When you’re 49 and talk a teenage girl into marrying you, and then she kills you and takes all your money… it’s kinda on you, bro. Minnie was only 16 when she left her home in New Orleans to marry 49 year old J.R. Walkup, the mayor of Emporia, Kansas. A month after the wedding…
Tag: weirdos and other notables
Cap Streeter’s Automobile Mobile Home
Did Cap Streeter invent the modern mobile home?
Whatever Happened to Baby Rembrandt?
A baby left on the doorstep at Tree Studios became a local celebrity before vanishing from the news in 1902
The Wild Adventures of “Sensational Viola”
I was researching a whole other story in the old Chicago Post 1903 microfilms when I came across an article about Viola Larsen, a 17 year old girl who was on trial for plotting to kidnap one of her neighbors. She told the judge that she was just looking for material to work into the books…
The “Widow in Green” Blackmail Mystery
“Does anybody know the woman in green?” asked the Tribune in November of 1908. “Can anybody tell the name of the mysterious woman motorist who for the last month has been an unfailing topic of conversation for those who have time to observe humanity as seen in Chicago’s streets? Who is she?” For a month, Chicagoans…
“I Keep the Tavern Like Hell and Play the Fiddle Like the Devil”
In 1880, the Calumet Club held their annual reunion of early Chicago settlers. Now approaching a population of a million, half a century before Chicago had been little more than a mud-hole, where, one settler remembered, a typical sunday consisted of taking champagne to church to drink the preacher’s health, then hanging around the church…
Podcast: George W. Green, The Man Who Stole the Gallows
New podcast! Get all our episodes here on the page or subscribe on iTunes! According to legend, after Chicago’s first public hanging in 1840, the gallows were stolen by a man named George W. Green, who used the lumber for furniture that was then sold in his shop. Ironically, fifteen years later, the next…
Bertha Warshovsky: Queen of the Arsonists
On November 7th, I’ll be conducting a Mysterious Chicago walking tour of the “Darker side” of Taylor Street for Atlas Obscura. Here’s one of the stories I’ll be covering! Bertha in the Herald Examiner As a grandmother in her sixties, Bertha Warshovsky assumed that no one would ever suspect her if a building burned down. We can…