The Real-Life Bride of Frankenstein

Okay, I know I promised my Veterans Day post, but I'm still working on it. In the meantime, enjoy this ridiculously creepy story.


Once upon a time, there lived a lonely radiologist named Carl Tanzler. He was born in Germany in February 1877.

Cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs

But Carl preferred the tropics to snowy Germany, so he took off to Australia around the turn of the 20th century. He intended to stay long enough to gather some supplies and go sail the South Seas. However, he really liked Australia, so he just stayed there.


When the First World War broke out, he was put in a POW camp because he was German. In 1920, he married an Australian lady named Doris. They had two daughters, Ayesha and Crystal. In 1926, they moved to the United States and settled in Zephyrhills, Florida.


However, the very next year, he left the wife and kids and went down to Key West. There, he took a job as a radiologist and changed his name to Carl von Cosel. 


As a kid and young man, Carl was apparently visited repeatedly by the spirit of an ancestor, Countess Anna Constantia von Cosel. Anna showed him the face of his one true love, a dark, exotic beauty.


In spring 1930, Carl (who by now had picked up the title Count) was working at the hospital and met a young TB patient, Elena de Hoyos. Now keep in mind, Carl is 53 at this time. Elena was 21. He was plenty old enough to be her father, but this mattered not to Carl.


He showered Elena with clothes and expensive jewelry, he tried all kinds of wanky treatments to cure her TB, but sadly, as tuberculosis patients are wont to do, she died just before Halloween 1931. By the way, now might be the time to point out that Elena never expressed any romantic interest in the Count. She was probably too busy being creeped out by him and coughing up blood.

Before

Now, to be fair, Elena was quite a looker. But keep in mind Count Carl already had a wife and two kids just an hour away. When the lovely Elena died, Carl was inconsolable. But did he mourn for a while then move on? Of course not. I wouldn't be telling you this story if he had. He got her family's permission to build her an elaborate crypt, and then pretty much set up camp right outside.


This was the way things stayed for the next two years, but then the story becomes less "Annabel Lee" and more "Frankenstein." In 1933, Carl did something even creepier. He opened the crypt one night and carried Elena back to his place in a little red wagon. His rationale for this? He claimed Elena came to him every night and told him she wanted to be taken out of her tomb, and that she sang to him in Spanish.

After. Would you tap that?

Here's where Carl puts even Victor Frankenstein to shame. He articulated her skeleton with coat hangers and wire. As her skin decomposed, he covered it with silk, wax, and plaster of Paris. He put glass eyes in her new face. He collected her hair as it fell out and turned it into a wig. He bought her clothes and jewelry. He stuffed her torso and chest cavity with rags to keep her from caving in. At least Victor was immediately disgusted with his creation when he realized how creepy and heinous it was. And it wasn't made out of anyone Victor knew personally. And he never ever wanted to sleep with it.


Was Carl repulsed? Nope. One guess as to where Elena stayed. His bed. Seriously. And to hide the smell, he just burned incense and used perfume and Lysol everywhere. Unbelievably, this actually worked for SEVEN YEARS.


Sadly, all good things must come to an end. In 1940, Elena's sister Florinda heard through the grapevine that Carl was sleeping with her sister's corpse. The rumor mill was correct.


The police arrested Carl and sent Elena back to the morgue. Carl was deemed competent to stand trial. (Clearly, the state of Florida and I have different definitions of sanity.) Elena was put on display and gawked at by 6800 people. Then she was buried in an unmarked grave. To this day, no one knows exactly where it is.


The cops were left scratching their heads over what to do with Count Carl. Necrophilia is one of those unwritten rules, because honestly, what kind of sick freak does that. The only thing they could charge him with was desecrating a grave. But the statute of limitations had expired on that charge, so Carl went on about his disgusting way. Shockingly, he was not immediately lynched. In fact, people were on his side! They thought it was just an eccentric but sweet romantic gesture.


Despite nobody being too mad at him, in 1944 Carl moved back to the same county his wife and daughter lived in. (One daughter was dead by this point.) Carl and Doris remained inexplicably close friends until his death in July 1952. He published his autobiography in 1947. They let him become a citizen in 1950. I'm shocked they didn't ship his keister back to Germany. 


As if this story could possibly get any more bizarre, the night before Carl left Key West, Elena's crypt mysteriously exploded. He showed them what the desecration of a tomb REALLY looked like. Also, after they took away his beloved dead girlfriend, he had a life-size effigy made of her from her death mask. They cohabitated for the rest of Carl's life.


Ironically, Carl was found dead in his lover's arms, even though she had already been dead for two decades.