The Victorian era is birthplace of many of our current views about hauntings.  The Victorian cult of mourning heralded in an obsession with death and its remembrance.  Viewing the corpse in the home was replaced by a new industry, that of funeral parlors.  The public appetite for tales of the macabre was insatiable and the literature of the time reflected this.  Penny Dreadfuls were inhaled by a huge readership bent on experiencing that unique chill a scary story produces.  Spiritualists were celebrities.  The common churchyards competed with palatial, spraying cemeteries replete with benches and picnic areas where mourners gathered to remember their lost loved ones.

The following is a story printed in the March 21, 1877 edition of The Grange Advance, a newspaper printed in Red Wing, Minnesota.  Join us as we visit a haunted house.

If you lived in Kansas City in the mid-1880s odds are you would have taken great interest in the double homicide at No. 410 East Eighteenth Street.  Popularly known as the Conway murders, the grisly events of late October would echo for years to come.

On the afternoon of October 21, 1885, milkman John D. Conway returned to his home to find that his world had been changed forever.  In the bedroom he discovered the corpses of his wife Catherine and daughter, Katie,  Both had been murdered by vicious blows to the head.  The bodies were laying together in the bed, covered in blood.  

The police were summoned and the investigators immediately began to focus their attention on Thomas M. Turner, also a milkman.  Turner had been observed going to  the home several times during the day starting about 6:00 am.  The reclusive Turner had an arrangement with Mr. Conway to use his property as a distribution point for milk purchased from a Mr. Morland of Westport.  Each milkman maintained a separate route, returning to the Conway property to replenish.   As such Turner returned to the property several times on the day of the murder.    Turner claimed to have been there at 6:00, 10:30, 12:00 noon, 12:30, 1:10,  The murders were thought to have occurred at roughly 12:10 pm.  Turner testified that he observed nothing out of the ordinary and there were no indications on his clothing that he might have been the guilty party.

A bloody coupling pin was found to the rear of the premisses.  Turner had on occasion used such a pin as a hitching weight but could not produce his pin.  The coroner's jury determined that the coupling pin was the likely murder weapon and indicted Turner for the crime.

An unusual aspect of the investigation was the attempt to retrieve an image of the murderer from the eyes of the victims.  A photographer was brought in to photograph the eyes of both victims.  Many believed that the last images seen by a person at the time of death were somehow preserved on the retinas (see image from The Daily Commonwealth, October 24, 1885) .  Of course, this was a wasted effort.

Lacking any help from such spiritual photography as well as any physical evidence linking Turner to the murders a jury returned a verdict of not guilty, apparently directed but he judge to do so.  The circumstantial case presented by the prosecution did not hold.  The Columbus Weekly Advocate on February 4, 1886 describes the scene at the reading of the verdict, "After the verdict was announced, Mr. Conway, husband of the murdered wife, jumped up and warmly grasping Turner by the hand, and with tears in his eyes, congratulated Turner in the warmest terms."   No further suspects were tried for the murders and the case remains unsolved.

History was not done with Turner, wagging tongues continued to weave tales about the the reclusive milkman.  At the time of Turner's death (May 1888), his obituary included a complex fiction that somehow Turner and Mrs. Conway has known each other in younger days.  The gossipers went on to weave a yarn where Turner was in competition for the future Mrs. Conway in which Turner fabricated a letter to Catherine, purporting to be from Turner's competitor.  This letter broke things off between Catherine and the other young man.  Catherine went on to marry John D. Conway and supposedly she later found out about Turner's deception and fostered a strong hatred for him after that.  Turner's death of Glanders, an infection passed on by horses, donkeys, and mules, was sensationalized.  The death is horrific including symptoms of pneumonia combined with painful pustules covering the body.  The agent of Glanders, Burkholderia mallei, was at one time considered as a potential biological weapon.

There's nothing like a massacre to sell newspapers.  In August 1891 word came to San Francisco from the Arctic that the crews of the whalers Grampus and the Mary D. Hume while wintering on the McKenzie River had been massacred.  The initial report was doubted by William H. Williams, the Special Agent for the U.S. Treasury Department in the Pribilof Islands.   On October 5, 1891 the Mary D. Hume returned to port with its catch from three years at sea.  It seemed that Mr. Williams was right to be skeptical.   

In late October (27th) Louis Duffy, purported to be a crew member of the Grampus  arrived on the Mohican with a tale of vengeance and murder.  According to Duffy the crew of the Grampus had misused the local women and the Eskimo men repaid them by killing almost all of them.  The tale spread like wildfire and newspapers across the nation repeated the tale of abuse and revenge.  Duffy added details of his own tribulations and escape from the evil captain, who beat him severely and starved the crew.  Local newspapers had a field day embellishing the whole story.  Yet rumors persisted that there were problems with the tale.

On Halloween of that year the ghosts of the Grampus made their presence felt in earnest.  The fully-crewed Grampus arrived in San Francisco, with its holds containing hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of whale oil.  It was no ghost ship.  The two-year voyage of the ship was a financial success and the ship had suffered the loss of a single sailor by disease.  Despite the fact that the massacre tale was a pure fabrication, newspapers continued to spread the initial story, with the news of the survival of the crew following weeks to months later.  As an example, on November 5, 1891 the readers of the Newton Kansan were reading Duffy's initial lies about the massacre.   With the Grampus safe in port, Duffy had long since faded into obscurity in San Francisco.

The Grampus and other whaling ships wintering on the McKenzie that winter had shown the bounty of the the northern whaling groups of Alaska.  The captain and crew had good things to say about their native hosts during the voyage.  The newspapers subsequently published accounts of mistreatment of the crew by the captain, starving them and hooking them along with dogs to dogsleds.  The crew claimed to be fed dog food and that they were beaten like dogs.  When several attempted to desert they were hunted down, abused, and returned to service on the ship. The Grampus​ had over a decade of whaling ahead of it, but none of the later expeditions matched the 1890-1891 voyage.

Source Left: San Francisco Chronicle ​November 1, 1891

Immediately prior to the Civil War the inhabitants of the United States had a period of several months in which to debate the issues that eventually led to the war itself.  With our own distant lens on the history there has been a tendency to simplify or soften the debates made as the nation stood at the edge of the abyss.  America was a nation of negotiators and it should surprise no one that there was a lot of horse-trading proposed in those dark days.  Sugar farmers worried about what would happen when protective tariffs were removed.  Free navigation of the Mississippi was debated.  Ownership of railroads and national property  created great concerns.  Underneath it all was the festering sore of human bondage.  Many have attempted to soften the perception of causes of the split under the rubric of "States' Rights".  Indeed there are many mentions of States' Rights in the debates of the period.  However, when the discussion drills down into the details, time and time again the rights alluded to almost exclusively relate to that peculiar institution, slavery.  The nation had progressed through decades of a balancing act to equalize the power of slave states and free states.  Mr. Lincoln's election was seen as a fundamental upset of that delicate balance maintained by some of the wildest mental gymnastics in American history.

Prior to Mr. Lincoln's inauguration the politicians in congress held a peace conference, intended to propose measures that would serve to keep the slave-holding states in the Union.  The Peace Conference was held in the Willard Hotel and was attended by 131 of America's leading politicians.  It was convened at a time when seven states had already approved articles of secession.  The conference clearly was aimed at keeping further desertions from the Union.   Not surprisingly almost every section of the report deals with aspects of a single issue, that of involuntary servitude (slavery).  The report was submitted to Congress by former President Tyler.  The House never voted on the recommendations but they were approved by the Senate in a 28 to 7 vote.  The recommendations were never passed and the nation continued on its path to civil war.

Here is a summary of the recommendations:

Section 1- Set up a freedom line across the continent at 36 degrees 30 minutes North latitude.  North of that line territories would be admitted to the Union as Free States.  South of the line new states would be slave states.

Section 2- This section requires a four-fifths of the Senate to ratify further land acquisitions.

Section 3- Nullified the ability of Congress to abolish or control slavery in the territories or states, even through Constitutional amendment.  Nor can States or Congress interfere with transport of  or tax  persons bound to labor.

Section 4- Allows slave state courts and officers to enforce delivery of fugitive slaves in free states.

Section 5- Foreign importation of slaves is prohibited.

Section 6- Set up a situation where modifications to major portions of the Constitution, including those dealing with slaves, could not be amended or abolished without the consent of ALL states.

Section 7- Permits the government to repay the owners of fugitive slaves for the value of their labor if the marshals attempting to return them were threatened or subject to violence.

On October 29, 1860 the citizens of New Orleans were enjoying a play called The Wolf at the German Theatre.  The play included a scene where actor John Kruger stabbed actor Emile Stener.  Unfortunately on the night in question Kruger was not given a stage dagger and borrowed a real one.  This dangerous substitution need not have ended in tragedy but Emile was drunk and leaned into the coming blade instead of avoiding it.  Emile was stabbed through the neck with the gash extending all the way to the  backbone.  A shower of blood sprayed the stage and Emile was hauled off to the hospital, where he perished.  John was hauled off by the police.  This left cast and crew with a dreadful decision, what to do with a house full of clients who expected a show?  The crew wiped the copious amount of blood from the stage and the cast performed an hour-long comedy.  Remind me never to get hurt in New Orleans. 

I cannot find what happened to Kruger.  The New Orleans papers apparently don't have a record of charges and a trial.  We do learn that Emile lingered for several weeks at Charity Hospital and that he was 26 years old and a native of Prussia.