Key West Venture Pt II
One of the East Martello Museums more intriguing residents, I happened upon by accident. Just past the Robert The Doll exhibit, the museum's star attraction, my EMF started pinging an entity nearby, then I heard the word LOVE on my ghost box. I said to my wife and faithful assistant Melissa, awww an unrequited love story in the keys how romantic, how wrong was I.
I briefly glanced at the exhibit before my eye was caught by another, then another. There is so much to see there, I didn't notice that the entity on my EMF had gone from green to red, indicating it was displeased, so we swiftly moved on deeper into the citadel until we reached the interior of the fort which was a large open area with a rounded barracks in the center which I wrote about in a previous blog.
It was in this open area that Melissa and I ran into the museums curator Susie Parpana who asked if we had seen the Carl Tanzler display, when I told her what registered on my ghost box she gave me puzzled look and imparted a truly bizzare tale of love, obsession, and grave robbing.
In 1930 in a hospital in Key West a self proclaimed doctor going by the name of Carl Tanzler met and fell in love with a patient, a Cuban-American woman named Maria Elena “Helen” Milagro DeHoyos, the beautiful daughter of a local cigar maker. She had been diagnosed with Tuberculosis and was on the verge of dying, Tanzler promised to cure her at his home with electronic equipment and various medicines. Tanzler began showing his adoration for Elena with gifts of jewelry and clothing but she rejected his advances because she was legally married to a man named Luis Mesa.
Elena finally succumbed to her illness in 1931 and with the family's permission Tanzler had an above ground tomb constructed for her, oddly enough there was only one key made for the tomb, and Tanzler kept it. He would visit her often, and claimed that her spirit would sit with him and sing her favorite Spanish songs. He also claimed she told him to dig up her body and take it home! For those of a gentle constitution be warned, this story gets darker from here.
According to Tanzler's testimony, he removed her body in 1933 and took her corpse home in a wagon. As one would guess her body was in a high state of decomposition so to preserve her he tied her bones together with piano wire, put glass eyes in her sockets, and filled her chest cavity with rags to retain its form. To replicate her skin, he wrapped the corpse in rags soaked in Plaster of Paris and wax, and finally, he made a wig of hair he had saved from her visits over the years.
Tanzler kept her well dressed and used perfumes to combat the smell of decay, by his admission he would take the corpse to his bed and engaged in necrophilia despite the smell. Rumors about the doctor's new love interest caught the attention of Elena's sister Florinda, who decided to confront the doctor, and to her horror saw him dancing with her sister's remains in his parlor through his front window.
The authorities were called and Tanzler was taken into custody and Elenas body was put on display. 6800 people came out to see her remains. Her family was finally given custody of her remains, and they buried her in an unmarked grave somewhere. on the Keys. Tanzler was deemed unfit to stand trial after admitting he had planned to bring her back to life using radiation.
It was rumored that Tanzler created a life sized model of Elena and kept it until his death in 1952.
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