A Handful of Eccentrics

All Bones Considered: Laurel Hill Stories #076

 

The July 2025 episode tells of five people who really didn’t fit anywhere else.

• Morton McMichael Hoyt married the same woman three times and once jumped off a steamship to impress a 17-year-old girl.
• Major Wakeman Griffin Gribbel was gassed and wounded during the Great War; during one of several psychotic breaks, he mortally wounded a police officer, but a jury found him “not guilty.”
• Fellow guide and amateur cemetery historian Tom Keels tells the rollicking story of Mabel Tinsley, one of the great con artists of the Gilded Age.
• Louis Bossle was the city’s best-known ratcatcher; when he died, his nickname “Ratcatcher Lou” was carved on his obelisk.
• Tom Keels returns for a segment on one of our Civil War generals Richard Naglee, whose California vineyards made the finest brandy in the land, but whose amorous ventures got him in deep trouble more than once.

These five people come together under one podcast on July 1st, then each individual gets their own podcast on the 2nd through the 6th.