.” By Meg van Huygen.

The Foundling Hospital, Holborn, London. Colored engraving by T. Bowles after L. P. Boitard, 1753 via Wikimedia, Public Domain.

This heart-breaking 18th-century rebus token was left for a child abandoned at London’s Foundling Hospital. By Erin Blakemore.

In 1863, a legless man washed up on a beach in Nova Scotia, unable to speak. The town adopted him, but no one ever figured out who he was. Meg van Huygen wrote about “Jerome” and other mysterious people without a past.

A few months after we published that story, a former nuclear physicist and forensic genealogist solved the case of identity thief Lori Erica Ruff, who was actually Kimberly McLean, a Pennsylvania woman who left her family at age 18. By Jake Rossen.

I’m sure there’s a bunch of other fantastic stories I’m forgetting, too. Certain of it.

In non-mental_floss news, I wrote “What Do the Scary Clowns Want” for The New York Times, a brief history of medical cannibalism for Lapham’s Quarterly Roundtable, and a long chapter about human remains in the world’s museums for a forthcoming book about Julia Pastrana, which is being spearheaded by the amazing artist and human Laura Anderson Barbata. (The book is called The Eye of the Beholder: Julia Pastrana’s Long Journey Home, and will arrive summer 2017). I appeared in a German TV show called “History” on the network ZDF; the episode retold several of the stories in Rest in Pieces, and did a great job.

I also edited, for Feral House, two books that I highly recommend: Al Ridenour’s The Krampus: And The Old, Dark Christmas (essential for understanding the fuss about Krampus) and the latest editions of Mel Gordon’s Theatre of Fear and Horror, The Grisly Spectacle of the Grand Guignol of Paris 1897-1962 (essential for understanding, oh, the whole horror genre, probably).

Favorite book I read this year: Other Voices, Other Rooms by Truman Capote.

Favorite movie I watched: Valerie and Her Week of Wonders 

Favorite album (that’s actually from 2016): Ancient Youth by Double Echo. Yup, it’s 1986 goth all over again, you got a problem with that? Runner up is My Friends Bury Their Souls For The Devil To Find, by Ritual Howls.

I have Bad Feelings about 2017. Still, with courage and imagination, maybe we’ll get through it.

Love and Indignation

It’s been a difficult week. Late Tuesday afternoon, I posted on social media about how I would soon be able to say I had voted for the nation’s first Black and then first female president. I noted that what I found even more moving than casting my vote was the diversity at my polling place in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, where a whole crew of people once excluded from the voting process (people of color, immigrants, women) were working, helping one another, and helping me, do our civic duty. For a moment, it felt like as messy and fucked-up as this country can be, maybe it would all be ok.

Fast forward a few days, and we have a hollow buffoon with misogynist, racist, looney tune tendencies as the president and there’s a swastika at the park in the town where I grew up. I’ve been having so many conversation with friends who are shocked, alarmed, and angry—as we should be. To be clear, these are not sour grapes because “our side” lost. Outrage is a valid response when a leader who threatens basic human rights—the right to safety and dignity regardless of ethnicity or country of origin, the right to a free press, the right to worship as we please, love as we please, to have control over our own bodies—is elected. I heard one person say, “I refuse to be angry, because anger is what got us into this mess.” That’s like getting food poisoning and then saying “I’m not going to eat ever again, hunger is what got me into this mess.” Vomiting is sometimes the body’s response to a toxin; anger can work similarly. And righteous anger can be transformative.

I could go on for days, but I can’t say it any better than the words of the ACLU’s executive director, Anthony D. Romero. He wrote:

“President-elect Trump, as you assume the nation’s highest office, we urge you to reconsider and change course on certain campaign promises you have made. These include your plan to amass a deportation force to remove 11 million undocumented immigrants; ban the entry of Muslims into our country and aggressively surveil them; punish women for accessing abortion; reauthorize waterboarding and other forms of torture; and change our nation’s libel laws and restrict freedom of expression.

These proposals are not simply un-American and wrong-headed, they are unlawful and unconstitutional. They violate the First, Fourth, Fifth, Eighth, and 14th Amendments.”

In my discussions with friends, many people are looking for ways to act and are unsure what to do next. Giving Trump a chance to lead is not what to do next—he has said enough for us to know what he is capable of. For right now, here are some basic things you can do:

• For those with the means to donate, consider the ACLU, the Southern Poverty Law Center, the NAACP, Planned Parenthood, or any of these organizations.
  • Is an important birthday, anniversary, or other special occasion coming up? Why not make a donation in honor of someone instead of buying a gift? I just did this for some family birthdays—people old enough to buy their own presents, who don’t really need another tchotchke from me. I’ve also set up recurring monthly donations, because guaranteed amounts help organizatios plan.
  • I know this might sound extreme, but what if we cancelled Thanksgiving and spent the money we were going to spend on an elaborate meal as a donation instead? My family’s across the country, and so I was considering a fancy restaurant meal; now, I want to donate that money and find a place where I can volunteer. (I will probably still find a way to eat some pumpkin pie, though.)
• If money is tight, many of those organizations have sign-up sheets for volunteering your time. Remember that you have the chance to impact people’s minds with every conversation in daily life. Be proud, be strong—you have a right to your opinion, and no one, certainly not the president, is exempt from criticism. Never let anyone tell you that criticizing elected officials is disrespectful or un-American. It’s anything but.
• Protest. If you think “protesting doesn’t do anything,” consider the civil rights movement. Perhaps you might google Gandhi? He was kind of a big deal.
  • The Million Woman March on DC in inauguration day one protest to consider. All genders are welcome, vaginas not necessary.
• If you witness harassment or discrimination, stand up for the vulnerable. Here’s a great comic that demonstrates one technique for how to do so, and applies regardless of the type of harassment being enacted. I used this technique on a train a few years ago, and the harassing man was so flummoxed it worked like a charm.
• Exercise your critical thinking skills at all times. When you see a news article, check the source and date right away. If you’re unfamiliar with the source, try to see how long it’s been around. Brand-new? Could be a red flag. Look for an “about us” section. There are a few other good tips at the bottom of this NYT piece.
• Be skeptical about attempts to commodify your dissent. The wearing of a safety pin might make you feel good, and that’s not nothing this week. But the symbol may not register to those you’re trying to protect, and if you’re spending more than a second and a few cents on it, your effort is probably better spent elsewhere. Please do not buy the $300 14k gold safety pin necklace as a gesture of solidarity.
  • On a related note, while self-care is critical for self-preservation, please don’t treat your pedicure like a political act. I mean, just don’t.
• Read, and read some more:
  • A primer on executive power and what Trump can and can’t do, in the LA Times
  • How to preserve the ideals of liberal democracy in the face of a Trump presidency, by Yascha Mounk in Slate
  • Autocracy: Rules for Survival, by Masha Gessen in The New York Review of Books
  • There is no solace in the past, Rebecca Onion (please stop saying “we got through x.” A lot of people didn’t.)

At the same time, I’m drawing courage from my freedom-fighting family members, like my ancestor Owen Lovejoy, who worked hard to end slavery in D.C. and lost his brother to the cause when his abolitionist printing press was torched. I take comfort in knowing that even Abraham Lincoln thought Owen Lovejoy was “too incendiary.” But I bet Owen knew which side of history he was on.

And yet, not everything is dark. In the Union Square subway station, the street artist Matthew Chavez has set up a wall of compassion (that’s what I’m calling it), featuring one of my favorite inventions, the Post-It note. I took a brief video of it:

In case you haven’t seen it, here’s the Union Sq subway station in NYC, covered in messages of love for the vulnerable and against Trump. pic.twitter.com/MsfxkC0yuU

— Bess Lovejoy (@besslovejoy) November 13, 2016

And there is still poetry. I went searching for one of the poems I loved most in my twenties, by the surrealist poet and activist Mary Low. I leave it with you now:

2014 Year in Review: Slightly Stygian

My laptop at the old Morbid Anatomy Museum in Brooklyn (not the magnificent new space)

2014 was tumultuous but productive, marked by the the kind of brush fires that are essential for clearing out the old and propagating the new. And while it hasn’t always been an easy year, one of the things I most enjoyed was getting to write slightly longer pieces that combine my curious cross-section of interests: history, place, memory, mourning, and the failed ideas of science and medicine. I love discovering overlooked people and places that have something to say about the folly of the human condition, our attempts to cure and fix and master ourselves. People like Grandison Harris, the African-American man enslaved by the Georgia College of Medicine to steal bodies for the medical students, or Julia Pastrana, the 19th century Mexican bearded woman who became a sensation on stage even as doctors debated whether she was fully human. Places like Hart Island, New York City’s potters’ field, which feels like something out of Soviet Russia but is just a boat ride away from Manhattan, or like London’s Cross Bones graveyard, which a modern shaman has helped rescue from obscurity, revealing layers upon layers of that city’s darkest social and sexual histories.

Stygian as these stories may seem, there is usually some light along the way: reversals of fortune, friends who appear just when they’re needed most, criminals put behind bars, forgotten graves finally marked, promising lawsuits. Here are my favorite stories from 2014; I hope I’m lucky enough to find and produce more like them in 2015.

Julia Pastrana: A “Monster to the Whole World” The Public Domain Review

The London Graveyard That’s Become a Memorial for the City’s Seedier Past Smithsonian.com

The Doctor Who Starved Her Patients to Death Smithsonian.com

Meet Grandison Harris, the Grave Robber Enslaved (and then Employed) By the Georgia College of Medicine Smithsonian.com

The Graves of Forgotten New Yorkers New York Times

How the Ouija Board Got Its Name Atlas Obscura

Trap Streets: Copyrighting Cartography with Fictional Places Atlas Obscura

The Gory New York City Riot that Shaped American Medicine Smithsonian.com

Maude Paris Review Daily

Of course, none of these articles would appear without the community of writers and editors who inspire me, edit me, and publish my stuff. If places like the Smithsonian Magazine’s website, Atlas Obscura, and Lapham’s Quarterly didn’t exist, I’d probably still just be a disgruntled teenager scribbling in her notebook. At least now I can write on a laptop!

The American Way of Death

I wrote a reconsideration of Jessica Mitford’s The American Way of Death for Lapham’s Quarterly’s new Death issue. Below, the cover of the first edition of The American Way of Death in 1963. Subtle design, right?

Mitford’s book wasn’t what I expected. I was anticipating a cultural analysis of America’s relationship with death, but the book is actually an economic exposé. The “American Way” isn’t a reference to thoughts and feelings so much as habit and techniques of buying and selling. Mitford was a strong critic of capitalism, and I have a feeling that her political motivations for writing the book have become somewhat, ahem, buried for readers of my generation.

Mitford never expected for her reputation to become so linked to funerals, and in fact, after reading many of her letters, I came to the conclusion that she didn’t care about the book as much as later, more overtly political work. But she certainly did love the mortuary magazines she used in her research (selections apparently papered her downstairs bathroom). I wanted to see what kind of material she was looking at, so I took a trip to the New York Public Library a few weeks ago and snapped pictures of a few choice ads from old copies of Mortuary Management. This one seemed especially ill-advised:

I have a feeling Mitford would have appreciated that ad, and perhaps the slightly disturbing Christmas card from the same issue:

Adventure Time

It’s been an exciting few months. Just to prove that I have actually left the house, here are some photos from recent travels:

At the end of April, I spoke at several Rest in Pieces-related events in New York. The first was at Observatory in Brooklyn, co-presented by the wonderful women of Morbid Anatomy and Phantasmaphile. I took advantage of the Morbid Anatomy space to snap a few pictures with some very early–or very late?–guests. Thanks to all who showed up!

I was lucky enough to speak at Sleepy Hollow Cemetery the following night. Yes, that Sleepy Hollow, the one with the headless horseman. (He was sadly absent.) Keys to the Sleepy Hollow mausoleums:

Burial registers at the cemetery–you can bet I was itching to pour through these:

Afterward, Jim of Sleepy Hollow invited us to join one of their “Murder and Mayhem” tours through the cemetery, which I highly recommend. Wandering through a cemetery with lanterns at dusk was one of the lovelier experiences of my recent memory. Unfortunately, it was hard to take good pictures with my iPhone, although this captures some of the experience (the grave is of a famous abortionist):

My favorite stop was the Bronze Lady, a sculpture who supposedly figures in some complicated local high school graduation rituals:

The last event in NYC was a reading at Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn. The place was just gorgeous, with fruit trees all in bloom around the graves. Driving up to the chapel in full sun was a sight to remember. Of course, the only good photos I got were inside. Here’s me with Carrie Schaff, a friend and editor type from Feral House/Process Media:

Here’s the one good photo from outside Green-Wood. Do I look bored? I definitely was not bored. That’s just my face.

A few weeks later I flew to San Francisco, where I was delighted to appear with the singer/songwriter Jill Tracy at an event for Obscura Society SF. (I also did a fun interview with Atlas Obscura to promote the event here). It was such a pleasure to meet Jill, Annetta from Atlas Obscura, and many others. Jill played a few songs that she composed while spending the night at the Mütter Museum, which I can’t even imagine doing. Here she is performing with the museum projected over her:

Judging from the audience response, the highlight of my talk was the part about Rasputin’s penis. I won’t post that picture, but here’s one of Rasputin’s daughter on a Wheaties box. (This is stolen from an eBay listing that has since sold.)

Another highlight of the San Francisco trip was exploring the giant necropolis of Colma with Colin Dickey and his wife Nicole Antebi. (I’m not sure why I look like I’m running away here.)

Hours before our visit, I discovered that I have a relative buried in Colma, a sea captain named Simeon Bartlett Kinney. Here he is:

Simeon Bartlett Kinney. Photo courtesy my dad James Lovejoy. Year unknown.

I’m thinking his beard would be an inspiration to the young men of Brooklyn.

Simeon B was buried in San Francisco’s Masonic cemetery, which was dug up at some point and the graves moved to Colma. (All of San Francisco’s graves were dug up and moved to Colma when the city ran out of room for graves in the early 20th century.) My father had researched Kinney and discovered that his grave had been moved to Woodlawn Memorial Park in Colma, conveniently enough the first cemetery we came across in the city. I braved the records office, where three helpful young ladies in black suits informed me that all the bodies from the Masonic cemetery had been buried in a mass grave at the back of the cemetery. They were relieved at how calmly I received the news, and I wanted to say “Hey, some of the most famous people in history ended up in mass graves!” Nevertheless, I may have shouted “mass grave!” with a little too much glee when I left the office to share the news with Colin.

Two strange big cats were flanking the monument, so of course I made friends. These guys didn’t look like normal cemetery art to me. Perhaps they’re rejects from a Disneyland ride?

Thanks to all who came out, let me crash at their house, showed me around, and cared about my odd little book! Let’s do it again soon, huh?

The Double World

Newly published over at The Appendix, a new journal of narrative and experimental history: The Double World: One Man’s Search for Meaning in the Seattle Public Library. Our hero:

Orrill V. Stapp, from his “A Short History of the Outlook,” 1929

The Madam Who Turned to Stone

Statue at Lakeview Cemetery in Seattle, where Madame Damnable is buried. By Steve Mohundro on Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

I wrote a few articles in preparation for the release of Rest in Pieces, but the one I most enjoyed was about a nineteenth century Seattle madame, Mother Damnable, whose corpse is said to have turned to stone. Mother D (also known as Mary Ann Boyer or Mary Ann Conklin) has been fascinating me for a few years, and I’m glad to have had a chance to tell some of her story. Read it at The Stranger.

I’d like to thank John LaMont, Special Collections librarian at the Seattle Public Library, for his help tracking down key documents for the story. John provided me with the 1884 article that describes the discovery of Mother Damnable’s corpse, which I’m including below.

“Removing the Dead.” August 22, 1884. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

A reporter of the Post-Intelligencer called upon Mr. O.C. Shorey, the contractor for removing bodies, monuments and stone work from the old city cemetery to the new burying ground, adjoining the Masonic cemetery, and asked him for anything of interest in connection therewith that has so far come under his observation. Mr. Shorey said: “I have been at work about three weeks, and have removed so far 120 bodies together with most of the monuments and stone work, and have, I think, over half of the work done. I have been laying off for a few days, waiting for the Catholics to get their grounds in readiness for the reception of the bodies of those of that faith. I have also delayed some in order to give all friends of deceased persons an opportunity to select new lots, and to give all such friends an opportunity to be present during the removal of the remains of their friends and loved ones.

“Last week among the remains taken up and removed were those of Mrs. Mary Conklin, who died and was buried eleven years ago, at the age of 70 years and 10 months. During her life she was known by the old settlers as ‘Mother Damnable,’ and many will remember her by that name. We discovered that the coffin was very heavy, weighing at least 400 pounds and it took six men to lift it out of the grave. On removing the lid to the coffin we found that she had turned to stone. Her form was full sized and perfect, the ears, finger nails and hair being all intact. Her features were, however, somewhat disfigured. Covering the body was a dark dust, but after that was removed the form was as white as marble and as hard as stone.

When we took up the coffin under the headstone marked “William Carnes,” who will be remembered as a large butcher, who died some ten years ago, we found the form of a small, delicate woman, with her clothing on and watchchain about her neck. The way I account for this is as follows: Some time after Carnes died, his friends had a stone made to mark his grave, and the parties employed to set the stone placed it over the wrong grave.

When the remains of James McKay, the tanner, who died ten or eleven years ago, were taken up, they were found well preserved, though the features were unrecognizable. All the graves, at certain seasons of the year, are full of water and the coffins float in their boxes. The action of the water has turned most of the bodies black. In a greater number of the coffins there is nothing but a few bones. The coffins are mostly sound, and before removing them we place them in new cedar boxes. So far we have found nothing of an offensive nature so far as smell is concerned, most of the bodies having been buried so long that the flesh has either all turned to dust or been eaten by the worms. I shall take up and remove all the bodies that can be found, including those who sleep in unmarked graves within the Pottersfield, but shall not interfere with the Chinese graves, as the Chinamen desire to take up the bones of their dead and ship them to the Flowery Kingdom.

Many graves have been sadly neglected, and I fear that some will be consequently overlooked. I wish you would tell the people again that I am anxious to hear from all those who have friends buried in the old cemetery, and have them point out the graves to me, especially those that are unmarked. A forest fire ran through the cemetery two years ago, and burned up a number of wooden grave marks, which adds to the difficulty of finding some of the graves. The new cemetery is located on a fine site between the two lakes, and can be made a beautiful burying ground with proper care and attention.”