October 30, 2017 • 36 mins
Carl Tanzler loved a woman, and his love for her continued long after her death. But whether she loved him back is a matter of dispute. Just the same, he removed her from her tomb so she could 'live' with him.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to steph you missed in history class from how
Stuffworks dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm
Holly Fry and I'm Tracy B. Wilson. Uh So, Tracy,
you may remember that when we did the Devil's Footprints
(00:21):
in the intro, I said, Hey, this sounds creepy, but
it's really funny. Yes, don't say that. Don't be scared.
This is opposite, kind of the opposite. It's really gross
and pretty horrifying. Uh to some people. It may even
sound a little bit romantic. In my opinion, it is not.
We'll get into why. But it involves a man who
(00:42):
loved a woman and his love for her continued long
after her death. But whether she loved him back as
a matter of some dispute. And according to the subject
of this episode, Carl Tandler, she did, but according to
her family she did not. And we don't actually have
to guess at Tandler thought during all of this. We
have his account, which he published some years after all
(01:05):
of these events happened, uh, as a paid writing gig
for the pulp comic Fantastic Adventures in heads Up. This
is very dark stuff. We're talking about things like decomposition
and people handling corpses, and it might not be suitable
for younger history buffs or just people that are a
(01:27):
little bit um queasy of tummy yeah, or in general,
or just cumans who are pretty dark by horrifying things. Yeah. Tandler,
whose name sometimes appears with a K instead of a
sea in Carl was born in Dresden, Germany, on February
eighteen seventy seven, and he claimed that he grew up
(01:47):
in a country castle that was haunted by a figure
known as the White Woman, who he also called Countess
Anna Costell. He believed this ghost was an ancestor who
died in the eighteenth century. The Countess, her Carl's account,
had been a beauty and was interested in alchemy, and
at the age of twelve, Carl, who had a hearty
(02:09):
interest in science himself, had a dream about the Countess,
the first of many visions of her that he had
throughout his life. As he matured, Tamsla remained obsessed only
with science and invention. He wasn't a smoker or a drinker,
and he also wasn't particularly interested in romance. That comes
up over and over where in his defense of his character.
(02:29):
He always comments that he neither smoked nor drink um,
but that focus on science enabled him, again, according to
his own account, to earn master's degrees in medicine, philosophy, mathematics, physics,
and chemistry. He claimed by the time he was twenty four,
Carl believed the ghost of the Countess visited him, sometimes
(02:50):
making a ruckus breaking scientific instruments, and eventually, he said
he she showed him the woman he was destined to
be with. This is a beautiful, a young woman with long,
dark hair. He would use this vision as sort of
a guiding element of his life. After he finished his schooling,
Carl traveled a great deal, and Tandler even admits in
(03:13):
his own writings his account of his travels as a
young man are lacking in details, writing quote, I can
refer to these years only in the sketchiest manner in
this magazine account, because all which matters is what leads
up to my final meeting with the apparition of the castle.
At one point he traveled to Genoa, he encountered a
(03:33):
marble statue that looked like this, promised Beloved that his
ancestor had shown him. The statue sat atop a grave
of a woman named Elena, who had died at the
age of twenty two. Tandler was so moved by the
appearance of the statue that he began to weep, and
he kept saying the name Elena over and over. He
(03:54):
wrote that he next saw a spirit seemed to emerge
from the statue and walk past him, as it may
direct eye contact with him. He pursued this spirit into
the streets of Genoa, but he lost her in a crowd.
After this incident, Tandler kept traveling, and his journeys eventually
ended in Sydney, Australia, where he settled down for a while.
(04:14):
He got a job as an electrical engineer and an
X ray expert. He also built rebuilt a torpedo boat
that he used to go fishing and to explore. In
May of nineteen ten, still living in Sydney, Tandler was
visited by what he believed was a ghost, a spirit
that entered his home, blew out his lamps, and then left.
(04:37):
The ghosts stayed away until March seventh of nineteen twelve
at seven pm, and then as he was eating dinner,
it appeared to him fully visible. The same beautiful young
woman that his ancestor had promised would be his bride.
He approached the apparition, they embraced one another, and his
writing about this moment describes a divine bliss before the
(04:59):
spirit melt it away. But the spirit was gone but
a moment before regaining its form in another room of
the bachelor's home. She remained for a week, following him
around the house, smiling as she observed him. She was
silent and he didn't know her name, so he began
calling her Aisha. He would later write quote, there was
(05:20):
an incorporeal love between us which approached the divine. When
the spirit left, Tandler reported feeling very depressed, although he
was also confident that they would meet again and that
she was his promised bride that the spirit of Countess
Anna had told him about. But his anguish over it
all manifested in physical illness, and he wound up being
(05:41):
admitted to the hospital. As he began to recover, he
discovered that his father had fallen into a coma and
then died a week later, And that week coincided, according
to Tandler's writings, exactly with his spirit visitors time with
him right to the hour. Tandler had actually become a
British subject while living in Australia, and he spent World
(06:02):
War One in an internment camp due to his German heritage.
Tandler wrote a lengthy account of his time in the
camp for Rosicrucian Digest in nine. In this tale, he
claims to have built an organ from debris with the
assistance of fellow prisoners, who Tandler said, we're all Buddhist
priests while imprisoned in the camp. The sounds kind of
(06:23):
far fetched to me, as much of his writing does.
After the armistice, the organ traveled with Tandler by boat
back to Europe, and it was a harrowing journey, during
which the ship he was on passed through a number
of storms. When he finally arrived back home, only his
mother and one sister remained there. His other sister had
(06:44):
gotten married and moved to the United States, and his father,
of course, was deceased. Carl felt completely unmoored back in Germany,
and he was unable to resume any sort of life
that resembled his previous one before the war, and so
tam Ler, who at this point was in his late forties,
left Europe. First, he traveled to Havannah, Cuba, arriving in
(07:06):
late February. He stayed there for a few days i'm
the carnival crowd to see if any of the women
might reveal themselves to be his promised love. But on
March one he headed to Florida, where his married sister
was living. And while Tandler did not exactly love Florida,
he thought that Cuba was a far more beautiful place.
(07:28):
He purchased land and began working on a home there,
but he soon needed to seek out work to keep
money coming in. At that point, he had been basically
living off a family money, and he soon began working
at the Marine Hospital at Key West as an X
ray specialist and pathologist. Coming up, we will talk about
the moment that Tandler felt all of those visions had
(07:49):
manifested in a faded meeting. But first we were going
to stop for a quick sponsor break. It was in
his position at the Marine Hospital that Tindler was called
to draw blood from a patient on April twenty, and
that patient was Maria Elena Milagrod Hoyos, and when Carl
(08:12):
Tandler met her, he loved her instantly he believed that
she was the woman that his distant relative had shown
him finally in the flesh, their lives having followed the
paths that would lead them to one another. There's also
the sobering fact that this young woman whose blood he
had drawn was listed as married on her records. Carl
(08:33):
questioned briefly whether he was somehow cursed and had finally
found his dream bride, only to immediately discover that she
was in fact someone else's actual bride. In spite of
this fact, though he he called his mood indescribably happy.
Tandler identified the cause of Elena's illness soon after they
(08:54):
met tuberculosis. In the nineteen thirties, tuberculosis was often still
a death sentence. Carl knew that there were places abroad
that could probably successfully treat Elena, and he even offered
to send her for treatment elsewhere, but Elena and her
family refused. Tandler had learned that Elena's husband had left
her and was not in the picture anymore, so he
(09:16):
dedicated his every energy and resource to trying to cure
her himself. He treated her with radiation at the hospital,
but also planned additional treatments and then he rededicated himself
to the restoration of an airplane that he had been
tinkering with. His intention was that he would cure Elena
and they would fly away together to an island in
(09:38):
the South Seas that he claimed to have discovered and
thus owned. That is not how it works. There are,
as we said, a lot of far fetched things in
his accounts of his life. Uh, this is also a
really good time to mention. In addition to the fact
that you may have noticed, we have not mentioned Elena
falling in love with Carl Tandler, but she was also
(10:00):
much younger than Carl, who also, by the way, was
calling himself Count von Kozel. She was only twenty when
they met, and he at this point was fifty three
years old. Per Tandler's account, Elena's treatment was hindered by
her family. He was willing to do almost anything for her,
and he characterized them and his writing as being distrustful
(10:23):
of the medical knowledge and advice that he offered. Carl
also had dreams about Elena, and at one point he
wrote her a letter detailing one of them. In response,
her sister visited Tandler at work at the hospital and
told him to dream no more. He felt that his
dreams included premonitions of what was to come. Regarding Elena's health,
(10:43):
Carl continued to write letters to Elena, writing in one quote,
so often you have said that I am too old
for you. But listen, Darling, I never count my years,
neither do I count yours. If you were a mummy
five thousand years old, I would marry you just the same.
I swear it's not for selfish reasons that I want
this marriage, but because I can do so much more
(11:05):
than a boy your age. I can offer you my science,
my experience, my capacity to save your life and this
apart and on top of my undying love. You want
to get well, don't you? And you want to see
the world. Don't you remember that time we did the
episode about Thomas Day and his and you were really
(11:26):
angry the whole time. Yeah, that's how I feel about
this episode. Oh me too. Um, Yeah, there's so much.
He kept proposing to her. She kept saying no, and
she would often say no, you're too old for me.
But he just kept going after her and just relentlessly
pursued her. All of his letters to her kind of
(11:46):
treat her like a child, and like she should just
inherently trust him. It's very weird and troubling. Um. But
Elena did visit the hospital again, although because there was
no privacy, she and Carl didn't speak much um. That
same day, though, Tandler received word that his mother had died,
and he actually believed, similar to how he thought that
(12:07):
a ghost had visited him when his father was in
a coma, that a higher power had made Elena visit
that day to offer him comfort. Elena's family moved, Neither
they nor their neighbors would disclose their new address to Tandler.
He did not give up, though, and eventually a friend
of the family he was worried about Elena's failing health,
(12:28):
pointed him to their house. Yeah, Elena was very, very
sick in this time, and this woman, presumably out of
a good intention, thought like, here's a medical professional and
this girl needs help. Um, So she gave up their location,
but he pushed his way into their home. Any more
or less took over whether the family had distanced themselves
(12:48):
from Tandler because they were fearful of science, as his
account indicates, or they were weirded out by this elderly
man's obsessive behavior with Elena. We do not know for certain,
we only have his side of this story, but they
acquiesced to his presence at this point, likely because Elena
was in a really, really bad state in terms of
her health and they were just desperate for any sort
(13:10):
of help. He started electric current treatment with Elena. You
let other members of the family experience it as well
so they would know it wasn't harmful. He also gave
Elena throat sprays to try to address her cough, including
one that had gold dissolved into it, but she didn't
like any of these. Yeah, he kind of was off
(13:30):
doing his own sorts of medication, concoctions, and treatments. Carl's
diary tells the story that he claims was Elena asking
him to take care of her body after her death,
which she felt was imminent in the fall of nine.
He quoted her as saying, if I must die, all
(13:51):
I can leave you is my body, for I am
only a sickly girl, so I can't marry you while
I am sick. But you will take care of my
body after I'm dead, won't you. According to Carl, he
promised that he would, and in his mind, he considered
this to be their marriage. Bow He also wrote a
note for Elena to keep in case of emergency, claiming
(14:12):
that he was her husband and that she was of
sound mind. And he did this after rumors began to
circulate that her family was considering having her move to
an asylum. So by the time Elena died on October,
Carl Tandler considered himself to be her husband, and he
had established an adversarial relationship with her family. Even so,
(14:36):
when Elena died, the family, which had a little money,
let Tandler handle all the funeral arrangements. Yeah, he basically
swooped in and said he would pay for everything, and they, grieving,
agreed to it. Carl describes in his writing feeling as
though Elena's eyes were looking into him at the visitation
before the funeral, even though her eyes were closed. While
(14:59):
intellectual he knew she was dead. He wrote, quote, my
heart with far greater force told me she is not dead.
And he wrote this of the funeral's conclusion, quote, A
strange kind of new life now began for me. It
was something like a rebirth after these last two oppressing
and depressing years. Now at last, nobody could take my
(15:20):
Elena away from me. Although I could not see her
any longer, I felt her presence all the time. Carl
then moved into Elena's room at her family's home. The
Hoyos family had told Tandler that they didn't want to
live there anymore because of their grief. That house only
held memories of their ailing Elena, and he said that
(15:40):
if they moved, he was just going to rent the
house himself or buy it outright, and they ended up staying,
and so did he. He also decided that Elena's grave
wasn't safe or watertight, so he built her a tomb,
to which he had the only key, and he disinterred
her body to have it placed inside this tomb. Handler
(16:00):
spares no details in discussing Elena's body as they found
it when they disinterred it. In his diary, he noted
that she had been decaying and that the lining of
her coffin had fallen down and stuck to her face
and body, and he spent hours carefully removing it. He
then cleaned and treated the body with preservative, and he
sprayed it with Eau de cologne. When Elena's body was
(16:23):
placed into the tomb, Tandler made sure it was under
the best possible conditions to prevent further decay. He visited
this tomb, which he compared to a small house, every evening.
He claimed he felt a piece when he was there
that he had nowhere else. After eighteen months of visits, Elena,
he said, began talking to him. She would ask if
(16:47):
she was truly dead, and told Carl she wanted to
go live in his home. He promised that she could,
and he brought her a gift every evening, things like
handkerchiefs and pieces of jewelry, and he planned for the
time that he would bring her home and dress her
in a wedding gown and live with her as his bride.
He believed that he could hear her singing to him
(17:08):
when he visited, and he also felt that at times
Elena was controlling his body, sending him signals to show
him things to do, including how to get her out
of the cemetery without being observed. Tandler rented a house
adjacent to the cemetery so that he could first move
Elena's body into it and then move it via car
from that spot. Under a new moon, he took the
(17:31):
casket from the tomb and put it on a child's wagon,
then covered it with a blanket and set out across
the cemetery. Sometimes you'll read accounts of this that are
kind of abbreviated, and they say he took the body
in a wagon, and it kind of sounds like he
folded up the body into the wagon, but now he
there was a coffin on top of it. Uh and
Tandler wrote of this walk quote, all of the cemetery
(17:52):
was alive with souls which came out of the graves
from all sides, moving and thronging around us. It was
indeed like a stable among the departed. As they moved
up on all sides. It was like a great divine
wedding march for me taking place. He moved the body
into the rented house near the cemetery, but it took
(18:12):
some trouble. When Tandler put Elena's body in the tomb,
he had placed it in a double casket with an
interior chamber that was filled with a preservative fluid. There
was a leak during the move, but Tandler managed to
minimize how much liquid was lost, and then he moved
Elena's body to his plane two days later. This is
the same plane that we mentioned earlier that he was
(18:34):
restoring with the intention of flying Elena wherever she wished.
Yeah became their home for a while. Carl called Elena's
cabin on the plane the ship's hospital, and he carefully
unpacked her from her coffin. This segment of Tandler's recollections
is a fascinating combination of scientific description and really twisted
(18:55):
and weird romantic interlude. He writes of the mold and
slime which were consuming her body and how carefully he
had to remove those, trying as best he could to
preserve her skin, and then within just a few paragraphs,
he also talks about how beautiful she looked once he
had draped her with a silk veil, and how she
was worried that he wouldn't love her anymore, and he
(19:16):
quote sank gently into the coffin to her and kissed
her as if she were alive. He took samples from
the body and examined them in the hospital lab and
was very happy that there were no dangerous bacteria in
the mix. He felt that dying had in a way
cured Elena of her tuberculosis. He washed her hair, cleaned
(19:37):
maggots from the body, cleaned her skin, alluding in his
writing to special ingredients that he used on her skin
that he wished to quote to keep secret. In a moment,
we'll talk about just what Tinseler's intentions were for Elena's body.
But first we're going to take a break, so we
could all use a little uh so sure in a
(20:00):
from all of the dead body talk, and we're going
to hear from one of our sponsors. So Carl Tandler's
intent was to resurrect Elena. He wrote over and over
that all of his restoration efforts were aimed at perfecting
her so that when she awoke, she would be her
(20:21):
beautiful self. He was adamant that even after eighteen months
in the grave, she was in better shape than some
of the living patients that he had treated. He fed
the body, dispensing quote nourishing fluids to her orally. He
claimed that Elena gained twenty pounds this way, and that
her various lacerations and wounds were healing. He wrote, quote,
(20:44):
even the expression of her face changed to divine happiness.
She did not require words to express herself. Her face
was so much more eloquent than words could be. He
also made plaster casts of the body to have a
permanent record of Elena's beauty, and when he discovered that
the silk that he had covered her face with had
(21:05):
bonded to the skin, he left it in place and
he painted over it with beeswax and balsam. Tandler was
still working at the Marine Hospital during this time, and
when the hospital administration had a leadership change, it meant
that Carl's airplane was no longer welcome and its parking
space on hospital grounds, so he moved it to the beach,
(21:25):
taking the plane through town as though it was on
a parade, enjoying his secret knowledge that Elena's body was
in it in a flower laden cabin. Yeah, he even
talks in his writing about how they went by her
family and they were all waving at him in the plane,
not knowing that he had their relative inside, which is
(21:46):
makes me growling. On his beach parcel of land that
he had arranged, he built a structure that was to
be his laboratory at home, as well as a hangar
for the plane. This was all one big structure, and
once they were moved in there, he continued his work
always with the goal that he was going to bring
Elena back to life. He played music for her because quote,
(22:07):
it was a means to apply the cosmic laws of
vibration through harmonic sound waves. He also applied electricity and
was adamant that all of his work was part of
an exact science. By soaking Elena in his liquid plasma quote,
incubator Tandler said he had reversed the embalming process to
(22:29):
prevent insect problems and desiccation. Tandler treated the entire body
as he had the face, with a layer of silk
coated with wax and balsam. He also kept the body
dressed and lying in bed, and remarked repeatedly on its
beauty in his writing about this whole process. As Carl
tended to Elena and his work to bring her back
(22:49):
to life, years passed. He celebrated holidays with Elena's body
and then moved again just before the summer of nine.
Tandler claimed it not long after the move, Elena began
to wake up and moved one of her fingers ever
so slightly and turned slightly to gaze at him. But
this was, in his account, a fleeting improvement. For the
(23:13):
next several years, he continued trying to maintain the body,
but he had started to realize that he was losing
ground just the same it was. This was roughly seven
years since Tandler had taken Elena's body from her tomb,
and it was then that things began to unravel. While
Carl Tandler had been careful to take Elena's body out
(23:33):
of the cemetery without anyone seeing him, and while he
had moved his corpse bride to his airplane under a
similar cloak of darkness, he was that very careful about otherwise,
not drawing attention to himself. For one thing, after he
had visited Elena's tomb every single night for a year
and a half, which everyone knew he did, he had
(23:55):
abruptly stopped. He occasionally went back to check him on
the actual structure over the years, but it was a
rarity and people noticed this change in behavior. And for another,
he continued to buy gifts for Elena and the sixties
something bachelor buying dresses, perfume, jewelry, and flowers also raised
some eyebrows. People started to wonder where all of those
(24:17):
things were going. Elena's sister eventually confronted him. She wanted
Tandler to open up the coffin in Elena's tomb. He
refused to do so. She became angry, but then she
said she just wanted to see her sister, and he
said that he would let her do that. He revealed
that Elena was in his home in her state of preservation.
(24:40):
Tandler seems to have thought that Elena's family was going
to be really pleased to see how well he had
cared for her, but the initial reaction on her sister's
part was disbelief. She didn't think this was really her
sister's body. But then Elena's sister, who was named Florinda
and went by Nana, asked Handler to just please return
(25:01):
the body to its casket. She kind of was coming
out of this weird state of disbelief and just wanted
her sister to be buried properly, but Tandler refused. Four
days later, two sheriffs arrived at Tandler's home. They took
Elena's body to a funeral home. Carl Tandler was taken
into custody. Quote accused of wantonly and maliciously demolishing disfiguring
(25:24):
and destroying a grave. The story of Carl Tandler von
Kosl and his corpse bride got picked up by gossip
circles and the press immediately. He basically became instantly famous,
and there were photographers on hand for every step of
the legal proceedings. He was held on a thousand dollars bail,
and he was put in the county jail, where he
prayed to die so that he could be with Elena forever.
(25:47):
But during his time in jail, sympathizers to Carl Tandler's
situation brought him food, they offered him consolation. Key West's
most experienced lawyer offered to take up tam Lur's case
free of charge. Carl was pretty open with the authorities
about his situation. He explained to them and to the
(26:07):
press that he could not bear to think of Elena's
body rotting away in the grave, and that he really
believed that he could restore her and bring her back
to life. His hearing was on October eighth, nin and
the time between the arrest and the hearing, Elena's body
was on public display at the funeral home that it
had been moved to thousands of people went to look
(26:28):
at her, and the overall public opinion was favorable to Tandler.
This never stops wearing me out. But we'll get to
that somewhere at the end. Florinda's testimony and the hearing
conveyed her horror at what she had discovered when Tandler
showed her Elena's body. The judge also asked Handler if
he had had a sexual relationship with the corpse, to
(26:50):
which the count replied that he had not. Carl went
on to say that he was a scientist and that
he was working on bringing Elena's body back to life
to rejoin her spirit, which continue you, but the judge
was quick to point out that in seven years he
had made no progress in that regard. Then Tandler, in
a really brazen move, asked to have Elena's body back,
(27:12):
and he was, of course denied. A court appointed physician
determined that Tandler was mentally in quote a borderline state
characterized by certain obsessions with other actions. Normal assessments of
his mental state by additional specialists contradicted one another, but
the final assessment was that he was saying, I don't
(27:32):
want to excuse anything he's doing here, but it seems
clear to me that he had a problem. Yes, I'm
of the exact same mind. The determination was that Elena
was to be reburied in a place that Carl Tandler
would not know about. He later wrote of this decision, quote,
I was thunderstruck. This was not fair, this was monstrous.
(27:53):
She to be buried again after all my work. To
the judge who gave him this news, he said, quote,
it is the end of everything for me. I protest
against this inhumane decision. Things became even more complicated when
the deputy sheriff received a letter from a woman named
Doris Tandler, who said she was Karl's wife, that they
(28:14):
had been separated for eleven years. She offered any and
all help that she could in the form of information
about Carl's mental health. Carl Tandler did not deny that
Doris was his wife, though he said that they had
separated sixteen years earlier after she tried to shoot him. Uh.
He also had a daughter with Doris, and per her account,
(28:35):
he had abandoned the family. There's also another daughter that's
in the mix that seems to have passed away at
some point on October eleventh, it was announced that Carl's
case would go to trial in November. His bail was
posted by two friends from his hospital days, Benjamin Fernandez
and Joseph Zorsky, who recalled his care of Elena which
she was in the hospital. They believed that his intent
(28:58):
was pure. On October were twenty two, it was announced
in the Miami Herald that Carl Tandler von Kostl would
not be tried as the statute of limitations had run
out on any crime that he could be charged with.
Tandler began giving tours of his lab for a quarter
of person. He also wrote his account of his time
in Australian prison for the Rosicrucian Digest and eventually Fantastic Adventures.
(29:22):
To make money, he moved to Zephyr Hills, Florida, to
get away from the notoriety that he had in Key West,
and this is where his remaining sister lived, as well
as his estranged wife and daughter. The same night that
Carl Tandler left Key West, Elena's tomb was blown up
with dynamite, and while the sheriff said that Tainsler didn't
(29:43):
set the blast, rumors of course swirled that he had.
He had trouble settling in at his sister's home, and
his wife Doris eventually stepped in to help him out
with the transition. Eventually, in four Carl moved out of
his sisters to a place of his own, where he
built a shrine to Elena and lived with an effigy
of her that he made from the casts he had
(30:04):
taken of her body. Early on, tuberculosis claimed the lives
of Elena's family one by one. They were all deceased
by the mid nineteen forties, which is why we do
not have an account of this whole thing from their perspective.
In nineteen fifty, Carl Tandler became a US citizen. He
died in his home two years later at the age
of seventy six, alone except for his Elena effigy. Perhaps
(30:28):
the most troubling aspect of Carl Tandler's story is the
fact that it is often framed as being incredibly romantic,
couched in phrases like he couldn't bear to be without her.
But it's important to remember that, based on everything we know,
Maria did not have romantic feelings for Carl. She turned
down his proposals politely, citing their age difference as the reason.
(30:48):
But it seemed as though she truly had no such
feelings for him. Even if she had had such feelings
for him, she didn't consent for him to do this
with her body. Right. Uh. He makes that statement that
she asked him to somehow take care of her body
after death, but that is strictly his assertion. We have
nothing to back that up. So in exhuming her body
(31:11):
and making it part of this odd marriage, he was
acting entirely counter to her own wishes, and at the
same time, according to Tandler's account, it was Maria's dying wish.
He said that she and I should live together. But
whether or not that's false, he really did seem to
believe it. Tandler biographer Ben Harrison noted in his book
(31:33):
Undying Love that it was entirely possible that Carl's time
in the internment camp had left him with some serious
problems that could explain some of his bizarre and difficult
to parse behaviors. He wrote, quote, Indeed, if these traumatic
memories are at all accurate, one may theorize that this
interval of imprisonment may have been the triggering mechanism for
(31:56):
post traumatic stress syndrome, causing von Kozel's later agitated at
mental states and altering his sense of reality, but also
his theories of life, death, and spirit. He definitely seems
to have had delusions for sure. To this day. The
exact location of Elena's final resting place is not known.
(32:18):
It was chosen by the Key West Chief Chief of
Police at the time, who was bien Venito Perez, as
well as Benjamin Sawyer of the Lopez Funeral Home and
Otto Bethel who was the cemetery sexton. Yep, and none
of them ever divulged where that location was in There
was an attempt made to raise funds for a feature
(32:38):
length film telling Tandler's story, and that project, which was
to include puppetry to recreate the events of the maccab Tail,
was from a fairly sympathetic point of view, but it
failed to get its funding through Kickstarter. Uh. I continue
to be befuddled by people who romanticize this story. I
will confess me to you. I don't understand it. I
(33:05):
just don't understand. I don't understand how you land there. Well,
and even if we just erased the entire everything that
happened after her death. Just the part where he was
badgering her while she was hospitalized, Like that is already
not romantic. Yeah, I mean her entire family moved to
(33:25):
get away from him, which to me is a pretty
keen indicator that they didn't want anything to do with him.
And even if they made that decision because they were
scared by science, as he alleges, which I think seems
not to be the case if they were going to
a hospital for treatment. Even if that were the case,
(33:46):
they have still sent the clear message that, like, you're
not welcome in our lives. So it becomes very weird
to me that people are then like, but he still persisted.
He just he loved her so much, and it's like, no,
I mean he may have, but that doesn't make it. Hey,
this is like the very very far extreme of the
romantic comedy behavior that is really stalking. Yeah, anyway, do
(34:11):
you have listener mail? That's less I do it in
short because this episode is a little long, and it's
actually a thank you. Um. It is a cute little note,
but it came with gifts that we have already received.
It says Holly and Tracy. You ladies always do such
a great job. At first, I may not have ever
heard of the topic of each podcast, but by the end,
I have learned so much, whether it is happy or sad.
(34:32):
These Starbucks reusable cups are to be filled with whatever
keeps you ladies going. I made the cozies myself. The
purple one is for Holly, the candy corners for Tracy Um.
Thank you ladies for listening Colleen. Colleen actually brought those
to us at our live show at New York Comic
Con presents UM and they are awesome and I have
been using mine a lot UM and it's so sweet.
Colleen also made us cute little um pumpkins last year
(34:56):
and yeah show, so we have been very spoiled by
Colleen and her her skills. So thank you, thank you.
I love it. I drink a lot of coffee, so
it's always good to have more travel cups because I'm
not always good at washing them in a timely manner.
If you would like to write to us, you may
do so at History Podcast at house to works dot com.
(35:17):
You can also reach us across the spectrum of social media,
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in History. We are also at missed in history dot com,
where you can check out every episode of the show
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are also show notes for any of the episodes that
(35:38):
Tracy and I have worked on together. So come and
visit us at missed in history dot com and we
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on this and thousands of other topics, works dot com
Welcome to steph you missed in history class from how
Stuffworks dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm
Holly Fry and I'm Tracy B. Wilson. Uh So, Tracy,
you may remember that when we did the Devil's Footprints
(00:21):
in the intro, I said, Hey, this sounds creepy, but
it's really funny. Yes, don't say that. Don't be scared.
This is opposite, kind of the opposite. It's really gross
and pretty horrifying. Uh to some people. It may even
sound a little bit romantic. In my opinion, it is not.
We'll get into why. But it involves a man who
(00:42):
loved a woman and his love for her continued long
after her death. But whether she loved him back as
a matter of some dispute. And according to the subject
of this episode, Carl Tandler, she did, but according to
her family she did not. And we don't actually have
to guess at Tandler thought during all of this. We
have his account, which he published some years after all
(01:05):
of these events happened, uh, as a paid writing gig
for the pulp comic Fantastic Adventures in heads Up. This
is very dark stuff. We're talking about things like decomposition
and people handling corpses, and it might not be suitable
for younger history buffs or just people that are a
(01:27):
little bit um queasy of tummy yeah, or in general,
or just cumans who are pretty dark by horrifying things. Yeah. Tandler,
whose name sometimes appears with a K instead of a
sea in Carl was born in Dresden, Germany, on February
eighteen seventy seven, and he claimed that he grew up
(01:47):
in a country castle that was haunted by a figure
known as the White Woman, who he also called Countess
Anna Costell. He believed this ghost was an ancestor who
died in the eighteenth century. The Countess, her Carl's account,
had been a beauty and was interested in alchemy, and
at the age of twelve, Carl, who had a hearty
(02:09):
interest in science himself, had a dream about the Countess,
the first of many visions of her that he had
throughout his life. As he matured, Tamsla remained obsessed only
with science and invention. He wasn't a smoker or a drinker,
and he also wasn't particularly interested in romance. That comes
up over and over where in his defense of his character.
(02:29):
He always comments that he neither smoked nor drink um,
but that focus on science enabled him, again, according to
his own account, to earn master's degrees in medicine, philosophy, mathematics, physics,
and chemistry. He claimed by the time he was twenty four,
Carl believed the ghost of the Countess visited him, sometimes
(02:50):
making a ruckus breaking scientific instruments, and eventually, he said
he she showed him the woman he was destined to
be with. This is a beautiful, a young woman with long,
dark hair. He would use this vision as sort of
a guiding element of his life. After he finished his schooling,
Carl traveled a great deal, and Tandler even admits in
(03:13):
his own writings his account of his travels as a
young man are lacking in details, writing quote, I can
refer to these years only in the sketchiest manner in
this magazine account, because all which matters is what leads
up to my final meeting with the apparition of the castle.
At one point he traveled to Genoa, he encountered a
(03:33):
marble statue that looked like this, promised Beloved that his
ancestor had shown him. The statue sat atop a grave
of a woman named Elena, who had died at the
age of twenty two. Tandler was so moved by the
appearance of the statue that he began to weep, and
he kept saying the name Elena over and over. He
(03:54):
wrote that he next saw a spirit seemed to emerge
from the statue and walk past him, as it may
direct eye contact with him. He pursued this spirit into
the streets of Genoa, but he lost her in a crowd.
After this incident, Tandler kept traveling, and his journeys eventually
ended in Sydney, Australia, where he settled down for a while.
(04:14):
He got a job as an electrical engineer and an
X ray expert. He also built rebuilt a torpedo boat
that he used to go fishing and to explore. In
May of nineteen ten, still living in Sydney, Tandler was
visited by what he believed was a ghost, a spirit
that entered his home, blew out his lamps, and then left.
(04:37):
The ghosts stayed away until March seventh of nineteen twelve
at seven pm, and then as he was eating dinner,
it appeared to him fully visible. The same beautiful young
woman that his ancestor had promised would be his bride.
He approached the apparition, they embraced one another, and his
writing about this moment describes a divine bliss before the
(04:59):
spirit melt it away. But the spirit was gone but
a moment before regaining its form in another room of
the bachelor's home. She remained for a week, following him
around the house, smiling as she observed him. She was
silent and he didn't know her name, so he began
calling her Aisha. He would later write quote, there was
(05:20):
an incorporeal love between us which approached the divine. When
the spirit left, Tandler reported feeling very depressed, although he
was also confident that they would meet again and that
she was his promised bride that the spirit of Countess
Anna had told him about. But his anguish over it
all manifested in physical illness, and he wound up being
(05:41):
admitted to the hospital. As he began to recover, he
discovered that his father had fallen into a coma and
then died a week later, And that week coincided, according
to Tandler's writings, exactly with his spirit visitors time with
him right to the hour. Tandler had actually become a
British subject while living in Australia, and he spent World
(06:02):
War One in an internment camp due to his German heritage.
Tandler wrote a lengthy account of his time in the
camp for Rosicrucian Digest in nine. In this tale, he
claims to have built an organ from debris with the
assistance of fellow prisoners, who Tandler said, we're all Buddhist
priests while imprisoned in the camp. The sounds kind of
(06:23):
far fetched to me, as much of his writing does.
After the armistice, the organ traveled with Tandler by boat
back to Europe, and it was a harrowing journey, during
which the ship he was on passed through a number
of storms. When he finally arrived back home, only his
mother and one sister remained there. His other sister had
(06:44):
gotten married and moved to the United States, and his father,
of course, was deceased. Carl felt completely unmoored back in Germany,
and he was unable to resume any sort of life
that resembled his previous one before the war, and so
tam Ler, who at this point was in his late forties,
left Europe. First, he traveled to Havannah, Cuba, arriving in
(07:06):
late February. He stayed there for a few days i'm
the carnival crowd to see if any of the women
might reveal themselves to be his promised love. But on
March one he headed to Florida, where his married sister
was living. And while Tandler did not exactly love Florida,
he thought that Cuba was a far more beautiful place.
(07:28):
He purchased land and began working on a home there,
but he soon needed to seek out work to keep
money coming in. At that point, he had been basically
living off a family money, and he soon began working
at the Marine Hospital at Key West as an X
ray specialist and pathologist. Coming up, we will talk about
the moment that Tandler felt all of those visions had
(07:49):
manifested in a faded meeting. But first we were going
to stop for a quick sponsor break. It was in
his position at the Marine Hospital that Tindler was called
to draw blood from a patient on April twenty, and
that patient was Maria Elena Milagrod Hoyos, and when Carl
(08:12):
Tandler met her, he loved her instantly he believed that
she was the woman that his distant relative had shown
him finally in the flesh, their lives having followed the
paths that would lead them to one another. There's also
the sobering fact that this young woman whose blood he
had drawn was listed as married on her records. Carl
(08:33):
questioned briefly whether he was somehow cursed and had finally
found his dream bride, only to immediately discover that she
was in fact someone else's actual bride. In spite of
this fact, though he he called his mood indescribably happy.
Tandler identified the cause of Elena's illness soon after they
(08:54):
met tuberculosis. In the nineteen thirties, tuberculosis was often still
a death sentence. Carl knew that there were places abroad
that could probably successfully treat Elena, and he even offered
to send her for treatment elsewhere, but Elena and her
family refused. Tandler had learned that Elena's husband had left
her and was not in the picture anymore, so he
(09:16):
dedicated his every energy and resource to trying to cure
her himself. He treated her with radiation at the hospital,
but also planned additional treatments and then he rededicated himself
to the restoration of an airplane that he had been
tinkering with. His intention was that he would cure Elena
and they would fly away together to an island in
(09:38):
the South Seas that he claimed to have discovered and
thus owned. That is not how it works. There are,
as we said, a lot of far fetched things in
his accounts of his life. Uh, this is also a
really good time to mention. In addition to the fact
that you may have noticed, we have not mentioned Elena
falling in love with Carl Tandler, but she was also
(10:00):
much younger than Carl, who also, by the way, was
calling himself Count von Kozel. She was only twenty when
they met, and he at this point was fifty three
years old. Per Tandler's account, Elena's treatment was hindered by
her family. He was willing to do almost anything for her,
and he characterized them and his writing as being distrustful
(10:23):
of the medical knowledge and advice that he offered. Carl
also had dreams about Elena, and at one point he
wrote her a letter detailing one of them. In response,
her sister visited Tandler at work at the hospital and
told him to dream no more. He felt that his
dreams included premonitions of what was to come. Regarding Elena's health,
(10:43):
Carl continued to write letters to Elena, writing in one quote,
so often you have said that I am too old
for you. But listen, Darling, I never count my years,
neither do I count yours. If you were a mummy
five thousand years old, I would marry you just the same.
I swear it's not for selfish reasons that I want
this marriage, but because I can do so much more
(11:05):
than a boy your age. I can offer you my science,
my experience, my capacity to save your life and this
apart and on top of my undying love. You want
to get well, don't you? And you want to see
the world. Don't you remember that time we did the
episode about Thomas Day and his and you were really
(11:26):
angry the whole time. Yeah, that's how I feel about
this episode. Oh me too. Um, Yeah, there's so much.
He kept proposing to her. She kept saying no, and
she would often say no, you're too old for me.
But he just kept going after her and just relentlessly
pursued her. All of his letters to her kind of
(11:46):
treat her like a child, and like she should just
inherently trust him. It's very weird and troubling. Um. But
Elena did visit the hospital again, although because there was
no privacy, she and Carl didn't speak much um. That
same day, though, Tandler received word that his mother had died,
and he actually believed, similar to how he thought that
(12:07):
a ghost had visited him when his father was in
a coma, that a higher power had made Elena visit
that day to offer him comfort. Elena's family moved, Neither
they nor their neighbors would disclose their new address to Tandler.
He did not give up, though, and eventually a friend
of the family he was worried about Elena's failing health,
(12:28):
pointed him to their house. Yeah, Elena was very, very
sick in this time, and this woman, presumably out of
a good intention, thought like, here's a medical professional and
this girl needs help. Um, So she gave up their location,
but he pushed his way into their home. Any more
or less took over whether the family had distanced themselves
(12:48):
from Tandler because they were fearful of science, as his
account indicates, or they were weirded out by this elderly
man's obsessive behavior with Elena. We do not know for certain,
we only have his side of this story, but they
acquiesced to his presence at this point, likely because Elena
was in a really, really bad state in terms of
her health and they were just desperate for any sort
(13:10):
of help. He started electric current treatment with Elena. You
let other members of the family experience it as well
so they would know it wasn't harmful. He also gave
Elena throat sprays to try to address her cough, including
one that had gold dissolved into it, but she didn't
like any of these. Yeah, he kind of was off
(13:30):
doing his own sorts of medication, concoctions, and treatments. Carl's
diary tells the story that he claims was Elena asking
him to take care of her body after her death,
which she felt was imminent in the fall of nine.
He quoted her as saying, if I must die, all
(13:51):
I can leave you is my body, for I am
only a sickly girl, so I can't marry you while
I am sick. But you will take care of my
body after I'm dead, won't you. According to Carl, he
promised that he would, and in his mind, he considered
this to be their marriage. Bow He also wrote a
note for Elena to keep in case of emergency, claiming
(14:12):
that he was her husband and that she was of
sound mind. And he did this after rumors began to
circulate that her family was considering having her move to
an asylum. So by the time Elena died on October,
Carl Tandler considered himself to be her husband, and he
had established an adversarial relationship with her family. Even so,
(14:36):
when Elena died, the family, which had a little money,
let Tandler handle all the funeral arrangements. Yeah, he basically
swooped in and said he would pay for everything, and they, grieving,
agreed to it. Carl describes in his writing feeling as
though Elena's eyes were looking into him at the visitation
before the funeral, even though her eyes were closed. While
(14:59):
intellectual he knew she was dead. He wrote, quote, my
heart with far greater force told me she is not dead.
And he wrote this of the funeral's conclusion, quote, A
strange kind of new life now began for me. It
was something like a rebirth after these last two oppressing
and depressing years. Now at last, nobody could take my
(15:20):
Elena away from me. Although I could not see her
any longer, I felt her presence all the time. Carl
then moved into Elena's room at her family's home. The
Hoyos family had told Tandler that they didn't want to
live there anymore because of their grief. That house only
held memories of their ailing Elena, and he said that
(15:40):
if they moved, he was just going to rent the
house himself or buy it outright, and they ended up staying,
and so did he. He also decided that Elena's grave
wasn't safe or watertight, so he built her a tomb,
to which he had the only key, and he disinterred
her body to have it placed inside this tomb. Handler
(16:00):
spares no details in discussing Elena's body as they found
it when they disinterred it. In his diary, he noted
that she had been decaying and that the lining of
her coffin had fallen down and stuck to her face
and body, and he spent hours carefully removing it. He
then cleaned and treated the body with preservative, and he
sprayed it with Eau de cologne. When Elena's body was
(16:23):
placed into the tomb, Tandler made sure it was under
the best possible conditions to prevent further decay. He visited
this tomb, which he compared to a small house, every evening.
He claimed he felt a piece when he was there
that he had nowhere else. After eighteen months of visits, Elena,
he said, began talking to him. She would ask if
(16:47):
she was truly dead, and told Carl she wanted to
go live in his home. He promised that she could,
and he brought her a gift every evening, things like
handkerchiefs and pieces of jewelry, and he planned for the
time that he would bring her home and dress her
in a wedding gown and live with her as his bride.
He believed that he could hear her singing to him
(17:08):
when he visited, and he also felt that at times
Elena was controlling his body, sending him signals to show
him things to do, including how to get her out
of the cemetery without being observed. Tandler rented a house
adjacent to the cemetery so that he could first move
Elena's body into it and then move it via car
from that spot. Under a new moon, he took the
(17:31):
casket from the tomb and put it on a child's wagon,
then covered it with a blanket and set out across
the cemetery. Sometimes you'll read accounts of this that are
kind of abbreviated, and they say he took the body
in a wagon, and it kind of sounds like he
folded up the body into the wagon, but now he
there was a coffin on top of it. Uh and
Tandler wrote of this walk quote, all of the cemetery
(17:52):
was alive with souls which came out of the graves
from all sides, moving and thronging around us. It was
indeed like a stable among the departed. As they moved
up on all sides. It was like a great divine
wedding march for me taking place. He moved the body
into the rented house near the cemetery, but it took
(18:12):
some trouble. When Tandler put Elena's body in the tomb,
he had placed it in a double casket with an
interior chamber that was filled with a preservative fluid. There
was a leak during the move, but Tandler managed to
minimize how much liquid was lost, and then he moved
Elena's body to his plane two days later. This is
the same plane that we mentioned earlier that he was
(18:34):
restoring with the intention of flying Elena wherever she wished.
Yeah became their home for a while. Carl called Elena's
cabin on the plane the ship's hospital, and he carefully
unpacked her from her coffin. This segment of Tandler's recollections
is a fascinating combination of scientific description and really twisted
(18:55):
and weird romantic interlude. He writes of the mold and
slime which were consuming her body and how carefully he
had to remove those, trying as best he could to
preserve her skin, and then within just a few paragraphs,
he also talks about how beautiful she looked once he
had draped her with a silk veil, and how she
was worried that he wouldn't love her anymore, and he
(19:16):
quote sank gently into the coffin to her and kissed
her as if she were alive. He took samples from
the body and examined them in the hospital lab and
was very happy that there were no dangerous bacteria in
the mix. He felt that dying had in a way
cured Elena of her tuberculosis. He washed her hair, cleaned
(19:37):
maggots from the body, cleaned her skin, alluding in his
writing to special ingredients that he used on her skin
that he wished to quote to keep secret. In a moment,
we'll talk about just what Tinseler's intentions were for Elena's body.
But first we're going to take a break, so we
could all use a little uh so sure in a
(20:00):
from all of the dead body talk, and we're going
to hear from one of our sponsors. So Carl Tandler's
intent was to resurrect Elena. He wrote over and over
that all of his restoration efforts were aimed at perfecting
her so that when she awoke, she would be her
(20:21):
beautiful self. He was adamant that even after eighteen months
in the grave, she was in better shape than some
of the living patients that he had treated. He fed
the body, dispensing quote nourishing fluids to her orally. He
claimed that Elena gained twenty pounds this way, and that
her various lacerations and wounds were healing. He wrote, quote,
(20:44):
even the expression of her face changed to divine happiness.
She did not require words to express herself. Her face
was so much more eloquent than words could be. He
also made plaster casts of the body to have a
permanent record of Elena's beauty, and when he discovered that
the silk that he had covered her face with had
(21:05):
bonded to the skin, he left it in place and
he painted over it with beeswax and balsam. Tandler was
still working at the Marine Hospital during this time, and
when the hospital administration had a leadership change, it meant
that Carl's airplane was no longer welcome and its parking
space on hospital grounds, so he moved it to the beach,
(21:25):
taking the plane through town as though it was on
a parade, enjoying his secret knowledge that Elena's body was
in it in a flower laden cabin. Yeah, he even
talks in his writing about how they went by her
family and they were all waving at him in the plane,
not knowing that he had their relative inside, which is
(21:46):
makes me growling. On his beach parcel of land that
he had arranged, he built a structure that was to
be his laboratory at home, as well as a hangar
for the plane. This was all one big structure, and
once they were moved in there, he continued his work
always with the goal that he was going to bring
Elena back to life. He played music for her because quote,
(22:07):
it was a means to apply the cosmic laws of
vibration through harmonic sound waves. He also applied electricity and
was adamant that all of his work was part of
an exact science. By soaking Elena in his liquid plasma quote,
incubator Tandler said he had reversed the embalming process to
(22:29):
prevent insect problems and desiccation. Tandler treated the entire body
as he had the face, with a layer of silk
coated with wax and balsam. He also kept the body
dressed and lying in bed, and remarked repeatedly on its
beauty in his writing about this whole process. As Carl
tended to Elena and his work to bring her back
(22:49):
to life, years passed. He celebrated holidays with Elena's body
and then moved again just before the summer of nine.
Tandler claimed it not long after the move, Elena began
to wake up and moved one of her fingers ever
so slightly and turned slightly to gaze at him. But
this was, in his account, a fleeting improvement. For the
(23:13):
next several years, he continued trying to maintain the body,
but he had started to realize that he was losing
ground just the same it was. This was roughly seven
years since Tandler had taken Elena's body from her tomb,
and it was then that things began to unravel. While
Carl Tandler had been careful to take Elena's body out
(23:33):
of the cemetery without anyone seeing him, and while he
had moved his corpse bride to his airplane under a
similar cloak of darkness, he was that very careful about otherwise,
not drawing attention to himself. For one thing, after he
had visited Elena's tomb every single night for a year
and a half, which everyone knew he did, he had
(23:55):
abruptly stopped. He occasionally went back to check him on
the actual structure over the years, but it was a
rarity and people noticed this change in behavior. And for another,
he continued to buy gifts for Elena and the sixties
something bachelor buying dresses, perfume, jewelry, and flowers also raised
some eyebrows. People started to wonder where all of those
(24:17):
things were going. Elena's sister eventually confronted him. She wanted
Tandler to open up the coffin in Elena's tomb. He
refused to do so. She became angry, but then she
said she just wanted to see her sister, and he
said that he would let her do that. He revealed
that Elena was in his home in her state of preservation.
(24:40):
Tandler seems to have thought that Elena's family was going
to be really pleased to see how well he had
cared for her, but the initial reaction on her sister's
part was disbelief. She didn't think this was really her
sister's body. But then Elena's sister, who was named Florinda
and went by Nana, asked Handler to just please return
(25:01):
the body to its casket. She kind of was coming
out of this weird state of disbelief and just wanted
her sister to be buried properly, but Tandler refused. Four
days later, two sheriffs arrived at Tandler's home. They took
Elena's body to a funeral home. Carl Tandler was taken
into custody. Quote accused of wantonly and maliciously demolishing disfiguring
(25:24):
and destroying a grave. The story of Carl Tandler von
Kosl and his corpse bride got picked up by gossip
circles and the press immediately. He basically became instantly famous,
and there were photographers on hand for every step of
the legal proceedings. He was held on a thousand dollars bail,
and he was put in the county jail, where he
prayed to die so that he could be with Elena forever.
(25:47):
But during his time in jail, sympathizers to Carl Tandler's
situation brought him food, they offered him consolation. Key West's
most experienced lawyer offered to take up tam Lur's case
free of charge. Carl was pretty open with the authorities
about his situation. He explained to them and to the
(26:07):
press that he could not bear to think of Elena's
body rotting away in the grave, and that he really
believed that he could restore her and bring her back
to life. His hearing was on October eighth, nin and
the time between the arrest and the hearing, Elena's body
was on public display at the funeral home that it
had been moved to thousands of people went to look
(26:28):
at her, and the overall public opinion was favorable to Tandler.
This never stops wearing me out. But we'll get to
that somewhere at the end. Florinda's testimony and the hearing
conveyed her horror at what she had discovered when Tandler
showed her Elena's body. The judge also asked Handler if
he had had a sexual relationship with the corpse, to
(26:50):
which the count replied that he had not. Carl went
on to say that he was a scientist and that
he was working on bringing Elena's body back to life
to rejoin her spirit, which continue you, but the judge
was quick to point out that in seven years he
had made no progress in that regard. Then Tandler, in
a really brazen move, asked to have Elena's body back,
(27:12):
and he was, of course denied. A court appointed physician
determined that Tandler was mentally in quote a borderline state
characterized by certain obsessions with other actions. Normal assessments of
his mental state by additional specialists contradicted one another, but
the final assessment was that he was saying, I don't
(27:32):
want to excuse anything he's doing here, but it seems
clear to me that he had a problem. Yes, I'm
of the exact same mind. The determination was that Elena
was to be reburied in a place that Carl Tandler
would not know about. He later wrote of this decision, quote,
I was thunderstruck. This was not fair, this was monstrous.
(27:53):
She to be buried again after all my work. To
the judge who gave him this news, he said, quote,
it is the end of everything for me. I protest
against this inhumane decision. Things became even more complicated when
the deputy sheriff received a letter from a woman named
Doris Tandler, who said she was Karl's wife, that they
(28:14):
had been separated for eleven years. She offered any and
all help that she could in the form of information
about Carl's mental health. Carl Tandler did not deny that
Doris was his wife, though he said that they had
separated sixteen years earlier after she tried to shoot him. Uh.
He also had a daughter with Doris, and per her account,
(28:35):
he had abandoned the family. There's also another daughter that's
in the mix that seems to have passed away at
some point on October eleventh, it was announced that Carl's
case would go to trial in November. His bail was
posted by two friends from his hospital days, Benjamin Fernandez
and Joseph Zorsky, who recalled his care of Elena which
she was in the hospital. They believed that his intent
(28:58):
was pure. On October were twenty two, it was announced
in the Miami Herald that Carl Tandler von Kostl would
not be tried as the statute of limitations had run
out on any crime that he could be charged with.
Tandler began giving tours of his lab for a quarter
of person. He also wrote his account of his time
in Australian prison for the Rosicrucian Digest and eventually Fantastic Adventures.
(29:22):
To make money, he moved to Zephyr Hills, Florida, to
get away from the notoriety that he had in Key West,
and this is where his remaining sister lived, as well
as his estranged wife and daughter. The same night that
Carl Tandler left Key West, Elena's tomb was blown up
with dynamite, and while the sheriff said that Tainsler didn't
(29:43):
set the blast, rumors of course swirled that he had.
He had trouble settling in at his sister's home, and
his wife Doris eventually stepped in to help him out
with the transition. Eventually, in four Carl moved out of
his sisters to a place of his own, where he
built a shrine to Elena and lived with an effigy
of her that he made from the casts he had
(30:04):
taken of her body. Early on, tuberculosis claimed the lives
of Elena's family one by one. They were all deceased
by the mid nineteen forties, which is why we do
not have an account of this whole thing from their perspective.
In nineteen fifty, Carl Tandler became a US citizen. He
died in his home two years later at the age
of seventy six, alone except for his Elena effigy. Perhaps
(30:28):
the most troubling aspect of Carl Tandler's story is the
fact that it is often framed as being incredibly romantic,
couched in phrases like he couldn't bear to be without her.
But it's important to remember that, based on everything we know,
Maria did not have romantic feelings for Carl. She turned
down his proposals politely, citing their age difference as the reason.
(30:48):
But it seemed as though she truly had no such
feelings for him. Even if she had had such feelings
for him, she didn't consent for him to do this
with her body. Right. Uh. He makes that statement that
she asked him to somehow take care of her body
after death, but that is strictly his assertion. We have
nothing to back that up. So in exhuming her body
(31:11):
and making it part of this odd marriage, he was
acting entirely counter to her own wishes, and at the
same time, according to Tandler's account, it was Maria's dying wish.
He said that she and I should live together. But
whether or not that's false, he really did seem to
believe it. Tandler biographer Ben Harrison noted in his book
(31:33):
Undying Love that it was entirely possible that Carl's time
in the internment camp had left him with some serious
problems that could explain some of his bizarre and difficult
to parse behaviors. He wrote, quote, Indeed, if these traumatic
memories are at all accurate, one may theorize that this
interval of imprisonment may have been the triggering mechanism for
(31:56):
post traumatic stress syndrome, causing von Kozel's later agitated at
mental states and altering his sense of reality, but also
his theories of life, death, and spirit. He definitely seems
to have had delusions for sure. To this day. The
exact location of Elena's final resting place is not known.
(32:18):
It was chosen by the Key West Chief Chief of
Police at the time, who was bien Venito Perez, as
well as Benjamin Sawyer of the Lopez Funeral Home and
Otto Bethel who was the cemetery sexton. Yep, and none
of them ever divulged where that location was in There
was an attempt made to raise funds for a feature
(32:38):
length film telling Tandler's story, and that project, which was
to include puppetry to recreate the events of the maccab Tail,
was from a fairly sympathetic point of view, but it
failed to get its funding through Kickstarter. Uh. I continue
to be befuddled by people who romanticize this story. I
will confess me to you. I don't understand it. I
(33:05):
just don't understand. I don't understand how you land there. Well,
and even if we just erased the entire everything that
happened after her death. Just the part where he was
badgering her while she was hospitalized, Like that is already
not romantic. Yeah, I mean her entire family moved to
(33:25):
get away from him, which to me is a pretty
keen indicator that they didn't want anything to do with him.
And even if they made that decision because they were
scared by science, as he alleges, which I think seems
not to be the case if they were going to
a hospital for treatment. Even if that were the case,
(33:46):
they have still sent the clear message that, like, you're
not welcome in our lives. So it becomes very weird
to me that people are then like, but he still persisted.
He just he loved her so much, and it's like, no,
I mean he may have, but that doesn't make it. Hey,
this is like the very very far extreme of the
romantic comedy behavior that is really stalking. Yeah, anyway, do
(34:11):
you have listener mail? That's less I do it in
short because this episode is a little long, and it's
actually a thank you. Um. It is a cute little note,
but it came with gifts that we have already received.
It says Holly and Tracy. You ladies always do such
a great job. At first, I may not have ever
heard of the topic of each podcast, but by the end,
I have learned so much, whether it is happy or sad.
(34:32):
These Starbucks reusable cups are to be filled with whatever
keeps you ladies going. I made the cozies myself. The
purple one is for Holly, the candy corners for Tracy Um.
Thank you ladies for listening Colleen. Colleen actually brought those
to us at our live show at New York Comic
Con presents UM and they are awesome and I have
been using mine a lot UM and it's so sweet.
Colleen also made us cute little um pumpkins last year
(34:56):
and yeah show, so we have been very spoiled by
Colleen and her her skills. So thank you, thank you.
I love it. I drink a lot of coffee, so
it's always good to have more travel cups because I'm
not always good at washing them in a timely manner.
If you would like to write to us, you may
do so at History Podcast at house to works dot com.
(35:17):
You can also reach us across the spectrum of social media,
including Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, uh Pinterest, and tumbler. As missed
in History. We are also at missed in history dot com,
where you can check out every episode of the show
that has ever existed, going all the way back to
the beginning, long before Tracy and I were involved. There
are also show notes for any of the episodes that
(35:38):
Tracy and I have worked on together. So come and
visit us at missed in history dot com and we
will travel the past, creepy and otherwise together. For more
on this and thousands of other topics, works dot com
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