Book Review / Remembering Key West and Von Cosel: Excerpt from my memoir Bootstrap Geologist

By Eugene A. Shinn

One memory is vivid—a loud boom!! It was around midnight, and the sound woke most of the city. I do remember that! Dr. Von Cosel, the same interesting doctor who took my father’s chest X-ray, had dynamited the crypt of his departed wife. He did this to make it appear he stole her body. The truth was that he had taken the body nine years earlier on the night she was buried. She had been ‘reconstructed’ and he was attempting to bring her back to life! How do I know all this?

The only person who knew he had the body was the mother of his dead bride. She lived across the street from us. My father knew her! Von Cosel was 60 when he married Elena. She was 22! He was receiving a World War I pension from Germany when they married, but Elena soon died of “consumption” as they called TB in those days. All of this is a true story about which many books and news stories have been written. As the reader will soon appreciate, EK learned a lot more than the various writers who have told and retold this story over and over again. I too remember something of Von Cosel. I skinned my knee near his home and he treated it with a new drug, something called a “sulfa drug.” I do not remember Elena or her mother.

EK had many hobbies. I didn’t mention earlier that in addition to the banjo and guitar, and ham radio, photography was another of EK’s early hobbies. Next to the ham-radio equipment in all our various rented homes, there had always been a photographic darkroom. They took many shapes and sizes. Usually, they were in the bathroom or a closet. This hobby would lead back to Von Cosel.

Elena’s mother knew Von Cosel had her daughter’s body. She told no one because Von Cosel had bribed her. However, sometime before the start of World War II, Von Cosel stopped receiving his pension and could no longer pay the bribe. Elena’s mother threatened to tell the police, so Von Cosel dynamited the crypt in the middle of the night and fabricated the story that he had just taken her body. He claimed he had been working on ways to bring her back to life. Apparently he truly thought he could bring her back in a Frankenstein-sort-of-way. He was a smart man. To prove how serious, or crazy, he was—Von Cosel is said to have held nine college degrees—he had built an airplane to fly her away once she came back. I remember the airplane. The wings had not yet been attached. The nose with the big radial engine protruded from a long shed with a tin roof.

Von Cosel had also built his own pipe organ. He played it while dressed in a white suit. It was like a scene from of a Vincent Price horror film. To complete the bizarre picture, he had made a plaster death mask of Elena. It was mounted on the wall beside the organ so she could look down as he played and worked the pedals with his feet. Being the strange place Key West was, and remains today, the authorities actually believed he might bring her back from the dead. They allowed him keep the body! It could only happen in Key West—-or maybe Transylvania.

Soon Von Cosel made a deal, and a Spanish film crew arrived from Havana to make a feature story of his experiments. They set up elaborate backdrops, and tourists flocked to Key West to watch and glimpse the body, for a fee of course. EK had no prior knowledge of the body but after the story broke, he did hear a lot from Elena’s mother who lived across the street. He also heard from Von Cosel, who enlisted EK to take still photographs while the Cuban film crew worked. Dad’s photographs included Von Cosel playing the organ and making sparks with his large Tesla coil. Most of his photos were printed in his darkroom and made into picture postcards that Von Cosel sold to the tourists who mainly came from Miami. It was reported that on one weekend as many as 6,000 people drove down to observe the body and the film crew at work. The railroad had been demolished four years earlier.

Just like in the Frankenstein movies, Von Cosel made sparks fly. He had constructed a huge Tesla coil that was over 6 feet high. It had a mirror-like silver ball on top. Sparks shot from the silver ball. When he electrified the body, some tourists were said to have seen Elena’s body twitch! Apparently those reports were enough to convince authorities that he just might succeed. That would really put Key West on the map! The city needed the money! I do not remember just how long the authorities went along with this ruse, but the film crew eventually returned to Cuba with a film “in the can.” If ever found, that film would really be worth something today! I have read countless accounts of the Von Cosel affair but have never seen the making of the movie mentioned. I wonder why?

The authorities eventually decided Elena was not coming back to this world and confiscated the body. Von Cosel was arrested on October 8, 1940, and sent to Miami for trial. The Miami Herald newspaper purchased most of my father’s unique photographs for a princely sum of $140 dollars— a lot of money in 1940! Every so often, I come across yet another rendition of how it all happened. The stories are usually published around Halloween. They usually show the photographs I know so well. The irony of it all was that Von Cosel won the case and was exonerated on the grounds that Elena was his property to do with as he chose. Imagine that today! Von Cosel went back to Key West, gathered up his possessions, and using the fuselage of the airplane like a trailer, drove off to Zephyrhills, Florida. To my knowledge, he was never seen again. The shocker came later. Careful examination of the body revealed that Von Cosel had been sleeping with the highly reconstructed body during all those years. Love is strange!

In the 1980s, an 80-year-old Key Wester named Bethel wrote the first highly accurate account of the Von Cosel affair. The book’s title is, A Halloween Love Story. He consulted with my father a few times and EK said it was the first of all the many accounts that told the story the way it really was. Maggots and all!

Whenever I reread the Miami Herald front-page account of Von Cosel’s arrest, I always look down toward the bottom of the page at a small chilling headline that said, “Chinese Say U.S. Should Hit First, Chungking, Oct 7, 1940. The influential newspaper Ta-Kung-Pao Monday said the United States should realize a U.S.-Japanese war is inevitable and the United States should “strike first.” War with Japan is imminent,” expert says. That was one year and 2 months before the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor!

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