February 24, 2021 • 14 mins
In 1945, residents of a Liverpool neighborhood found a desiccated body in a long cylinder they’d been using for years using as a bench. It launched a mystery that’s still alive today.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hey, you welcome to the short Stuff. I'm Josh. There's
Chuck and Jerry's lurking there on mute, just hanging around
being a weirdo, looking all weird. And this is short stuff.
As I said, already, we should tell everyone. The other day,
it was kind of funny. We were recording and about
five minutes in Jerry somehow a muted herself and she
was in some sort of a conference call. We couldn't
(00:27):
get ahold of her and it was just like, shut up. Yeah,
I mean, she wasn't recording, but it was very distracting
to us. And that's the important thing, you know. Yeah,
I have a thing in my brain where they're and
this happens a lot when you have a kid, Like
You'll be listening to music and then she'll come in
with some dumb toy that's playing different music and it
(00:49):
it just it breaks my brain and makes me want
to break things. It's not good. I don't know what
it is. It's a big trigger. Yeah. Well, I like
the anecdote. It was very charmed. Right now, we're not
going to be able to get to the end of
this episode. Alright, let's do it. We've wasted Uh, I
don't know a minute. So all right, well let's start
by talking about the Blitz, because that's kind of where
(01:11):
the story technically begins. And the Blitz is like this,
the German bombing of England, and Germany really really bombed
England in general. But most people think of London being
bombed the most as the Blitz. That's not entirely true. Well,
London was for sure bombed a lot. We don't want to,
you know, take anything away from what they suffered. But Liverpool,
(01:33):
I think was number two in England is getting walloped
by the Germans. And there's a there's a place in
Liverpool where after the bombing they I think it's near
uh what was then called Great Homer Street. And after
the bombing they kind of left it that way for
a little while because I think everyone was just recuperating
(01:55):
from the war. And then in nine some American soul
just finally started clearing out this area and found a
little something interesting. Yeah, well at first they didn't think
it was interesting. It was part of the rubble that
was cleared out by those American soldiers, but it was
a long tube of cylinder um. Let me say this
(02:17):
found something that would prove to be interesting exactly, but
we are in agreement that at the time they didn't
think it was interesting at all. Yeah, it just looked
like a tube, you know. I think it was a
little under seven ft long um less than two feet
in diameter, and it was just made of steel. It
(02:37):
just looked like some big, dumb thing. But apparently it
was heavy enough and big enough that rather than being
removed with all the other rubble, it just kind of
got left in the area and became kind of a
fixture in this little little part of the neighborhood, so
much so that people would like sit on it as
a bench sometimes and children would play on it and
roll it along and all that stuff. And that's the
(02:57):
way it stayed for at least a good two years
between ninety three when they cleared out the rubble in
when something kind of big happened. Yeah, I think one
end was sort of factory sealed, and one end was
kind of uh stamped shut by the bulldozers and stuff
that we're clearing stuff out. And over time over those
(03:18):
couple of years, that end that was sort of stamp
shut kind of worked its way loose a little bit,
just enough for a little kid that was climbing on
it to see a bony skeletal foot. Yeah, a little
boy named Tommy Lawless who appropriately found the skeletal foot
in the cylinder on a Friday. So the little boy,
(03:41):
um who went on to become Ringo star, went and
fetched a cop, the local cop, Robert Baile or Bailey
would be Bailey, I guess, but I've never seen it
spelled that way. Be a I L L I E. Yeah, sure,
that's that's Bailey, right. And he said, well, this is
way above my pay grade, rather famously, and went and
(04:02):
got the detectives and they all kind of came together
and said, what is going on here? And this mystery
was launched. That's right. Uh. I think it's too early
for a break, but that is a good cliffhanger. I
thought so too. I can do whatever we want. We're
God's here. That's right. Let's let's take an early break
since you set it up so well, and we'll come
(04:22):
back right after this. Alright, great cliffhanger. They find this thing,
(04:51):
they find the skeletal foot. They need to get inside
of it, so they get a welder to open it up,
and they get some corners and some forensics people in there,
and what they end up finding it was an entire
skeleton of a man about six ft tall, dude, Victorian dress,
and they had it was it was a little bit
of hair still left even on the skull. And here's
(05:14):
one key that kind of flummixes me that I'll kind
of harp on a bit later, but yeah, me too.
There was a brick wrapped in burlap as a little pillow. Yeah,
which to me kind of confuses a lot of the
a lot of the ideas they had of what might
have happened to this guy. It really does. And it's
weird that the brick was there and wrapped in burlap.
I don't know if it was the guy who writes
(05:35):
Passing Strangest, which huge shout out um this this is
actually kind of a somewhat well known mystery. The body
and the cylinder is what it's called. But Um Passing
Strangeness did far, in a way, the best job of
kind of getting this point across. And that guy Um
describes it as as a pillow. So I don't know
if that's if it was just Tamm or if that's
(05:56):
generally what it's love, but it is very weird that
it was there and in that position. Do we have
his name? From what I can tell, the guy who
wrote that, and probably the guy who has the the
blog Passing Strangeres, which seems to be defunct, which is
a shame because it's pretty interesting. UM is named Paul Dry.
At the very least, that's the name of the person
who's accepting um compliments on the comments under the blog.
(06:19):
But you want to hear something truly bizarre, Chuck. Sure.
There is a little tag called trackbacks. One of them
is Indonesia Blowing Up Boats and C g I Pompeii.
Another's fishing Shop. The third one is s y s
K Internet Roundup. Really isn't that cool? Does that mean
(06:42):
we covered this before? No? I think this guy UM
is just a fan. I don't think the trackbacks mean anything.
I think he's saying, like, go check this out. Maybe,
I hope, let's find out. Well that's small world. So
all right, they've got this body in there, and there's
a lot of other stuff in there, and we'll kind
of just list out what else was in this cylinder
with the skeleton. UM, they discovered a London north Western
(07:07):
Railway notice that had a tag about arrival of some
goods that was dated June five. I think there was
a postcard from Birmingham dated July three, eight five, a
couple of diaries which they couldn't read. It was illegible.
I would guess just sort of damage to time would
be my guess. Uh. And then they found some papers
(07:30):
and this proved to be I guess the biggest key.
They found some papers under the body, um, one of
which was a receipt and account sheets for a company T. C.
Williams and Company, and then some other kind of stuff
that didn't prove to be useful, right right. One of
the things that got me though, is that it was
found in a bunch of grave wax, like a pool
(07:51):
or puddle of grave wax from the body decomposing onto
the papers. That's called yeah, grave wax. I think we
ran into it for Center Urban Explorers episode because like,
people find it in catacombs, but it's um the what's
astounding is that these coroners from the mid century were
able to kind of um uh get the papers back
(08:15):
in tax so that they could read them again. That's
astounding to me. Pretty cool. They also did find that
his skull was damaged, but I think they thought that
was kind of due to the bulldozing and trying to
get the body out of there, that's right, or the cylinder. Yeah,
So there didn't seem to be any any um evidence
of violence. There was just a dead body. So they
(08:38):
have no idea what happened to this guy. And at
first I guess the coroner thought, um, this is like
maybe a ten year old cadaver that we're looking at.
Everybody else said, um, what about every other piece of
evidence that that you've discovered along with this guy? And
he's like, well, technically somebody could have dressed up like
(08:58):
a Victorian person in and gotten a bunch of old
papers and keys and stuff in a ring, and um,
you know, died within the last ten years. And I
think everyone kind of said, you know, that's bosch. The
coroner wasn't ready to give that up yet. They actually
investigated a theory that it could have been, um, a
man named TC Williams son whose name was also TC Williams,
(09:24):
and maybe it was him and he just happened to
have some old papers with him. And they said, I
think we already said bosh to that, Yeah, because I
don't think we mentioned, Uh, there was a paint manufacturing
plant in that area that was owned by Thomas Kreegan Williams.
That fit the time period. So they're like, it can't
be that guy, Like you said, maybe it's his son,
(09:46):
but did They ended up finding him and that went
in that right They found the sun his body. Yeah,
the son had been buried back in nine nine and
leads so he was accounted for. His strange Chuck, is
that the older man, his father, had not been accounted for.
The man who owned this manufacturing plant in the eighteen
seventies and eighteen eighties in this area of Liverpool, Um
(10:08):
had suddenly just vanished right around right. Uh. They did
end up kind of figuring out that the tube and
the cylinder itself was part of a ventilation shaft, which
to me sort of only confused things a little bit.
Um that it was put forth and I don't know
if this was Paul who kind of put this forth,
(10:29):
or or or general evidence that perhaps this man was
despondent and suicidal over the loss of the factory and
crawled into the shaft for final privacy. That seems a
little a bit of a stretch to me. Um. Yeah,
it also seems like a stretch that a ventilation shaft
(10:49):
should be closed off on one side. What kind of
ventilation shaft is that? Yeah, I guess, But don't they
all end at some point they're supposed to end into
like the open air? You know, Like I think that's
just really weird, like a a a one ended a
ventilation shaft. It just I'm sure there's some kind out there,
(11:11):
but it just escapes me. And then the pillow also
seems a little weird, that brick burlap pillow. Yeah, that's
the weirdest part to me is that that that is
clearly some sort of a a purposeful thing that someone
has done, um right, I mean like like for comfort. Yeah,
but also it's like do you hate yourself to um?
(11:33):
Like a brick wrapped in burlap is not a comfy pillow.
Like you could use almost anything else on the planet
and wrap it and burlap and it will be more
comfortable than brick. Uh. Yeah, And they had pillows back then,
you know, right exactly. Um. There was another theory put
forth that it wasn't Williams, it was someone else that
was maybe murdered, uh in retaliation for that factory closing
(11:56):
and maybe they stuffed them in there and Williams maybe
just like disappeared after that, changed his name and skipped down.
Who knows. Yeah, so I think they finally closed the
case in nineteen forty seven, forty five, actually right up
right off the bat, they closed the cases that we're
never going to solve this um or we've totally solved it.
(12:17):
We just can't say with a percent, But they basically said,
we don't know who it is, we don't know how
he died, but you can probably surmise yourself. And the
prevailing theory is that it was TC Williams, upon the
ruination of his um paint business, uh possibly took his
own life. The fact that he wrapped a pillow or
a brick and burlap and took it into ventilation shift
(12:39):
with him with all this other stuff would suggest he
didn't accidentally go in there and and get stuck. He
probably died by suicide or it was somebody else made
to seem like TC Williams. But the astounding fact is
that this happened in five. He was in that ventilation
chef all the way up and through the bombing of
Liverpool during World War Two and used to be rolled
(13:02):
around the playground by children until they finally figured out
he was in there. Yeah, I'm sure there was more
than one adult walking around that remembers playing on that trip.
I know, I know. Um. And then a very special
shout out to Josh and Chuck from the past because
it turns out, Chuck, we did talk about this in
(13:23):
an Internet roundup which explains the track back, So this
is probably the last time we'll ever talk about the body,
and I think memory of that, I think this is
the best version. I don't either, and plus no one
saw an Internet round up anyway, so I think we're
all good. Enjoyed that show. But big thanks and hats
off to Passing Strangeness for making such a great blog post.
And if you haven't been on that blog yet, go
(13:45):
it's very good. And since I said that, that means
short stuff is a happening. Stuff you should know is
a production of I Heart Radio for more podcasts for
my heart Radio. Is it the I Heart Radio app
Apple podcasts where every listen to your favorite shows. H
(14:08):
m hm
Hey, you welcome to the short Stuff. I'm Josh. There's
Chuck and Jerry's lurking there on mute, just hanging around
being a weirdo, looking all weird. And this is short stuff.
As I said, already, we should tell everyone. The other day,
it was kind of funny. We were recording and about
five minutes in Jerry somehow a muted herself and she
was in some sort of a conference call. We couldn't
(00:27):
get ahold of her and it was just like, shut up. Yeah,
I mean, she wasn't recording, but it was very distracting
to us. And that's the important thing, you know. Yeah,
I have a thing in my brain where they're and
this happens a lot when you have a kid, Like
You'll be listening to music and then she'll come in
with some dumb toy that's playing different music and it
(00:49):
it just it breaks my brain and makes me want
to break things. It's not good. I don't know what
it is. It's a big trigger. Yeah. Well, I like
the anecdote. It was very charmed. Right now, we're not
going to be able to get to the end of
this episode. Alright, let's do it. We've wasted Uh, I
don't know a minute. So all right, well let's start
by talking about the Blitz, because that's kind of where
(01:11):
the story technically begins. And the Blitz is like this,
the German bombing of England, and Germany really really bombed
England in general. But most people think of London being
bombed the most as the Blitz. That's not entirely true. Well,
London was for sure bombed a lot. We don't want to,
you know, take anything away from what they suffered. But Liverpool,
(01:33):
I think was number two in England is getting walloped
by the Germans. And there's a there's a place in
Liverpool where after the bombing they I think it's near
uh what was then called Great Homer Street. And after
the bombing they kind of left it that way for
a little while because I think everyone was just recuperating
(01:55):
from the war. And then in nine some American soul
just finally started clearing out this area and found a
little something interesting. Yeah, well at first they didn't think
it was interesting. It was part of the rubble that
was cleared out by those American soldiers, but it was
a long tube of cylinder um. Let me say this
(02:17):
found something that would prove to be interesting exactly, but
we are in agreement that at the time they didn't
think it was interesting at all. Yeah, it just looked
like a tube, you know. I think it was a
little under seven ft long um less than two feet
in diameter, and it was just made of steel. It
(02:37):
just looked like some big, dumb thing. But apparently it
was heavy enough and big enough that rather than being
removed with all the other rubble, it just kind of
got left in the area and became kind of a
fixture in this little little part of the neighborhood, so
much so that people would like sit on it as
a bench sometimes and children would play on it and
roll it along and all that stuff. And that's the
(02:57):
way it stayed for at least a good two years
between ninety three when they cleared out the rubble in
when something kind of big happened. Yeah, I think one
end was sort of factory sealed, and one end was
kind of uh stamped shut by the bulldozers and stuff
that we're clearing stuff out. And over time over those
(03:18):
couple of years, that end that was sort of stamp
shut kind of worked its way loose a little bit,
just enough for a little kid that was climbing on
it to see a bony skeletal foot. Yeah, a little
boy named Tommy Lawless who appropriately found the skeletal foot
in the cylinder on a Friday. So the little boy,
(03:41):
um who went on to become Ringo star, went and
fetched a cop, the local cop, Robert Baile or Bailey
would be Bailey, I guess, but I've never seen it
spelled that way. Be a I L L I E. Yeah, sure,
that's that's Bailey, right. And he said, well, this is
way above my pay grade, rather famously, and went and
(04:02):
got the detectives and they all kind of came together
and said, what is going on here? And this mystery
was launched. That's right. Uh. I think it's too early
for a break, but that is a good cliffhanger. I
thought so too. I can do whatever we want. We're
God's here. That's right. Let's let's take an early break
since you set it up so well, and we'll come
(04:22):
back right after this. Alright, great cliffhanger. They find this thing,
(04:51):
they find the skeletal foot. They need to get inside
of it, so they get a welder to open it up,
and they get some corners and some forensics people in there,
and what they end up finding it was an entire
skeleton of a man about six ft tall, dude, Victorian dress,
and they had it was it was a little bit
of hair still left even on the skull. And here's
(05:14):
one key that kind of flummixes me that I'll kind
of harp on a bit later, but yeah, me too.
There was a brick wrapped in burlap as a little pillow. Yeah,
which to me kind of confuses a lot of the
a lot of the ideas they had of what might
have happened to this guy. It really does. And it's
weird that the brick was there and wrapped in burlap.
I don't know if it was the guy who writes
(05:35):
Passing Strangest, which huge shout out um this this is
actually kind of a somewhat well known mystery. The body
and the cylinder is what it's called. But Um Passing
Strangeness did far, in a way, the best job of
kind of getting this point across. And that guy Um
describes it as as a pillow. So I don't know
if that's if it was just Tamm or if that's
(05:56):
generally what it's love, but it is very weird that
it was there and in that position. Do we have
his name? From what I can tell, the guy who
wrote that, and probably the guy who has the the
blog Passing Strangeres, which seems to be defunct, which is
a shame because it's pretty interesting. UM is named Paul Dry.
At the very least, that's the name of the person
who's accepting um compliments on the comments under the blog.
(06:19):
But you want to hear something truly bizarre, Chuck. Sure.
There is a little tag called trackbacks. One of them
is Indonesia Blowing Up Boats and C g I Pompeii.
Another's fishing Shop. The third one is s y s
K Internet Roundup. Really isn't that cool? Does that mean
(06:42):
we covered this before? No? I think this guy UM
is just a fan. I don't think the trackbacks mean anything.
I think he's saying, like, go check this out. Maybe,
I hope, let's find out. Well that's small world. So
all right, they've got this body in there, and there's
a lot of other stuff in there, and we'll kind
of just list out what else was in this cylinder
with the skeleton. UM, they discovered a London north Western
(07:07):
Railway notice that had a tag about arrival of some
goods that was dated June five. I think there was
a postcard from Birmingham dated July three, eight five, a
couple of diaries which they couldn't read. It was illegible.
I would guess just sort of damage to time would
be my guess. Uh. And then they found some papers
(07:30):
and this proved to be I guess the biggest key.
They found some papers under the body, um, one of
which was a receipt and account sheets for a company T. C.
Williams and Company, and then some other kind of stuff
that didn't prove to be useful, right right. One of
the things that got me though, is that it was
found in a bunch of grave wax, like a pool
(07:51):
or puddle of grave wax from the body decomposing onto
the papers. That's called yeah, grave wax. I think we
ran into it for Center Urban Explorers episode because like,
people find it in catacombs, but it's um the what's
astounding is that these coroners from the mid century were
able to kind of um uh get the papers back
(08:15):
in tax so that they could read them again. That's
astounding to me. Pretty cool. They also did find that
his skull was damaged, but I think they thought that
was kind of due to the bulldozing and trying to
get the body out of there, that's right, or the cylinder. Yeah,
So there didn't seem to be any any um evidence
of violence. There was just a dead body. So they
(08:38):
have no idea what happened to this guy. And at
first I guess the coroner thought, um, this is like
maybe a ten year old cadaver that we're looking at.
Everybody else said, um, what about every other piece of
evidence that that you've discovered along with this guy? And
he's like, well, technically somebody could have dressed up like
(08:58):
a Victorian person in and gotten a bunch of old
papers and keys and stuff in a ring, and um,
you know, died within the last ten years. And I
think everyone kind of said, you know, that's bosch. The
coroner wasn't ready to give that up yet. They actually
investigated a theory that it could have been, um, a
man named TC Williams son whose name was also TC Williams,
(09:24):
and maybe it was him and he just happened to
have some old papers with him. And they said, I
think we already said bosh to that, Yeah, because I
don't think we mentioned, Uh, there was a paint manufacturing
plant in that area that was owned by Thomas Kreegan Williams.
That fit the time period. So they're like, it can't
be that guy, Like you said, maybe it's his son,
(09:46):
but did They ended up finding him and that went
in that right They found the sun his body. Yeah,
the son had been buried back in nine nine and
leads so he was accounted for. His strange Chuck, is
that the older man, his father, had not been accounted for.
The man who owned this manufacturing plant in the eighteen
seventies and eighteen eighties in this area of Liverpool, Um
(10:08):
had suddenly just vanished right around right. Uh. They did
end up kind of figuring out that the tube and
the cylinder itself was part of a ventilation shaft, which
to me sort of only confused things a little bit.
Um that it was put forth and I don't know
if this was Paul who kind of put this forth,
(10:29):
or or or general evidence that perhaps this man was
despondent and suicidal over the loss of the factory and
crawled into the shaft for final privacy. That seems a
little a bit of a stretch to me. Um. Yeah,
it also seems like a stretch that a ventilation shaft
(10:49):
should be closed off on one side. What kind of
ventilation shaft is that? Yeah, I guess, But don't they
all end at some point they're supposed to end into
like the open air? You know, Like I think that's
just really weird, like a a a one ended a
ventilation shaft. It just I'm sure there's some kind out there,
(11:11):
but it just escapes me. And then the pillow also
seems a little weird, that brick burlap pillow. Yeah, that's
the weirdest part to me is that that that is
clearly some sort of a a purposeful thing that someone
has done, um right, I mean like like for comfort. Yeah,
but also it's like do you hate yourself to um?
(11:33):
Like a brick wrapped in burlap is not a comfy pillow.
Like you could use almost anything else on the planet
and wrap it and burlap and it will be more
comfortable than brick. Uh. Yeah, And they had pillows back then,
you know, right exactly. Um. There was another theory put
forth that it wasn't Williams, it was someone else that
was maybe murdered, uh in retaliation for that factory closing
(11:56):
and maybe they stuffed them in there and Williams maybe
just like disappeared after that, changed his name and skipped down.
Who knows. Yeah, so I think they finally closed the
case in nineteen forty seven, forty five, actually right up
right off the bat, they closed the cases that we're
never going to solve this um or we've totally solved it.
(12:17):
We just can't say with a percent, But they basically said,
we don't know who it is, we don't know how
he died, but you can probably surmise yourself. And the
prevailing theory is that it was TC Williams, upon the
ruination of his um paint business, uh possibly took his
own life. The fact that he wrapped a pillow or
a brick and burlap and took it into ventilation shift
(12:39):
with him with all this other stuff would suggest he
didn't accidentally go in there and and get stuck. He
probably died by suicide or it was somebody else made
to seem like TC Williams. But the astounding fact is
that this happened in five. He was in that ventilation
chef all the way up and through the bombing of
Liverpool during World War Two and used to be rolled
(13:02):
around the playground by children until they finally figured out
he was in there. Yeah, I'm sure there was more
than one adult walking around that remembers playing on that trip.
I know, I know. Um. And then a very special
shout out to Josh and Chuck from the past because
it turns out, Chuck, we did talk about this in
(13:23):
an Internet roundup which explains the track back, So this
is probably the last time we'll ever talk about the body,
and I think memory of that, I think this is
the best version. I don't either, and plus no one
saw an Internet round up anyway, so I think we're
all good. Enjoyed that show. But big thanks and hats
off to Passing Strangeness for making such a great blog post.
And if you haven't been on that blog yet, go
(13:45):
it's very good. And since I said that, that means
short stuff is a happening. Stuff you should know is
a production of I Heart Radio for more podcasts for
my heart Radio. Is it the I Heart Radio app
Apple podcasts where every listen to your favorite shows. H
(14:08):
m hm
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