Here's something you might be interested in.
Ask a Hipster — Advice you didn't know you needed
Big Screen — Movie commentary
Blurt — Music's inside track
Booze News — San Diego spirits
Classical Music — Immortal beauty
Classifieds — Free and easy
Cover Stories — Front-page features
Drinks All Around — Bartenders' drink recipes
Excerpts — Literary and spiritual excerpts
Feast! — Food & drink reviews
Feature Stories — Local news & stories
Fishing Report — What’s getting hooked from ship and shore
From the Archives — Spotlight on the past
Golden Dreams — Talk of the town
The Gonzo Report — Making the musical scene, or at least reporting from it
Letters — Our inbox
Movies@Home — Local movie buffs share favorites
Movie Reviews — Our critics' picks and pans
Musician Interviews — Up close with local artists
Neighborhood News from Stringers — Hyperlocal news
News Ticker — News & politics
Obermeyer — San Diego politics illustrated
Outdoors — Weekly changes in flora and fauna
Overheard in San Diego — Eavesdropping illustrated
Poetry — The old and the new
Reader Travel — Travel section built by travelers
Reading — The hunt for intellectuals
Roam-O-Rama — SoCal's best hiking/biking trails
San Diego Beer — Inside San Diego suds
SD on the QT — Almost factual news
Sheep and Goats — Places of worship
Special Issues — The best of
Street Style — San Diego streets have style
Surf Diego — Real stories from those braving the waves
Theater — On stage in San Diego this week
Tin Fork — Silver spoon alternative
Under the Radar — Matt Potter's undercover work
Unforgettable — Long-ago San Diego
Unreal Estate — San Diego's priciest pads
Your Week — Daily event picks
The severed head of Haydn, the boiled body of Mad Anthony Wayne
Vanished vital organs story starts with Pancho Villa and Santa Anna
Dear M.A.: I seem to recall a few months back you discussed the sagas of the severed heads of Santa Ana, et al. I therefore naturally thought of you when I saw the enclosed, taken from Beethoven: Biography of a Genius. — Brian A. Barnhorst, downtown
Actually, it was Pancho Villa who started our occasional series on vanished vital organs, though it’s true, Santa Ana met a similar fate. Brian’s story is about an Austrian prison warden named Rosenbaum who bribed his way into a churchyard and decapitated Franz Josef Haydn just two days after the composer’s burial in 1809. Rosenbaum was not only a fan, he was an amateur phrenologist, a student of the art of reading skull bumps to analyze a person’s character and intelligence. (Rosenbaum later confirmed that the lumps in Haydn’s music sector were very well developed, just as he had suspected.) There are a couple of versions of the subsequent fate of the pate, but Haydn the Upper and Haydn the Lower were finally reunited in 1954.
The same year Rosenbaum was handling Haydn, we had our own corpse caper unfolding in Pennsylvania. This item recently infiltrated itself into the Mat Al Missing Body Parts file, but it actually may be a Too Many Body Parts story. Anyway, it’s too good to pass up. Our hero is Revolutionary War General “Mad” Anthony Wayne. He died and was buried in Erie, Pennsylvania, in 1796. The rest of the Waynes, living and dead, were a few hundred miles away in Radnor, outside Philadelphia. By 1809 the family decided they wanted the general back. Wayne’s doctor assured them his body would by then be only a skeleton and would be no problem to transport. But when he exhumed the general, he found him in remarkably good shape, for a dead guy. It was too late to embalm the body, and it couldn’t be moved unpreserved, but Doc couldn’t disappoint the Waynes and all of Radnor. In a stroke of ghoulish creativity, the doctor dismembered Wayne, put him in a kettle, and boiled him — as in Mad Anthony soup. Once the flesh had separated from the skeleton, he fished out the bones, cleaned them up, arranged them neatly in a bed of sawdust in a new coffin, and took them to Radnor, where the general was buried again with full honors. Doc put his surgical instruments and the remains from the kettle into the old coffin and reburied the lot in Erie.
Here's something you might be interested in.
The severed head of Haydn, the boiled body of Mad Anthony Wayne
Vanished vital organs story starts with Pancho Villa and Santa Anna
The severed head of Haydn, the boiled body of Mad Anthony Wayne
Vanished vital organs story starts with Pancho Villa and Santa Anna
Dear M.A.: I seem to recall a few months back you discussed the sagas of the severed heads of Santa Ana, et al. I therefore naturally thought of you when I saw the enclosed, taken from Beethoven: Biography of a Genius. — Brian A. Barnhorst, downtown
Actually, it was Pancho Villa who started our occasional series on vanished vital organs, though it’s true, Santa Ana met a similar fate. Brian’s story is about an Austrian prison warden named Rosenbaum who bribed his way into a churchyard and decapitated Franz Josef Haydn just two days after the composer’s burial in 1809. Rosenbaum was not only a fan, he was an amateur phrenologist, a student of the art of reading skull bumps to analyze a person’s character and intelligence. (Rosenbaum later confirmed that the lumps in Haydn’s music sector were very well developed, just as he had suspected.) There are a couple of versions of the subsequent fate of the pate, but Haydn the Upper and Haydn the Lower were finally reunited in 1954.
The same year Rosenbaum was handling Haydn, we had our own corpse caper unfolding in Pennsylvania. This item recently infiltrated itself into the Mat Al Missing Body Parts file, but it actually may be a Too Many Body Parts story. Anyway, it’s too good to pass up. Our hero is Revolutionary War General “Mad” Anthony Wayne. He died and was buried in Erie, Pennsylvania, in 1796. The rest of the Waynes, living and dead, were a few hundred miles away in Radnor, outside Philadelphia. By 1809 the family decided they wanted the general back. Wayne’s doctor assured them his body would by then be only a skeleton and would be no problem to transport. But when he exhumed the general, he found him in remarkably good shape, for a dead guy. It was too late to embalm the body, and it couldn’t be moved unpreserved, but Doc couldn’t disappoint the Waynes and all of Radnor. In a stroke of ghoulish creativity, the doctor dismembered Wayne, put him in a kettle, and boiled him — as in Mad Anthony soup. Once the flesh had separated from the skeleton, he fished out the bones, cleaned them up, arranged them neatly in a bed of sawdust in a new coffin, and took them to Radnor, where the general was buried again with full honors. Doc put his surgical instruments and the remains from the kettle into the old coffin and reburied the lot in Erie.
Comments