M.J. Rose

The bittersweet tale of solving the mystery of Miranda Eve — San Francisco’s mysterious mummified little girl. (Including some very interesting San Francisco history.)

Uncovering the original lead and bronze casket in San Francisco. Courtesy Garden of Innocence

Edith Howard Cook. Courtesy Garden of Innocence

From Atlas Obscura,

Searching for the Identity of San Francisco’s Mysterious Mummified Girl
The toddler, dubbed “Miranda Eve” when her coffin was found in 2016, died in 1876.
by Rick Paulas

“In 1900, with space in the 46-square-mile peninsula of San Francisco quickly becoming a premium, the city’s Board of Supervisors voted to reclaim some room from the dead. First, they ceased further burials within city limits. Then, in 1914, on the back of a developer publicly valuing cemetery land at $7 million, the city began the arduous and ramshackle process of evicting the deceased.

Over the next 40 years, nearly 150,000 bodies were exhumed and relocated a few miles south to the city of Colma; currently, dead residents outnumber the living there roughly 1300-to-1. But the relocation process wasn’t as fastidious as you’d expect. Records were transferred incorrectly, family plots were split apart, body parts were transposed and mixed with others, often in mass graves.

On May 9, 2016, as construction crews were renovating a home in the city’s posh Richmond district, they struck something with their shovels. Under the garage floor was a tiny coffin made of lead and bronze, its most prominent feature a pair of glass windows that allowed workers to peer inside. They saw the preserved remains of a three-year-old girl. She was dressed in white, with ankle-high shoes, and grasped purple flowers that’d also been woven into her hair. A rosary and eucalyptus seeds had been carefully set atop her chest. There were no markers indicating who she was or when she died…”

For the rest, click here. For more on this story and the identity of Miranda Eve, visit Garden of Innocence.

Iconic (and mysterious) corpse, Rosalio Lombardo, AKA the jewel of the Palermo catacombs…

Via Curiosity.com,

This Mummified Two-Year-Old Appears to Blink Every Day
Written by Reuben Westmaas

“Down in the catacombs of Sicily, you can visit the incredibly well preserved body of a two-year-old who died in 1920. And that’s not the spooky part. The spooky part is the fact that if you stand there long enough, you’ll see her eyes open and close.

Meet “Sleeping Beauty”

Rosalia Lombardo led a short, strange life. The daughter of a city official from Palermo, Italy, she was only two years old when she died of pneumonia. Her father, Mario Lombardo, took it about as well as you’d expect. In his grief, he contacted the legendary embalmer Alfredo Salafia to preserve his little girl in perpetuity. And if you dispute the existence of legendary embalmers, ask yourself: how many other embalmers do you know of that have their own Wikipedia page?”…

Click here for the full story, and scroll down the page for a great video (this video is actually the highlight of this whole piece. It’s from the series, Ask a Mortician, here).

Listen up witches, here’s the scoop on henbane, “the insane seed that breedeth madness”…

From The Vintage News,

Henbane: Egyptians smoked it, witches used it for “flying ointment,” and it poisoned Hamlet’s father

by Magda Origjanska

“The dose makes the poison, the ancient pharmacists once said. Even the most poisonous fauna that Mother Nature produces can be beneficial if used judiciously. The word poison may evoke thoughts of sudden, painful death, but for centuries herbalists and healers exploited the power of natural toxins and venoms as medicine.

Moreover, it is no secret that some “notorious” substances played a hallucinogenic and psychotropic role too. Most of us are quite familiar with the fact that Coca-Cola’s older variants (1886-1929) contained cocaine in varying amounts. At the time cocaine was considered a legal medicine, and it wasn’t the first drinkable product that used the coca plant in its formula.

Among the numerous plants of this kind was henbane, which during the Middle Ages was widely known as “the insane seed that breedeth madness,” although today it is recognized for its contribution to the development of modern medical painkillers…”

Click here for the rest.