Carl Tanzler & Elena de Hoyos

In our final RiCRYPTulous Romance of 2021, we saved the worst for last! A ghostly prophecy gave Carl Tanzler a vision of his future wife. When he finally met the girl in Florida decades later, she was terminally ill. But Carl wouldn't let death stop him from being with his promised bride...

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Greetings everyone, Hello, welcome back to the final episode this
year of recrupulous Romance. Halloween is upon us, and that
means we're done with these spooky stories for now. True.

(00:21):
I mean, although I'm sure they'll come up again. How
many stories are just spooky on their own merits, you know? True?
So true love is scary, isn't that in the vows?
Love is scary, love is kind, love is spooky, love
is blind. I think that's what it was, right, Yeah,
I think that's what it was. I don't remember. I'm Eli,

(00:43):
I'm Diana, and we're so excited to have you back
with this. Yes, the last Recryptulous romance of the year.
We saved the best for last in terms of just
all out spooktacular horror show nightmares, and this episode was
something we already had on our list, but then Lauren

(01:03):
Rockburn at Rockburn reached out to us on Instagram and
suggested it as well. So shout out to Lauren for
having this uh ready for us, because uh yeah, we
could not do this story at some point. Lord yeah,
this one and Halloween weekend feels like the perfect time.
Of course, very much in the Halloween spirit as well,

(01:25):
because we watched hocus Pocus last night, which is my
Halloween tradition classic, and no one is having more fun
we decided than Bette Midler, Kathy Nagamie, and Sarah Jessica Parker.
It's true. They are having a blast. They are having
such a good time. They're the movements they all put together,
the choreography, even their facial expressions. I mean, like, just yeah,

(01:49):
that's a whole lot of fun. And they're like sisterhood
they created with their little like spats and when they
when they would come together, when they would fight, it
was just so well done. I just love it. That's
such a one. Anyway, really put me in the mood.
And then you made it all creepy with this story.
This is probably the polar opposite mood of hocus Pocus.

(02:13):
Oh yeah, I think we have to get right into
this one because you're ready for spooky season. You guys
are ready for a creepy story to get you through
this weekend, and this one's really going to set the mood.
This is the story of Carl Tonsler, also known as
Count Carl van Kozel, and he was a German scientist

(02:34):
question mark Um who fell in love with a young
Cuban girl and um, and I'm not even gonna spoil
for you that it just got really bad from there.
Get right into it. Let's do it. Hate it, friend,

(02:57):
You're welcome to hell. There's no man making romantic tips.
He's just a out crops you were lying in chrissy
type of demonico. But if there's a spirit with a
second chance, we'll put it off. Show Recruitulous a production

(03:25):
of I Heart Radio. Carl Tonsler and we learned it
is pronounced Tonsler, not Tansler. Carl Tonsler was born in
Germany in February of eighteen seventy seven, and he grew
up in Dresden. He was a bright kid and very
curious about the world around him. A lot of the
fine details of his story here are going to be

(03:46):
pulled from Ben Harrison's book Undying Love, So I want
to give a big shout out to Ben Harrison for
the work he did to kind of dig all these
details up and put him together. He pulls a lot
from Carl's own writings, his autobiography, and those describe his childhood,
although Ben does say that the veracity of these autobiographies

(04:07):
is quote simply not to be trusted, and you won't
anyway by the time this story is over, so no worries.
Carl grew up mostly in the countryside on a family
estate called Villa Kozl. Now this was a large, drafty
old castle and it was known to be haunted by
a spirit called the White Woman. Not a white woman,

(04:32):
Karen's hunting my castle. So Carl's mother had told him
that this ghost, the White Woman, had appeared many times
over the last hundred years or so. She was said
to be the Countess Anna Constantia von Bruckdorf, who was
an ancestor of the Tonsler family who died in seventeen sixty.
Now this was a real person, a real historical figure. Anna,

(04:54):
the Countess of Kozel, had worked to become the official
mistress of King Augustus the Strong of Poland in the
early seventeen hundreds. But there's a whole other story about
her here, and the Polish court basically hated her for
her very heavy involvement in politics. As we've seen on
this very show many times for royal mistresses, sounds quite familiar.

(05:16):
They they'll they'll dig in, they'll stry to start manipulating
the politics. Sometimes in their favor, sometimes just they genuinely
think they can help the country. But either way, the
other people in the court don't take too kindly to it,
and they usually start scheming against her. Right. It's all
just a big tug of war and you keep changing
sides of the rope. But and that's what happened here.

(05:38):
Rumors broke out that the king had made a secret
promise to marry this woman, and the court got to work,
and they really worked hard to try and replace her
with a Catholic mistress. And it worked, and in seventeen
thirteen Anna was banished to a castle in Dresden, and
she remained there for the next sixty years until her death.

(06:00):
But now her ghost haunted the walls of the Villa
Coastal and made visits to family members. And when Carl
was twelve years old he met her for the first time.
A vision of a very beautiful girl in a white
dress came to him. She was reclining on a rococo
settee and didn't speak, but just watched him. He painted

(06:24):
the image, but beyond that it didn't really hold his attention.
He was more focused on his interests like electricity and
chemistry and astronomy and especially the new interests in flying
machines that was sweeping across Germany. So by the time
I went to college, he was experimenting with electricity and

(06:44):
high voltage laboratories, and he was building hot air balloons
and gliders. It's like big, just a big science engineering
kind of guy. Music and art were of no interest
to him, and he says, quote, girls did not exist
from except formally, and I did neither smoke nor drink.

(07:05):
So he was really like focus, It's just very one
chap kind of dude. It's all about the science. And
he claimed that when he finished school he had nine degrees,
which would be quite an accomplishment, but basically nobody believes
that have been true. But Harrison writes that whether or

(07:26):
not he genuinely had those degrees, he was clearly very brilliant.
Carl has a tendency towards exaggeration and colorful storytelling, as
we definitely see, but he was fluent in many languages,
and he clearly had a brilliant mind for science. So
he's he's got some smarts. But one night in while

(07:49):
Carl was deep in his studies, he had a visit
that would change his life forever. It was near eleven PM,
and he sat at his desk, surrounded by acts of
books and laboratory instruments. Not wishing to be disturbed. He
had locked all the doors to his study and he
had planned to be working long into the night. Out

(08:10):
of the corner of his eye, he saw a pencil
on the table start to roll towards him. He tried
to ignore it, but suddenly it lifted off the table
and it flipped around in the air and then clattered
to the floor. Then a match box floated off his
desk as well, and then his books. He was amazed

(08:31):
as eventually the desk itself lifted off the floor and
carried itself up into the air. The chairs and the
room started dancing around him, and he said he wasn't frightened.
He still thought this could be some kind of prank,
and actually he found the whole scene kind of funny.
But then he heard a large craft and he found

(08:52):
that one of his mercury pumps had shattered. Fifty pounds
of mercury poured out across the floor, and it hundreds
of dollars worth of equipment. This made him furious. He
screamed and the floating books and furniture fell to the
down silent. I'm gonna speculation station here. If he's working

(09:16):
around that much mercury, as I understand it, that can
make you a little crazy. We may have identified the
problem with Carl right off. He's got too much mercury
in his brain. I mean it was contained in glass,
so he may never have you know, it might have
been safe. But he's a chemist, you know, so any

(09:36):
number of things could have gotten into that brain of his.
Mercury is a medicine for a while too, So who
knows um. I want to know who he's got around
him that can pull that prank off, because he's like,
desk is raising up in the air and he's like, oh, Frank,
you're such a frankster, how would you do this one?
Frank the prankster, always coming in with those pranks. The

(10:00):
next night, Carl tried to go to sleep earlier and
drifted off around midnight. At two a m. He found
himself mysteriously awakened to the sight of two women in
his bedroom. One was a tall woman with snow white hair,
and she leaned over his bed, staring straight into his eyes.

(10:22):
Her cold and weightless hand clutching his arm. It was
the ghost of Countess Anna of Coastal. The other woman
hovered behind the countess as if she were trying to hide,
but the Countess held her hand and kept her close.
She wore a long, dark veil. The countess bent lower

(10:43):
and closer to Carl and said to him, I've been
trying to get your attention for some time, my boy,
but you wouldn't take a note. You were too much
engrossed in your experiments. That's why I had to use
some violences. Care Carl, I have brought you the bride.
On some day you will meet. Carl tried to respond

(11:07):
but couldn't speak. The Countess stepped aside and pulled the
young girl closer to him. The veil parted and he
saw a young girl's face. Quote so beautiful, I can't
attempt to describe it. She smiled at him for just
a brief second before the Countess took her hand off

(11:28):
his arm and they both vanished. Spooky ghosts, spooky ladies
in his bedroom. I was going to say, I bet
a lot of guys have a dream where they wake
up and there's two ladies in their bedroom. Yeah, but
one of them doesn't usually lean in and say, hey,
this is your future wife. Hey, I thought we were

(11:49):
here for some fun. Wait a minute, now a dream
we just met. I'm mad because this sounds like Lovecraft,
where he is like so beautiful. I couldn't describe it,
And I'm like, you're the author. That's your job. You
have to describe it. Find some words. Tell me. It's

(12:10):
not enough, but you give me something terror so horrifying.
Words cannot even come close. Well, guess what, buddy, that's
kind of your job. It's your job. I wonder if
the editors ever said that, like, come on, Lovecraft, that's
what we're paying something, give me something. I gave you
a whole advance for this now. Carl took a very

(12:34):
scientific approach to this whole interaction. He couldn't deny what
had happened because he saw it, he experienced it, but
he also had no rational explanation, so as a scientist,
he was determined to find one. He started studying metaphysics,
which he had never really touched before, but soon he
realized that there really wasn't enough literature available to him

(12:54):
where he was that was going to help him find
the answers that he was looking for. So he decided
he was going to set out on his own expedition
and travel the world to try and find the answers
that he saw it. This brought him to Genoa, Italy,
and into the Campo Santos Cemetery. He wandered amongst the
tombs and gravestones, unsure exactly what it was that he

(13:17):
was looking for. Then he passed by a marble statue.
He found himself drawn to it as if he were
under a spell, and when he saw her face, he
noticed the face and the statue was the exact same
girl that he had seen in the apparition in his bedroom.
There was a name carved into the stone, Elena. She

(13:40):
had died at twenty two years old. He was compelled
to say the name, and he repeated it again and again, Elena, Elena, Elena.
Then suddenly, the figure of a live girl seemed to
detach itself from the statue and walked slow lea past him,

(14:01):
looking straight at him as she moved by, before vanishing. Well,
now we had a name, and he continued to search
for answers and for the girl herself. His travels took
him halfway around the world, and according to his book,
he eventually settled down in Sydney, Australia in nineteen o one.

(14:24):
There he became a British citizen and was employed by
the Australian government as an electrical engineer an X ray expert,
and after almost two years he was visited again. He
was eating dinner when he saw her, the same girl
from his vision in his study those few years ago,
the girl from the cemetery statue, Elena. She had rich

(14:46):
black hair so long it reached her knees. He wasn't
sure what to say, so he addressed her formally, what
can I do for you, my lady? She had no answer,
but gave from a smile which he described as quote
the most heavenly I had ever seen. She stretched out

(15:08):
her arms to him, and he felt his hair raising
as he slowly approached her. Her arms closed around him,
and he felt a divine happiness like he'd never experienced.
The chills turned to warmth, and he felt them both
float off the ground. But then she vanished, dissolving into

(15:30):
the air, and he was terrified that he had lost her,
or that maybe she had sacrificed the last of her
substance for that one embrace. But she reappeared the next
night and stayed with him for a full seven days,
never speaking, just present. She stood by his bed as

(15:50):
he fell asleep, until one night she vanished. Rude man
also when they floated up, and then she sepear, do
you like fall to the count h in the comedy version, Yes,
in the comedy version, yeah, yeah, which is of course
my favorite version. Yes, I went the Marks Marks Brothers

(16:16):
version Carl be very different. So years went by and
Carl hadn't seen her. He was kind of depressed, and
he also spent some time in the hospital with typhoid
and malaria. But that would be the least of his
worries because in nineteen fourteen, as we all know, as

(16:36):
we always say, a little kerfuffle broke out between the
British and the Germans the Great War. Yeah, and of
course Carl was a German living in Australia, which was
a dominion of the British Empire, and despite his alleged
close relations with the Australian government and as many friends there,
he like all other German citizens at the time, were

(16:58):
forced into an intern camp. Okay, it's important to note
here that again this this is Carl's version of the
story in terms of his travels. Whether he sailed away
in search of this mysterious ghost love uh, to Australia,
living there working for the Australian government. That's all from

(17:19):
his memoirs, and historians are pretty dubious of a lot
of that. Some suggest that he never lived in Australia
and he was actually part of the German army and
he ended up being captured and sent to a prison
camp in Australia. Um, but whatever happened, he was imprisoned
in Australia, and he describes it as a fairly nightmarish

(17:41):
and isolated situation, obviously because internment camps are never fun
and these people are rarely treated well because they're treated
as enemies, he said. And I'm thinking speculation station that
this experience in and of its health could have really
mentally damaged this guy and given him who knows what

(18:07):
kind of stories his mind might have come up with
to sort of cope with it. Uh, not just in
the present, but in his own past. He might have
created memories you know that put him on this journey. Oh,
I you know, he's captured and thrown in prison in Australia.
But maybe he's thinking, no, I I was on a
journey to find my mystical promised love and and that's

(18:28):
how I ended up here. You know, it all seems possible. Wow,
that's so it's just interesting what your mind can come
up with times to protect you. So yeah, I mean,
you're probably right. Well, Harrison says in his book in
fact quote is if these traumatic memories are all accurate,

(18:50):
one may theorize that this interval of imprisonment may have
been the triggering mechanism for PTSD, causing his later agitated
mental states and altering his sense of reality. So all
all under that same umbrella, they're just like, whatever he
went through here might have made him a little crazy.
So he was in this camp in Australia until the

(19:11):
armistice was signed in ending World War One. Carl at
that point left Australia and headed back to Germany. And
we are going to head back to a commercial break.
Who will be right back? Welcome back to Recrupulous Romance

(19:36):
and the story of Carl Tansler and Elena Milagroos. Carl
was back home in Germany now and had just turned
forty years old. He hadn't seen the ghost of Elena
in well over a decade, and he was ready to
move on with his life. Sure makes sense, I mean sure,
that's a long time to dedicate to a ghost woman.
It just appears as a statue. Sometimes I can't remember

(19:58):
what happened to me ten years about, you know, seriously,
So he's like, let me just do something normal. He
met and married a woman named Doris Schaeffer around and
together they had two daughters, and then in nine six
he looked around and realized that he lived in Germany.

(20:19):
In ninety six, I was like, let me do something
about this situation. You need to change this situation because
things are looking pretty grand. Uh. And his sister already
lived in Florida, and he had heard such great things

(20:40):
about Florida, as you do worldwide, probably a very different
Florida than than it is today is today, I don't know,
maybe it was just as crazy. So anyway, he was like, oh,
Florida seems nice, and so he decided to move to
Zephyr Hills and he arrived ahead of his family. They
were following behind him in nine but their reunion was brief.

(21:05):
So Doris was half Carl's age. She's much younger than him,
and she's a healthy, determined, practical woman. So that contrasts
a lot with this very fantastical, imaginative guy um and
his first memoirs, which he had written in the time
between when he arrived to Florida and when his family

(21:25):
joined him, he was already mixing fantasy and reality. He
made no mention of his family. He described himself as
quote Ulysses in Search of Elena. Shortly after his family
arrived in Florida, Carl was short on money, so he
took a job down in Key West at a marine
hospital and moved down there alone, leaving his family and

(21:47):
Zephyr Hills. And he wrote that he was employed as
a pathologist and ex ray specialist, but a woman who
worked with him says he showed up destitute, like willing
to take any job, and ended up working as an
attendant who cleaned up after procedures. It was like a
janitor basically, yeah, pretty much a janitor in the operating rooms.
It's like specifically blood half an intestine on the ground.

(22:11):
He's like sweeping up gloves. But Carl kind of a charmer, right,
He's smooth talking. He did have existing knowledge about X
rays and stuff like that, so it did allow him
to kind of talk his way up to being a
technician who worked with the X ray machines. Yeah. They
they do say that he was probably self taught in

(22:35):
science and that he even if he didn't have these
nine degrees, he did teach himself a lot about it
and could carry a conversation and sound very smart. Yeah.
So so he's doing okay. But he was working at
this hospital with the X ray machines when he met
Elena da Hoyos. Maria Elena Milagrod Hoyos was the daughter

(22:56):
of a cigar maker whose family had been quite wealthy
in Cuba, but they moved to Key West after falling
on hard times. She had two sisters and a very
large extended family who all visited regularly. It was always
loud and boisterous conversation and laughter and just a strong
sense of community, a lot of people coming in and
out of their house all the time. She was born

(23:18):
in nineteen o nine and she was the middle child
with her two other sisters. She was a great singer
and a dancer, and she loved going to the local
movie theater. She'd pay a nickel to watch Charlie Chaplin
or Rudolph Valentino movies. Rudolf Valentino got a Rudolph Valentino
fan in the house here. Well I saw the Chic.
For all the movies you haven't seen, You've seen the

(23:41):
Chic with Rudolph Valentino. Well, it's all thanks to this
great girl that I went to high school with named Megan.
She loved old films because she started a film club
at the Horizons, and I just stay late anyway, So
I was like, I'll join the film club and lots
of great She she really knew what she was talking about.
So we watched The Chic and that's when I watched
all this Jimmy Cagney movie. Yeah. Yeah, we watched a

(24:04):
lot of goods. Okay, Well that's school. That explains it.
In her mid teens, Elena loved dressing as a flapper.
It was it was the nineteen twenties then, and she
would go to dances. When she was eighteen years old,
she married a man who was just about her same
age named Luis Mesa. She was beautiful and with her

(24:24):
amazing singing voice, she was a popular performer at special
events around town. It's just super cool girl. Oh yeah, yeah,
everybody's favorite. Everybody loves Elena. Yeah, you know. And Louisa
and Elena's early marriage was pure bliss. They had been
together just a few months before deciding to marry. They
were just like, let's do this. What are we waiting for?

(24:47):
And when the day finally came, she looked stunning in
a beautiful fringed white dress and a red rose and
her long, thick black hair. And the wedding took place
on February eight, the six, which was the same month
and year that Carl Tonsler first came out to Florida.
Within months of their wedding, Elena was pregnant, and she

(25:09):
and Louise felt like they had nothing but a perfect
life ahead of them. Nothing could possibly go wrong, my dear.
So this is about the part of the horror movie
where the car breaks down the weird creepy castle. Sadly,
in November, Elena suffered a miscarriage. In the coming weeks,
she became thin and ill, and her family thought that

(25:32):
it was grief over the baby, but before long they
started to suspect that it was actually the other way. Around.
She wasn't ill because of her miscarriage, but rather some
existing illness had caused her miscarriage, and she developed a
recurring cough just as rumors were spreading that the local
hospital had diagnosed several cases of tuberculosis recently. Yeah, tuberculosis

(26:00):
in that era was just death sentence basically, and not
a pretty one. Um there was virtually no treatment and
in Key West during the nineteen thirties, according to Harrison's book,
TV was the number one cause of death, and he
says especially in the cigar factories um, which was a
very popular place to work in Key West the time

(26:22):
for Cuban immigrants. It was the very close quarters and
long hours just really spread through and killed a lot
of people. So together Elena and Louise traveled by trolley
to the Marine Hospital for a blood test and an
X ray, and Louise waited. As she went into the

(26:42):
exam room, they're a technician greeted her, who was going
by the name Count Carl von Kozel, which was the
name that he had taken when he came to the US.
Elena was nervous and she had had a hand over
her face most of the time, just out of pure shy,
this mostly, and he calmed her, and he bent down

(27:03):
to take a drop of blood from her fingertip as
she twitched from the prick of the needle. He apologized
to her, and he looked up. She pulled her hand
away from her face, and Carl was speechless. He described
it as quote a face of unearthly beauty, the face
of my dreams and my visions, the face of the

(27:25):
bride which had been promised to me by my ancestor
forty years before. He was dumb struck and shaky. He
didn't know what to say, so he stood and he
bowed out of the room, unsure if he was awake
or dreaming. Wow, super spooky. I mean to see this

(27:46):
face that had been haunting you for so many years,
just sitting on your table, that is. And it must
be said that the first time Carl saw this goes
the first time that the Countess on his ghosts showed
up with the girl in hand and said this is
your bride in the future. That was ten years before

(28:07):
Elena was born. So how this vision worked is just
as mysterious as as anything. Very weirds like a doctor
who thing and keep popping in and out at a
different time. So Carl sat in his lab, examining the
blood he'd collected and trying to reconcile what he'd just seen.

(28:29):
The same woman from his visions, the same ghost who
had appeared to him, the same girl from the marble
statue in the Italian Cemetery. I mean. Then a nurse
brought him her record sheet for him to log her information,
and there was her name, Mrs Lena Hoyos. He saw

(28:49):
that she was married, and it did phase him for
a moment. He wrote in his memoirs quote, was there
a curse upon me? Set after this search of decades
has come to an end, I should lose her again
at the very moment I had finally discovered her my
promised bride. But then he continued, what did it matter?

(29:11):
She belonged to another? Hadn't I also belonged to another
years ago? I was just about to say, do you
not recall that you were married sir to Mrs Doris
Shaeffer tons Lair. Yeah. And this is the only reference
he makes in his memoirs to the woman to whom
he is currently married. So he's running like, oh long

(29:35):
since past I was married to all those many many
eons ago, and she's sitting there somewhere going like, oh
my my husband hasn't called me in a few months.
I wonder where he's at. I've been waiting around for
that deadbeat. Come on, man. He was like, I was married,
but then I left and that's all it takes. It's

(29:56):
over now, so they forget all about me. But he
had completely changed in this moment, right um, As it's
probably come clear to you, Harrison writes, after this, von
Kostle mentally turned his responsibilities off as one might turn
off a water faucet, and he barely ever thought of

(30:19):
his wife and children again. So it's as if a
whole like he stepped into a whole new life and
old the old life was dead. It was like a
dead Carl in a new carl. Right. And and what
sort of PTSD or existing mental illness or anything might
have caused this is anybody's guests. They they talk a

(30:41):
little bit in this book, which came out in I
don't know the whole psychiatric field of study may have
changed since then, but they discuss this sort of idea
of snapping, that his personality really just in a moment,
just broke and became something completely different, and his past
memories may have vanished or altered. Um, but whatever it was,

(31:05):
he's just like you said, Yeah, just this totally new Carl,
who isn't even aware of old Carl. Like you asked
him about wife and daughter, he'd be like, what wife
and daughter? Right? It's almost as if the real life
is the ghost story, and the ghost story is the
real line he It's making me wonder, like, first of all,

(31:27):
I have to question how much alike all of these
women really looked. Surely he's super imposing a lot of
similarity that isn't necessarily there. I mean, that's definitely a possibility.
But I think even that presumes that these things actually
happened in the chronological order that he experienced, instead of
him retroactively making up these memories, you know. I mean,

(31:50):
it wasn't until he wrote his books that anybody knew
anything about this ghost he saw when he was a kid.
So maybe that didn't happen back then, and he just
thinks it did. He's sort of fabricad memories, very untrustworthy
of course, so who knows. But but but if he did,
I wonder I also wonder if He was like questioning

(32:12):
it up until he saw Elena's person and then he
was like it must all be real. And it was
like a cementing and it was like boom, now now
all that ship has gone is over. This is everything now,
and he sort of rewrote the experience to be something
that he believed all along. Yeah, maybe instead of some
weird experiences. I don't know. His brains are crazy. I mean,

(32:35):
brains are just even normal brains are crazy. Yeah, they're
all crazy. It's meat with electricity in it. Oh yeah,
and it does some weird ships. Like a computer. It's
gonna glitch, it's going to have errors, it's going to crash. Yes,
it's wild. Well his his crashing, I think. Well, the
diagnosis came back for Elena, and she did indeed have tuberculosis,

(32:58):
and in fact, she had a articularly nasty strain, which
at the time they were calling hasty consumption. They called
it that because it's spread and killed so quickly. I
was going to say, that's not a soft punch of
a name. They wanted to give it to you with
that name. Shortly after this, Louise left Elena for another

(33:20):
woman and moved to Miami to become a restaurant server. Louise,
I know, now this sounds terrible. This is terrible, right,
it doesn't just sound terrible, it is, but it's a
little heartless. He says that her illness had nothing to
do with it, and Harrison writes that realistically, Louise had
a very difficult choice to make. He could either stay

(33:43):
here and quite possibly die of the same, very contagious
strain of tuberculosis. And I'll note here that much of
the rest of Elena's family also died from tuberculosis. So
he had to decide whether he was going to stay
with that or kind of abandon her and go somewhere
else and try to live his life out. So you know,

(34:06):
I'm not here to judge whether he's a good or
bad person based on this choice, only that it was
definitely I feel like sure a speculation station that it
was a very difficult choice for him, um, and that
you know, he might not have been super happy either way,
but um, but certainly from a Lana's standpoint, that sucks. Yeah,

(34:29):
that's pretty cold. Yeah, I mean, Doc holiday at TV
and Kate's Kate still sat in his lap. But in
either case, it broke e Lana's heart, but not Carl's. Nope,
he was just about the only person who was happy
about this breakup. The next time she saw him, he
told her, don't worry about anything anymore. From now on,

(34:53):
I am going to take care of you. And he
just threw himself into studying tuberculosis and he devoted himself
entirely to her treatment. Do you do you think She
was like, well, I thought you would because you're my doctor.
Who I mean, you know, I supposed to take care.
But this is where his expertise kind of came into question.

(35:15):
Harrison writes that Carl quote walked a tightrope between genius
and mad scientist without a net. He was very intelligent,
and everyone around him thought of him as a genius.
But even for his best theories, which he had many
about medical treatments and uh innovative machines, flying machines, and

(35:37):
and watercraft and electrical machines. He had all these ideas,
but he lacked the skill to actually bring them into reality. Like,
for example, he was building this ridiculous plane out behind
the hospital. It's big and clunky, and the wheels are
like as tall as a person, and it's this big
fat metal machine. Uh, I would never getting into this plane,

(36:00):
and there's pictures of it and no thank you. And
he told Elena that he would use it to fly
her out of here to an island in the South
Seas after he cured her, and they would live this
life together, you know, in this tropical paradise that they
would find. And every time she came over for treatment,
he would take her out of the plane and show

(36:21):
it to her. They'd sit down next to each other
in the cockpit and pretend they were flying. And he
wrote in his memoirs that one time, when they were
looking at the plane, he asked her could I name
the plane La Contessa di Kozo, the Countess of Cozel,
And it was suggesting to her, like you're gonna marry

(36:41):
me and be the Countess of Cozel, and I'm going
to name the plane after you. And she was like,
oh that's sweet. Sure, yeah, you can name it the
Contessa and very much Indeed, he painted Contessa Elena van
Kozo on the side of the plane the next day.
I have to wonder if he was like, can I
do can I write the contest of Kosal And She's like, yeah,

(37:04):
I meant you're playing, I mean, go for it. And
then the next day she comes out and sees Elena
Countess contests of like ohn't yeah, oh wow, I better
go now. He had been sending payments back to Zephyr
Hills for Doris and his daughters, but now with his

(37:26):
focus on Elena, all of that stopped. He was not again.
They were they were gone for him. It was like
they had never existed. And he was showering Elena with
gifts and jewelry and making constant promises that he could
cure her tuberculosis. He tried several experimental treatments, even concocted
some homemade elixers, which sounds terrifying. Outside of his memoirs,

(37:54):
there's no historical evidence that any of his feelings for
Elena were reciprocated. Right, So we don't know how she
felt about Carl. I'll say that even in the quotes
from the memoirs that Harrison puts in his book, even
though he sounds delusional, like he never really writes her
as sounding like she's in love with him, but it

(38:15):
sounds like he thinks she is. But even in his
own writings, I'm like, dude, she's not into you know,
but he's still responding as though she is. It's very strange.
That is so creepy, so so creepy. You know. She's like, oh,
you're so nice to know, you're so kind. Oh you
give me a diamond ring. Oh that's so sweet, thank you,

(38:37):
uh thanks by Okayssie tomorrow. You know, I do think
it's weird that she would accept jewelry from him, but
maybe she just didn't know how to say no. He
just refused to take it. Something like that ship can
be so awkward. And I'll say side note too that
years later many of Helena's friends said that ship wasn't

(38:59):
ex pensive. So Carl and this, uh that he did
right that he gave her a diamond ring at some point. Uh,
nobody else ever saw that ring. He was like a
ring pop when that be He's like, I gave her
this beautiful stone and Elena is like, oh, thank you

(39:20):
so much for the lollipop that would cheer me up
on the way home from my horrible tuberculosis experimental tuberculosis street. Well, anyway,
all that speculations case, and I don't think ring pops
existed yet, but it was probably something like yeah and
Harrison also wrote that when Carl confessed his love for

(39:41):
Elena to her, she insisted that even though she was
aware that she probably would never see Louise again, she
still felt that she was married in the eyes of God,
she could not be with Carl. So anyway, it doesn't
seem like probably she was being very encouraging to him,
but he certainly was building a whole fantasy whatever she

(40:05):
was in. He treated her with radiation therapy, and when
she was too sick to go to the hospital, he'd
go to her and bring this homemade high power medical
units with Tesla coils that he would use to zap
the back of her throat and tonsils. And he claimed

(40:26):
her condition improved for a time from this. Yeah, she
seemed to get her voice back and and uh and
was more active and feeling better. He says. Okay, he
fought with her parents because they brought her company, like
they'd bring her friends to see and stuff like that.
They would take her on car rides and just kind

(40:47):
of do stuff with her. Activities that Carl insisted was
deteriorating her health further. But honestly, they just knew that
she wasn't going to live much longer, and they wanted
to give her as much enjoyment as they could and
probably spend as much time with her as they could
until it was over. And then on October, despite all

(41:13):
of Carl's efforts, Elena died. Carl was brought to the
house shortly after she died, and he made a last
minute attempt to revive her with his electric machines, but
she was gone. In his grief, he was angry at
her family for this paltry funeral service they had planned,
and he insisted that he paid for a better service

(41:35):
is in. Her parents were like, Okay, yeah, if that's
what you want to do, you know, sure, I don't
think they cared much but um, but they were willing
to let him do it. On his way to the service,
he said that in his head he was hearing beethoven
seventh Symphony like to him, he thought people would say
that was weird, but he felt like it was very
powerful and almost wedding like experience. He called it um.

(42:00):
He just didn't have the same feelings that other people
did about this funeral. After she was buried, Carl offered
her parents five dollars a month to rent her room
and stay there. Now, this was a considerable amount of
money back then in in Key West, and strangely they agreed,

(42:21):
probably just because they needed the money and also in
their grief. You know, who knows what they were thinking.
And then he made them a strange promise. He said, quote,
I'll take good care of her. I'll not permit her
body to decay. And if in the grave Elena should
lose her hair, I'll buy new hair and put it

(42:44):
back on her head. He writes then that her mother
responded by saying, quote, don't use other people's hair. I
have some which she cut off a year ago, and
she gave him long tresses of Elena's black hair. Now,
he went back up to her room and lay down
in her bed, where he would sleep many of his nights.

(43:07):
And he wasn't really sure how he could live up
to this promise of keep taking care of her body
while Elena was buried underground. So he decided that it
was his responsibility to have a mausoleum built and to
have her body interred inside. And I'm telling y'all, from

(43:30):
this point on, his behavior got more and more bizarre
and horrifying and strange and nightmarish and we're going to
see it right after this commercial break. Use that to tea,

(43:51):
and we're back with the horrifying conclusion. To Carl Tansler
and Lena the Hoyos. Carl had the crypt built and
paid to have Elena's body dug up and moved there.
The construction took three full months, and moving her was
highly unorthodox. When they dug up her coffin, they saw

(44:14):
that the reins had already steeped through, as the wood
had been cracked when the grave diggers packed the earth
above it too tightly. He paid the undertaker to allow
him in to redress Elena for her new tomb, and
when they lifted the boards of the broken coffin from
her body, the lining from inside had become stuck to

(44:39):
her face. Carl had to spray her with a formula
to disinfect the corpse and harden its tissues so she
didn't fall apart when they tried to move her. It
took them hours to clean her and finally transfer her
into a new coffin, so he came a second night

(45:00):
and placed her into a specially made incubator tank that
he built specifically to preserve her. From there, she was
sealed in an airtight double casket with fifty locks on
it that required a special key to open, and then
the crypt itself was closed with three more locks on

(45:20):
the outside, and for eighteen months, Carl came to visit
the tomb and sat inside by her coffin. One night,
he dozed off as he sat in the dank crypt,
only to be awoken by a sudden, loud, blasting noise.
He looked around, but no one was there. He thought

(45:42):
maybe someone was playing a prank on him. A neighborhood
kid came and shot a cap gun while he was
sleeping to startle him, but there was no one around.
He looked back to Elena's casket and he saw that
all fifty locks had sprung open at once. Then he

(46:03):
heard a light tapping sound from inside, like fingers gently
scraping at a metal surface. He flung open the outer
casket and put his ear down to the wood, but
he heard nothing. Then he opened the rest of the
coffin and the incubator and revealed Elena. The smell, he said,

(46:29):
was quote exactly like the healthy and agreeable odor of
a young woman's skin on a warm day, which is
so much scarier to me than if it had been
brank and disgusting. And from then on he started having

(46:49):
conversations with Elena on his visits. He said he thought
that her blowing all the locks open was just a fun,
practical joke, like the kind that she used to play
and loved so much. He chucks everything up to a
practical Joe doesn't like people were pranking car a lot.
I guess he really had a high opinion of what

(47:09):
a prankster could accomplish, right like, man, you were the
subject of some elaborate shit. I guess. She started to
sing to him from the crypt, and one night he
saw a vision of a white haired woman waiting outside
the tune Oh count as count Asama's back. Huh. And

(47:31):
eventually Elena's spirit called to him, begging for him to
release her from the mausoleum. She gave him the very
instructions he would need to do so. Bring a large
blanket to cover the fence and hide from neighboring houses.
Bring a wagon to carry her away. Come when the
moon is new, under cover of darkness. It's a real

(47:53):
heist planner, Elena. She also told him that the dead
woman in her neighboring plot was her friend, then that
she would help him keep a lookout. Wow, Elena is
like a Danny Ocean. She's getting a whole crew together,
corpse crew of the corpse crew together to hoist her
own body. Where is that Halloween movie? And on the

(48:18):
darkest night in April of n Carl came to the tune.
He opened the locks and took the inner casket with
him in the wagon, bringing her back to his own house.
He removed her body. Her hair was thick and matted,
stuck to her scalp. There were maggots around her head

(48:41):
and ears, and her eyes were empty black holes. The
spirit told him he must not love her like this,
but he told her she was as beautiful as ever,
and he kissed her dry lips and breathed her into
her lungs until her chest rose. Then he laid down

(49:05):
next to her on the table, holding her for the
rest of the night. He believed he could resurrect her,
but that he couldn't do it with her body in
this state. The state of being dead and rotten was
the state to Yeah, it was, He basically said, like

(49:26):
that would be That would be rude of me to
resurrect her like this, it's everything you've done so far.
It's pretty eff and rude. It is. I'm so disturbed.
That's so fucking gross. He was like, no, you're as
beautiful as ever, and then he kisses this corpse. There's
maggots and there's my well. Anyway, hopefully no one's eating

(49:49):
lunch right now something, but if you are, just save
it for later. So he couldn't do anything for her
with her body in the state, so he decided what
of course, he had to rebuild it. He used wire
and broken coat hangers to keep her skeleton intact. He

(50:12):
mail ordered glass orbs to replace her eyes. When her
hair began to come loose, he took the hair that
her mother had given him and fashioned her a short
wig out of her own former hair. When her body
cavity started to collapse in on itself, he stuffed her

(50:34):
full of old rags. He used plaster casting to try
and create the perfect mask of her face, and he
made several copies of it. But in creating the masks,
he discovered that he could use a mixture of bees
wax and balsam to set a new form of skin

(50:55):
over her. The oiled silk that he had used to
protect her face while he was making the mask hardened
to her and fastened tightly to her skin. He thought
it looked just as beautiful as ever, and ended up
painting her whole body in this solution, replacing her skin
with a waxy plaster like coating. He sprayed her with

(51:20):
perfumes and preservatives to keep the stench of death at bay.
All the while he's out there working on his airplane,
which he believed he could use to fly her into
the stratosphere and resurrect her with radiation from outer space.

(51:41):
This man is not well. He is not okay. And
I gotta tell you. I mean, there are pictures and
this is a nightmare looking thing. I mean, this idea
that he created this perfect, beautiful plaster mask of her
face that he did not not it's really really terrifying.

(52:05):
I've seen I've seen them. Yeah, and this went on
for seven years. God, he believed he was returning her
to life. But there was no muscle, no blood, no
functional organs anywhere in her body. It was effectively a twisted,

(52:27):
waxy modern mummy that he was creating. I mean, she
was like a scarecrow. And yeah, he had completely abandoned
his family in His younger daughter died suddenly of diphtheria,
and his wife assumed that he would come home to
bury his child, but he completely ignored her letters. He

(52:51):
did not attend the funeral, and he sent no money.
And some believe he was just so far gone that
he had completely replaced his entire life in his head.
As we kind of spoke about earlier, he just had
no practical memory of even having had a wife and daughters,
like that was like a past life, for like a
dream he had or something. Meanwhile, rumors started to spread

(53:16):
of Carl Tonsler dancing with a wax doll in his
house at night. People are like that creepy German guys
here has got a weird doll mannequin or something, and
he's dancing with it, like past the window. Mm hmmm.
And finally, in those rumors spread to Elena's older sister, Florinda,

(53:42):
and Florenda's lying, Okay, we need to investigate this rumor
because I remember that crazy old dude. And in September,
Carl heard Elena tell him hide me, hide me somewhere.
But Carl felt like he couldn't the only place he
could keep her with her coffin. But in there, he said, quote,

(54:05):
she would be deprived of the air, which she needed.
Oh man, so he thinks she needs air. I mean,
this just shows you how far gone. And again this
is not He didn't hear Elena's spirit. He didn't hear
a voice from somewhere. He heard her tell him, hide me,

(54:26):
hide me the thing he made. Yeah, he's having a
full on conversations. This is a conscious person who needs
his help in his mind. It's wild to me. On
septem Florinda and her husband Mario, demanded that Carl come

(54:46):
to the mausoleum and open Elena's tomb. And you know,
he told her, I don't have to do that, there's
no reason to do that. She actually gathered a bunch
of people from around town to go down to that
tomb and said get down here, now, want to see
you open it. And he said, look, this is a
family affair, so let's talk about this in private, and

(55:07):
I will show you Elena's body. So he brought them
back to his place. He walked them up to his room,
and he pulled back the covers on Elena's bed. Florinda,
of course, could not believe what she was seeing, and

(55:28):
at first she refused to accept that this bizarre wax
reconstruction was her sister. She asked him how long he
had kept her body, and he told her seven years.
She was absolutely horrified. She demanded that he returned Elena's

(55:53):
body to her crypt, but Carl fought back. He insisted
to her that the crypt and everything inside it belonged
to him. He'd paid for it all, after all, and
he also said it was better for Elena for him
to have her out here than for her to go
back into the mausoleum. To him, that's made perfect sense,

(56:15):
Like why don't you see that I'm I'm doing what's
best for her here. Well, and he's talking about a
conscious person like he He really is seeing somebody who
needs air to breathe, who can dance with him and
talk to him and knows what she needs and wants.
And that's not what Florinda is seeing. So they're just

(56:36):
not even on the same planet right now, exactly exactly, Well,
the next day the sheriff showed up, maybe no surprise
that Florinda was like, I mean somebody to come over here.
This is some some ship I need some help, and
they arrested Carl for grave desecration and removed the body

(56:57):
and took it in for inspection. And Carl insists in
his memoirs that the sheriff was very kind and understanding
and felt like Carl was being wrong. But that sounds
like a manager to me. Or He's like, listen, man,
you know, I don't want to be down here. I'm
with you, really, I'm just trying to get my job done.

(57:17):
They asked me that I got it, you know. You
know how it is with them. They're taking your wife
away on that's that's wild. You know. I'm sure it'll
all work out for you in the long run. Yeah,
I'll take good care of her while she's in custody.
Don't worry, you know. So that Carl was like, all right,
you're a nice guy, come on and do what you

(57:37):
gotta do. I think Carl just believe this whole time, like, man,
I have to go through this so that Jerry can
tell them that I'm right for what I'm doing. You know, well,
it would not be long before he went to trial.
And if none of this is crazy enough, here's a
bad ship, insane little fact toy that might ruin what

(58:00):
will hope you had left for humanity. The trial was
obviously a media sensation. This is a guy who lived
for seven years with a corpse turned into a more
and more horrifying doll, and he was talking to it.
I mean, you know, this is prime stuff. But the
majority of public opinion was on his side. What women

(58:22):
called him an eccentric, romantic, just a man who felt
passionate about the love of his life. He'd go to
any lengths to help U. That's so beautiful. God, get
you a man who will dig up your body, put

(58:43):
it in an incubator, make a waxy skin version of
your skin, put your own hair on your head, and
then dance around past a window with you. Oh yeah,
just a regular casanova. That's what we're going for. My
heart is breaking for women of this era if this
is what they're like. You know, I would love a

(59:03):
guy who was that dedicated. They were like, you know,
I don't know why, but that looks good to me
for some reason, My god, my god. Meanwhile, the trial
went very quickly, as you'd expect, right cut and dry,
right obviously, but as you might not expect, Carl got

(59:27):
off Scott free. And why because our good old friend
the statute of limitations. If you just wait your crimes out,
just wait out the clock, you can get away with anything.
Oh my god. They were like, hey, so, I mean,

(59:47):
nobody's really mad at you anyway, except you know, everyone
who was related to this woman. Yeah, her entire family,
and anyone would have a brain, which is apparently not
most people. I don't. It's funny because I don't, you know,
I'm not sure that once you're dead, your body doesn't
matter to you anymore. I just feel bad for her
family because there's something so gross about knowing your family

(01:00:11):
member's body is being disrespected this way. And yeah, I
don't know. It just feels like such a like injustice
to them and to her. I need to mention that
she's dead, but still, but not to mention the deception
that went along with it too, you know, like, oh,
let me build her this mausoleum. She'll be safe there. Yeah. Well,

(01:00:32):
let's let's go over the fine details of this and
see what your definition of safe is. Yeah, because I
feel like it's different than mine. Plus, if anywhere in
this story, people what should have said, Man, you're not
doing well. Someone should maybe be talking to you or something,
or you should be sitting down somewhere safe, like it
should be here. When they found out that he was

(01:00:54):
literally talking to a course like, why didn't anyone go
maybe this person is not okay and they need to
go somewhere. Sorry, statuted limitations, Free to go. I guess
he was crazy then, but he's not crazy now. He
still got the body okay anyway, So he moved back
to Zephyr Hills. No mention if he found his wife

(01:01:17):
and daughter, probably not, assume that they probably didn't want
to see him anyway, and he sat down and wrote
his autobiography there. He published it in the pulp fiction
magazine and got his story out. I'm sure people were
more than happy to pay for it. Absolutely, that's worth in.
Nicol Elena's body, meanwhile, was put on display in a

(01:01:40):
local funeral home and tourists could come see it for
a dollar, and nearly seven thousand people came and paid
to see this mutilated corpse before finally her family members
got her back and they buried her in an unmarked

(01:02:02):
grave in Key West Cemetery to prevent further desecration. Carl
lived out his life in relative obscurity and became a U.
S citizen in nineteen fifty. Then two years later he
died at the age of seventy five. He was found
on his bedroom floor three days after his death, and

(01:02:25):
in his room was a life size doll with one
of the wax and plaster masks of Elana's face that
he made attached to it. What. Oh my god, so horrific.
So clearly, I mean, this obsession just never ended for

(01:02:48):
him and his sense of reality. Obviously it was completely distorted. Yeah,
I mean, I'm wonder if he was still talking to her,
if he knew that it was a doll replacement for
what he had already lost. God, who knows, you know
what point he could have believed anything. He might have
thought so gross that somebody was able to just display
her body until the family could work out some details

(01:03:10):
or whatever. What is that and makes seven grand off
of it? Because the trial was such a media senstation,
everybody wanted to come see and I'm like, first of all,
I didn't want to see the two pictures of it
that I saw. First people were real starred for entertainment. Yeah, oh,
and this is prime like sideshow era. This is what's
so horrific about the whole thing is his very matter

(01:03:34):
of fact, practical approach to it all. It's like when
he when he opened the tomb and smelled this, you know,
the skin of a young woman, as fresh as the day,
like like a woman's skin on a warm, sunny day.
And I'm like, that's more scary to me that he

(01:03:55):
cracked that tomb open and was like, ah, when if
you were in there with him, uh, you probably would
have thrown up from the smell. Absolutely absolutely. I think
we talked about this on another episode, but that about
that movie with Bryan Reynolds called The Voices, Yes, which
where he is serial killer but he doesn't he His

(01:04:19):
point of view in the movie is all sunshine and
rainbows and happiness and everything's bright colored and yeah everything,
and then you cut to another perspective and it's and
it's disgusting, hard, warped and horrific. And that's kind of
what I feel like it is with Toddler, right. Yes,
I was definitely thinking about that movie the whole time

(01:04:39):
because it was exactly like that. It's it's completely separate
from reality and it's all clean and sweet, smelling and innocent.
That was the other thing about Bryan Reynolds characters, he's
actually very innocent, sweet and dopey and whatever, and you
just they're like, oh, don't you know, you know what

(01:05:01):
he's up to, But like, you just can't believe this
guy that he thinks of himself as doing that, because
that's not really who he is. And then you see
the real world and it's a fucking nightmare, but he
doesn't see he really doesn't see it at all. So yeah,
I mean that's exactly like Carl kind of being like
not only smelling, not smelling her rotting body, which he's

(01:05:24):
like a very overwhelming gross smell, not only replacing that
with a pleasant smell, but then also like thinking that
breathing air into her mouth was going to do something,
that that rebuilding her body was going to do something.
What was you know how, I don't know. And then

(01:05:46):
this weird rocket ship he was going to send her on.
I mean, he just had a whole, like the whole
world going on that does not match this one, but
it was so real to him. Clearly, this idea that
he had reconstructed this perfect man ask of her face.
And imagine him seeing that and then go look at
a picture of this face, because it is the furthest

(01:06:08):
thing from a from a realistic portrayal of a human face.
It is a pure nightmare. It's remarkable. This whole story
is remarkable and certainly one of the creepiest stories I've
ever heard, for so many reasons. Oh my god, the
when he showed her body to her sister. When he

(01:06:30):
leads her upstairs and he's like, I'm gonna show you.
You're gonna meet your sister, aren't you glad to see
her again? And then pulls back the covers and there's
this wretched, twist, twisted, waxy doll of a corpse. Oh.
I can't imagine a more nightmarish experience for anyone than

(01:06:52):
something like I mean, that is straight out of a
horror movie. Oh yeah, straight. Florinda was never the same,
But you know what she didn't do. She didn't have
her mind snap and go and fallow ghosts. Most of
her immediate family died within the same time period of tuberculosis.

(01:07:13):
Parents and eventually even Florinda herself died shortly after. Um.
You know, but she had a very large family extended
down there, and I think most of them dealt with
this funeral home displaying the body and everything afterwards. But
even still, I mean, they all knew and loved this girl,
and just an absolutely terrifying experience and and and a

(01:07:34):
really extra horrible considering their family was also like being
wiped out by tuberculosis, like they weren't going through enough.
And then this this this fake doctor comes in and
is like gaslighting them, like I can cure your daughter.
You've got to let me do whatever I want, and
just totally made up this story that everyone else just
got sucked into. I mean, that's when it turns from

(01:07:57):
like creepy ghostie horror story to just like the story
of a delusional asshole taking advantage of people. Um, whether
he knew he was or not. Um, pretty pretty twisted. Yeah.
The impact, yeah, you know, greater than the intent. Just
to recap again, like the story of him and Elena

(01:08:19):
and what he did with her body, all of that
as true, but who he was before this, his life
leading up to it, his air quotes, adventures across the world,
the spirits, the statue, everything, all like we said, like
could be very like fabricated after the fact. He may

(01:08:40):
have believed it intently, um, but but something happened to
this guy at some point. Definitely that really cost a
lot of trauma that I think he dealt with in
a way that really affected a lot of other people.
It's reminded me a little bit too of Raymond Fernandez
from our Lonely Hearts Killer episode, because remember he got

(01:09:01):
hit by that door and it cracked his skull and
his personality completely changed, and after that he became really
violent and stuff and like grumpy and just like unhappy
it could happen and that, you know, it was kind
of like, well, if that door had not fallen on him,
would he have ever been a killer? You know, would
he have ever done any of that stuff? Maybe speculation station.

(01:09:25):
Maybe back in his lab that night, Um Carl's pencil
rolled off his desk. He went down to get it,
and he like got back up and banged his head
real hard on the desk and it was just like
started hallucinating and just from then on he just had
this like ghost experience. Maybe that's maybe that was the

(01:09:47):
root cause of it. It's just a just a knock,
knock on the noggin for that hit your head in
the wrong place, You never know what could happen. It's
not unheard of. So more all the story everyone tonight,
I think is be careful when you're getting back up
after you drop your pencil. Maybe that's why they started
making pencils like hexagonal. They were like, we gotta stop.

(01:10:12):
Yeah they ca Yeah, we caused a lot of problems,
making a lot of killers with our round pencil. We
finally solved the mystery of both round pencils and you're
welcome history. Well, I hope you all enjoyed this truly

(01:10:32):
terrifying tale. Yeah, and this whole series of recryptulous romance
that we've had so much fun bringing you this month.
I know this has been really fun to tell. Spooky story, Yeah,
find all these weirdos. I want to get into more.
But I also you know, we've got to save something
for next year, right, Hey Christmas has ghost ease in it?
Oh sure, Yeah, maybe we can find a nice story. Hey,

(01:10:57):
if you all have any suggestions for stories like these,
or any ridiculous romances that you've come across, please send
them our away. I'd love to hear from you like
Lauren did with this one. Thanks again, Lauren, Thank you
so much Lauren for sending us one you can reach
out to us at Romance at iHeart media dot com,
right on social media, Twitter and Instagram. I'm at Danamite Boom,

(01:11:19):
and I'm at Oh Great, It's Eli and the show
is at Ridict Romance and we would just love to
hear from you. Check out our YouTube page where we're
gonna be having more episodes uploaded all the time with
the close captions available so you can read along with
us and also you know, send drop us a review.
We'd love to hear from you there. Thank you so
much for staying in touch with us, Thank you so

(01:11:40):
much for listening. Happy Halloween, Happy hallo Ween, Stay safe,
stay spooky, and we will see you all in the
next one and we'll rise again. All aloisive, put your

(01:12:04):
friends in at and preachments and play within a show.
We Contalus romes Ha