Final Years and Death of Tanzler

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All loans an amount subject to lender approval Carl Tanzler loved Allena Dejoos positively adored her She loved her slender figure, her gentle smile, the way she laughed He loved her Cuban features and heritage, which reminded him of an ent trrancing couple of days he had spent in Cuba on his way from Germany to the US He loved to gaze into her wide trusting eyes. He frequently bought her gifts from various little stores in their small eccentric town of Key West Florida Stuff like fancy jewelry and clothing thingsings that her family couldn't afford to buy her Whenever he wasn't with her, he imagined traveling with her, bringing her to all these fantastic places he had seen during his many, many travels in the first two decades of the twentieth century. despite his status as a married father of two Carl firmly believed that the much much younger, Elena, was the girl of his dreams. And I mean that literally He truly believed she was the girl he had seemingly been dreaming about since she was a kid, dreams he considered to be visions. Visions heavily influenced by his mother's stories about this supposed spirit called the white woman who had supposedly haunted his family's estate in Germany for many years Uh. From the moment Carl saw Elena, he knew that she had to be his. Shadab be It was destiny There was just one problem. There were two problems actually. The first problem was that he was, as I mentioned, married with kids. The second arguably even bigger problem was that Elena was dying. And dying fast She had tuberculosis, the most deadly disease in human history It is estimated to have taken well over a billion lives. By the dawn of the nineteenth century tuberculosis, or as it was known then, consumption, had killed one in seven of all people who had ever lived. Victims suffered from hacking bloody coughs, debilitating pain in their lungs and fatigue pleasant way to go In eighteen eighty two, Robert Cotch's discovery of the tubercle Bacillus revealed that TB was not genetic, but rather highly contagious. It was also somewhat preventable through good hygiene As the medical community came to accept that tuberculosis was contagious, officials launched public health campaigns to educate people on how best to protect themselves In nineteen forty three under Dr. Selman Abraham Waxxman's supervision. Rutger University graduate student Albert Shotz discovered the bacteria that would later create the antibiotic streptomycin A huge breakthrough in TB treatment pavave the way for later even better antibiotics that the virus was less resistant to. that treatment would not come nearly soon enough for Elena Djoyos Alina died On october twenty fifth, nineteen thirty one at the age of only twenty two Tanzler devastated. The woman he had been searching for his entire life, the woman of his actual dreams was gone slipped out of his grasp like she had been no more than smoke Of course, she hadn't actually vanished, as almost every person alive does, if they don't spontaneously combust or actually disappear. Elena had left behind her body which under normal circumstances, would be prepared for burial and intern a local cemetery where it steadily would rot and turn into bones and eventually into dust Tazler's love, it didn't adhere to normal circumstances Soon, Tanzer was convinced that Elena was calling out to him from beyond the grave, that she wanted him to protect her, to protect her body from decay, to take care of her that they could still have the life he hadd always dreamed for them, the traveling, the gifts, the togetherness He started to believe that he could preserve her body so well that the illness that had ravaged her takaking her life could actually be reversed. He started to believe that he could resurrect her Hanszer just needed two things to make this happen, ainajollo's body, of course, and somewhere where they could be alone, where he could perform his experiments Oh and maybe he needed a third thing like an actual miracle against all the odds He would get exactly what he wanted except for the Ecept for the miracle and except for the resurrection. But he would get the body Not for a month, not for a year. But for over seven years. The incredibly strange story of Carl Tanzer's undying love for the dead right now on this incredibly romantic loving tender or maybe incredibly disturbing, delusional, and psychotic ition of time suck This is Michael McDonald and you're listening to Time Suck Well, happappy Monday. Welcome and welcome back to the cult of the Curious. Happy fourourth of July. if you are a space lizard here in this early or hope you had a good fourth of July if you're not I'm Dan Cumman is a suck Master Necrofile shhamer Work in progress and you are listening to Time suck Hale Nimrod, Hail, Sphina praise be to a good boy jangles and G glory beat a T triple M. wantanted to give one of the final reminders this week that tickets are still on sale for wet hot badmagic summer camp twenty six, to howown showdown the final camp Thursday, september tenth, twenty twenty six through Sunday, september thirteenth Thanks so much to the people who have bought tickets already, many of them recently. Definitely have more than enough people coming to have an awesome time Go to badmagicroductions. com. If you want to get tickets, same place you go to for merch and thanks to all those who do continue to get their merch there. Ton of fun designs Tickets will no longer be for sale as of august first. timeime is running out to join us if you are thinking about it And that's it for camp. A. justust realizing now But this is a second topic in a row that's strongly related to necrophilia. Oh whoops. Uh or for some of you creeps, Oh, fuck out, bro. Let's go. aboutout time this fucking podcast found a true theme to stick with. Uh maybe we'll learn more about how to create a zombie baby this week. Who knows? find out R right first off, let's learn about the funerary practices that help lead to Tanzler. keeping a corpse for as long as he did and entertaining the notion that he could bring her back to life Before we jump into our timeline and cover this his story properly But Have you ever been to an open casket funeral I haven't been to one in many years, not since since the incident, not since the Well, since the funeral for my My cousin Katie, my sexy sexy cousin, first cousin, Katie Not since I wasn't, uh, you know, not since I was I was worn I wasn't warned, I guess, you know, rather that u that she was going to be buried and a tight little perfect black dress. Not since she was buried in that in that little pushup bra I mean, what was I supposed to do? notot squeeze them Keep my pants on? I' was set up I don't have a cousin Katiey. and I've never been an open caset funeral Thatot once I still have never seen a corpse in real life, which is fucking crazy considering how much I've talked about corpses here over the years. That being said, I am in no hurry to see one I'm good I'm good. I'll take your wor for it. what they it look like I've seen pictures on the internet. For some people, open caskets are the norm. They give people the opportunity to see their deceased loved ones one last time as they were in life more or less Prob a little bit quieter I'm guessing they were in life Little stiffer, hopefully but at least some approximation gives them the chance to potentially lay them to rest in an outfit they loved or with things that were important to them. Before it's time to say goodbye K kindind of a one sided goodby But still, it's emotional Some families are resolutely closed casket families like mine We don't need to see your face again We got plenty of photos. And you're even smiling with your eyes open You realize and a lot of them And you look' like a zombie and hardly any of them, you knows to we' good. For some families, it depends on the situation. After all, open casket funerals are often easier on mourners if the deceased body is, you know, in relatively decent condition. If they've suffered an accident that impacted their physical body significantly, O if their body was not discovered for a couple of days or a couple of weeks or months, you know, that can open the door to a lot of trauma But how do bodody's well become ready to be buried at all It's not something most of us probably spend a lot of time thinking about And some we know is sick, for instance, we naturally focus on spending the most amount of time we can with them, pushing the question of what comes next back of our minds If you have helped plan a funeral You know, you know that there's a lot more that goes into it than simply sticking them in the ground Indeed, when people die, they leave behind a life that must be legally and administratively closed out. An official declaration of death is the first step to getting a death certificate, which is a critical piece of paperwork If your loved one died in a hospital or nursing home where a doctor was present, the staff will handle this. But if your relative died at home, especially if the death was unexpected, you'll need to get a medical professional to declare them dead. do this callall nine hundred eleven soon after your loved one passes and have them transported to an emergency room where they can be officially declared dead and moved to a funeral home If your family member died at home under hospice care, a hospice nurse can declare them dead. without a declaration of death. You can't plan a funeral, at least not legally. You can't legally bury your cremated body without specific permits, muchuch less handle the deceased leg the deceased legal affairs. Now ideally You've had an opportunity to talk with the deceased about what they want whether that's as vague as they want to be buried or as specific as, they want the macareinna played as they are lowered into the ground. or as I clearly specified. Many times You know, you wouldd like to be laid to rest in an animatronic exoskeleton And then right before your casket is loadered into the ground, Michael Jackson's thriller starts to play loudly casket opens, your body is raised up by some sort of hydraulic contraption. your animatronic suit is then activated by the DJ playe, the music and you start ain you' mother fucking dead ass off. Now as a backup plan B I would, of course, be open to having my body launched towards a target via a massive catapult And if I hit that target Well, then naturally Everyone present gets a free car. Load the Dan. Aim the Dan. Fire the Dan And yes, I would like to have my funoal sponsoreor If the decease has not laid out a specific burial plan You'll need to choose a funeral home and decide on specifics like where the service will be, whether to opt for cremation, where the body or ashes will be interred, what type of tombstone are earned order And all of this can get pretty expensive. N like, Animatronic choreography expensive, or massive corpse catapult expensive, but still pretty costly The average cost of a funeral with a casket and burial has risen to do eight thousand three hundred dollars approximately as of twenty twenty three. Furthermore, the average funeral with cremation bypassing the cost of a casket. and other preparation measures Still costs around six thousand two hundred and eighty You can't just You can just leegally throw in a fucking fire pit in the backyard for some reason The most important factor, of course, is location Funerals are most expensive in New England. Wh the average costs are more than nine thousand one hundred dollars and the least expensive in around the Rockies in the West cooast. States like Oregon Washington hereere in Iid know. where the average costs are well under eight thousand dollars generenerally areas with higher cost of living will have Higher costs for the dead, highigher funeralosts So try to die over here if you're worried about cost, I gu Unsurprisingly, a service with viewing, ceremony and burial will cost more than a service that just involves cremation. So called economy wood caskets, made of things like pine, poplar, or veneer construction can cost a thousand to about three thousand bucks or cherry caskets can cost three thousand to seven thousand do. Some luxury materials like mahogany, walnut, other exotic woods can cost upwards of twenty thousand dollars Eespecially when accounting for additions like hand finished details, custom interiors Specialty designs was I was not able to get an estimate for what an animatronic exoskeleton would cost or a casket designed to push it up and out via a hydraulic mechanism turns out you can find you canot find everything on the internet Making things much more expensive, caskets often sell for three hundred percent to five hundred percent more than wholesale prices. six hundred dollars casket might cost grand funeral home Thankfully by U SS federal law funeral homes generally must accept a casket purchas elsewhere cannot charge a handling fee simply because they bought it from another vendor And then there's the matter of where to Put the casket The burial plot typically cost anywhere from about five hundred to twenty five thousand dollars or more. depending primarily on location In rural areas, plots can often be found for less than three grand M suburban cemeteries commonly charge between two grand and ten grand. major metropolitan areas Eespecially where land is scarce Prices of five grand to twenty five grand, not unusual at all And particularly prestigious or historic cemeteries, they can charge far, far more The most expensive cemeteries in America are in New York and Los Angeles Pierce Brers Westwood Village Memorial Park in LA. the final resting place of Marilyn Monroe. sppace is severely limited and plots regularly trade on the open market, which is fucking weird to me peopleeople out there trading resting resting places. Premium spaces near celebrities Frequently cost between two hundred thousand dollars and several million dollars situated in the heart of Hollywood, the historic graveyard, the Hollywood Forever cemetery home to countless stars like Judy Garland and Rudolph Valentino prices in the exclusive Garden of Legends area. start at two hundred a grand can exceed six million custom family mausoleums six million do buck for house for the debt Finally, the national historic landmark of Woodland Cemetery in the Bronx, New York City features elaborate private family mausoleums that have sold for upwards of four and a h fivealf million dollars some families have sold their family mausoleums to other families for seven figures, that's a Interesting way to make money, but why not, I guess Oh should. Do you know our dead grandparents' final resting place is worth almost five mill Did he look care if we saw it I don't think they will If they do, I't think can stop us. Let's do when buying a burial plot Plot price is simply for the right to be buried in that space usually does not include the cost of digging the grave, closing it up afterwards, or installing a headstone or mausoleum. Then there's the burial vault, the oftentimes optional structure that a casket can go into basic concrete grave liner generally cost Anywhere from seven hundred bucks to fif hundred dollars, while a standard burial vault will run between a thousand and three thousand typically higher end sealed signed, delivered, sealed, reinforced or metal lined fault can cost anywhere from two grand to fifteen grand or more Many cemeteries require either a vault or a liner because it helps prevent the ground above the grave from sinking as the casket eventually deteriorates And why do any of this Would' it easer to simp leave the bodies of our loved ones out the woods? where they can just decompose peaceully You know, return return them to the land from which they came. Uh orr you know, set him off at a Viking funeral Burnem on some kind of floating pre. Catapultem towards a floating target for fucking prizes. Like with many things, our attitudes towards death, how we engage with the ritual of experiencing the end of another's life is largely the product of our wider culture And our attitudes about death, the final rite of passage for every human being has been one of the primary topics for every culture to address with traditions, belief systems and practices For a long time, these prxices were directly influenced by what kind of technology was available Which youn for most of human hory wasn't much It's typically a hole in the ground Maybe a box Mbe shove And anything like, you know, food, drink or gifts that would spring up around the funeral to support mourners In early America, as most of us know, death was a frequent part of colonial life. The conditions of the seventeenth century in the U.S. were such that forty percent roughly of children in society did not reach adulthood That's a durby number Early death, parental grief, just a constant back then No know we got a lot of problems in the current day, but we don't have problems like that At least not in most of the world.. The most profitable funeral related material produced by the colonial press back then was mourning broadsides, these pamphlets basically, they that contain eulogies for the deceased While Puritan funerals were silent sombber affairs, the night before them was generally a lively communal event The night before the burial, friends and family of the deceased would gather at the house of mourning to partake in a viewing. or a time of watching over the body to make sure that the disease did not awaken. this so called wake was accompanied by a large feast, where mourners celebrated with food and liquor The Rum bill was often the most lavish expense of the entire funeral Real quick, the term wake does not come from the ritual of making sure that the dead were truly dead by the way, though. The term originated centuries earlier, the true origin of the word wake comes from ancient Celtic and old English traditions of staying awake to act as a spiritual guard. or a vigil over the body People believe that the soul remained with the body until burial and the vigil was held to protect the deceased from evil spirits. guide their soul to the afterlife. Man, even if even if you lived a good life, you still had hope that you're fucking diphit friends kept the appropriate vigil Dark forces didn't get a hold of you R got to keep an eye that body and fight off the demons with I don't know, squirt guns full of holy water, Bird fucking Blessed Sords orr blessed wands, or just regular w ones. I don't know B back to America As the population of the colonies grew, their funeral ceremonies became increasingly elaborate public displays of mourning The exchanging of gifts became a major part of colonial death rituals The most common being pairs of gloves and gold rings that were distributed to the attendees at the funeral of Wait Still Wintthrop grandson of the founding governor of Massachusetts Bay Con A sixty rings were given to friends and attendantance. How o Odd that this dude was literally named Wait Still First of all, like hold still Also odd that sixty people got a weight still death ring Membr and bi. 's gonna to fuckking rememrance ring. In my funeral Not no one. mayaybe new car If I hit the target The total expense of the entire ceremony was over six hundred pounds, which amounted to one fifth of Winthrop's entire estate Abssurd waste ofoney Unsurprisingly, the increasing grandeur of funeral ceremonies became a financial burden for many in the community, particularly for widows and children who became impoverished sometimes by spending so much of their estate money Daddy's funeral bill Feeling a bit guilty now about my wish for anmatronic suit in Cataple I'm definitely not going to even consider not anymore, a catapult And an exoskeleton Apparently spending that much money would just be selfish Colonial legislators began to pass suumptuary laws to regulate extravagant funeral purchases. This legislation restricted the amount of money that could be charged for things like mourning garments, the tolling of the church bell. undertaker serervices. It also enacted fines for excessive gift giving and providing litorate funerals The more I learned about humanity, the Weirder, I think we collectively are For example, in seventeen sixty one, the Massachusetts Bay provroince enacted an act to retrench the extraordinary expenses at funerals That's actually what it was called which read in part No scarves, gloves, except six pair to the bearers, and one pair to each minister of the church or congregation where any deceased person belongs Wine, rum, or rinks She'll be allowed and given at any funeral uppon the penalty of fifty pounds to be forfeited by the executor throughrough the will or state of the person interred, or to be recovered by action in any of hisis Majesty's courts of record. Great job guys. Way to put on those powdered wigs and just get some important shit done. Way to fucking regulate that problem. Problem solved Not even really sure that there was a problem, but you fucking solved it Moving along now, the nineteenth century is considered to be the genesis of the modern American funeral industry Towns grew into cities, which quickly became severely overcrowded, as local urban cemeteries ran out of burial space, the rural Park cemetery emerged Since these were located far enough away from the city to require transportation, coffin makers began to offer additional services like carriage rentals and hearst transportation to the graves site Over time, these coffin makers began to take on other duties of what is now considered death care They offered mourning wear, burial clothes, flowers, preparation of the body, coordination of the entire funeral service But for the most part, the act of physically getting the body ready for burial was much the same as it had always been cleaning and dressing the body in appppropriate garments. withith a civil warar That would change. Soldiers were desperate not to be buried on what they considered enemy soil. And likewise, their families were very eager to have their loved ones' bodies return to them. So that presented a problem My just logistically Despite remarkable advances in transportation like trains, the journey was still very often quite a long one. From a battlefield in a border state or the upper south to a northern city transport might take several days to about a week From much deeper in the Confederacy, could take one to several weeks, right? F much deeper in the Union un look vice versa. In addition, rail networks were fragmented, wartime damage often disrupted service And even before you got to the transportation method, arranging identification, permits and the proper pathways for the bodies could take days Sometimes bodies would be preserved for transportation or for viewing by packing them in ice, or laying them on so called cooling boards. With a concave ice filled box fitted over the torsoone head. What if they didn't have any fucking ice handy Right? That wast always an option Even when it was, didn't always work very well You know, shortages of ice, other materials during the Civil War meant that families were likely to get back something that looked less like a body And more like a nasty, noxious bucket of human soup It's probablyably my least favorite kind of soup that I've tried. which I have to my knowled Luckily, scientific advances would help preserve bodies through a new process called embalming. Now, embalming existed long, long before the Civil War, long before the nineteenth century. The most famous embalmers were the ancient Egyptians they developed elaborate preservation techniques for mummification over five thousand years ago between four thousand and three thousand five hundred BCE But their goal was religious and spiritual preservation rather than viewing before burial And Balbing in its modern form actually goes back to the sixteen hundreds The English physiologist, William Harvey developed some of the earliest techniques while studying how blood moves through the body. As part of his experiments, he injected colored liquids into the arteries of cadavers Later scientists such as Fredrich Rusch And Gabrielle Clautorus used similar methods toow slow decomposition Royce was an interesting dude Among a lot of other things he did, he used preserved anatomical specimens, preserved by either drying or embalming them to create these macabre dioramas. someome scenes incorporating human parts You know, just fun stuff like infant skeletons, adorned with lace and jewelry and arranged in artistic displays I mean, I I wouldn't necessarily mind some of that, but it would freak some people out for sure. you know, Can you imagine walking into somebody's living room Sing something like, oh Oh my Oh was Is that what I think it is Well, do you think it's three baby skeletons, wearing diamond necklaces, playing ring around the rosy, wearing crowns made of squirrel spines If so, then yes it is. Do you love it the first person to fully describe emmbalming as a way to preserve bodies for burial was a Scottish anatomist William Hunter Billy's work became especially famous after his younger brother John Hunter embalmed a woman named Ms Ms. Martin. Ms Martin Van Butchel In seventeen seventy five Her will it stated that her husband could keep control of her fortune If and only if Her body remained above ground To satisfy that condition, he had her embalmed. dressed in fashionable clothes and displayed in a glass topoppped case in his sitting room H where visitors could and did come and view her during visiting hours What a fun thing to look at When you get up in the middle of the night to grab a fresh glass of water, for example Damnit why are you still I hate this U still pre nineteenth century The average American was pretty opposed to embalming the body, most people considered it to be a mutilation. But with the Civil War, that perception would change Dr. Thomas Holmes, considered the father of modern embalming I would start using a new embalming process on fallen Union soldiers, embalming over four thousand bodies before he privatized his practice He hadd come up with his new process as a result of his experience in college, where he had fucked a whole bunch of corpses and did not like how it made his dick feel backack in college He had complained that preservation was either improperly rendered ineffectual or not attempted at all preservatives used at the time, including mercury and zinc based compounds were bad for medical students' health had to spend a lot of time inhaling all that stuff Not the best for them. Also by this time, medical students or schools rather were facing the problem that was about to hit the US during the Civil War Students needed cadavers to learn anatomy and practice their skills on, but the bodies were decomposing too quickly before they could practice on them. That led to a lot of grave robbing and body selling on the black market The proposed solution to this problem M the bodyies full of a bunch of really toxic chemicals But home stop there might be a better way Over the course of his studies, he learned about how in eighteen thirty eight a French chemist named Jean Nicholas Ganal had introduced a new method for preserving human remains in which arsenic was injected directly into the coted artery This allowed anatomists to dissect corpses or prepare anatomical specimens without worrying about the putrefaction or decay By and large, the method worked Though many anatomists suffered arsenic poison as a result. so it wasn't quite the non toxic approach Homes had desired did deliver astonishingly lifelike results, which would end up unsurprisingly being exactly what a lot of people wanted Right before the Civil War, Holmes experimented with arterial embalming and through this developed an arsenic based solution that could be pumped into a cadaver's arteries via an injection apparatus And how does Arsenic do what it does preserves bodies by blocking the biological processes required for decomposition, effectively acting as an extreme sterilizing agent. When a person or an animal dies, the body naturally breaks down through self digestion, autoysis and bacterial putrefaction, arsenic disrupts these pathways at a molecular level largely preventing the tissue or more accurly really slowing down the tissue Rodd So then as a captain in the Union Army Medical Corps station in Washingon D.C. Holmes got his chance to show off his new technique. A the death of Colonel Elmer Ellsworth Colonel Elmer E. Ellsworth Hmm. Why Elmer's mom and dad? Why would do that to baby boy? Anyway, a friend to Pident Araham Lincoln Ellsorth was also the first officer to be a military casualty of the Civil War. On may twenty fourth, eighteen sixty one, he was shot while removing a Confederate flag from the roof of a hotel in Virginia Thanks to Homes, Ellsworth's body was embalmed and displayed to the public at his funeral, and people were reportedly very impressed with his lifelike look. Afterwards, Ellsworth's body was taken to New York City where thousands lined up to view the funeral procession. Mourners on the route displayed a banner declaring Ellsworth, his blood cries for vengeance And now this new but really old science of embalming takes off. Over the course of the war, homes alone embalmed four thousand men at one hundred dollars hundred per corpse Lot of dead bodies how weird were his dreams after seeing all that shit and shops in DC, Georgetown and Alexandria. He displayed the preserved bodies of unknown soldiers which he'd collected from battlefields man we used to be so much more morbid than we are now. Imagine seeing a dolled up, propped up fresh battlefield corpse in the window of some little boutique shop downtown U thanks my God. Thanks to the number of dead bodies piled up, it soon became a quick way for other people to make some money Bommbers literally followed the Union Cfederate armies across the country, not ominous at all, pitching tents next to battle sites even offering soldiers the chance to prepay for their own embalming In January of eighteen sixty five, General Ulysset S Grant withdrew Ebalmer' permits and ordered them to stay beyond the lines. It was affecting morale G no shit byy this point, some embalmers were already moving on to another business model. Many of them started woodworking too, which allowed them to make coffins, and now the modern American funeral industry was up and running Ironically, before his death in nineteen hundred Thomas Holmes stipulated that his own body should not embalm And why was that? Well, perhaps he knew that embalming Well presented a problem Not a physical problem, but an emotional one After all, part of the body's natural decay is what allows us to move on When we see a fresh corpse, especially one that looks like the person is only sleeping It is harder to understand, especially in the throes of grief that the person's soul or essence or whatever you want to call it has already moved on. It looks like they should be able to just open their eyes and start talking to you again that they're not really dead And this was exactly what had happened to President Lincoln On february twentieth, eighteen sixty two, Abraham's eleven year old son Willie Lay dying of typhoid fever in the guest bedroom of the White House At five PM that evening, the young boy T his last breath As Lincoln locked himself in his office, overcome with grief, preparations were made for Willie's body. And Henry P. Cateell, who later would handle Lincoln's own body after he'd been assassinated, was hired to embalm a little boy. Once Cateel's work was done, Willie's body was laid out in the green room of the White House poet, Nathaniel Parker Willis later described the dead boy'searance at the funeral with the following. He lay with eyes closed, his brown hair parted as we had known it pale in the slumber of death. but otherwise unchanged for he was dressed as if for the evening and held in one of his hands crossed upon his breast a bunch of exquisite flowers A according to those in attendance, The family intended to send Willie home to the West so that he may sleep under the sod of his own valley after the funeral At the last minute, however, Lincoln decided that he could not bear to be separated from his dear son's body. and he had the boys's remains interred in William Thomas Carroll's family vault in DC The president then visited the grave many, many times and requested that his coffin be reopened on at least two occasions so he could look upon his boy and perhaps caress his cold, but still somewhat lifelke face Some stories about this state that Lincoln could not stand to leave the boy alone in the dark cold tomb And we do know that he would sit with Willie's body for hours on end And that Lincolnce admitted to a Union soldier, Since Willie's death, I catch myself every day involuntarily talking with him as if he were with me Now to be fair, there is a little solid evidence that embalming itself causes prolonged or unhealthy grief. But anecdotally, there is quite a bit which only makes sense in my opinion. Looking at a skeleton. You know That person is long dead No matter how powerful your grief, they've been dead But looking at a dearly missed loved one who still appears to be alive, just sleeping, It's like God refusing to bandage the wound their party has left you with. and you just keep bleeding and bleeding profusely. But there are, of course other perspectives on all this. In his influential essay in a nineteen sixty five book, Death, Grief and Mourning English anthropologist, Jeffrey Gore argued that Western societies had made death increasingly private, hidden, and even taboo He compared death in the twentieth century to sex in the nineteenth century something that everyone was experiencing or would experience, but that people avoided discussing openly, which made it harder to deal with when inevitably it came up. Similarly, in her nineteen sixty three investigation of modern day burial practices behind the Fmaldehyde curtain English America's a great title English American author and activist, Jessica Midford came to the same conclusion. that the funeral industry and embalming, in particular turned a normal human process into something commercialized and fake As she famously opened her essay. The drama begins to unfold with the arrival of the corpse at the mortuary Alas, poor your How surprised he would be to see how his counterpart of today is whisked off to a funeral parlor and is in short order sprayed, sliced, pierced, pickled, trussed trimmed, creamed, waxed, painted rouged, and neatly dressed. Transform from a common corpse into a beautiful memory picture No law requires embalming, no religious doctrine commends it, nor is it dictated by considerations of health, sanitation, or even of personal daintiness. In no part of the world, but in Northern America, is it widely used At one point, she describes the vast array of products that embalmers use to preserve and even to improve corpses wrote There are various choices of embalming fluids. If flex tone is used, it will produce a mild, flexible rigidity The skin retains a velvety softness. The tissues are rubbery and pliable ideeal for women and children It may be blended with B and G products, the company's Lelick tint, which is guaranteed to reproduce nature's own skin texture The velvety appearance of living tissue Sntone comes in three separate tints. Sntan, spepecial cosmetic tint. pink shade, especially indicated for young female subjects and regular cosmetic tint moderately pink And all of that is, in my opinion pretty damn creepy I you really think about it? By this time, mortuary science dictated that between three and six gallons of dyed in perfume for aaldehyde, glycerin, borax, phenol, alcohol, and water be circulated through a corpse, along with massage cream to plump any areas of flesh that might have been emaciated or sunken In other words, to erase any sign of illness, disease, etceta to erase any and all signs death itself And on one level, that's not entirely a bad thing. Like we said at the beginning, many of us may prefer to remember our loved ones as healthy and vibrant, not as ravaged by illness and see them one last time. Today, too, most funeral homes position themselves at places that help bring people closer to death, not further away from it, but for somebody deep in grief, for somebody who may have already had shaky mental health to begin with and say persistent and powerful delusion about a dead woman who he was meant to find, could this new science of embalming have inadvertently contributed to some very fucking weird behavior Yes And today's story is a shining example of that, potentially And it's hard to know what exactly made Carl Tanzler do what he ended up doing I'm sure it was a mixture of things but was one powerful ingredient in that mixture the relatively new science of embolmment I think so. was another the specific cultural climates around the idea of eternal romance and specifically eternal romance as it was connected to tuberculosis, which was widely considered one of the most aesthetically pleasing diseases Yeah, I think so And was another ingredient, probably the most powerful one, something going on in Tanzer's brain, somethingomet that none of us will ever be able to fully explain Let's jump into our timeline and look into all of this now Or in a moment, right after today's first of two mid showow sponsor breaks. If you don't want to hear these ads ever again, please sign out to be a spacer on Patreon, help us make monthly charitable contributions, get the catalog ad free, episodes three days early and more Support for Time Suck with Dan Cummins comes from talkaboutpD d. com Let's talk about a condition many people haven't heard of. And it turns out it's more common than you'd think. Pe Rononey's disease or PD for short PD can happen when scar tissue builds up under the skin of the penis. This can cause a curve with the bump during an erection, and for some men, lead to pain during intimacy and may impact mental health It may also lead to anger and frustration. deression, lowered self esteem, and even withdrawal from sexual activity and physical intimacy Because of this, some men could feel embarrassed or reluctant to talk about PD The actual cause of PD isn't always known. In some cases, it may be linked to a minor injury or repeated injuries during sex or other physical activity Good news is PD is treatable. If you notice a curve with a bump, a trusted urology specialist can help diagnose it and walk you through your options, including non surgical treatment To learn more about Pay Roni's disease visit Talk about PD d. comot This show is sponsored by Better Help For a long time, I was very averse to thepy due to the stigma that surrounds it. On one side of my family, it is associated with being, quote, crazy But as I've gotten older and involved and surrounded myself with more pro therapy people, I think not seeking out help is quote Crazy. Therapy made me a better dad, better husband, and a better friend kindinder person to myself. F feels pretty sane to me But still, even in twenty twenty six, there can be stigma for getting support for your mental health Maybe you have avoided taking the first step yourself because you're worried what others would think What matters to you more? Happiness and inner peace or the opinions of people who don't want to give you permission to go seek it theerapy with Better Help can be a space to slow down and talk things out and make great strides towards finding that happiness and peace. Better Helalth therapists work according to a strict code of conduct and are fully licensed in the U.S. They're waiting to talk to you Are you waiting for Don't let stigma stand in the way of support. 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That's QuIncE dot com slash time suck for free shipping and three hundred and sixty five day returns Quince dot com slash time sucks ODeck is built to back small businesses like yours. Whether you're buying equipment, expanding your team or bridging cash flow gaps, OndDeck' loans up to four hundred thousand dollars make it happen fast. Rated A plus by the Better Business Bureau, and earning thousands of five star trrust pilot reviews, ONDeck delivers funding you can count on. Applying minutes at onndDeck dot com Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OndDeck or Celtic Bank. OndDeck does not lend in North Dakota all loans and amounts subject to lender approval Thanks for listening to our sponsors, and now it is actually timeline time Strap on those boots, soldier We're marching down a time suck timeline january twelfth, eighteen seventy seven That is where today's story begins, potentially. Since a lot of information about Carl Tanzler's life is from his own memoirs, and since he loved to lie about himself, we don't actually know that with certainty As he tells it, however, he was born january twelfth, eighteen seventy seven in Dresden, Germany in the townhouse that his family called The Castle But he would grow up in their other house, what his family called Via Casell out in the country And that house was potentially Carl's mother apparently told him that the I guess probably Villa in this situation Villa was haunted by an active spirit called the White woman Supposedly one of Carl's ancestors, who had died over a century earlier in seventeen sixty five. Later, Carl would wonder if his own fondness for dead women started here. Interesting. Do Carl have a hanker and four Ghost,ittdies possible It's certainly possible. D don't you dare K' shame him If he and his ghost ladies want to go all succubus and get their spectral fuck on. Don't try and stop him Maybe you can't ask if you watch so Right? If you're one of those ghost cooks I've been hearing so much about I haven't hearing anything about ghost cucks, but I wish I had been Sounds fun. weird. Refocusing now. When Carl was twelve, he apparently had a dream or rather a vision of a very beautiful girl in a white dress, reclining on a Rco sate, which I painted on a piece of paper then So that's what he wrot Young Carl also had other interests outside of a crush on a ghost. load of electricity, chemical experiments, astronomy Dream of inventing a flying machine I love the back then, that's still how you thought of these what airplanes would be called flying machines. On high school, he supposedly would build a glider plane and tested himself from a hill in a nearby park By the time he's in college He wroted he had an entire room in the villa devoted to his experiments with high voltage electricity and that he built a workshop where he had made a boat and two hot air balloons. Okay so he's Fankenein He's a type of Frankenstein working in his laboratory nineteen oh one at the age of twenty four, he earned a master of Arts in medicine, philosophy, mathematics, chemistry, and more for a total of nine different degrees from the University of Leipzick O so he said Do I think that's true? Oh, fuck fuck no. noh I don't think a of I don't think the fucking bo shit is tr plain shit is true. I don't think almost any of this is true Around this time, he'd also claim he had another paranormal experience though T actually, He wrote I was sitting in my chair in the green room It was his laboratory The hour was late, aboutb eleven, I would say, I felt tired but my day's work was not yet finished Suddenly without looking up for my papers, I noticed a movement near my side It was a pencil lying on the table. It moved slowly half across the table, then it lifted itself off of the table, performing a few somersaults in the air and down to the floor. Now a matchbox started walking about the table, lifting itself gyrating in the air And then they're followed my books Finally, the entire heavy oaken table lifted itself off the floor and floated upward, as if carried by water. Then there was a noise, like the retort of a gun port of a gun fromr the direction of my static electricity machine You didn't have a fucking sat electricity machine. Walking over to see what had happened, I found that all four huge central glass discs had been broken right to the middle Then he said, as the furniture began to shake and move all around the room, it crashed into hundreds of dollars worth of scientific equipment, and Carl didn't know what to make of it prank a thief, a prowler Something weirder going on all made up wo nights later, he wrote that he woke up at two in the morning find two women standing over his bedside. Fuck yeah, bro. Magaoir and was ghosts No worries about STIs or pregnancies, ideal scenario. Get after it And if people watch, let them ghost ccks watch Apparently they they didn't try and fucking knowough The first was a tall lady with snow white hair She seemed to Tanzler to be the white lady he had been told about as a child The second figure hid behind the white lady who clutched her hand I you' clutcher pes. Then the white lady bent down and spoke and said, I've been trying to get your attention for quite some time, my boy but you wouldn't take note too much engrossed in N your experiments That's why I had to use some violence Look here, Carl brought you the bride whom someday you will meet Carl could respond A bit little Carl could though. I bet littleittle Carl was fucking hard as a rock, but regular Cl I guess he was dumbstruck He said he was frozen as the white lady drew the second figure closer. The second woman's veil slipped, and for just a moment he saw this woman's long, dark hair and beautiful face. The girl smiled. They vanished Then Carl came M maybe, possibly probably Thanks to that, Carl became obsessed with the supernatural. He had no rational explanation for what he'd experienced. Nothing that had been written about ghosts or apparitions satisfied his curiosity. so he had to investigate himself His investigation led him to Camposanto an expansive open air monumental cemetery in Genoa, Italy There, he wrote that he had another strange paranormal experience This time, he claimed he saw a marble statue of a beautiful girl who bore a striking resemblance to the apparition introduced to him in the green room in his laboratory He learned that the girl immortalized and Stone had died at the age of twenty two And that interestingly, Her name was Elena. As if under a spell, he claimed he kept repeating her name, Elena Elena And then all of a sudden, the figure of apparition of a girl seemed to detach itself from the statue and slowly walk past him hadad he summoned his bride to be orr he made all that shit up years later in this reverse engineering attempt fucking somehow rationalize this supposed fated love for a corpse. Either way Carl still had to get on with his life thanks to expertise in X ray imaging. He had apparently picked up across the supposedly very diverse course of his studies Now twenty four year old Tanzer got a job with the Australian government and headed to Sydney, where he arrived in nineteen oh one He had made enoughoney to buy a house overlooking Darling Harbor a hundred and ten foot power boat and even a torpedo boat that he intended to use for deep sea exploration, of course. This all seems like a lot That's unclear again, how true this is. According to Tanzer, the age of twenty four would have been a busy year for him passing nine different examinations for nine different degrees hunting down ghosts and moving to Sydney to what's now a very you know, bougie little area veryery expensive Some of it may have been true though. He did speak in writing English quite well which seems to indicate that he probably lived for a whileild in an English speaking country Later, people would remark that he had a German accent that was slightly British inflected But it's still unclear how he wound up in Sydney or if he really worked a good, respectable job while he was there. Indeed, coworkers in Florida would later say that Tanzler only mentioned Australia in connection with the time he was incarcerated there that he would remember that he'd been placed in a you know, or talk about being placed in an internment camp for Germans in nineteen fourteen during the first year of World War I. After he'd supposed he'd been there for thirteen years already. According Taner, life in Australia was mostly about x rays and apparitions though he would describe another paranormal encounter That supposedly took place one night at exactly seven PM writing Still frozen to the threshold, she stretched out both her hands to me, in friendly gesture like a child As I walked across the room to meet those arms, I felt my hair raising and cold shivers running down my spine. The closer I approached her and then felt her arms closing around me and felt my arms embracing her I cannot possibly describe the upsurge of a divine happiness, such as I had never experienced before There was a melting together in divine bliss Her wonderful dark tresses fragrant and caressing covered us both There were no longer any chills, only warmth. Filling my entire body. It was as if my feet were off the ground and she and I were floating in space Did you describe sex with a ghost? Phantom fucky Wraith Cidas. seems like he did Melting together in divine bliss He definitely did Now he's not only encountering spirits, he is fucking him And we're all listening to it. We're all hearing about it. We're all ghost cooks wrote that he wanted stay in the Ghosty womom' embace forever But that as held her tighter, she disappeared into mist Luckily, she would be back. She wanted more of that hot carl action Apparently soon after the apparition returned, stay with them for seven days. Tanzer went to work and did Eerras. She never spoke. This this during this seven day period but stood by his bed while he slept at night No more melting together in divine bliss. D that specter just friends on him After this visit once again, she vanished into thin air All of this, especially the paranormal experiences, made Australia something of a paradise for Tanzer But on the Eve of World War I All of that changed Tanzer was still German, and now Germans were the enemy The Australian government supposed the interned him at the trial Bay concentration camp for five years This does seem to be backed up at least partially by some others who were there and wrote of their experiences When he finally returned to his house on the shore, he claimed it was basically destroyed. that he' lost his library. All the documents Here's laboratory A collection of dionds, emeralds, and opals No, not the opals. One can never have enough opals Australia does produce around ninety five percent of the world's precious sil. so I guess you know If you were going to stockpilile them, that would be the place to do it Taner claimed to arrive back in Germany in nineteen twenty And between then and nineteen twenty six, we don't know much about what he was up to probably, you know U working in another laboratory He never read about his marriage to a young woman named Doris or the birth of her two daughters. as noteworthy as an oppal collection U hisis story picks back up in nineteen twenty six when he decided to start a new life onn february sixth, forty nine year old Carl Tanzler left Germany Born andew leaving his young wife Well she wasn't much younger than him, but believeved, leeave his wife, Dors. and small daughters behind. he planned to join ster in Zephyills, Florida His family would follow once he had settled and felt he could provide for them Carl Ship departed from Rotterdam in the Netherlands bound for Cuba initially But once in Cuba instead of heading on to Key West, Carl decided to stay for a few days Why because of the sweet, sweet Latin ladies as he would write in his memoirs. It was the time of the carnival in all of Havana seem to be intoxicated with a carnival spirit As it was, I stayed four days, not to amuse myself, but held to the spot by some strange irrational hope that I could find my lost bride in this carnival crowd This was probably because there were so many So many. Beautiful ladies of the Spanish type who somehow resembled her. And because in this carnival time, so many of them wore veils and fairy like dresses which made the similarly still more possible he he had Oh, he was fucking excited. Damnit they arere so hot These women reminded him of his lost bride He goh to see woman that he was apparently still obsessed with Even though he'd already married a real living woman And they already had two real living children with each other, and he was planning on bringing them all across Atlantic to join him shortly Anyway, while Carl like Cuba, his first impression of T West not as favorable Perhaps there weren't as many sexy ladies there. Perhaps there weren't any ghostly women there trying to seduce him Or maybe it's because the terrain was, as he thought, less beautiful than the mountains of Cuba Interestingly, most of the buildings that Carl saw there are still standing today houses built by shipwrights around the turn of the nineteenth century from sturdy Pine held together with hand shaped wooden pegs rather than bolts or nails Some of them were one story, some consisting of two levels. Many had these things called widow walks. Widows walks on their roofs to enable their owners to look out at the harbor Other houses were essentially small shacks, which had been built by the owners of local cigar companies for employee housing Altogether these houses were spread across about four square miles and as Tanzer got off the ferry, he took it all in Nobody degreeted him because his telegram had not made it to relatives The next morning, twelve miles from Key West, carrying the few possessions he had brought with him Carl climbed aboard the overseas railroad and took a train to Miami From there, you traveled further nor to the small town of Zephre Hills, close to Tampa and Stain. Petersburg Once there, he sent to congratulatory waterater cooler painted to his wife witing in Dresen I sure that was exactly what she wanted. a painted water cooler. Oh, than you, Carl. That's the perfect gift A handwitten on the back in German was Hay Birthday seevenh, septtember, nineteen twenty six. It's a different world in Florida The next year nineteen twenty seven, when Carl was now fifty, his family would join him unlike the imaginative mystical Carl, Doris Tanzer, who is now thirty eight, stocky, healthy, determined, practical, strong willed, She insisted once she was in America, that her daughters only speak English and learn the ways of the people in their adopted country and basically forget their German traditions For a while, Carl seemed to do right by his wife. He Americanized his first name by spelling it Carl with a C instead of Carl with a K. O what a change. Also bought some land, laid the foundation for a home they hoped to move into To do that required more money though, which you didn't have So we took a job It was supposed to be a one time stopover point, right back in Ky West. Carl's own words The Marine hospital at Key West employed me as a pathologist and x ray specialist. Built up a fairly well equipped x ray department and peace of mind and scientific work until the fateful day of april twentieth or twenty second, excuse, nineteen thirty Now that makes it sound like Carl was fairly prosperous But a woman who worked at the hospital would describe him as destitute According to her, she started out as an attendant who only cleaned up after procedures. L, like, you know, just a type of custodial position Dude love to talk himself up and stretch the truth though, orr does outright lie Still, he must have been pretty good at his job or at least a smooth talker because eventually he would end up heading the X ray department Thanks to the recommendation of Commander Lombard, the physician in charge who had been transferred there from a stint in New Orleans, where he had battled with a bubonic plague seems like this hospital is enterging workpl Two articles about the hospital appeared that year in the Key West Citizen. The first one was a response to accusations made in the Miami News that describe the Marine hospital as nothing other than a saloon and a brothel. charges that were angrily denied. by the drunks and sex workers there I mean by doctors and staff. The other articles seem to point to a more ordinary workplace stated that patients at Marine Hospital will have Christmas second to none in whole Island City. The final sence in the article was teechnician Carl Tanzer cooperated by helping with the decorations It's a weird usage of cooperated, isn't it just say like, yeah, he helped. He helped fucking with the decorations. Kyl Tanzler initially tried to attack the tree decorators. But a deal was struck with him, and he agreed to cooperate with the other decorators and help them as long as they promised to give him his fair share of gingerbread If the hospital was a Bordello Or a saloon. I actually wouldn't have been that out of place for Q West Well, the town wasn't exactly lawless. It was difficult to get u, you know, u anywhere else in Florida from this town and vice versa. And that isolation meant that people were pretty free to do the kind of work they wanted, live the way they wanted which included doing things like smuggling Cuban Rum was an especially popular form of contraband brought in by any number of sea captains and sailors, many of them who had fled to the Kys to Lalo makeake a little money. off the area's numerous shipwrecks Indeed, as soon as the ship crashed into the nearby rocks, which happened about once a week back then at the height of this some would shout recosure And then people would run out of their houses, hop into boats and claim whatever they could from the disaster just run along the beach and just scraatch it In the first half of the twentieth century, there was an attempt to make Key West a more upststanding place. President Roosevelt's newew Deal brought to the WPA or Works prorojects addministration projects ministeres, which offer jobs that pay decently. Even so, most of the town was unemployed aside from the people who worked regularly at the cigar factories. Men and women who filed into large brick buildings where they would sit in straight back chairs and hand roll tobacco leaves While on an elevated platform, other workers would literally read stories to them to keep the rollers from getting too bored early form of podcasting, basically But if you could make a living with a conventional job in Kywest, that wasn't exactly a catastrophe. It drew a lot of eccentric types of people. Florida heat being what it was. A lot of people could and did just crash out on the beach The sea offered plentiful lobster, conch, yellow tail fruits and vegetables, like a mangoes, you know, grew naturally limes, tomatoes, sweet potatoes, and more. noody really had to worry about, you know, affording a grocery bill or having like proper shelter If you happen to get a good catch or if you pull some valuable cargo out of wreck, you know, you can always trade it for what you needed, you know, or like a simple luxury like a cigar But for Maria Elena Milagro dejoyes. Her father's job as a cigar manufacture brought if not prosperity, stability. So whoo was she Maria Elena Mia Mia, excuse me Maria Elena, Milagro dejoyos A later Maria Elena Malagro deem Mesa was named according to Cuban tradition. Maria, her first name. Eelena, her middle name, Hils. the surname she took from her father, Amil Lagro. that came from her mother Mesa would come from her husband. O course, she took when she got marri But at first you did toelena. The middle child in a lineu of three daughters Despite growing up in a place that to many was an island paradise where people bartered and traded for essentials, Elena's childhood fairly conventional. Her family had been upper middle class back in Cuba And then they fell in hard times. In search of work, her father uprooted the family, brought them to Keywest where he found a job at a cigar factory And in phases, the rest of the extended family would come to join them When Elena was growing up, her house was full of relatives and their friends, uncles, cousins, aunts, cooking in the kitchen. Oh, I bet making the most delicious shit. Boyfriends and girlfriends sneaking off together children giggling, chasing each other across the lawn J everybody generally having a good time Alena and her two sisters, Florinda or Nana She was called An Celia They would also spend every Saturday morning at the Strand Mvie Theaters Matinee show. Every Saturday morning, they could, I guess, you know, afford to get away. Whether they would swoon at Rudolph Valentino or laugh at Charlie Chaplin The sisters main pastime would become daning though. All three girls became very good at it You know, as they grew up They grew into becoming some of the most beautiful women in the area by many accounts, espeally Eena became very popular dance partners at the Cuban Club where they be danst the Rumba, Samba, the Chacha two step called Tony's wife and of course, the congal line. Because their family couldn't afford fancy dancing clothes or makeup, the girls made mascara from Vaseline and charcoal. They rubbed a dampened red crepe paper on their cheeks for blush. Sometimes on special occasions, their parents would buy them cotton dresses for fifty cents a piece Leather sandals were especial once in a very blue moon treat And then at eighteen years old, on february eighteenth, nineteen twenty six, the same month that Carl Tanzer set out for America Elena got marri Her husband was Louise Meesa. Their courtship, the wedding, the honeymoon period afterwards among the best times of Elena's life. The newlywoods were apparently crazy about each other as newlywoods often are, which predictably led to Elena quickly getting pregnant. It ended a few months later, devember fifth, nineteen twenty six, she had a miscarriage. and was devastated As she grew paler and more withdrawn, her family thought it was because of the loss she had suffered. Indeed, studies have shown that roughly thirty percent of women experienced depression and anxiety immediately following the loss of a pregnancy But soon it became clear that something else was going on with Lena Her health was deteriorating She had a recurring cough, weakness, shortness of breath, chest pain Finally, the family doctor would confirm the grim diagnosis of tuberculosis And since it has been a minute, since we've discussed it in the Sckverse What is tuberculosis Uh, in a word, In more than a word, tuberculosis, often abbreviated TB, is a contagious and infectious disease that is caused by the bacteria mycobacterium tuberculosis or MT And it's, as I mentioned up top, the deadliest disease in human history Even with all of the medical advances we have today, over a million people still died of tuberculosis in twenty twenty three That year, in fact, more people died of TB than died of malaria Typhoid and war combined. One estimate from Frank Rinean' tuberculosis, the greatest story never told maintains that TB has killed around one in seven people who haveve ever lived as I mentioned earlier COVID nineteen displaced tuberculosis as the world's deadliest infectious disease from twenty twenty through twenty twenty two, but then in twenty twenty three TB regained the status it had held for most of what we know of human history killing approximately one million, two hundred fifty thousand people that year That's crazy Today we understand that tuberculosis is an infection caused by bacteria MT, which has been around for over over seventy thousand years. with some thinking that this family of bacteria originated more than one hundred fifty million years ago. TB is airborne, and spreads from person to person through small particles contained in coughs, sneezes, or exhalations Anyone can get tuberculosis, in fact between a quarter and a third of all living humans have been infected with it at some point. In most people the infection will lie dormant for a lifetime But up to ten percent of all infected people will eventually become sick A phenomenon we call active TB Today, active TV very curable thanks to antibiotics. notot so much during Elena's lifime N not at all Now back to the MT bacteria that causes it, perhaps unsurprisingly MT has a long history Three million years ago, an early progenator of MT might have infected early hominids in East Africa And then somewhere between twenty thousand and fifteen thousand years ago, for the first time, the common ancestor of modern strains of MT might have appeared and then spread across the globe Indeed, mummies in ancient Egypt from around five thousand years ago show the tell tale deformities that accompanied tuberculosis of the bone wherein the bacteria scrapes out tiny holes in the skeleton leaving bones that resemble dead coral Simultaneously, TB was one of the few infectious diseases present in both the Americas and Afro Eururasia between or excuse me before fourteen ninety two arrchaeological evidence indicates that TB was in the Americas at least two thousand years ago and it has been president in China for at least five thousand years. Ancient China TV was known by a term that translates to lung exhaustion In ancient Hebrew, TV was called by a word that meant wasting away The famous Greek doctor Hippocrates wrote about TB two which as we have learned, was known in Greek by a word Thysis that meant to decay. pretty dark association Around four hundred and sixty BC, Hippocrates identified Thysis as the most widespread disease of the time and noted it was almost always fatal Due to common theysis related fatalities, he warned his colleagues against visiting TB patients in the late stages of the disease because their inevitable deaths might damage the reputations of these attending physicians didn't know that those physicians also were at risk of catching TB two hundred CE, a new Chinese term for consumption had emerged Huai Fu Meaning destroyed palace A Chinese medical textbook at the time read, Toxic drugs bring no cure, short needles cannot seize the disease Within a millennia, Taoist priests would begin referring to the illness as Sojai or corpse disease because the illness transformed a living being into a cadaver. Man And there was something else unique about this disease, you know other than the fact that it you know made you look like a corpse. Unlike many other diseases, for most of human history, consumption appeared indiscriminate killing the rich and the poor, educated, and non educated at the same rate. Charles Dickens called consumption the disease that wealth never warded off And indeed among its victims was one of the richest individuals of the nineteenth century American Railroad magnet Jay Gold Also very hard to predict how TB would spread Because TV infects and kills so slowly. it doesn't resemble a plague that sweeps through a community, right where one family member gets sick and everybody else or nearly everybody else in the household is also sick within a few days This is because MT grows super slowly. The bacteria takes a long time to build up its unusually fatty thick cell wall, which is a formidable enemy to the immune system. blood cells then struggle to penetr the cell wall and kill the bacteria from within. In fact, it's so hard for infection fighting cells to penetrate the bacteria's cell wall that instead white blood cells usually surround it, creating a ball of calcifying tissue known as a tubercle Empty can survive within these tubercles, replicating very slowly consuming dead tissue as food This type of infection sometimes known as latent tuberculosis will often last a lifetim withithout ever making a person sick And most people infected with TB will never become ill because the tubercles will continue to hold the bacteria within them preventing active disease from developing, right? fascinating But in five to ten percent of infections, the immune system cannot produce enough white blood cells to surround all the bacteria with tubercles, and MT is able to grow and grow within the lungs or elsewhere as in brain swelling, tuberculosis, meningitis, to to the rupture of infected lymph nodes through the skin sccrapula to tuberculosis of the bone, which can cause lifelong disability through destroying hip, spine, or limb bones, right? Just brutal shit T be affecting the spine known as PotTs disease is a common and terribly painful cause of a hunched back indeed the fictional hunchback of Notre Dame suffered from Pot's disease prerecisely because consumption was so fundamentally different from other infections, classical understandings of the disease varied wildly In ancient China, Huif Fu, generally understood to be contagious, but lifestyle factors could worsen it. One book claimed you could get consumption by overworking one's mind and exhausting one's energy injuring one's chee and loosening one sperm. Gotta fucuckking keep that sperm tight You don't want to fucking loose jist? My God. You fucking trying to get consumption in ancient Greece Hippocrates thought it to be an inherited condition wrriting that consumptives beget consumptives. Other Greeks, including the physician Galen Belve the disease to be contagious. in ancient India, consumption understood to be caused by excessive fatigue, anxiety, and hunger In other communities, it was seen to be the result of a curse poison or Naturally. demonic possess. But other advanced thinkers thought that the disease was being caused by something not demonic related to a curse, perhaps something of this earth Yet invisible to the human eye. Around a thousand years ago, the Persian scholar and poet, Iibin Sina wrote that tuberculosis and other illnesses were caused when the body was contaminated by tainted foreign organisms that are not visible by naked eye. Smart fucking dude He wrote that shit in the early eleventh century almost exactly a thousand years ago An you fucking new more about illnesses than a lot of people do today. But this view would take a couple of centuries to migrate over into Europe. More than a couple actually In his opera Medica of sixteen seventy nine Dutch physician and scientist Franisca Syilvias. was the first to European first European to identify actual tubercles as a consistent and characteristic change in the lungs and other areas of consumptive patients and how this would progress to abscesses and cavities What were those tubercles? In seventeen twenty, the English physician Benjin Martin would write that TB could be caused by wonderfully minute living creatures which once they had gained a foothold in the body could generate the lesions and symptoms of the disease and you wrote more about how this could happen It may be therefore very likely that by a habitual line in the same bed with the consumptive patient constantly eating and drinking with him, or by very frequently conversing so nearly as to draw in part of the breath he admits from the lungs, a consumption may be caught by the sound person I imagine that slightly conversing with consumptive patients is seldom more never sufficient to catch the disease Another smart dude. he's pretty much figured it out So how do doctors go about curing this though Right, That's of course, a lot harder to figure out. Ain Sino first person to think the TB had a microbial cause praisise the use of garlic and TB treatment and garlic does in fact have antro antimicrobial properties, but not nearly strong enough to treat the disease effectively. And Europe bloodleting was a common and completely ineffective treatment You would still have TB and now a lot less blood that you needed to fight it with. S sometometimes you just bed to death. So than you, Doc On the Americas, herbal remedies were used, some of which were useful to varying degrees, but not curative. Global medical treatment for TB has ranged from rubbing buzzard fat on the chest Bzzard f to ingesting hean milk Uh huh. from anal sacrifice to acupuncture Regarding breastfeeding It was actually believed that the most powerful cure was suckling directly from a healthy woman's breast. Pcription. Chitties Fine them and suck them until mouth has been filled warm gar of milk Hopefully no doctors were recommending anybody's mother or sisters, but I bet that happened from time to time because how fucking derange Some of us humans are Now let's take a quick break, our second of two mid showow sponsor breaks Summer is a gift 's a gift of days that last a little longer, a brighter state of mind So giveift yourself a new Kia at the KIia Summer Sticker sales event, Epecially taged vehicles including the Sorrento, Sportage, Carnival, as well as the Nuro Hybrid. All backed by a ten year one hundred thousand mile limited powertrain warranty. So the gift of summer can keep on giving for summers to come. Kia Movement that inspires. Call eight hundred three three threety fourty for Details hostoafree event and seven hundred six twenty six to deealer for warranty details So you know that uneasy, anxious feeling you get when you think about dealing with your insurance company? 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And now let's revisit how TB treatment evolved over the years Identifying effected treatment was made more difficult by the fact that people sometimes seem to recover only to get sick again or seem to get sick after treatment only to recover later U likeike many of the time, Herman Braamer In nineteenth century, Silesian Botany students suffering from TB was instructed by his doctor to seek out a healthier climate He traveled to the Himalayan mountains, where he could pursue his botanical studies while trying to rid himself of the disease And it actually worked in the eighteen fifties to return home. cured I mean, he presented his totally cured and he started studying medicine. I said kind of cured because climate can't actually kill the bacteria. But in some cases, rest and climate, healthy living, the right herbal remedies, et cetera, can take the bacteria, you know, help take it from active to latent,, Hp your body fight it off yourour body's immune cells can wall off the bacteria I mentioned earlier, forming that protective barrier that shell called a tubercle. And inside that tuberle, the bacteria again place in a dormant, non replicating state you know, where they survive, but they're kept completely under control. They're in fucking jail. They're in consumption jail In eighteen fifty four, Bramer presented his doctoral dissertation Tuberculosis is a curable disease In the same year, he built an institution in Gerbersdorf in the Prussian state of Silesia Wh in the midst of fir trees, patients were exposed on their balconies to continuous fresh air. This setup became the bllueprint for the subsequent development of the Sanatorium that we've heard about in numerous sucks, especially wild West ones places where people's social and sanitary conditions would be improved with warm weather, dry air, a sterile environment Enough that hopefully they could get better you know, isolated them from healthy populations as well And then more scientific breakthroughs would follow In eighteen sixty five, a French military doctor, Jean Antoine Villemont single handedly demonstrated that consumption can be passed from humans to cattle and from cattle to rabbits postulate that a specific microorganism must be the cause of the disease, finally laying to rest a centuries' old belief that consumption arose spontaneously in each affected organism And then as we mentioned in the beginning, in eighteen eighty two, Robert Kootch discovered a staining technique that enabled him to see mycobacterium, tuberculosis which allowed for the development of later antibiotics and antibiotics for tuberculosis would not be successfully adistered administered until late nineteen forty four Sadly too late for Elena Throughout all of this, tuberculosis made an astounding impact on culture, religion, economics, et cca. For instance, did you know that this's a cowboy hat The icon of the American West that has experienced a huge resurgence today thanks to country pop superstars It was invented because of tuberculosis In the eighteen fifties, a young man named Joh He living in New Jersey, working as a hatmaker, when he you started coughing up blood John visited the doctor and learned he had consumption According to the prevailing wisdom of the time, his only real chance of survival was to head west. In the nineteenth and early twieth centuries, it was commonly accepted that consumption could be effectively treated by dry air as I mentioned, which you made a kind of sense. Consumptive lungs seemed wet. So did the humid stagnant air in big American cities like New York and Baltimore, where consumption flourished People fled to Arizona, or New Mexico or California, which came to be known as the land of New lungs As one brochure boldi promised, come west and live Several cities, including Pasadena and Colorado Springs were essentially created for consumptives and their families But it wasn't only desert air that was mythologized. Doctors also recommended island air or mountain air or forest air, even Italian air. the justification for the so called travel cure varied Except for one constant consumption thrives in cities And so the solution must be rural John headed out from his home in New Jersey to the rough frontier town of Stain.t Joseph, Missouri ended up settling there for a while and miraculously started to feel better for reasons we still don't fully understand, but due to that process, it going from active to latent Between twenty and twenty five percent of people recover from active TB illness without treatment, and John was among this lucky minority Regaining his health over the next few years, he noticed something about the West Had options, not great. Fur traders of European descent often wore bug infested brimless coonskin caps Folks who made their way to Missouri from Texas and Mexico meanwhile, tended to wear wide brimmed straw hats to protect it from the sun, but leaked in the rain So after returning to the Northeast with his consumption under control, John John B Stetson created a new sort of hat, which in time came to be known as the cowboy hat or The Stetson little piece triby there. And the influence of tuberculosis went way beyond a single type of hat in America of course, It influenced politics at the national level as well. For example, even after New Mexico became a US territory in eighteen forty eight, it was regarded with a lot of suspicion by many white Americans. After all, the majority of people lived in the territory were indigenous people or people who spoke Spanish as their first language. They spoke a different language, so they must be bad Differe always equals bad. Never forget that Always be afraid of different. never learn, never adapt, always resist. A fucking camy. Hey. I said Im fucking cammy. Don't you dare mock me, Miles Despite New Mexico having institutions needed for statehood, such as a large enough population and a strong majority of its voters seeking statehood Congress repeatedly turned down New Mexico's attempts to fully enter the Union different Bad Resist change at all costs In order to please Congress, New Mexican officials realized they needed to recruit a larger white and English speaking population and thus began New Mexico's quest to woo consumptives From the American Northeast and south with the promise of desert air, open skies and world class consumption care plan worked By nineteen ten, about ten percent of all New Mexicans were tuberculosis patients And with all these new white patients, residents now, Congress finally acquiesced and New Mexico became the forty seventh US state in nineteen twelve. Same good, differentiffere bad. loveove same. hate bad Uh there is another aspect of TB that we haven't yet talked about though. One that relates more closely to our story. Before the nineteenth century, TV was often associated like so many diseases with immorality, lack of hygiene and other undesirable traits that made it seem like it was the victim's fault. for getting sick Why do we humans make assumptions like that Well, because many of us are ignorant, selfish lack empathy, live fearfully If we can just believe that bad things only happen to bad people, right? Hello, just World fallacy then we get to believe that as long as we be good, we know get hurt A simple rule for simple people In the eighteen hundreds though, this thinking began to change. I mean, a lot of people still employ versions of this today, but thankfully, not as many As it became increasingly clear to many that stigma alone could not answer the why of consumption peopleeople began to conclude that consumption was caused by a personality onene especially attuned to the fragility and fleeting loneliness of life. Okay Did you see that coming? I did not Uh I guess it's made it kind of sense In Northern Europe, consumption was widely understood to be an inherited disease passed on like personality traits from parents to kids And so it reasonably follow the consumption might be accompanied by other traits like beauty and brilliance and sensitivity Indeed, consumption was believed to bring one's creative powers to new levels helping artists get in deeper touch with the spirit as their worldly bodies literally shrank away Fuck said that Victor Hugo's friends joked with him that if he could have been a truly great novelist if he had just had consumption And Lord Byron, widely considered one of the greatest English language poets of all time, wrote I should like, I think, to dive consumption becausecause then the women would always say, seeee that poor Byron. How interesting he looks in dimes All of the physical signs of consumption seem to point for many, I guess, to this idea of the spirit's beauty After all, the person got paler, thinner, with rosier cheeks and larger eyes, almost more beautiful. Indeed, women with consumption are almost always believed to become more beautiful, ethereal, wondrously pure Some women even applied Beeladona to their eyelids, albeit to minimally toxic amounts to dilate their pupils so they would have this wide eyed consumptive look And magazines offered instructions for how to apply red paint to the lips and cheeks to capture the rosy glow of the dying off consumpted fevers. Oh, we're so fucking weird As English novelist and poet, Jane Ey author, Charlotte Bronte put it in a letter she wrote to her sister, as her sister was dying of the disease Consumption, I am aware, is a flattering malady. can sell weird Perhaps this perception of increased beauty played a role in Lena story Of the viousrains of tuberculosis, the most dangerous form, the kind Elena hadatch. was a type called hasty consumption back then becausecause it very quickly consumed those unfortunate enough to contract it Realizing the seriousness of the situation, we're back on track now, her doctor immediately referred you to the Naval Marine hospital for a blood test and an x ray of her lungs to see if any allegions in formed During the hospital visit, which took place april twenty second, nineteen thirty Fearing the results, Elaina and her husband, Louise, rode the trolley and then walked her mining blocks to the hospital for the appointment Once there, Louise stayed outside in the waiting room while Lena was ushered into an examination room were a certain distinguished looking gentleman with a beard and muststache O a very fucking creepy looking motherfucker in my opinion. prerepare to take the blood sample from Elena. This man was of course Tanler And he would later write that he had an immediate reaction. to her. Boner. Do you talking about boner there I's talking about bon. I's read what he wrot He wrote In the middle of my routine work, I received a call from the head offffice to go and take a blood test from young Signorita who, as an outpatient, had come for examination I hardly looked at the patient as I entered the room. I don't buy that The first thing I noticed of her personality as I bent down to take a drop of blood from her h from one of her fingertips, rather rather than one of her ears, which were too exquisitely lovely to mar, was that her hand was unusually small Its long tapering fingers, the loveliest I had ever seen Have any of you ever had a moment like that with somebody else's hands likeike with their fingers But like the first time you saw someone's hand, we were like, Oh, fuck Oh I has never And I mean never seen a finger that's sexy. Oh God I have not U I guess I'm not into digit kink whatever it might be called Carl continued As the needle struck, the hand twitched a little And it was then that from my kneeling position, I raised my head for the first time to say I'm very sorry to have caused you pain Forgive me, please. Her face had been hidden by her hand, so that I had hardly seen it as I first entered the room, but now she withdrew her hand to answer me, and I looked into a face of unearthly beauty the face of the bride, which had been promised to me by my ancestor forty years before so thunderstruck I hardly heard her saying It didn't hurt much Excuse my nervousness Her voice was soft and sweet and child likeke It reminded me of a mocking bird's song in sppring Okay, so u we are we herearing a hopeless romantic here or fucking lunatic? Nitick for me Sting ding ding, Lunatic Alina had no idea that the technician was so attracted to her. She had other things in her mind like, you know, whether or not she was going to fuckking die soon But Carl Tanzler, he couldn't stop thinking about her backack in his office, he sat around, feeling that he had finally met the one So he was shocked when the nurse came in and gave him a file which had said that she was married Carl's words. She belonged to someone else This didn't really matter to Tanler. I mean, mean he was also marri C clearly did not give a shit about that This was the woman from his visions The one promised to him and his promising visions trumped all else. Carl resolved to make the best impression he could when Lena came back the next day for a chest X ray. On his way to the hospital next morning, his clothes were ironed to perfection The sun was shining He was still bey eyed and fucking weird looking in my opinion. The lush tropical foliage was glisting whichich was nice Welena entered for her x ray. He said, goodood morning Nitoyos. And apparently, he'd then bowed And weird She sat on an oak chair, told him that she had slept better the night before, and her cough didn't seem as bad. He replied that that was good And held her hand to take her pulse trying to hide the flut of his own pulse, as he touched her skin for the second time and maybe came a little U Th then he instructed her to unbutton the top button of her blouse. Oh, fuck yeah, bro, so he could hear her heartbeat Mhm T totally for that reason, sure She did so And he pressed his stethoscope to the smooth skin below her collarbone First on her right side then the left And now Now he definitely came if he hadn't already Mewile, Allena's heart was beating fast She was nervous, not only because the visit might confirm she had an incurable disease, because a weird fucking German dude was touching her nervously, looking at her in his creepy way And the crotch of his pants, maybe freshly wet with cum Tanzer's heart was of course beating quickly as well He next guided her over to the X ray machine and instructed her to take a deep breath and hold it while he took the image. Also he said, She would have to take off her blouse. Oh and the rest of her undergarments h coursese that creeped it She asked if that was really necessary, and he said, it was. evenven though it definitely was not that fucking creep Then he did agree to turn off the lights that she requested while she undressed Still there was a dim red bulb. that was part of the equipment so he could see as she undid the remaining buttons and pulled down her slips or her young perky breasts were fully exposed. Then sweating profusely, maybe jerking off quietly inside his pants, creepy Tanzler took the X rays Afterwards, he reassured her that he would do everything in his power to make sure she got healthy He would see her the next day, he said to give her the diagnosis When she left, he looked at the images and his excited mood vanished Elena did have tuberculosis He would confirm the next day and somehow managed to wrangle an invitation from Melena's mother to come to the family home to talk about the prognosis further He went that evening, returned a few days later to take a blood test Every time he saw her, he fell more deeply in love. And I imagine tried to get her naked again Okay, it is time to draw some blood. Would you mind taking your clothes off All right I didn't take a temperat So just go ahead and fully undress if you would Hey need to check your pulse. Please are fully dress slip in this lingerie. you know, just dance around sex like for a few minutes. Mewhile, Elena was suffering Not long after diagnosis, her beloved husband, Louise abandoned her. Another woman left Keywest for Tampa before making his way to Miami, where he would become a waiter He would later claim that Elena's illness had nothing to do with his decision to leave. I mean, it was highly likely. He might have thought it was highly likely that he would catch it then die if he stayed News of the breakup made its way, of course, back to the one person who saw all this as amazing Carl Tanzer Sony offered to send Elena is on expense. E though again, he was supposed to be supporting his wife and two kids, which was not. to a famous Tuberculosis Institute abroad But Elaine refused She didn't think her condition was that serious. So Tanzer wrote a couple of you know medical equipment manufactrs to see if he could get the right equipment to treat her right there in the Florida Keys While he waited for that, he used the hospital's equipment to give her free radiation therapy, it sounds Uh, and in his free time, he jerked off so frequently. He whittled his dick down to a little more thann toothpicke and then refusing to follow his own doctor's orders to slow down He jerked off even more fiercely and he broke it off, and he did use it as a toothpick until he threw it away And now now he could only come by punching himself in the balls. But soon he had punched those poor balls completely flat. So now Now he could only come by poking a ho in his throat and blowown up his balls like a balloon like he would a beach ball with a pump. and then he punched it flat again and again and again until one day he blew too much air into his throat and he fucking popped like a balloon. And then well, then he couldn't come anymore, could he But you knew that. we all did 'Cause that's how balls work. Obviously, that's science. You can't use them anymore once they're fucking popped Nor all that Uh Forgive me What I meant to say was that in his free time, he started building an airplane That sure In all likelihood, he bought a very small wreck plane, part of one hauled it to the lawn behind the hospital, where he was allowed to keep it and he started restoring it. Why? Well, in Tanzer's own crazy words Once Elena had regained her health, this plane was to take the two of us to the South Sea Island, which I discovered for myself during one of my fishing expeditions in Australia This was a little paradise and my dream was that Elaine and I should spend our honeymoon there Every time she came to the hospital for treatment, she took time out or we took time out to inspect the plane together Those moments were of great delight for both of us When we sat side by side in a little pilot's cabin and imagined how it would be when it carried us into the air and acrossed the ocean Butas Elena actually into this plan or him or was she just being polite to the weird fucking man who had promised that he was going to cure her disease and keep her alive? I am strongly assuming that second one Indeed, that was exactly what Tanzer had promised promised D Lena promis her parent They were, of course, deeply worried about being able to afford Elena's medical treatment Chands are told, Don't worry about it. I got it Around the time he did stop sending any and all money back to his fucking family in Zephre Hils. That creepy piece of shit. We can all truly hate him now if we didn't already, right I' to say we can Let's for sure do Some of that money he spent on her treatments. He had other plans for the money as well though. On Elena's twenty first birthday, he bought a ring and hid it in a bouquet of roses. As they celebrated with cake and wine, he told her he could give her so much more than someone her own age Alas Elaina turn him down She reminded him that she was still married woman that even if her husband had left her. She had made a commitment in the eyes of God Clearly she took marriage a wee bit more seriously than he did. Taylher tried to sway her describing how he still intended to get well. No get her well and then fly her to the South Seas. But she laughed, You're going to fly me in your plane with no wings Okay, did I mention the plane had no wings? It had no wings More of a cockpit really, like just a cockpit, maybe with some whes than a proper plane Why did he call it a plane? Well, because he was a delusional psychopath When he kept pressing her She then told him plainly, Carl, I think I'm dying She did not want to spend her last days in some weird romance with a weird doctor. wasn't even a doctor,' a fucking technician. She wanted to spend it with her family,. but he would refer himself as a doctor U still Elena didid not want to be unkind. She thought he had done a lot for her, so she did invite him to her sister' wedding But when he got there, or I guess, and when he got there, she introduced him to the groom. U and then she kept, you know, serving drinks and talk to other guests. And by the end of the night, he was fucking annoyed. So annoyed, he turned to her and said that she was too sick to host parties, excuse me. she needed to rest, recuperate, and marry him Let's get married and let's get away from this. he told her Before Lana could respond, her mother declared that no daughter of hers was ever going to marry an American orr fucking weir German guy and that if Elena did get married again, her husband would be cid And that was that or should have been Tanzer stocker ass didn't quit. The next time he saw her, he brought her a pearl necklace, probablyro not the kind of pearl necklace he wanted to give her. and he sent over his radio So she could listen to music He wrote her letters sprinkled equally with declarations of love and medical advice Here is one of those Uh My darling, Elena. Please don't deceive yourself that all is well. even if you feel that way Don't throw caution into the wind Your enemy is an invisible one. He can only be seen by a trained scientific ey And he can only be fought in a scientific manner. Please, Darling Do not listen to irresponsible advice I know there are quacks around who are suggesting all kinds of magic cures which have their common source in ignorance Pace Take the medicine I am sending and do come back to the hospital for a new checkup Dr. Lambard two He wants to see you. I amm working on our airplane in my spare time. It is now nearly completed and the next time you come I will give you the key for the cabin and we shall Officially Tit in it Th then too, I am already collecting the things we are going to need on our wedding trip Press this for you And a bridle gown which is all white silk Ail the rest of your tousseau even lingerie Silver slippers And last but not least, all of your medicines like kinisool and adrenaline and glucose, beef, extract and all the rest of it Forever yours Hor That's c This dude is a real fucking creep. Prionate, lingerie, dude. She's twenty one twenty to this point. he's fifty three or fifty four. She is literally dying. The only reason she ever fucking saw him with medical treatment Right? He was just her radiology te technologist giving her free treatment Soon, Elena was missing appointments though at the Marine hospital, and making excuses to no longer go. One excuse was that her father's car wasn't working. Tans or sent over a taxi Th Elena said, Wow she didn't trust the taxi company He didn' he still didn't get the hit So he drove over in his own car to get what she hid from him. She wanted nothing to do with of course she didn't. R? I'm sure he's scared the shit out her. She's dying She's right? She had just lost her baby nothing longer her husband had fucking has desured her She shouldn't have long left to live. She she wanted to spend with her family and not this weird motherfucker Elena wrote him a short letter though, apologizing and saying that she would be happy to see him at her house if he wanted to swing by later. She was too nice Right? That never works, that approach with these cannot take a hint delose on motherfuckers When he did stop by, Tanza was frustrated by the numerous other people around All the people preventing him from having Elena to himself. Now, with Lena getting sicker and sicker, refusing treatment, Tanzer soon worried his time with her was running out. Right? He was making her death all about him. By the beginning of nineteen thirty one, he was routinely having dreams that he had discovered Elena dead and brought her back to his laboratory to see if he could bring her back to life. So that's fun then Elen hiss family moved to a new house, possibly to get the fuck away from him, you know, Now he couldn't find them For some reason, they didn't tell him where they'done. Apparently night after night, he now went around looking in people's windows like the ghoul he truly was hoping to catch a glimpse of her. fininally did poorlena lay in bed in the brink of death. This dude's out in bushes, watching through a window, probably hard as a rock At this point, Tanzer did not care if her parents wanted him around or not He fel like he had to see So he just let himself in the house You walk inside. Aslena's mother tried to get relie took her blood press pulse was weak. There was a nasty looking abscess on her leg He didn't want to overexcite her then Or so he would claim and now he left Or maybe his mom kicked him out. Uh, But then the next day He came back with fruit and cakes for Lena So I don't know what the fuck's going on. She would only eat a little bit though Then the day after that, he had a huge bed delivered, along with a large mosquito net, silk sheets and cushions and a dresser. apparently he talked his way again into being around the family, talked to her family and explained that he was gonna to save her Uh, And then he wanted to shock her literally Taner thought he could cure her with a primitive for of elect electroshock therapy now which Laina understandably hated but did endure She did allow him to perform treatments on her anyway. And this is the guy who was warning her about quQacks m Magic cures During one of these treatments, she supposedly, again, according to Tanzer, asked him something. Sane. If I must die All I can leave you is my body. For I'm only a sick girl, so I can't marry you while I'm sick. You will take care of my body after I'm dead, won't you Did you say that I'm gonna to literally bit my life that never happened. May I be struck dead right now if that happened God Satan, Mommed Hindu God with fucking lots of weird arms h creepy rapees. S gotott, anyone, anyone listening All right, still lifeive. Gess never happened According to Tanzer He promised her that they would take care of her body and death now And it was the most sacred promise he'd ever made in his life It was what he considered their marriage vowl He was so batched With that crazy Carl decided it was time to get a ring for Nhering. On october eleventh, nineteen thirty one, he bought another ring, headed over to Alenas with it, but to his horror. He found Elaine was out H dad had decided to take her for a walk that a few days later october sixteenth when he came over again He was furious to learn Elena's dad had taken her out of the house another time, it's time for a drive. It's almost like they were trying to get away from him By Friday, october twenty third Elaina was exhausted and drifting and out of consciousness And then on Sunday October twenty fifth She passed away to the age of just twenty two Tanzer had just finished paperwork at the hospital when Mio Elena's br in law rushed over and told him the news. Clearly as fucking weird as he was, because he'd done so much to try and keep her alive, there were those in Eanda's family who appreciated him more than I wish they did At around five PM Tanzer reached Elena's house. You could hear people moaning and screaming from a block away. The lawn was crowded with a bunch of people inside, Lanna lay in her bed, a distant far away look in her Dad eyes Tanzer is devastated He claim that he paid for the funeral. And it seems if he probably did And if he did, it likely was not motivated out of generosity for her family was selfish And all part of his obsession. It meant that now he got to pick the rose colored silk line casket, the flowers, he got to make decisions about how she would be displayed Likely he probably changed her outfit himself Gross And again, remember, he is doing all of this while sending zero money to his wife and two kids that he had dragged across the Atlantic, fucking narcissist herer funeral It would be october twenty sixth throughw hundreds of mourners. Throughout it, Carl was remarkably weirdly calm Even as he sat beside her coffin, there was still a part of him that you know, told him Eelena wasn't really dead This feeling was reinforced by the procession of cars that drove from the funeral home to the cemetery. It felt like to Carl more like a wedding than a funeral Before the coffin slid shut, he slipped a letter inside that read My love for you is greater than ever. You are now free from all your fetters and you are free to go where you wish Elena, please come to me, sweetheart. I long so much for you. Tell me, what shall I do? As I cannot live without you. Will you have me, darling Then take me, or you come to me and stay with me until I can go with you, my sweetheart, Elena wasn't just creep he deeply unwell Elena was buried at the Star of the Sea Catholic Church of smallall Cemetery Afterwards, Tanzler went right back to Elena's house He asked her parents if he could rent her old room. And they agreed Be they badly needed the five dollars five a month that he would pay them My Godd That's so insane How many times do you think he buried his nose in her sheets to sniff her scent while also jerking off? How many times a night Anyone else thinking at least twice. S a creed Or Gless romantic. Adoring Loyal up to and beyond their suitor. As he lid in a lavish bed, he had bought her, his mind returned to the promise he had made her to take care of her body Carl took this to mean he had to keep hern a state of perfection But as we all know, bodies decay And in the fllorid to heat, you know, she was going to decay faster than many So how was he supposed to take care of her body in a moment of inspiration. He realized that it was his duty to erect a grand mausoleum, both as a testament of his love for her and as a way to remove her from the grave So he bought a large plot around Elena's grave, big enough for a family tomb and hired a mason to help him bring his vision to life and he would pay that Mason with money that should have gone to his kids. But There was a problem with his plan. I mean, there are actually so many problems. But there wass one main problem I'd like to talk about next Because Tanzer planned to build the orrnate cryp over the plot where Elena was currently buried He had to get a disinternment permit to remove her body from her underground grave So with the Joyoz family and the state Florid' permiss Eena now made her second trip to a funeral home She will wait there for three months while construction took place completed the final version looked more like a family house than a tomb. with a sloping roof held up by ornate Greek pillars and a door with a triangular window He hadd also decided that he would have Elena rebed it. in another casket into this other more expensive casket. He put new sheets, pillows, sterile cotton, gauze, more chemicals and sprays to preserve her. He also put in jewelry he' had given Elena while she was still alive And now now it's time to open the old casket. Working with the mortician, Tanzler eed the casket open And he would later write As the first step I spray diluted formin all over the shrouded body in ample quantities. This was for disinfection, and also to harden the body tissues before we undertook to detach from the skin the drapery, which had become glued to it Kay had said in in a most disheartened manner Only with the greatest care, I was able to peel the pieces of textile from the body This took hours We then lifted the body out of the coffin and laid it on a table on a clean sheet Having sprayed the body all over again, I now proceeded to sponge her face with a specially prepared solution and also her hands and feet Dismay I discovered that in view of the damage already done Much more cleaning was required than we could do in one night. I had it the morg at my disposal When morning came, my sweet bride was free from all outward signs of decay and from that of odor When the mortician came to work, we placed her on thick layers of cotton after I sprayed her form all over with 'aud de Cologne. We now covered it all around with similar layers. They then lifted her into the new coffin But if the mortician thought the task was over now, Tanzer would surprise him with a follow up request He needed another night, alone. in the embalming room. And you apparently get this night alone in the morgue a few days later On that night, he took Elena out of her coffin again, probably jked off, maybe Mlees her corpse, almost certainly did not pull out and try to make a zombie baby. And he definitely put her in something called an incubator tank. Then he poured a quote nourishing body cell solution into the top of the tank until it was completely fulled Not sure what the solution was, some recipe of his own mad scientist making. And with that, he was satisfied that Elena's process of decomposition had been fully halted The next day, he had her transported into his special vault Outside in a custom made headstone, it read Elena, Milagrojoyos Born, july thirty first, nineteen oh eight, died october twenty fifth, nineteen thirty one, RIP Count D Casle. which is what he was calling himself now Yes, this motherfucker put his own fake name on her gravestone. He signed her fucking mausoleum likeike her corpse was his art piece And now he has a new problem If Elena's body was perfectly preserved, and her mausoleum was built, what was Tanzler supposed to do with his free time pp his kids? Yeah, right what would we get out of that Possibly their love, possibly the adoration of two people. He didn't even want to fuck. No, thank you U for the next eighteen months. He would simply spend most of his free time sitting next to her tomb totally normal. Tanza would say he had some interesting experiences during that time. Yeah I bet he did One evening, as he was sitting in the floor to heat, he said he heard a loud crash from inside the tomb He said he then went inside and saw that the locks that held the metal caset closed had sprung open And this to Tanzer was evidced that Elena playing a practical joke on him And when you heard a tapping come from inside of the coffin, well, that seemed to confirm that Interesting conclusion, to jump to first What is she doing while dead? Not coming back to visit her parents, not checking in on her sisters. Oh, no, no. no, she's com back to play a practical joke on her weird stocker The Tans were immediately opened the coffin Oh which was actually two boxes an innerbox and an outerbox. And as soon as he opened the innerbox, he smelled a pleasant perfume like fragrance, like a young woman's skin on a warm summer's day, he said After that, he started talking to Elena And one day, when he put his ear against the valve of the inner coffin He could have sworn, he heard her talking back to him. He was losing what little was left of his mind. h That was all Carl said he needed to spring back into action. Now he would spend his days buying l a presents. Oh deliver them back to her tomb. Hkerchiefs, a Spanish shawl, comb, cases of makeup. You know, I'd be? the usual shit that zombies crave thenen soon he would see something else This very stable minded, you know man wrote I change my visiting hours further into the night It was the time of the full moon And the cemetery was almost as brightly lit as in daytime So it could not have been that my eyes deceived me when on my next visit I saw a veiled white figure at the entrance to the tomb As he moved closer to this figure, he started he said it started moving closer to him And then he was just a few feet away figure disappea Oh haa more practical jokes. Oh just a jokeser now that you did U He said he could hear Allena's voice still, though singing to him after this apparition disappeared, calling to him, telling him she wanted to be with him. And so now Carl made a new plan On Easter Wekend nineteen thirty three, april fifteenth or sixteenth Carl waited for the sun to set, and then he put on a freshly ironed tuxedo This is so fucking crazy Uh Next, he double checked everything he'd assembled before taking a wagon, blanket cushions, and rope into the cemetery. Th then he went into the mausoleum What he did next was pretty difficult because the coffins you know were very heavy, so Carl pushed, shoved, pulled, finineally maneured the inner coffin. onto the grass outside of the tomb He then loaded Elena's corpse Oo the little wagon he brought Before it departed, he put the blanket and the crucifix on the top of the casket and then he was off in his memoirs written in Zeh Hills, Florida afterfter he would leave Key West He would write about how he felt that very night Oh, I was hard that night, dear God, I was so hard Throbbing felt like it was going to pop. We then went at it, like animals, or rather like one animal. Furiously humping a dead and rotting carcass. A dead and rotting perfect super sexy carcass I'm pretty sure I came into her brain that night And then sixty or so seconds later, a small creature crawled out. From betwixt her legs, a baby, a zombie baby And it called out for me, Father And I took it into my arms And I held it as I walked to the nearest sewer grate. You sit it down I pressed it into the opening. I kicked it until I kicked it through the grate Now I know not What has become of it since. Here's what he really wrot A wonderfully elated feeling took complete possession of my entire being as though a second spirit had entered my soul It seemed that a bodyguard of veiled angels had formed on both sides and were coming along with us and a great inspiration, filled me then It made me feel like a victor Holding the triumphal entry in a world forgotten and buried, I felt secure, protected and invulnerable. No matter what was coming against us now, nothing could harm either one of us anymore There was no place for the living here on this blackest of knights All of the cemetery was alive with souls which came out of the graves from all sides moving and thronging all around us Slla Slla not They were everywhere, none blocking our way, but all of them melting out of our way. It was as if we were delighted and desirous to help us if they were The little cart for all its weight seemed almost to run by itself Oh what this jolly little festival thing happen here. R responded to the slightest touch of my hand, which gave me the impression of being aided on by friendly hands reaching out of the ground. Oh all the corpses are helping him get his corpse bride. It's like a fucking weird Tim Burton animation When hed almost got herody out of cemetery, disaster struck As Carl struggled to get the coffin over the cemetery fence, he sank into the mud And then the whole load fell on top of him and a foul smelling liquid dripped all over him Most men would have vomited here Prob turned Cl on. maybe used his lbe and jerk off You probably loved it was a len it, phallous smelling liquid Finally After whatever he did, Carl was able to get the casket over to a little house. he had rented it for this exact purpose, a away pointoint Since there was no running water, it was more a shed than the house. I had to wash himself and his clothes with a bottle of whiskey he found on the shelf And then leaving her body there, he headed home Walking in the dark streets of Key West in his liquor and corpse fluid soaked wedding tuxedo on his way to the room, he still rented from Elena's parents. Once inside Stuck in the bathroom R your dof scrub down h wasash their dead daughter's fluids off of him Next day left the coffin what it was But the day after that, he took Elena's corpse from the rented house and loaded her into a large sedan. Come fly with me and be my wife, my heart, thy resting place will be. an old German song. Carl's mother used to sing to him, played over and over in his mind, as he pulled onto the hospital grounds and up next to his small plane, but really just a small part of a small plane where he loaded Elena's body into the cabin. Around her were all the things that she would need to be, quote cozy, her clothes, bridal dress, veil flowers, jewelry and stockings After getting her situated, he then started taking her out of the coffin And how did Elena Hoyos look two years after her death Not good Really not fucking good, very, very rotten. M Mallo M moreth day. Ami up his torsa Despite essentially being in a vat special solution U She look like fucking shit Of course she did. She's been dead, you know, for long, long, fucking time. A ya Her eyes were deep, empty black holes, her lips were dried up. and it was really, I guess, you know, closer to a year and a half than two years, but still You're in half deead for a long time. Her eyes were deep empty black holes H lips were all dried up. pooked out of her tight and thin lied mouth, her hair glued together and to herself U Maggots, There was maggots, literally feed on her head, ears, stomach Her clothes were basically slimy sludge, some of it glued to her skin. He would spend days now, painstakingly removing bits of cloth from her skin, washing her, dumping the fetted sludge into the ocean When she was finally uncovered, now dead and completely naked, he Kissed her lips And he breathes into her lungs until her chest inflated, or so he say, acclaimed. Reassuring Elena he would love her forever no matter the state of her body This guy is such a ghl. The shit might have made Ed Gean squeamish or vomit Uh he did make some changes now He wanted to replace her eyes which we're basically completely gone. So he used a catalog from the hospital to order two glass ones Then he put splints on Elena's nose, kept it in place with bandages, since it was at risk of kind of melting into her face, you know. Next he straightened out one of her arms, since it had frozen into a cramped up position while she was in the casket Oh, yeah, you're going to be real stiff after this She wasn't doing any yoga there. He also wanted to make a permanent non perishable record of her face, a death mask. He used oil silk to cover her face, eyes and hairs Glass eyes hoping to get a perfect impression of how she looked. Well how she looked up. She's been dead for a long time, whatever. The solution though, then stuck to Allena skin He felt he had no choice but to put oiled silk all over the rest of her body. now, since he believed that it would help discourage maggots and other infestations By this point, Lenaus Korf was basasically a mumm. For months, he would now tend carefully to his mummy, feeding her feeding her vitamins and other solutions that he thought would bring her back to life Oh, vitamins I guess he thought would turn her glass fucking eyes back into real ons According to him, she did look more lively after these treatments In the meantime, some changes at the Marine hospital were about to unsettle Carl's, Everyday existence, the commander of the Naval station. which the hospital was a part of died, and his successor was much younger did not kiss corpses and refused to allow Tanzer to contin continue storing his partial airplane on government property But there was an upside to this. It did allow Tanler to now figure out a place for him and Elenus to live together After telling Elaina hiss parents goodbye, he moved out of their place into a new house, sort of open shed on the beach And he brought his partial airplane with him. In fact, Mario Medina would actually help him move the plane Hving no idea that he was helping Carl steal his sister in law's remains Meanwhile in Zhy Hills, one of Carl Tanzer's two daughters A poor little girl named Crystal suddenly died of diphtheria. Oh, well, not his problem He's busy enough with one corpse Doris and her grieving family thought that Carl would surely come back to the funeral especially after Doris wrote him, asking him to do so, asking for his support But he did not go to the funeral nor did he send a single dime was entirely devoted to Elena And he needed to save his money. Right to fucking bring her back to life So he continued to live in his ghoushed now with his corpse bride schoolshed. had once been part of the old butcher pens where cattle were slaughtered in the area. theirir blood flowing directly to the sea is perfect. L least was on theach though This ghoul shed and in Carl's half plane is where Carl and Elena would live together for two years as Carl renovated this place, built a laboratory that would include a volt transformer, x ray machine, operating table And then he would also, you know, go to work the hospital when he wasn't at work, taking in beautiful sights of the Alantic Ocean, he was naturally working on Elena He wrote All work in Elena has been for the purpose of arresting and delaying further deterioration of the body tissue. Mummification had partially set in. this, however, was not beyond resurrection The revival of the dried up cells merely consumes, and I never gave up hope while I have a will. Now I began mixing plasma solutions in sufficient quantities, adjusting, testing, cooling, heating elements So he still thought He could resurct. after giving her body a long bath in this plasma solution. He would take a lan out, put it on his x ray table for a five minute radiation treatment. h thenen return her to her incubation tank Truly mad scientist shit He might have just fucking mail the shit up What's he doing all of this? Did he actually have enough electricity in his fucking ghoul shed to run this equipment. we don't know Either way, Tanzer was convinced that he was closer than ever to bring her back to life After all U A allie said, her once gone body was now plump with fluid taking her from sixty pounds to around ninety pounds. Oh, yay! She was plum enough to pump out two more zombie babies after she and Carl made love on occasions where he did not pull out. And again, he kicked them through sewer grates and they scurried off to dude God knows what while he went on with his life To supplement his treatments, play a l of music believing that the vibrating sound waves would help further restore her But then another problem arose A new obstacle in Carl's very reasonable resurrection scheme By nineteen thirty five, with the end of the Great Depression, still nowhere in sight T West trolleys had shut down. eighty percent of his population was unemployed Public services like police officers, firemen, sitation pretty much non exist. The city' once famous cigar factories had moved to Tampa And the only other industry, the sponge industry randomly ended up getting fucking wiped out by marine disease And that meant of course, a sharp rise in crime keey West residents, many of them already used to stealing here and there to make ends meet, now started venturing into people's homes and vehicles and soon Tanzer felt it was only a matter of time before someone came in and discovered Elena in his ghous shed and took her before he could realive her So he dismantled the incubation tank Tk her out, wrapped her again in silk So, you know, fucking asshole insects would not further desicate her Around this time, he also lost job at the Marine hospital due to cupbeacks Although we still had some form of income, some mysterious checks kept arriving potentially he's getting paid for possible service in the German Army during World War I. if he didn't actually go to Australia for as long as he said. but I think he probably did. He's probably getting some form of inheritance Anyway, some kind of money And now we cut to Christmas, nineteen thirty five. It was a quiet one Tans are decorated a little Christmas tree with silver tinsel, cotton snow, little candle little wax candles He wrapped up a pile of gifts. Christmas Eve He hadd been feeling festive so he'd opened a bottle of wine, took a sip, went over to Elena's body and baby birded it into what was left of her mouth U What's you wear in laundry Well, he did that, you think? It's not impossible. He had been with her corpse daily now for over thirty two months Over two and a half years She was dead for over four The nineteen thirty six would bring more changes, more in addition to further decomposition peace and solitud, Tenszer enjoyed his home on the beach, was interrupted further in nineteen thirty six by workers from FDR's Works proroject administration. Damn you bastards The program they were employed by was designed to give steady paychecks to people who work for the government, who in turn would spend those paychecks on consumer goods, which would jump startart at the economy in theory, and to a large extent it did One of the greatest governmental decisions in the history of this country, in my opinion, did so much for our infrastructure, gave so many Americans blue collor jobs In Key West, workers were recruited to create, amongst other things, massive public arts projects as well as to clean up the beaches. And all those people on the beach made it impossible for Tanzer to keep up with his experiments on Elena and to make things even worse, the person in charge seemed to have a grudge against him h he said they dynamided something on the bef that shook the walls of his ghoul shed. No longer feeling safe, he decided he had to move And he found a new place in flagg the raf, about about two miles oldld town Another wooden shack. anotherother goul shed. Ghoul shed two But tanzer didn't mind, most important thing was that it was secluded betweenetween april thirtieth and may twenty eighth, nineteen thirty six, he moved his supplies over there. One settled into his new ghoul shed. There wouldn't be enough room for the partial airplane to poke into the structure. I guess he'd been keeping her in the cockpit most times when she wasn't getting treatments brought Allena into the bedroom now bedroom He would sleep with her every night, occasionally discovering that she had leaked a little bit of a fluid But he would refill it. In the mornings, he would play organ music for her as one does He would make breakfast eched toast and tea, which he would leave on her bedside table, but she barely nibbled on it june first, nineteen thirty eight Carl wrote an interesting letter about this time I've done it. She has given birth to two zombie babies One I kicked into the sewer. The other I keep up here in the cage. My laboratory in three days time, it has grown as big as its father. Feeding only on dead rotting flesh I found along the beach I am to keep it and use its organs and pieces for my sweet bride. Yes, Eureka. I shall rebuild the mother from the child. The mother from the child, I tell you, I'll rebuild the mother from the child. My bride would yet live again Here's what he really wrote dear sister. Yes, he's righting his sister. U Last night I had a dream But it seem more like reality I spent the whole night with father and mother Elena too was with me. We were talking quietly and peacefully when Elena who had been in a deathli comauh woke up suddenly It was wonderful to see her relation in this new world. She was wear a pink dress The color of her eyes had changed from dark brown to blue Now as I write this down, I have a feeling that I have moved and I am standing right in the threshold of this eternal space It is as if only a thin veil separates me from it. I am convinced now that mother and father are living happily together in that eternal life. and I am so glad that it has moved so close to me or else I have moved close to it. With love. Your brother Carl Fuck Did his sister know he was living with the corpse now The corpse he romantically loved seems that she might have How would you handle that if it was your brother, right? What would you write back U so would Elena ever really wake up Of course not. fuck, of course not That's not how the shit works. She is maximum dead She's been maxim dead for years But according to Crazy Carl yeah, ye, she did I claim it' soon after that letter to a sitter following the stream As the two lay together in their marital bed. and they' in their death marital bed He saw Elena's hands movving And when he checked her fingers out Her arm supposedly lifted up and pressed firmly against his face Then when he kissed her hand, she opened her eyes, her glass eyes, mind you, and looked at him with eyes that could not see, with eyes that could not have lenses and then attempted to get up push her back down gently her, no, dar You must get your strength back first. And then he went to get her some tea When he came back, she was in that same position, rigid A Was her reawakening over as soon as it had begun Apparely not As he then gave her a bath shortly after this, and went to wrap her in another layer of silk and wax She spoke She said, takeake my bridal dress. It is soiled anyhow Hands are agreed He thought this was a good idea He cut off the soiled parts, wrapped her body in the rest of the dress which he then sealed with wax and balsam Th Elena You can now speak German, apparently began to sing in that language. One particular song was a favorite of his. In English its title translates to How can I partart from Thee? How can I Lave Thee? Oh, he for sure did not hallucinate all of that, did he? Ohh no way Jose D definitely wasn't super fucking insan Not everything was going super well though There were some troubing signs that Carl couldn't ignore It's out the incubat Desication had said it. E lane was dry now Go from ninety down to seventy pounds and to sixty, well then fifty and then maybe a little under forty What real skinn And this worried him and distracted him. And on march second, nineteen forty recently turned sixty three year old corpse fucker, Carl Tanler slipped and fell to the deck frames of a boat he was working on Yeah, he also had a boat, okay? This crazy fuck kind of ghl shed, a second one partart of a plane Corpse bride and a whole boat. Do you even have one of those things No Th what the fuck you do with your life Wastting it. That's what. now Stuck in the boat. and with several broken ribs now. Tanzer was paralyzed with fear What would happen to Elena If he couldn't make it back, would he die? Finally he was able to crawl out and hobble back to the shack. Oh, thank God, she's still there. Elaina's condition and his injury Press him greatlyough thenen in September of nineteen forty, some good new Tanzler heard Elena'so calling out to him again Hide me somewhere, she said He was confused. What She was in bed with him, like always What place could be safer than their bed? And they thought, no, no she's right. My wife is right again. I do need to hide her. Ah I've gotten sloppy I've been buying too much soap, so much soap and jewelry and other presents for a young woman in town. evenven though for all anybody knew, I wasn't dating anybody But how would he keep Allena un comfortable? How would he keep her comfortable and maintain a low profile at the same time Well, some more bad news comes. september twentyentieth, nineteen forty, Tanza received an unexpected visitor. It was Mario Not super Mario, not not a fun Mario, Mario Medina Lain'sother in la U Luckily he didn't go into Carl' broom, D didn't find Elena. But he was there because of Elena. He told Carl, uh oh. Elaine' Tomb H been broken into and her coffin seems to have been tampered with They finally figured this out seven and a half years after it happened Tantra now went with Mario to the cemetery whereere he found her latest sister, Nada mister Bethel, the seexton and mister Pritchard the underndertaker. Erlena Sitcher immediately said she wanted the coffin to be opened. Thankfully, the two cemetery workers on duty did not seem want to get into it pun intended. And they said that things were probably fine Ieed, nobody except for secretly Tanler wanted to see a body that had been dead for roughly nine years now. However, Elena's sister was suspicious. Her suspicion would not go away and three days later, october first, nineteen forty, Nana went to the gravesite again, demanded the coffin be opened. Like her sister, Nana also had tuberculosis. The disease had actually claimed the lives of Alena's parents already. She wanted to make sure that her sister was at peace before she died This time a crowd gathered and Tanzler rushed over The sexton, Mr. Bethel. Handed hands are a piece of rusty iron and a pair of rusty scissors Taner couldn't do He couldn't open it. Instead, he pulled Nuna aside and told her Okay. you can see Eena She's over at my house in bed Mhm Now he told her that as is if she might understand. Oh Well why didn't you say that? a few days ago, you stillill the old necrophiliac goose? Oh my heck gosh, dang' that's great news I just didn't want her body to have been lost Im glad she's been put to good use. Uh Nana and Mario followed him home they walked into the bedroom where Tans are announced Elena was at peace, resting in her silk clothes with all her jewelry Then he pulled back the curtain around the bed And there she was. And Nana was thrilled. She immediately cried tears of joy and hugged Carled, Gracius, Eonb Mararosa U no None I was fucking shock U She could not believe her eyes Her citrus corpse was l than a corpse M more of a patchwork Frankenstein monster Reconstruct with wax and cosmetics. She turned to Tanzler, ask or asked him how long her sister had been there And he was like, seven years Nana is still unable to process what was going on U said no, no, this is not Elena. Uh noope,. she now demanded to go back to the cemety and open the coffin. And then Mario said What's the use You know she's here. Or maybe it happen that way. Again, this is a Tzler's retelling In Tantor's version, Nana calmly asked him to put Elena back in her coffin now But later, both she and Mario would recall being fucking horrified. about what they'd seen when they spoke to authorities They immediately left and Tanzer because he's crazy Carl seemingly believed that everything was going be fine now. that he had shown Nana and Mario, you know, how well he had taken care of Elena, you're welcome. And they obviously would now let him keep her body until he too died at which point they would do the right thing and put the both of them in the mausoleum. For five days, Tonzler just went out with his life Totally oblivious Just thinking everything's gonna to be great feeeding a zombie son in his fucking cage. Thankfully no one had seen him and fucking his corpse bride Oober fifth nineteen forty A motorcate headed by two sheriffs, the then Justice of the Pace and a funeral car Stop in front of Tanzer Shack I know I Taner Tanzer. The sheriff had a warrant charging Tanzer with being in possession of a dead body. Oh, come on, fascists I thought this was the land of the free. homeome of the brave Uh you know, a place for those free and brave enough to take a corpse home and care for it and make love to it for over in seven years. But I guess we live in China As Tanzer was sadly taken into custody Not sure if authorities found a zombie son in the cage or not And if any charges were filed against him for being a zomie Two funeral attendants went into the house and carried Landa's remains out on a wickger basket I guess in one Taner had no idea That would be the last time he would see Elena's body the courthouse Tanza would tell a story Howaelen had died, her burial and disinterment, reintermented the tube. the incubation tank he had made for at his expense, thank you. He would be held on one thousand dollars bail could not afford for quote, wanton and maliciously demolishing, disfiguring and destroying a grave Oh Wh the man live? Who is he hurting Who was he hurting that was still alive? No one Well, Non one until her sister found out at least. Then I guess he's maybe kind of hurting her and probably some other people U This news would spread like wildfire through Southern Florida, drawing crowds of journals and photographers who all wanted to scoop on this strange story. C course it did O october seventh, nineteen forty the addition of the Kywest Citizen. The front page headline read Hold von Kossel on malicious and wanton charges. Warrant served this afternoon. Case attracts interests throughout nation the title kind of a week The article that followed read At a late hour this afternoon, county officials were investigating in the process of law to follow in the case of Carl Van Cosle who has been formally charged with malicious and wanton disfigurement of a burial vault in the city's cemetery when he removed the body of Elaine Joyomesa to his home in defiance of state health laws Elaine, it's Elena What kind of crack pop journalm is Key West was a buzz with T talk today concerning one of the most interesting stories ever to break in this or any other city of the nation. And according to observance, the rest of the nation is going to hear of the story too, for two leading news services have placed it on their wire and telephoto releases to subscribing members Carl Tanzer van Kassel, a resident of Key West for the past ten years is the center of attention here today According to the scientist, he had come to the end of a long trail, which started with a dream he had back in Germany which had compelled him to search the world over for the beautiful lady pictured in that vision He found her in Key West, only to lose her, at least temporarily when she died at the hospital and was buried in the city' cemetery Iish a better journalist would have written that. Better than nothing you th know scientist D go want to describe how he had moved her and live with live with her seven years But nobody knew exactly what was going on there Was Tanzer insane? an extreme, romantic, a mad scientist, all three I think most of the first one h Weirdly enough, a lot of people seem to have a fair amount of sympathy for him After all, this was the era of doomed love. In two years, Casablanca would come out to critical acclaim. We' going to become one of the most enduring romance stories of all time. Some women thought that what T Tanzera had done was marvelously romantic and a crowd of women even came fromamp from Tampa to meet him course I mean, Ted fucking bund had a bunch of fawning admirers, right? Like attracts like, sick, attracts sick Many of these women likely believe that Tanzer was the person he had advertised himself to be, a high born, multi degree genius on the cusp of a scientific breakthrough, the most important of all time. someone who'd figured out how to stop decay, maybe perhaps even death you know, being in the beginning of World War two, many people were eager for some news that had nothing to do with bombings, Nazis, or global chaos The general consensus seemed to be that Tanzer should be freed and Elena's body should be returned to her family's custody Louis A. Harris, local attorney would defend Crazy Carl in court He would fight for Tanzler on october eighth during a hearing at the county courthouse that was presided over by Pace justustice Enrique Escuinaldo, junior. There were three legal aspects that needed to be figured out. The charge of destroying destroying a grave Tansor Sanity and another law that forbade, quote the unauthorized disenttering of a body of a deceased human being t the hearing Elena' ster Flora, Nana Medina would speak, describing how she became suspicious that something was not right with her sister's grave The courtroom shivered As she described what she'd seen at Tanzer's Ghool shed Uh Your honor It was the most grotesque thing I've ever seen in my life Her hair was still on her head. hake glass eyes Her arms and legs were like sticks with stockings. It was a monster It was horrible What I saw will haunt me for the rest of my life Canszra immedily stood up and protested, shouting, How dare you? Don't talk about my sexy bride like that May I remind you that I was happily sleeping with that glass eyed stick limbed monster? For God's sake, our son can hear this. Any number of our kids can hear this right now. they've probably escaped from the sewer. They could be anywhere Of course that never happened. Next, Nana said that she wanted to know What had Tanzer been doing with Lena's body Had he just been sleeping next to it or something else Esquuinaldo asked Taner the same question. Paner vehemently denied that he had molested her corpse then when it Tanzer's time to share his side of the story in full, he painted a story of doomed love How he had met Elena when she'd gotten sick What he had done for her How he had known that she was the woman of his dreams the first time he saw her You brought her back to life, Your Honor. She said, There was always life left in the body, he added, that could be resurrected, even if the physical body was asleep. For some wild reason The justice of the peace did not seem to buy that. Esquuinaldo announced that what was left of Elena would be buried that she was definitely unquestionably very dead. and that the court would convene to decide whether or not to bring Tanzer to trial. Th Tanzs ar asked Now may I have Elena's Body back And the justice steped No No, you may not You may not have the body back You are no relative to Mrs. Hoyes. You have no claim to the body And with that and with that, Tanzler snapped He said this was not justice, that he had done everything for Elena, everything, and that meant that she was his But the court heldirm Melena would be buried at a secret location now and Tanzer could fuck off Meanwhile, hundreds of people from all around swamped the Lopez funeral home to view Elena's infamous remains, which an Orlando newspaper termed past all recognition as a human body modeled by the skillful hands of Van Cossel into a wax like statuette. In her casket, Lana wore a blue Rayon robe and a pair of black houseliippers, a square of cheesecloth. covered her chalky face with its glass eyes and matted wig of short straight, dark brown hair The manager of the funeral home would later say that almost seven thousand people C to see the body and their reaction did not lead to outrage Weirdly enough, reports about Allena's body cause more people to show their support for Tanler and support spread across the states. A goodood reminder that sometimes, oftentimes really the majority of people in a situation, in a culture They actually get shit wrong Jack Hartman Linton and Mrs. Netislton of Deerfield Beach, Florida. and Mrs. M. Selman of New York City wr wrote a joint letter to the quote proper authorities that read in part In these times, with the world's lust to kill and destroy, it is no more than expected for the mob to unjustly crucify But if by miracle, a person such as Professor Von Cossel a profess could succeed in restoring to life a deceased person the greatest discovery of all ages would have been made These fucking idiots. He's not some necromancer The letter continue with Even if the chances be a million to one against his chance of success, it was worth a try was it Past history reveals that most of our great scientists have been unjustly labeled by the majority who could neither follow nor comprehend which in reality was an inner, hidden grudge against anyone who had the courage and intelligence to further the progress of the world I mean, they're actually kind of making an argument, but still don't like it We feel that not only should he be liberated with compensation, but also that he should be permitted to carry on with the subject with the permission of the subject's custodians He should get to keep her corpse and be compensated Tanzer's psychiatric evaluation would take place at the courthouse on Thursday, october tenth wild how the justice system works so fast back in the day. members of the so called Sanity Bard We're Dr. William R. Warren Dr. H.C. Gailey and Mrs. Gilmore Park Secretary to countounty Judge Raymond R. Lord. Their hearing lasted a little over an hour The court, interesting enough would find Carl perfectly san. And then he would be released on october twelfth after two wealthy Kiwest citizens offered up his bail Soon, however, law enforcement would have a little more info about the kind of person Tanza really was when they got a letter from his estranged wife, Doris She said she'd be happy to testify about his sanity and mentioned that quote, his mind is troubled on account of many ways But for some reason, she was never called to testify Seemingly, the court believed Tanzer when he told them that he had separated from Doris back in Germany and later heard that she had moved in with his sister in the US So he got away with being a deadbeat husband Dad as well Tanzer had more lies for the scores of journalists who now wanted to interview him. He said he had a coconut plantation in the South Seas, okay and that he'd almost died in India one time When he was put in a morgue, before heard a man' voice saying he would be buried five o'clock and then woke up ose story bro He claimed he had been originally held at Ellis Island when he hadd immigrated and that his sister in Elizabeth,ew Jersey put up a twenty thousand dollars bond so he'd be let in. He said he stayed in New York for a year, but that was too darn cold The press could not get enough of his stories. They loved him a Havana radio station, CMQ even began running a nightly soap opera based on this whole fucking thing This show caused such a sensation that the Cuban government forced it off the air and then sent a delegation aboard SSQuba to investigate the curious going ons in Q West Not everyone believed Tanzler's tales of Doomed romance Thank God U The headline of the november second nineteen forty edition of Miami Life read Ky Wester used body to gratify sex passion As the article stated, Tanzer was undoubtedly criminally insane. The evidence offered by the effigy he manufactured with cloth, wax, hair and whatnot is damning proof of his perversion of his unspeakable intentions towards the bones of a girl for whom he professed love His next step might be murder for the sake of acquiring another body upon which he might satiate his unearthly and abnormal desires Von Cassel should be put away by American authorities or deported. The latter probably would be the best punishment that could be given him Hail Nimron. Fally, someone speaking some sense Meanwhile, after dockinging the K key West Harbor, october twenty second, nineteen forty Cuban delegation, learn from reading the Miami Herald, the answer to the question, peoplee all over were waiting to find out Van Cassel will not be punished According to theaper, Muro County Grand jury decided Tanzer would not be prosecuted for any more crimes. He was free to go to figure out how to live the rest of his life without his beloved body Tanzer, who had little money left began charging a quarter a person for a grand tour of his home, the ghoul shed he had shared with Llena's corpps, which of course included his own personal commentary But then Key West would become too much for him to handle. He did not care for the notoriety. everyverybody everywhere he went, people accosted him on the streets. notot everybody a fan Some people understood he was a sick fuck So we decided to pack it up and head to Zeher Hills to be with his sister. who is reportedly having health problems And I guess to hide from his estranged wife And you know, his remaining child that he had abandoned since they were also still living there First though before he left you had something to do O'clock in the mor o AM. He snuck in the cemetery, slipped inside the mausoleum that he had built for Lena. Uh wasas that what you were expecting He spent a few hours there reminiscing and resting before he placed a few sticks of dynamite in a timer in a wooden door jam and then headed out april fourteenth, nineteen forty one, Carl left Ky West dressed in his black tuxedo, bow tie in his best Fedora. He began his trek up the overseas highway at nine PM A few hours later, there was a massive explosion Not massive, but an explosion, and part of Eena's tomb, where she was no longer interred was destroyed Carl read about that in the paper. I bet he was satisfied. Actually, he wrote that he was. By the time he got to his sister's house, towing his half built airplane C't fucking likeOvIid behind He was in a good mood. But a sister wondered if him living there was maybe not such a good idea She was horrified by what Tanzer had done, not only to Elena, but to his wife Doris and their teenage daughter who lived just down the road And then as Carl took over her house with his fleet of possessions and equipment, never once offering to help, his sister grew angrier and angrier Meanwhile, unable to work on his memoirs with his sister banging around the house He retreated out to the yard and got into his airplane to write them and now he's living in the cockpit of his still not rebuilt small plane, parked at his sister's yard As all of this was happening, the war in Europe was heating up and by nineteen forty two, the US. was in the thick of it because a German in an airplane, even a small unfinished one looked somewhat suspicious. Tanzer was ordered by the government to take the wheels off his plane which then tilted the cabin at an uncomfortable angle Soon he had an unexpected visitor Doris. Apparently not mad at him as she could have been, Doris took the initiative and brought him to the place where his daughter, Crystal had been buried She cried softly as he quietly looked down for the first time at their child's burial place Soon, he would make a memorial for her a simple arch. with the cross on top the red Crystal Tanzler, our darling U Not exactly Mausleum for the slab you placed in a handmade cement urn Tanzer being Tanzer though, mostost of his energy would still be devoted to one thing, his memoir about Elena. While he waited for publishers to get back to him, he made watercolors Images of him and Elena flying to heaven Oh fun portraits of her in the ocean Then sometime in nineteen forty four, Tanzer moved away from sister's house to a little place of his own after freeloading there for three fucking years He moved into a rural residence still in Pasco County Florida Still never did shit to help his remaining daughter, that worthless fuck This move allowed him to erect a suitable indoor shrine to Elena now Somet his sister refused to allow him to do in her home for some reason On a long table inside this crude little house, he put Elena's casket and inside the casket, he put one of his plastter death masks to topop a remake of her body. Fuck He won't quit. On top of the coffin were pictures of her from when she was alive, her rosary and crucifix hung on the wall. Meanwhile, fantastic adventures this pulp publication agreed to print the secret of Elena's tomb his memir One of the sources we use for this. In Tanzer's letter requesting money, he said the manuscript was seventy thousand words, including illustrations But only about thirty seven thousand words and no illustrations would show up in the published version It was upsetting for him But it was the only deal he could get for That same year, nineteen forty four in Key West, both Mario and Floranda Nana, Medina Dite Mario was executed, accidentally, february twelfth, trying to rescue a fellow worker when the crane he was operating hit a power line Nana, who had been ill for quite some time, sucumbed succumbed to all Jesus Christ, succb to tuberculosis On april twenty third at the age of forty And with that, the entire Hoyos family was dead And so where did Elena end up? Three people were entrusted with her burial. Key West pololice Chief Bian Venito Perez, Lopez funeral home undertaker, Benjamin Sawyer and Cemetery Sxton Otto Bethel. The three people promised each other that they would never ever reveal where she had been reburied In order to hide the burial further, they dismembered Elena put what was left of her into an eighteen inch square casket, which was buried more discreetly Some think she was buried somewhere in the old cemetery others thinks she was buried behind one of Keywest's oldest hes. some think she was buried behind the Catholic Church On september fifth, nineteen forty seven, the quirky pulp publication featuring Crazy Carl's story hit the newstands. Once again, he's in the limelight. But what little money he had made didn't last long And soon he was destitute, unable to afford rent or food But His estranged wife, Doris, would step in to save him She would give him two dollars and fifty cents a week, even though he did not fucking deserve it. two dollars fifty cents from her fifteen dollar a week salary, and she would keep them alive Ugh why? nineteen fifty Carl, now seventy three years old received his certificate of United States citizenship with a peculiar addendum Typed on the back of his citizenship papers was notification of a name change. He'd wanted to change his name for years now from Karl Tanzer to Karl Tanzer von Kossel be precise. Two years later, FCarl had not showed up for his daily walks around town Two neighbors checked in his checked his home. They found mail piling up on the front porch. They called a sheriff who found Tanzer's badly decomposing body lying on the floor next to the casket. He was seventy six and the sheriff immediately started fucking his corpse It was what car would have wanted And now a new zombie baby was made, wouldould it grow up and find its half siblings further south? Not sure The date of death on Carl's certificate would be listed in july, nineteen fifty two, exact day unknown. And so on august fourteenth, Tanzer was now buried at the Zephyhill Cemetery near his daughter Crystal, did not deserve that Doris would not pass away until nineteen seventy seven. Nearly three decades later and she would still be buried next to him. Never remarry Now it's finally answereder the question you've been asking yourself this whole time, did he actually did Carl Tanzler? Really Not kidding Zombie bab jokeside. Did he fuckle in his corpse Well for a long time, nobody knew Stories about Tanza circulated for years after his death, after all, pretty wild story And the age of Pulp magazines, it proved ample fodder for exaggeration and speculation of all sorts But it was the Tropic magazine article by John Dorschner that appeared on Sunday, march fifth, nineteen seventy two that confirmed something that had been whispered about for years. The author of the article interviewed Dr. Duu, who belatedly told what he had found during Elena's autopsy. This one conducted after her body was taken out of Carl's home neearly a decade after she'd actually died. And the doctor said regarding her lady parts The breast really felt real In the vaginal area, I found a tube wide enough to permit sexual intercourse At the bottom of the tube was cotton and in an examination of the cotton, I found there was sperm Then I knew we were dealing with a sexual pervert Maybe Dr. Duapoo would have been forced disclose the results of the autopsy, H had Tanzer been brought to trial, but he never was And the doctor didn't volunteer the information at the time, right? in nineteen forty, a lot more taboo to talk about dude fucking a did body Making this less likely to be sensationalism, another doctor would confirm what that article claimed The romantic necrophilac of Key West An article written by Dror Fker said the following, I attended this autopsy on the desesiccated corpse, which had a reconstructed face, breasts, arms, legs, trunk, and vaginal tube constructed so that intercourse could be simulated you're finished I have searched the forty to fifty years of accumulation of literature in sex crimes and related problems and have found no case, as yet similar to this one For years. That sick fuck was fucking. the corpse of a young woman who had never, ever even wanted to kiss him. Someone who just wanted to live Live without him Sone whose family wouldn't have given him the time a day had they not been poor and desperate to keep her life You knew that, right You knew that he wasn't having non sexual sleepovers without corpse, just like you knew that Michael Jackson wasn't having non sexual sleepovers with a lot of the kids he groomed. Why is MJ catching a stray right now? Well, probably just becausecause he's on my mind. Thanks to that thriller reference. B boom ba Banna And with that Let's get out of the zombie filled timeeline. Good job, soldier. You've made it back Barely arl Taner, what a creey fucker One of the funnest things to me about this episode is that since most information about how Tanzer grew up came to America, excuse me, Medelena lived alongside her corpse comes from Tanzer himself He should have been able to present himself in the best light possible to make it seem like, you know, maybe he's doing kind of a good thing in some way And yet he still comes across as a completely batched insane creep Still comes across as anhle Why? Because there is no way for this story to not come across as crazy and creepy. Dead bodies are dead And the fact that they are something to be disposed of safely for health risks and for the mental well being of those they leave behind is literally encoded into our human functioning Indeed, the sensation that drives us away from ited body is an evolutionary survival mechanism called the Behavioral Immune systemy, a suite of various psychological adaptations designed to detect the presence of disease causing parasites and pathogens, triggering a strong emotional response of disgust It's that disgust that has prevented us and our ancestors from lingering around corpses largely, therefore minimizing our exposure to whatever killed the person. It's a survival instinct The way to bury them or otherwise dispose of bodies, the traditions around that process. have always varied from culture to culture and there are some cultures likeike the Taraja of Indonesia, who keep the bodies of their deceased relatives inside their homes for weeks or months, or even years. While they save up the money, the expensive water buffalo required for an elaborate funeral requires Every few years, families practice a second funeral, they exhume their ancestors from their stone tombs, clean the mummies, brush the hair, dress them in fresh clothes, sometimes add in accessories like sunglasses, which I've seen in videos on YouTube and they walked into the village to take new family photos. and it's fucking creepy These cultures demonstrate that human culture can clearly, entirely override biological programming by teaching children from a newborn age that an ancestal corpse is a safe Uh, you know, a fucking thing to have around You know, the psychological disgust mechanisms or disgust mechanisms are replaced with feelings of comfort, duty, deep emotional connection But to go against this instinct when you haven't been raised that way living in a culture where people do that regularly and have for you know fucking generations, that requires a deeply different mind than most people have. And by all accounts, Carl Tanzler had that such mind This in all likelihood was present from the beginning from the first time he latched onto the story of the white woman. that his mom perhaps told him as a child. Rather than feel fear or disgust or unease, Carl felt desire, attraction, maybe even lust for the dead It is possible that no matter what era he hadd been born into, Carl would have done something deeply strange when it came to dead women But there are a few unique factors that made the time he lived in particularly aligned to his sensibilities For one, there was a newly booming funeral industry, right? We talked about that during the Civil War, as soldiers and their families wanted bodies return home for burial, new techniques emerged to preserve those bodies, including an arsenic based fluid pump through the corpse's arteries, which resulted in them looking remarkably lifelke, almost like they were sleeping people, the display of bodies, what we now call an open casket funeral, became a key part of the grieving process, allowing families to spend time with their loved ones before the burial By the time of Jessica Midford's essay on funeral practice, however, that had expanded to making the bodies better Funeral homes used specialized products to erase signs of illness that had taken them, plumping their cheeks, giving them what essentially amounted to a tan they may have never had in life All of this introduced a new level of psychological complexity How do you balance your instinct to get away from a dead body with your love for the person who was once encased in that body And how do you navigate those things when the body looks so remarkably lifelike, especially in the case of tuberculosis, where beauty standards were literally rearranged around the appearances of those infected with this fatal illness. This experimentation with embalming also may made it seem, especially to the wider world that didn't know as much about medical or funeral technology If you could make the body look like itself or even look better Bringing the body back to life Maybe not that far off Indeed, many people would come to think that Carl Tanzer may have been on the verge of a scientific breakthrough onlyn he'd been given more time. In reality though Hananser was up to something much worse. We know now, thanks to the candor of a few physicians that he was having sex with Lena's body whichich makes him more of a Jeffrey Dahmer type ghoul than it does some kind of Dr. Frankenstein, corpse revivor, Albert Einstein like genius Also, which stories about what Carl tried to do with Linda's corpse were even true? Did he Sent as much time try to bring Elena back as he claimed Did he really experiment on her that much? or was he spending most of his time satisfying his own dark, perverse carnal urges? Did he really think Elena wanted him to protect her body, or did he come up with that when so much the world started to view his story as romantic Was he a deeply strange, mentally unwell person who had somehow convinced himself that his love story was one for the ages Or was he more like all the other dirt bags dirt bags we've covered here Did a culture that wanted romance in the wake of the Great Depression and the beginning of World War II simply see what they wanted to see in Tanzler? And Tanzer eagerly took them up on that And most importantly, did he bring a number of zombie babies to life and kick most of them into the sewer Did he just abandon them? like he'd abandoned his living human children Are those zombie babies still somewhere down in the Florida swamps? Should we be looking for them? Are they related to Florida man? We'll probably never know the answ So a lot of these very important questions In the absence of that, all we can say is rest in peace, Elena Hoyos Hopefully the rest of her family is resting in peace as well, together somewhere, getting to enjoy music and family the way they did in life not having their corpses Fucked by some psychotic necrophile ghoul. Time for today's takeaways Time suck, top five takeaways Number one Mysterious, possibly quite educated, possibly aristocratic. although possibly none of those things, Carl Tanzler became obsessed with Elena Djoyos as soon as he met her. belieelieving her to be the mysterious figure, the white woman entity from his childhood, a spectral ghostly woman That was, you know, promised to him If we can believe that Number two, Alinida Hoyos was never into Carl at all. Even based on Tanzra's memoir recollections, we still know she didn't like him like he liked her She might not have liked him at all, not even platonically. Tanzer wrote that she loved the gifts he gave her and enjoyed his company, but did she? Did she actually take the gifts because she liked them or liked him or because for whatever reason, she felt it would be rude not to He proposed to her many times, she never accepted She claimed that that that was because, you know, in God's eyes, she was already married was that true I doubt it I think she' just be nice. She was less than half his age, way out of his league. She looked like a beauty queen truly, and he truly looked like a guy who would rob a grave and fuck a beauty queen's corpse Number three Ky West back in the day was an interesting place While known primarily for being one of the homes of a writer Ernest Hemingway, Keywest's unique way of life was embraced by many of its residents, who sometimes held normal jobs, like working in the area's cigar factories, but often went without steady work and fished for abundant seafood, you know, just scavenged for food, foundound of shipwreck supplies that they traded for food, slept outside, made do with whatever they could scrouge around from, you know what they could find. veryer eccentric place Number four, Carl's infamy stretched far beyond Ky West, thanks to press coverage of the Wild story. News of Elena's mummification and how Tanzer had essentially lived alongside a dead body for seven years, spread across the country and the reception was largely Positive Yeah, most people fell along one of two fell into one or two camps. Either they believe that Carl, given the proper time and equipment, actually could resurrect Elena, or they believe that what Tanzer did was unbelievably romantic They didn't know the special equipment though, that he'd set up with her so he could have sex with her dead body, to be fair On the second issue, some of the blame undoubtedly goes to the cultural iconography, including movies like Casablanca that presented persisting undying love as the most romantic thing possible Do you think That's what Carl was, a hopeless romantic I hope not The number five, new info Of course, many of us have probably heard stories of people who have come back from the dead AKA been resuscitated after their heart has stopped beating Meaning they've been brought back from cardiac death as doctors call it that usually has to happen pretty quickly as opposed to, you know, years after you've died You know, after your eyes have rotted out of your head And you know have glass ones and weigh forty pounds Generally, spending more than thirty minutes dead and coming back without major brain damage is incredibly rare. But in some specific circumstances, people have been resuscitated after many hours and made a full recovery This happens in cases where cardiac arrest has been combined with hypothermia. Hypothermia occurs when the core body temperature drops below ninety five degrees Fahrenheit, and on its own, it can be very dangerous causing the heart and lungs to fail, which of course eventually leads to death But if the heart has already stopped on its own, hypothermia can actually have some upside The cold temperatures slow down the body's metabolism, protecting our delicate brain cells from dying after using up all their oxygen The longest known reported case of successful resuscitation after cardiac arrest and accidental hypothermia for a full neurological recovery is of a thirty one year old man identified in sources only as Roberto During an attempts during an attempt, excuse me, to climb the face of Maralada in the Italian Dlomites on august twenty sixth, twenty seventeen. And the Dolomites, by the way, gorgeous mountains. My God. U Roberto and his climbing partner identified in sources as Alessandro caught off guard by a freezing summer thunderstorm. When Alessandro clambered to safety, Roberto tried, but then became trapped beneath a freezing waterfall and experienced hypothermic cardiac arrest pllunging his eternal temperat to seventy nine degrees A helicopter rescue team soon winched him from the face of the mountain before beginning resuscitation efforts didnn't seem like things were going to go well. Once Roberta was at the hospital, though, he was placed on a life support system that maintained fresh blood flow for five hours. And he was eventually warmed and successfully resuscitated after a whopping, eight hours, and forty two minutes spent technically dead That's fucking crazy. He came back after that Now, nearly all of that time his heart was being pumped by either CPR efforts or equipment in the helicopter or hospital, but still. After three months, doctors reported that Roberto had completely recovered with no sustained neurological damage But he did have minor amnesia. is a bummer, because now he can't tell us about what crazy shit he might have seen on the other side This story, crazy as it sounds has been reported on numerous legitimate sites, right? and it's in the Guinnessbook of World Record Not sure if anybody fucked him before he was brought back By the way and quickly made another ombie baby sources surprisingly quiet Time suck, Tub five takeaways Carl Tanler, romantic necrophiliac. has been suck Thanks to the Bad Magic Productions team for helping and making time suck. Thanks to Queen of Bad Magic, Lindseay Cummins to Logan Keith, helping to publish this episode in designing merch for the store at badmagicroductions dot comot Thank you to Sophie Evans for some excellent research. Also thanks to the All seen eyes, moderating the culture of the Curious private Facebook page, the modod squad, making sure discord keeps running smooth, and everyone over in the time sucks subredit and bad magic subred it And now let's heading over to this week's Tim sucker Updates. Get your time sucker updates All right, meet sex as promised last week, some follow up messages. seend it to Bojangles at Timesuckpodcast d. com that I did not get you Last updates. First up, one from an anonymous sack. This is a huge message U even bigger reply. It's like ten messages in one and ten replies. I really had to think about it It is essentially a sh short sock that I've snuck into the updates. It sent it with a subject line of strong feelings and curiosity An anonymous person wrote, I just feel like it was It was a lot of things they talked about here that showed up in a lot of other emails and parts. And so it's just kind of easier to like J list them all out in one. And they wrote Hey I want to start this email with, I am Truly a meat sack I haven't always agreed on some things here But I have also heard logic and was happy to change my opinion or even beliefs based on listening to you and our fellow Me Sacks who have written in The most recent topic Stonewall writes seem like the time to ask slash, share my frustration, and possibly get eye opening information First, I don't see gay or lesbian as the same as transgender I know they share the same acronym, but they seem way different to me. as someone who is neither I will be using the word mental illness for transgender because it makes the most sense for me right now. and I'm not going to replace or comment on any of their words as I go through here I am one hundred percent open to hearing out why I'm wrong or a different way of thinking I do want love for everyone. You love whomever you want, stay away from kids and animals, dress how you want, do whatever makes you happy until it affects others This is where I have issue with the trans community over the gay community Like you said, if you don't like it, don't look. I find if I don't go to gay clubs or pride parties, it is not pushed into my face or affects my life Letting two people getting married and wanting to live in love together and possibly adopt children to raise with love and care. This is all positive in my heart. D donon't care if they're the same sex, what what they want to dress or pretend to be the other gender. If you're just trying to live a happy peaceful life, all good I also share the same opinions with the trans community Do whatever your heart is content, do whatever makes you feel happy. However, unlike the gay community, the trans community do make me angry and uncomfort I will repeat, I am open to hearing the other side First as a woman and a mother of girls, the fact that a man can come into my or her bathroom is very uncomfortable for me, even if you are truly just there because your heart says you are a girl and that makes you feel right or happy I don't want you there. unless you're good. I don't, but unfortunately that has not been my experience Twice it was clear, you were a man and it made me uncomfortable comomfortable is one thing, but also you know that creep are going to use anything they can to creep We shouldn't have to risk mine and my daughter's safety So other people whose brain says they are the sex, they are not just because they want to be in there which also falls in line with the school interactions. Kindergarten through twelfth grade students should not be schooled on sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, it should not be a thing. Don't get me wrong if your parents made itar being gay was not an option or if you have O or you have to be a boy, if you feel like a girl. Yes, you absolutely should see the school counselor. But again, this is not a whole class issue. Most humans know pretty quickly if they like Dick or pussy or both pretty naturally Don't need a class or a club reaffirming that just support. I was such a tomboy from birth to like ninth grade, someone could have easily wanted to convince me I was a boy in those formative years You are really a boy because you like pants and mountain bikes and climbing trees you're a boy No, I was just a different kind of girl. So give dumb children hormones or hormone blockers classes on who they are. It is so frustrating The next thing still really bothers me, but not as much as the sharing of my bathroom is sharing sports There was a good reason why there was an NBA and a W NBA, not all built the same Men are physically stronger by nature, and that's okay But it's so fucked for a man to dominate in any woman's sports. I just heard about a change that if a trans win, that runner up women, that runner up women will share the first place. Fuck that. If a girl worked her butt off to do well in that sport, she should get the spotlight in pride alone She and I am thinking to my daughter, my time has passed, will not have a chance up against a male We are so strong in our own ways. I gave birth to two babies, and I can guarantee you that was not easy My husband, having seen it from beginning to end, not just giving birth, but carrying for months, breastfeding, post recovery. It's not easy work, and thankfully he understands, which leads me to the last and least offensive thing but still hits me the wrong way. Being called that a cis woman, I'm a mother fucking woman I gave birth twice, dealt with hormones and periods and all these things Chaps my ass to hear Sis women because you have a mental illness, I have to share my bathroom, my sports and my women I know there's a chance I'm wrong or not seeing the big picture because I've experienced it before. I also wouldn't be butt heard about hearing the other side. I may not be seeing things because I feel like learning growing, sometometimes changing makes his better meat sacks and that's what it's That is what I want for me and my kids I don't write this as a way to feed into nasty negative energy, but my honest feelings and frustration do That to understand. and I know we have a ch have transgendnder who listen. I don't want them to think I hate them because I was walking in the store. I would smile and greet them because the fact that they want to live away or exist isn't what bothers me I'm so grateful for this podcast I will listen and do my best to learn from all of them sorry for the bad gramm anonyous. Okay, anonyous Lots to unpack here Its a lot done by first Thank you for taking the time to write all that down asking questions about things that admittedly make you feel uncomfortable Thank you for being open. Thank you more for being open to hear the other side U Aain, you packed about ten miles worth the questions is that one there. I'm going to do my best to address it all So first up, you know, you spoke of transgender as a mental illness, you know, is it? To begin to answer this, the people who have studied this the most do not think so. No major medical and or psychological organization, including the APA, the American Psychiatric Association, the Wh, the World Health Organization Consider being transgender to be a mental illness and that does matter I get very frustrated in our current society about the attack on credibility of experts It does matter. One of the pillars of an advanced civilization is having citizens able to do specialized work be able to gain specialized information, you know, in various fields and then share that with the rest of society and have society largely trust them experts sometimes wrong, of course all humans are. But are they more likely to be correct about their area of expertise than somebody who is not an expert? Yes That's where a lot of people get wonky currently, in my opinion I think if we stop believing that, we become the societal equivalent of a nation of flat earthers, right? A nation of Qon believing, lizard illuminati fearing ignorant motherfuckers And anyone who doesn't believe that, you know, if you don't think expertise matters, well, then how about you start taking your car into a dentist when it doesn't start properly Maybe try and get your cavities fixed at the muffler place. Right? experxpertise, it really does matter a lot Also let's say that let's say you're right Let's just go with this possibility that you're right, and it is a mental illness How should that affect their rights? And I'll just say, should someone with paranoid schizophrenia? notot be allowed to marry, not be allowed to have kids, not be allowed to use a public bathroom because they might have an extreme mental health episode that could make people uncomfortable or scared I doubt you'd want that Even if it was a mental illness. whyy demonize it? Like we used to demonize people with afflictions like schizophrenia because we did Uh, you know, and it was cruel Doesn't it seem cuel to do something like that again? Now next, And this is part of that same thing for you. I know, are bathrooms dangerous because of transgender people , we've covered a lot of serial killers over the years, a lot of sexual predators How many times have we come across a man dressing up as a woman in order to access women's public bathrooms specifically and then once inside that bathroom, sexually assault somebody coming in to use that bathroom is the best of mymory Zero times And I bring that up to illustrate an important point A well lit public bathroom is not the kind of place If you can look at the stats on this, it is not the kind of place deranged, pervert sexual predators tend to target It is not where they tend to do their hunting Why not? because it is too public. Too much risk of being cught, right? We just think about this logically If someone has a choice between a fucking dark alley, if they can sneak into somebody living alone, their home late at night or walk into the fucking, you know, Kroger or Fred Myers bathroom in the middle of the day, what are they going to do They're going to do the stuff where there's less people around You know, there's too greater chance that somebody will hear the victim scream or barge in during the act of the assault I Googled the following question, quote, How many times has a man dressed as a woman sexually assaulted a stranger in the's women's public bathroom This is a summary that came back. erverbatim There is no specific statistical registry tracking this exact scenario. However, extensive archival research and investigations by legal, academic, and anti violence organizations indicate that such incidents are extraordinarily rare and isolated events rather than a systemic phenomenon Basically whileile it is not impossible It is not nearly as likely, statistically, as say being raped by a stranger while trying to get into your car at night in a dark parking lot. It is far, far, far, far, far less statistically likely that than you know, you or your daughter being raped by a family member. family friend or someone in a position of authority over your child Coach pastor or babysitter Also, there are plenty of unisex bathrooms. Just think about this. Now For forget about everything I just said plenty of UnIx bathrooms all over the country that people use all the time without incident I've used them in hotels, restaurants, concerts, etcetera. pllaces that have to carry liability insurance, places that would never have unisex bathrooms. if that opened them up to, you know, being sued more frequently, if it put their patrons in danger, you know, because of the increased risk at the hotel Ran in Mazoula, Montana I've been there many times. U at the lobby floor, you loby level, an extension lobby they have a big multi stallle uniseX bathroom R You anybody can walk in. manan, woman, doors open, you walk in, then you walk into your stall, close the door, then you come back out and you wash your hands. And I have used this in a stall next to a little girl in the stall next to me. We've washed our hands in in the sink side by side. She didn't seem scared. You know, her parent out there didn't seem scared My son's dorm In his first two years of college, Their entire floor shared a UIX bathroom with not only multiple stalls for going to the bathroom, but also multiple showers, individual showers guarded only by a plastic shower curtain Young men, young women showering in adjacent stalls with no locking doors Youve never heard about a single incident of assault or someone peeeping on the person the next all over. And again If that was really a big problem, the school would not do that Just for liability reasons alone, take political ideologies, take everything. justust think about fucking money. They wouldn't do that because theyd be sued all the time N never heard about kids complaining Right? They adaped. it was fine Finally, I go to a lot of music festivals, last couple years. music festivals with row after row of porta potties. And those are used by everybody. Men, women, boys, girls. it's fine. Actually, I said finally, but one more justust got back from Germany, visiting Keyler. Europe, it is the norm now to have unisex bathrooms in many places No one seems to fucking care because it's not an iss this is a I don't want to just discount your fear, but this is, in my opinion, a boogeyman fear in a logical, kind of like we're worried about the witch out in the woods type fear I don't think it's logical I think it's a type of fear that is stoked intentionally by fear mongering, manipulative politicians, and political operatives, largely And regarding your anger over this Well, I think I know why it leads you to feel angry Allow me to nerd out and quote, Star Wars Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate Hate leads to suffering. I know consound little silly. He has a movie quote But I don't think truer words have ever been spoken Okay, next question, shouldh people be able to talk about their sexual preference in school? Yes because it's not going to be explicit Straight teachers reference having straight partners all the time. No one seems to have a problem with that. U What they don't do is reference how they fuck their partners Or at least if they do that, they tend to get in trouble My kids yeah, they knew that, you know, this teacher is married to so and so. this other teacher is married to this so and so not a problem Qeer teachers talking about being queer does not equate to saying shit like so my male partner, John and I, man we sure love sucking other's dicks, right kids? You boys should try that You should try. Gohead, go ahead suck each other' stick That's not happening because that's not happening on the straight side either U All that's happening and all the people want around this issue is to allow queer teachers and staff to just be able to talk about their lives and the same managers, straight teachers and staff can. justust to say like, yeah, a woman can say like, yeah, my wife and I went to all of it. That's it Not I my wife and I were eating each other's pussies, you know that's it just gets ted into these nonsensical scenarios. and again, pushed by fearmongering political operatives and pundits Uh, you know, doing that, just talking about their lives, that is no more akin to grooming, a word that I hate that gets thrown around in this context than it is to straight people talking about their lives Uh, yeah. Aually, one more thing on this issue, I've come across a lot of scandals where teachers have fucked their students, h, One of my friends in college was fucked by his teacher when he was a freshman, bigig deal. she got fired and went to jail. Every time I've ever heard of this kind of thing happening, these these sexual impropriety Al always been with straight people. It's always M trraay teachers So why are we disproportionately worried about transgenders? M any queer stuff. Fear er again to my Star Wars quote Next up, should a transgender or gay student be allowed to have a club at school? You reference these clubs? Yes, becausecause joining them is not mandatory. My kids public high school has more than one or their former high school now had more than one Christian clubs No one scientifically is born Christian That's a fact actually Being religious of any sort is one hundred percent a choice, hard to stop So not letting people have another belief People, the scientific community believe did not make a choice to be queer. when you do let other clubs exist that are based entirely on choice That is blatant hypocrisy. You also mentioned that at one point during your formative years, someone could have actually convinced you like that you were a boy Is that true I would argue that it is not unless you are actually transgender. Uh know, when it comes to these things, you can't be talked into anything. And again, this goes back to these notions of grooming. No one's going to talk your straight kid into being gay. That's just not a fucking thing. Right?? And if you think it is and you're actually straight Try to imagine a scenario where somebody could just fucking sweet talk you. into putting the opposite of the genitals you like in your mouth and suck it up. No, it doesn't work that way. I could care less about anybody being queer. I love love, love, hanging out, going on vacation with a gay friend of mine, his gay partner. I've crashed in the same bed as him when we were young and poor Uh, could he have ever talked me into suucking his dick? And I love this guy. loveove this man Could he haveaed me to suck his dick while you're there? No I'm just not interested. No amount of persuasion at any point in my life could make me do that whichich is part of why I just don't care about it I don't think anybody is being talked into being queer again And that's backed up by a lot of studies, that that's not how it works. So these clubs, they are not a threat. They're just a nice place for these kids to be able to go and, you know, and not feel so alone and maybe have the, you know, suicidal ideation drop somewhat Uh Two more things, should transgender women be allowed into women's sports? I don't think so actually I don't think so and this issue makes me sad. for transgender athletes Someone born with male musculature does have a physical advantage that is oftentimes impossible to overcome The heaviest all time raw bench press, no lifting equipment being used byy a mail three hundred and fifty five kilograms, which is just over seven hundred and eighty two pounds chieved by this this guy in twenty twenty one Heaviest all time raw bench press by a woman. two hundred and seven and a half kilograms J just over four hundred and fifty seven four hundred fifty seven pound in twenty sixteen Huge fucking difference due primarily to anatomical structure Men have more upper body muscle fibers on average a lot more than women fastest ever mail time in the mile. Three minutes, forty three seconds, thirteen hundreds of a second fastest ever mile run by a woman fourour minutes, six seconds, forty two hundreds of a second. That's a big difference between elite athletes And think about it in terms of MMA If male and female elite fighters were put in the octagon together, women would start being literally killed or regularly end up with brain damage due to the difference in raw explosive violence. notot just the same Stat after stat will tell you that if you know, you're willing to look at it with no emotion, there is a substantial difference between male and female athletes I do think we should work towards the creation of special leagues for trans athletes. We should not demonize them. It is such a complex issue because it is different for each sport, way too much to get into here U But I didn't want to duck the question I definitely don't think it is okay to berate, to send hateful DM's to, to leave hateful comments on trans athletes' accounts. There is no good reason to be cruel about it Right no need to be a bully. We can all work to find the most compassionate solution with grace And finally, Is anybody trying to take your title of woman from you Don't think they are Your motherhood, your sacrifice, your feminine strength, your beauty can still be celebrated just the same regardless of how this issue unfolds I look at this like I've looked at gay marriage, versus straight marriage Gay marriage is not a mockery of straight marriage like some people think, it is just another marriage I personally don't give a fuck who else is married when it comes to how I view my marriage. I don't base my marriage on anybody else's marriages. U I don't care about stuff like that absurd complaint of like, well we just we just open it up for everybody. Well, what if two dogs get married? Even that absurd scenario? All right, well, fucking get for those dogs I don't fuck you care I don't mean I mean their dog brains can't know, regnize that concept. I don't fucking care I'm just trying to focus on being married to my wife, hard stop.