Illustration by Lars Leetaru
A Theory Rings Hollow
Hamilton, Ohio, is home to the Hollow Earth Monument, among the very few memorials erected to celebrate a crackpot geographical theory. The monument marks the gravesite of Captain John Cleves Symmes, who believed that the earth was hollow and that we could gain entrance to the interior of our planet through huge holes that pierced the North and South poles. Symmes published his Hollow Earth theory in 1818 while he was living in Newport, Kentucky. Symmes’s name may sound familiar—he was the nephew and namesake of the same John Cleves Symmes who helped create Cincinnati. The younger Symmes earned fame as a hero during the War of 1812, and spent the rest of his life, and his reputation, propounding his delusional geography. Symmes died with his theory ignored. His son, Americus Vespucci Symmes, labored to popularize his late father’s ideas. Symmes’s theory inspired Jules Verne to compose his novel, A Journey to the Center of the Earth, and contributed to the idea that Santa Claus makes his home at the North Pole.
Loveland Frog
Reports of bizarre cryptids are not uncommon around Cincinnati. In 1894 two “nondescript creatures, horrible in appearance and strange in habits” were spotted at a sandbar near Vevay, Indiana, and dubbed “mud mermaids.” Dozens of people in 1959 claimed to see Octoman, a half-octopus, half-human beast near New Richmond. None of these apparitions have enjoyed the staying power of the Loveland Frog (or Frogman). Sightings of varied credibility date to 1955, when a businessman first reported seeing several three-foot-tall creatures with leathery skin and amphibian faces standing near the side of a road. The legend really hopped off in 1972 when two Loveland police officers spotted some froggy suspects near the Little Miami River. Discovery of a dead, tailless iguana in the area could have, but did not, end speculation. Sightings have been rare recently, but the tale has grown in the telling, with some people now claiming the elusive frog is six feet tall. The City of Loveland, recognizing a good thing, has designated the Loveland Frog as the city’s mascot and sponsors an annual Frogman Festival.
Buried in the Church Wall
Image from The Cincinnati Enquirer 19 November, 1961, Illustration by Caroline Williams, Image Extracted From Microfilm by Greg Hand
The pastor of Hyde Park’s Knox Presbyterian Church received a most unusual communication one day in April 1924. Nettie Creed Chaffin, a woman who was not and had never been a member of his congregation, recently died and left the bulk of her substantial estate, estimated at $50,000, to his church. Knox was then erecting the fine stone edifice that decorates Observatory Avenue today. In the fine print of her bequest, the pastor discovered a somewhat irregular covenant attached to this generous gift. Mrs. Chaffin demanded to be buried inside a wall of the new church. Although her tomb was to be unmarked, she requested a plaque in the nave which would note her gift and her eternal presence “until the day break and the shadows flee away.” All of this could indeed be accommodated, the good pastor decided, and the earthly remains of Nettie Chaffin rest immured at the Knox church to this day.
Cincinnati’s Death Family
In the early history of Cincinnati, a family of Deaths held positions of prominence. The Death family emigrated from England early in the 1600s to Virginia and Maryland, then made their way westward, settling on Cincinnati’s Western Row in the 1850s. Perhaps the most unusual name in the annals of Cincinnati, and certainly the most Goth, belongs to the daughter of this family, Arachne Death. The patriarch of the Cincinnati branch, Absalom Death, was a prosperous compounder of rectified whiskey who was influential enough to be appointed director of the city’s public hospital. Yes, the head of our hospital was named “Death.” There is an old anecdote about Mr. Death’s whiskey business. Over his shop on Main Street, Absalom had a sign that read “Rectified Whiskey” and underneath that was his name. One day, a near-sighted woman from the country rode by in her son’s carriage and called out to the young man to stop immediately when she saw this sign. “Rectified Whiskey! Absolute Death! That’s a fact. Johnny, let me get out. There is at least one honest man in Cincinnati and I want to see what he looks like!”
Cincinnati’s Baddest Badass
Illustration courtesy of Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division
General August Willich was born into German nobility, possibly the illegitimate son of the Prussian crown prince. Over the course of an audacious life, Willich renounced his noble heritage, incited two revolutionary armies in Europe, challenged Karl Marx to a duel, raised a regiment during the American Civil War, defeated the Texas Rangers in battle, conducted rifle drills while under fire on the battlefield at Shiloh, endured months in a Confederate prison, defied exile and a price on his head by returning to Germany to study philosophy, and volunteered at age 60 to fight in the Franco-Prussian War. Willich was a staunch “Forty-Eighter,” one of the militants who attempted to overthrow Europe’s monarchies in 1848. He was an early adherent of the ideas of Karl Marx, who considered Willich to be far too radical. Willich publicly insulted Marx and challenged him to a duel. Marx wisely declined. Willich escaped a death penalty for his revolutionary activities by immigrating to Cincinnati, where he rallied fellow Germans to fight the slave-holding South. He achieved the rank of general and was showered with military honors.
Phrenologist Loses His Head
William Byrd Powell was a noted phrenologist who was very much invested in studying how the inner essence of human beings was expressed through the shape of our heads. Powell held an esteemed professorship at Cincinnati’s Eclectic Medical College. Among his students was Temperance Kinsey who, upon receiving her medical degree from that college, became the first female physician in Cincinnati. When Professor Powell died in 1866, Cincinnati was shocked to learn the contents of his last will and testament: He bequeathed his head to his favorite student, Kinsey. Yes, his head. Powell’s will, duly filed and approved in the probate court, requested another of Powell’s students, one Dr. Adolphus Turner Keckeler, to surgically remove his head and deliver it to Kinsey at the soonest opportunity. As it developed, almost simultaneously with Powell’s demise, Kinsey and Keckeler married. In those days, it was rather expected of phrenologists that they maintain a collection of heads and skulls for research purposes. The Doctors Keckeler, it was reported, shared an inventory of more than 400 crania, the disposition of which was not mentioned in either of their own wills.
America’s Rosetta Stone
The Pre-Historic Remains Which Were Found On The Site Of The City Of Cincinnati, Ohio With A Vindication Of The ‘Cincinnati Tablet’, 1876, Images Extracted From Microfilm By Greg Hand
Out in the West End, Mound Street got its name because it ran straight south into a large, prehistoric mound at Fifth Street. That tumulus stood about 35 feet high when the first European settlers arrived here in 1788. General “Mad” Anthony Wayne ordered several feet shaved from the top so it could be used as an observation post by the soldiers stationed at Ft. Washington. As the city expanded some 50 years later, the Mound Street mound was leveled. During demolition in 1841, workmen excavated a strangely inscribed rectangular stone tablet. At first, scoffers claimed the Cincinnati Tablet was a hoax. As similar tablets were found later in similar mounds, the artifact was accepted as real, but a real what? Was it a talisman? A calendar? An astronomical device? A fabric pattern? A pagan idol? An ancient tattoo “flash”? One scholar, Joseph John Hall, declared the Cincinnati tablet to be “The Great American Rosetta Stone” and claimed that this mysterious object, preserved at the Cincinnati Museum Center, is, in fact, “the master key of all the mound builders’ mysteries, wonderful culture and high intelligence shown and handed down to civilization of the present day for our good and welfare.”
The Case of the Price Hill Psychic
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, was a devout Spiritualist. During his 1923 visit to Cincinnati, Conan Doyle regaled audiences with “The Promise of Immortality” in a lecture illustrated with “spirit photographs” allegedly portraying people long dead. Conan Doyle scheduled his appearance in Cincinnati so he could visit a psychic medium named Laura C. Pruden, who lived in Price Hill. Mrs. Pruden claimed to be a sort of spiritualistic stenographer who transcribed messages from beyond. Conan Doyle was quite taken with Mrs. Pruden and even brought her to London, despite several widely published exposés about her very fallible seances. Mrs. Pruden had a son named Albert Carter, who continued his mother’s prognosticating work by patenting in 1948 a device he called a “Liquid Filled Dice Agitator.” Redesigned and spiffed up with a 20-sided die by Cincinnati tinkerer Abe Bookman, the “Liquid Filled Dice Agitator” became the “Magic 8-Ball” we know today.
Wannabe Vampires
Illustration from Cincinnati Weekly Times, 1885, image extracted from microfilm by Greg Hand
A curious article appeared in the Cincinnati Medical Advance for November 1875, alerting local doctors that some of their patients had adopted a peculiar diet. According to that august medical journal, Cincinnati was home to blood drinkers—anemics and consumptives who daily visited the slaughterhouses to obtain the invigorating draft of ruddy life-elixir, fresh from the veins of beeves. Back when Cincinnati butchers operated abattoirs all over the fringes of the downtown area, they provided free blood to anyone who stopped by and asked for a glass. It is no surprise that a macabre practice such as this would attract Cincinnati’s legendary chronicler of the bizarre, Lafcadio Hearn, and indeed it did. Hearn published his report of a visit to one such shambles just a few months later, reporting that “many handsomely dressed ladies” stopped by each afternoon for some crimson elixir, warm from the throat of a healthy bull. Hearn witnessed the scene when the neck of the animal was severed and glass after glass, held to the spouting veins, was immediately offered to the invalids, who “quaff the red cream with evident signs of pleasure, and depart their several ways.”
Court Jester’s Final Rest
Judah Touro Cemetery in Price Hill, unlike any other cemetery in Cincinnati, can boast the grave of an actual court jester. Always small, Hayeti Hassid stopped growing at around 5 years of age, when he stood just 30 inches tall. Hassid early on developed a talent for making people laugh through a repertoire of dancing, singing, and sleight-of-hand tricks. Around 1870, Hassid’s reputation caught the attention of the Ottoman Sultan, Abdul Hamid II, who added him to the royal household in Istanbul as court jester. When the novelty wore off, Hassid was consigned to the harem, where he entertained the Sultan’s many children, becoming, as it were, a sort of Ottoman Uncle Al. Tiring of the kiddie fare, Hassid made his way to Paris and joined the troupe of the Folies Bergère. He was discovered by British entertainment impresario Lloyd Forsyth and promptly appointed mayor of Forsyth’s “Tiny Town” revue of little people. An international tour brought Hassid to Cincinnati, where he reconnected with a childhood friend and retired here for the remainder of his days. Hassid died, aged 67, in 1919.
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