THE CORPSE AT THE FAIR

2024-11-18T15:41:00.001-08:00

Yeah, there's a dead body on display at the fairgrounds. What's the big deal?

Visitors to the 1985 Sonoma County Fair found a tent at the far end of the midway announcing a "World of Wonders" exhibit. Admission was a buck.

Inside were cages and stalls with deformed or otherwise unusual looking animals. According to the Press Democrat the menagerie included a hundred lb. water rat (which was probably a capybara), a "five-legged cow, a steer with two noses, a five-legged lamb, a 'punk rock' goat and a 'headless' chicken."

In the center of that barnyard freak show was a coffin. Through the plexiglass top you could see the body of an adult man. His skin was leathery and the color of mahogany with sparse hair and beard. A loincloth covered his hips.

Propped against the side of the coffin was a sign: "He is real. Count Demonicus: preserved and petrified by arsenic solution." The July 31 edition of the PD ran a photo of the coffin with the remains faintly visible.

But wouldn't you know it, some killjoy didn't think it was appropriate to have a dead guy laying on the straw covered dirt just a few steps away from the barn with the 4-H bunnies. The cops were called.

Coroner Investigator Tom Siebe thought it was probably fake and told the PD "Yeah, it looks pretty good. But under plastic, things can be deceptive." To check on it, the county took possession of the body for an x-ray. It was real.

The rest of this article can be read at the SantaRosaHistory.com website. Because of recurring problems with the Blogger platform, I am no longer wasting my time formatting and posting complete articles here. I will continue to create stubs for the sake of continuity, but will be publishing full articles only at SantaRosaHistory.com.

- Jeff Elliott

NOT EVERY PICTURE TELLS A STORY

2024-10-20T20:52:00.000-07:00

Don't be scared, but there may be strangers in your house.

Anyone lucky enough to inherit their family's photo album must have wondered about some of the folks in there. Are there unlabeled Victorian-era portraits where people look as stiff as statues? Maybe there are snapshots from a century ago of relatives posing with seemingly close friends - but could they be distant relations you'd like to know about? There may also be missing persons. Why do none of the photos with great-aunt Tilda include her husband Cornelius?

This is a quick trip through a collection of pictures left by a Santa Rosa family from around the turn of the century. Or rather, it's about forty images that were donated to the Sonoma County Library, which scanned them and placed them online. Not all of the set is interesting - about half are nameless, rigid-necked Victorians - but some are quite unusual and deserve attention. The final section of this article concerns the bigger question about what could be done to restore information missing from thousands of historical photos in our library's archive and elsewhere.

The first puzzle is figuring out which family we're looking at. The library's descriptions usually mention "William H. Hudson" or "part of a collection of Hudson family photographs" but that's a weak clue, as there were several unrelated Hudson clans in the North Bay at the time which included a William H. A few years ago the Sonoma County Historical Society wrote a piece on this and concluded a Santa Rosa businessman was the right guy.

But in the library collection three different men are identified as William H. Are their photos mislabeled or were these really the trio who shared the same name? And which one is the businessman we seek? Fortunately, he was vain enough to buy an entry in one of the local history "mug books" so we have an accurate reference of what he looked like, at least in his senior years.

That history book offers a detailed bio or you can read a condensed version at his entry on Find a Grave (although it presently uses photos of wrong Williams). Here I'm skipping most of the details except for those that apply to the photographs.

Overlooked was that William and his wife Percie had very private lives. Rarely were they mentioned in any of the local newspapers. Aside from a nice announcement in the paper where he once worked as a printer, their marriage was elsewhere a two-line notice in the Vital Statistic columns. There were no birth announcements for their children, even though she was part of a large and prominent Healdsburg family.

Their quiet profile extended to the family album. There's no wedding photo, nor baby pictures, nor portraits of their son in Army uniform as he went off to fight in WWI, nor picture of the son with his wife or of their children. (Think about that for a moment: Grandparents without a single photograph of their grandkids?!) I want to assume such images did exist and at some point a family member raided the album, but the Hudson's seeming desire to live behind closed doors does not lend great confidence.

- Jeff Elliott

I See by the Papers...

THE CORPSE AT THE FAIR

NOT EVERY PICTURE TELLS A STORY