Florida Man That Kept A Dead Girl

Pieces of his body, guts, everything flew everywhere. Remember this is just a three day old, freshly dead body. Get ready for a campfire story. I'm Edwin, I'm Michelle, and we'll share spooky stories with playful banter that'll keep you up at night. So throw some wood on the fire and put a wiener on a stick. We're telling you a campfire story. Tonight, Edwin, I present for you the story the Doctor that Kept the Dead Girl. When Karl was a child in Germany, he was regularly visited by the spirit of a dead relative. This was normal for him. The spirit would show him images in his dreams of a dark haired, exotic looking woman and told him this was the face of his one true love. As an adult, Carl became a doctor, married and had two children, immigrated to America, but he never forgot the visions of his true love. By the time he was fifty three, he had left his family and was working in Key West, Florida as a radiologist. That's when the woman from his dreams walked into his life. It's like a Disney love story. Hold tight on that. Elena was a stunning local beauty and had come to the hospital seeking treatment for tuberculosis at only twenty That diagnosis was a death sentence. Over the next eighteen months, Carl became obsessed to cure the woman that he considered his one true love. He brought X ray equipment to her home for personalized treatments, order with jewelry clothing, professing his love to her every day, even though he was still illegally married and there was a thirty three year age gap. Sadly, Elena died and there's no record that she ever reciprocated any of his feelings, by the way, so Carl was devastated by the death of his one true love. He immediately made a death mask of her face, which you know people do culturally. I don't understand. I've never understood why people do that, but you know, he did that, and then with the permission of Elena's family, he paid for the funeral and then constructed an above ground mausoleum in the Key West Cemetery. He then insists on an airtight casket with an incubator tank full of formaldehyde to prevent decay, and then he proceeds to visit the mausoleum every night, where he says her spirit routinely popped up to sing to him. Anyway, one night, two years into him, you know, routinely visiting her mausoleum with her song in his head, Carl creeps into the cemetery with a little toy wagon, where he removes her corpse from the mausoleum and wheels it on home. Next So, anyway, Elena's body's laying in his bed and he's making sweet, sweet love to it. As time goes by, Elena's body starts to decay. Carl starts to use piano wire to keep her together, fits her face with glass eyes, replaces her decomposing skin with silk cloth soaked in wax, and gets rid of all the maggots, and uses perfumes and preserving agents to mask the smell and to stop the riting. Are you in shock, o, maggots man? Anyway, seven years of bliss go by for Carl. What is this whole story? Oh no, and it gets weirder. There's like some levels of weirdness. This isn't even that weird yet. So seven years of bliss go by for Karl. Rumors are swirling around about his odd behavior. Those who remember his frequent visits to the mausoleum, wonder why he suddenly stopped coming. His neighbors find it curious that he routinely buys women's clothes and lots of perfume, and a boy claims to see Carl in the window dancing with what looked like a supersized doll. Finally, Elena's sister gets suspicious and she marches over to his house, and Carl willingly shows off Elena's body, or what's left of it, in his bedroom. He's instantly arrested for wantonly and maliciously destroying a grave and removing a body without authorization, and is examined by chiatrists and declared sane, and the story makes headlines in Florida, of course, classic Florida man's story, and the public considers, actually considers Carl a hopeless romantic who's just an eccentric, misunderstood old man who needs to have sex with a young girl's dead body. And so there's even a public viewing of Elena's body, and eighty five hundred people came to see it. Isn't that weird? Like that's how big this story was, So with public support of his love and frankly madness Carl asks if he could have Elena's body back so they can go back to their happy life together, but his request is denied. Elena is actually reburied in a secret, unmarked grave, so he can't go digger up again, so the family keeps it a secret. But then furious Carl set off a bomb Elena's mule as a way to show the authorities quote unquote wantonly and maliciously destroying a grave what that really looks like. Carl goes on to live another twelve years before dying alone. In his final diary entry, he writes, human jealousy has robbed me of the body of my Elena. Yet divine happiness is flowing through me, for she has survived death, forever and ever. She is with me. Three weeks after his death, his body was found in his apartment next to a homemade life sized doll wearing Elena's death mask. Love. I'm telling you things you do for love. It's his one true love. So thirty three years be damned, death, be damned. That is disgusting. That's a disgusting story. Florida. Uh, something's in the water in Florida. Yeah, Floria. You know when you first started telling me about the guy with his one true love and everything. I did feel kind of bad. Fro hm, I'll admit, because I think I told you about this image that really traumatized me back when now I was like in middle school or high school or something. No, I don't know if you did. They showed me this picture from like rotten dot com of this guy and there is this woman next to him who's not alive, and this guy smiling, and I think the caption was like notice anything wrong with this picture or something. And when they showed it to me, I was like, oh my god, Like she's dead, Like she's dead, like she I've never seen a picture of a dead person, Like I've never by that time, I had never seen a dead person at all. Yeah. And you know you can see that the eyes aren't there, like I said, they're just not alive. You can She's not looking at anything. No expression is like really thin, like sucked in face. Bizarre and traumatizing. We talked about it. We're like, do you feel bad for him? Like do you think that's his wife? And like he just really misses her and like this is so messed up, and like he just wants to keep her close or just some sicko. I'd go with the sicko on that. So what you're saying is that this didn't form a fetish for you when you saw that dead woman, you weren't like, you weren't like this, is it? I feel bad for this guy, Like if his wife died, he doesn't want to say bye to her yet That's what I thought back then, But it was gross still, It's just I thought of like, I mean, it's weird to take a selfie with a dead body. I mean, I took a selfie with a bog body, but that person's been dead for three million years? Is that any better than I mean, I wouldn't have. But also, like they don't have wastes anymore so Florida. So if we go back like eighty years in Florida, we have a whole different landscape, right. And when you told me about the Florida's story, I had to look up some stuff, obviously, and I found so many things about Florida to live in Florida, which I think is funny that you did. Yeah, kick maverl it's a strange place, and to imagine it, I always thought that like in the during the Civil War times or a little bit before then, there was nothing there. I always thought Florida was just empty. I don't know why. I just imagined it as like a yeah, and it wasn't like no, It's always had people there for a long time. And we all love a little bit of history. So I'm going to take you through the life of a Florida man who became a well known figure. Okay, unlike all the headlines that we hear that include Florida man a tax girlfriend with a banana, Florida man blame's paranormal activity for driving car missing two tires, Florida man drives stolen truck to Space four space to warn of battle between aliens and dragons. All real, by the way, this one it's more historical. We're going back to Florida, Sa Augustine in the eighteen sixties. At this point were right before the start of the Civil War in the United States. Churches were being built and repaired around Saint Augustine Jacksonville, Key West, and one of these priests that was helping out with everything was Augustine Vero. People were arguing about slavery at the time and how it was okay how it wasn't okay. Religion was spreading with the Catholics, Christians, Protestants, like all these people, this mix of who's going to win, who's gonna the usual human experience. Right. So this guy, Augustine Vero had just immigrated and they were along with the Catholics who were trying to find their spot. He later became Bishop of Savannah and the first Roman Catholic bishop in Saint Augustine. He also became known as a rebel bishop through his sermons defending the rights of the slave states, but he also wanted the slaves to be treated a little bit better. Anyway. He died in eighteen seventy six on a sweaty, extremely hot Florida summer in June. And that's where our story begins. You see, Saint Augustine has a cemetery that is said to be one of the most haunted in the United States, the Tolo Motto Cemetery. And before the Catholic Church took it over, it had been an Indian burial ground, which we all know what that means haunted, and this is where the bishop was buried. Now, according to the Saint Augustine Ghost City tourist page. The story of this bishop who has a really peculiar story here. You see, when you're a bishop, you're well respected, and even once you're dead, people want to come and see you. They want to come and say goodbye, pay their respects. Like you're kind of like an important person. Did a lot of things, built churches, did a lot of good so we want to go and say proper goodbye. Funerals usually require the body to be out for a few days. Of all this happens. Unfortunately, the funeral for this bishop did not go. According to Plant. To keep the bishop's body there for people to come and visit, they put them in a pit with sawdust and ice, and they put them in a casket. So there was in a pit inside of a casket made of iron. It was supposedly very expensive material, and it was the least they could do for the man. I mean, he was a writer, she was smart, studious, so to thank them for his work, they needed to do this for him. But when I hear a face plated iron casket in the scorching heat in the middle of June in Florida, I think of an oven. For three days he was sealed there and left in this shut casket, just like slow roasting. I guess. Mourners were there quiet on the third day, they were paying their respects, and then he exploded. The iron explodes. Yeah, it just popped open and it just boom. It just pieces of his body, guts, every thing flew everywhere. Remember this is just a three day old, freshly dead body, right. Thankfully no one was hurt, but they left quite abruptly, like they're just they were like, ah, like I've brains all over me, or have like liquid ah. So those in charge of the funeral had to gather up the pieces and take what remained of him to rest right there at Tolamadol Cemetery. Now, this city, Saint Augustine, is historic, known as America's oldest city, and it's well documented that the streets were built on top of graves of yellow fever victims. Protestant victims of the yellow fever were not allowed to be buried within the city and had to go outside the city walls and be buried there. So, along with this bishop's story, which I found super interesting, I also found some other ghost stories, not necessarily like Florida man stories, but like more about the cemetery, and for this Bishops was collected and placed to rest. There was this ghost story of this five year old kid, his name is James P. Morgan, who liked to climb trees, hang out in the branches, and one day in November eighteen seventy seven, he climbed the giant oak tree. He slipped, fell and landed hard of the dirt of Tolamado Cemetery, where he broke his neck and died. Fortunately, though, the Morgan family had already bought plots in the cemetery under that same tree, so that's convenient. I mean, the family wanted all of them to be buried together so they could be there forever, but no one was expecting to have to use a plot so soon, so they did bury him there. But they couldn't stand the pain of his death so early on, so they left Saint Augustine forever, leaving their son alone by himself. Now, little James is seen running around, happy, laughing, going up that tree and sitting in the giant oak tree watching people that walk by. Some people see him and tell him to get down because he can hurt himself, but he doesn't respond. He simply just stares at them. Another one of these tales that we remain here in Florida has a tale of this Apop'nack's tree. I don't know if I've pronounced that right. Biologists and treatists, please let me know. In the nineteenth century, people were freaking out about being buried alive. Did you know about that? Yeah? I always kind of like, can they like install like bells and stuff in case they needed to ring a bell to get out of their coffin? But those things cost money, right, So it was expensive, so not everybody could afford that, so a lot of people were buried alive. Unfortunately, there was this war veteran and lawyer, Colonel Joseph Smith. He had started his new life in Saint Augustine when he met a young couple at a party. They met for dinner, and that's when he learned that the young woman was ill and was eyeing. So she died the following week. The husband, hurt, obviously, invited his new friend, the colonel, to the funeral to participate in this ritual that they did, delivering the dead person to the cemetery seated in a chair. Everything was well decorated. The woman's body bounced and moved around the chair as it made their way to the cemetery from the church. I don't know what religion this is, but it sounds kind of cool being in a chair. So they're taking this woman's body to the cemetery and then they pass under in a poppin neck's tree in the graveyard, and that's when the young woman's forehead hits a branch. Blood started leaking into her eyes, and as blood hits her eyes, she kind of like winces her eyes like she kind of goes like the colonel saw this right, and he's like, yo, the eyes like this woman's alive. Nobody was believing him, and he's like no, seriously, Like the eyes just moved, like and why is she bleeding? Like what's going on. Eventually, though, they brought the body back to their home and they just kind of lay her there for several days, and then she suddenly wakes up in her bed and the colonel was said to have saved the young woman's life. Six years later, though, she actually died and they left her there for a week just to make sure that she was actually dead. The husband wanted to do the ritual again, but asked not to pass by that tree. He didn't want to get his hopes up. Understandable, we get a bunch of these stories in old Florida. I don't know if it was as insane as it appears now it's I mean, I feel like we bullied Florida a lot. Some of it is justified, some of it is just like humans being humans are Florida listeners. Obviously you're the exception, right, so obviously just to make sure. But this is one of those places where I think it's something about, you know, the weather, to the soil, the area in general. It's so different than everything else. It feels very jungly to me, like that part of the South, but still super interesting. My point here is that we could take one of these stories and just kind of turn it into a funky headline religious Florida man explodes at burial, Florida family abandoned sun for an eternity. Or Florida man keeps woman in bed for a week after she died just in case. My story would be like Florida man lives happily with corpse for seven years. If those stories happen today, like it would, you could see these headlines they're just like that, so still bizarre place never been. Now it's time for fan corner, fan fan Cornery. This comment is from Anthony. Love Love, love this podcast. The chemistry between you two is amazing and hilarious. I have to Edwin for a long time on his other podcast, and it's funny and interesting to hear him in a different light, basically being freaked out by things. Michelle says, hu, huh, keep up the good work. Thanks. That was kind of the point I think when we started the show, right, I was like, ah, because people don't really hear me like reactingly. You're very easily grossed out Edwin, So that is true. A lot of people don't know that, but I am. And thank you Anthony for writing in. Okay. This message is from Madeline. I heard fans can leave messages now, so I have listened to SMS podcasts since it started, and I'm a fan. You both make me laugh about the weirdness and scary things that keep me amused, and I learned something new every time. Thanks. And then you know smiley blushy emoji yay. Well we are good teachers. Yeah, for some reason, we do educate, but also we encourage everyone to actually look up the information. Yes, don't trust that verify our fans. But thank you Madeline for your comment, and I hope you enjoy camp Fire Story as much as you enjoy Scary Mystery Surprise. Since it's almost the same show, I hope join us in this transition, this awkward stage. If you have any comments, feel free to leave a message. We'd love to hear your voices on our website, campfirestory dot com, and you can record an Instagram voice message as well and we'll play it on the show. Or you can just write us a little comment. I'm fine reading those out loud. If you want to keep up to date and support the show, check out Scary Mystery Club at scarymistery club dot com. Big shout out to Laurie, Amanda Gonzalez, Sophia, Kevin, Hannah, Tia, Maggie, the Archists, and Alex. Thanks a lot, Thanks a lot for your support helping us out and join the Scary Mystery Club and get shouted out and support the show and join us next week at the campfire that never goes out until we put it out because that's fire safety. Campfire Story is hosted by Michelle Newman and Edwin Karubias. This podcast was edited and sound designed by Sarah Vorhez Wendel, a VW Sound