How far the mighty fall

In 1918 in Yekaterinburg, Russia, this family

was roused from their beds in the middle of the night. They were marched down to the basement of the house in which they were being held captive (having been under house arrest for the last sixteen months), lined up, and killed in this room.

A group of men shot at the family, their doctor, and the three servants who had chosen to accompany them into exile. Most of the bullets ricocheted off the bodies of the four daughter, as, unbeknownst to their captors, they had sewn some of the family's diamonds into the lining of their dresses when they had first been taken prisoner. Seeing that the bullets were failing, the men then stabbed the young women with their bayonets.

They were the Romanovs, once the Imperial family of Russia. Many had become displeased with the way the country was being run, and so Tsar Nicholas II abdicated the throne in face of the Bolshevik uprising and the Russian Civil War. For a while the enemy forces had been content to keep the family hostage, but when the White Russian forces were gaining ground and would potentially have been able to stage a rescue attempt, the order was given to execute the family. According to Leon Trotsky, the order came from Vladimir Lenin.

The four grand duchesses and their dogs while in captivity

Their brother the Tsarevich, one-time heir to the throne (photo taken while in captivity)

The children all contracted measles while in exile, and the practice back then was to shave the head to get rid of any remaining traces of virus. Pictured here are the four girls.

Relations with their guards were fairly civil in the beginning. Here, the former Tsar and one of his daughters (the two standing in the back to the right) pose with some of their gaurds.

The bodies of the Romanovs were driven out into wilderness to be disposed of. They were tossed into an abandoned mine shaft, which turned out to be much shallower than their murderers had hoped. A few grenades were tossed into the shaft in an effort to collapse earth in around the corpses and cover them up, but that didn't work out so well either. The men covered the bodies with  brush for the time being, while they returned to town and worked on coming up with a plan B.

The next day the story had already begun to make the rounds - some of them men had gone drinking and bragged about what they had done, even mentioning the area where they had ditched the bodies. So now the bodies had to be moved. They drove the corpses to another location and dug a mass grave. They smashed the faces with the butts of the rifles and doused them with sulfuric acid, hoping to render them unrecognizable should the bodies be discovered.

The site where the remains of the Romanovs lay buried for more than half a century, now marked and commemorated

As it turned out, no one found the disposal site until 1979. But the men who found the remains then were too scared to tell anyone about it; it was not a time in Russian history when they would be thanked for uncovering the last imperial family. They returned all of the bones to the grave and covered them back up.

10 years later the political climate had changed enough that one of the men told the world of the discovery, and said he would point out the location of the site if the remains were given a proper Christian burial. In 1991, the official go ahead was given to open the grave.

Diagram of the grave that was exhumed in 1991

However, a new problem was uncovered once the grave was dug up. Inside were the bodies of the Tsar, the Empress, three of their daughters, the doctor and the three servants who had died with them.

But wait a minute. What about the fourth daughter? What about the son?

Thus began the trend over the next many years of people popping up all over the place claiming to be the long lost Tsarevich or Grand Duchess. (Think the Disney movie "Anastasia.")

Russian and American scientists disagreed on exactly which girl was missing, Anastasia or Maria.

Only five skulls from a family of seven

 So we definitely had Empress Alexandra (whose skull had dentures made from platinum):

Alexandra, shown here with her beloved son Alexei

And we definitely had Tsar Nicholas II (whose leg bones had been permanently altered by all of the horseback riding he did):

A photograph of the last tsar superimposed over the skull believed to be his

We had the oldest two daughters, Olga and Tatiana:

Olga on left, Tatiana on right

Olga

Tatiana

But we were missing one of the younger girls:

Maria

Anastasia

All four grand duchesses together when they were little

And we were definitely missing this guy:

Tsarevich Alexei

For years that mystery went unsolved. If they really did kill all of the Romanovs as claimed, where the heck were the other two bodies?

In the meantime, scientists worked on positively identifying the remains they did have. They confirmed that two of the skeletons had been the parents of those that belonged to the three young women. They exhumed the remains of the tsar's long-dead brother to compare DNA, and confirmed a sibling relationship. One last important step was achieved with the help of Prince Philip of England (the Queen's husband, the Duke of Edinburgh.)

Dude was kind enough to provide a DNA sample for study. And since pretty much all of European royalty was related to one another in some way throughout history, this helped seal the deal. (In this case, Prince Philip's grandmother was Empress Alexandra's sister.) The skeleton of the mother and the three young women were matched to Philip's DNA.

And now, just because it amuses me, I am going to further emphasize how tight the gene pool of European royalty was at the time. Check out this picture of the Tsar of Russia and the King of England.

Tsar Nicholas II and King George V. I'll let you guess which is which.

Whoa, for real?

Yes, for real.

The two men were first cousins. Incidentally, King George V was also the Empress Alexandra's first cousin. Of course.


For many years the recovered remains were studied in this way, by scientists from around the world.

But the mystery remained - where were Alexei and his sister? Had they somehow survived that brutal night? Had they escaped? If they were killed along with all the others, as their executioners claimed, then why were they not buried with the rest? Much was made of those questions, breeding as they do our sense of the romantic.

However, in case you didn't hear (because I sure didn't until well after the fact), in 2007 the bodies of the other two WERE discovered. They were found in a separate grave about 260 feet away from the first. It irked me that after so much speculation and sensationalism, this side of the world barely even heard about it when the mystery was finally solved. (DNA testing confirms the whole lot: http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0004838)

One possible explanation for the separate grave is this: when the first attempt to hide the bodies failed so miserably, the man in charge of the operation scrambled to come with another idea. He set his men to digging one huge mass grave. In the meantime, he tried to burn two of the bodies to see if that was a viable option for disposing of them all. He chose to burn the Tsarevich Alexei and Empress Alexandra. However, due to the nature of the corpses at that point, he mistook the body of one of the Grand Duchesses for the Empress.

I'm still not sure why this would lead to him burying them separately. I'm sure the world will never know exactly what happened, since people in that grisly period of Russian history were constantly changing their stories to suit. For example, multiple men from the firing squad tried to turn their guns in to museums, claiming that theirs was the one that had ended the last tsar.



In 2008 the bodies of the Romanovs were finally laid to rest with state honors in the St. Catherine Chapel of the Peter and Paul Cathedral in St. Petersburg.

May they find peace at last, and so too all of the other victims of that ugly time in Russian history.

Little Romanovs!

Fifth time's the charm - finally got that boy!

Wait a second, wait a second...who is that with them in the last picture? OH SNAP! It's Rasputin! 

Keep an eye out for my next blog post, which will be all about Rasputin, the mad monk.

Giants, sea creatures and ghosts, oh my!

The Cardiff Giant.

Some of you may be aware of this little piece of American folklore, while some of you might live right near Cardiff, NY and not be familiar with the story.

It begins in 1868. It was a time when people were more likely to take the written word of their holy books as literal truth (a practice which, sadly, continues in some degree to this day, to the detriment of humankind), not recognizing the fact that the words themselves were put down by the hands of men. I think we can all agree that the hands of men (and women) are fallible, and often driven by the writer's own agenda.

The tendency to interpret their holy books literally was more widespread back then than it is now, and the Old Testament of the Bible makes mention in several places of a race of giants. (See http://www.answersingenesis.org/articles/aid/v7/n1/ot-giants) So that means that, at least at one time in the history of our world, there were honest to god giants roaming the earth. Right?

Think David and Goliath

George Hull, a cigar manufacturer of Binghamton, NY, was an atheist who had experienced a heated debate with a Methodist minister. Hull scoffed at the unlikely tall tales he claimed the Bible held, while the minister vehemently argued that the stories in the Bible were all to be taken as literal truth. Hull considered the people who maintained that belief to be gullible, and thought to profit from these circumstances. He commissioned the construction of a sculpture of a giant man from 5-ton block of gypsum. The resulting 10-foot stone man was then hammered with knitting needles to create the look of pores in skin, and treated with acid to make it appear aged and weathered. He then had the statue shipped to the farm of his cousin, William Newell, in Cardiff, NY, just south of Syracuse. Hull and Newell buried it behind a barn.


On a side note, my husband has family in Cardiff. His grandmother, Maude (whose name was not really Maude) and her common law husband Buggy (whose name is not really Buggy) lived in Cardiff for many years. Buggy lives there still. Just because it makes me happy, I'll share here a photograph taken in front of the Cardiff house: my husband, our firstborn son, Grandma Sue and Great-Grandma Maude.

Four generations

Meanwhile, just down the road

One year later, Newell hired some men to "dig a well" on his property. And, gasp! They uncovered the remains of what appeared to be the corpse of an ancient giant man! So old, in fact, that he seemed to have become petrified!

Within mere days, Newell and Hull had obtained a license to exhibit the Giant, erected a tent over its "burial site", and charged 50 cents for admission to come view this wonder they had discovered. So many people flocked to see the remains of the Giant that they even constructed a food tent, cider stand, and carriage service at the site for all of the paying tourists. Within less than three weeks the men had made approximately $7,000 in admission fees.

Note the placement of the leaf. We wouldn't want to scare anyone with this:

Giant peen.

Cardiff was too small to put up all of the tourists now making their way to see the exhibit, and as a result, the economy in Syracuse was booming. With such a financial interest, Syracuse businessmen paid Newell $37,000 for 3/4 interest in the Giant. The Giant man's remains were exhumed and transferred to an exhibition hall in Syracuse.

Circus entrepreneur P.T. Barnum made a generous offer to buy the Giant, but was refused. Not one to take no as an answer, Barnum had a plaster replica made of the giant and displayed it in his own show, hawking it as the real thing. There was, in fact, a time when both the original fake giant man and Barnum's copy of the fake were both on exhibit in New York City; Barnum's drew more crowds, and earned more money.

Professionals were called in to examine the remains. Geologists and paleontologists, among others, came to look at the Giant. Almost all of them declared it a fake. Hull finally confessed his scheme. As the hype wound down, the Cardiff Giant was relegated to storage for many years before being acquired in 1947 for display at the Farmer's Museum in Cooperstown, NY (http://www.farmersmuseum.org/).

The Farmer's Museum has many other interesting things to check out, such as a "village" of genuine 19th century buildings from around rural New York that were relocated and restored piece by piece, including a doctor's office. Very cool.

Speaking of Cooperstown...

I kind of love Cooperstown, NY. Due in no small part to this book:

Groff's novel takes place in a town called Templeton, which is actually Cooperstown (from where she hails). The map of Templeton on the inside cover even features the Farmer's Museum. But Groff is hardly the first novelist to come from and write of Cooperstown. Ever heard of James Fenimore Cooper? He wrote The Last of the Mohicans, and Cooperstown was founded by his father, U.S. Congressman William Cooper. The younger Cooper and the people his characters' may have been modeled after also feature in Groff's book. (If you ever visit Cooperstown, I also suggest you visit the Fenimore Art Museum: http://www.fenimoreartmuseum.org/).

One of the biggest (and you can take that written word literally) themes of The Monsters of Templeton is the sea monster in Glimmerglass Lake, aptly named "Glimmy." In her book, Groff creates her own part of New York State mythology and folklore. She somehow manages to make this monster and its story into something profound and touching. 

This is not Glimmy, but "Champ", the alleged monster of Lake Champlain at the border of New York and Vermont. Also sought after by P.T. Barnum, that greedy rascal.

In real life Cooperstown, it's actually Otsega Lake. Cooper first called it Glimmerglass in his books, and there now is Glimmerglass State Park and Glimerglass Opera on its shores. Also right on its banks is the Otasaga Resort Hotel. Fancy stuff.

And like any "historic hotel of America" worth its salt, there are stories of hauntings at the Otesaga Hotel (as well as at the historic village at the Farmer's Museum!) There was an episode of SyFy's Ghosthunters where the members of The Atlantic Paranormal Society (TAPS) investigated the hotel. (See http://www.phantomsandmonsters.com/2010/03/haunted-history-of-cooperstown-ny-and.html)

TAPS also hosted an event called "The Ghosts of Cooperstown." Members of the public could stay with them at the hotel for two nights and perform investigations on a few of the hotels floors, and also at the historic village section of the Farmer's Museum. People could also attend different talks, the topics of which included the history of the Ouija board, cryptozoology, and demonology. Chip Coffey was there, among others. 

My own sister and mother attended this event, and they had a blast! The second night included a dinner with the some cast members of the TV show, including Grant, Jason, Britt, and Amy. There was an auction during the dinner for different prizes and such. My sister won the prize to participate in a light painting.

 

My sister, Sarah, as part of a "light painting" with TAPS members Amy and Britt; they're the ghosts trying to communicate with her during her investigation at the Otesaga!

My lady mother with Jason Hawes from ScyFy's Ghosthunters

My sister with Jason Hawes of TAPS

Oh, and there's something about baseball in Cooperstown, too :)

And so, for those of you still with me and reading, perhaps now you know a little bit more about my neck of the woods in Upstate New York now than you did before. I hope you enjoyed the post :)