SKULL AND BONES GLASS COFFIN SERIES

Spray, who acted as superintendent of a local asylum, donated his collection of patients’ skulls to the collection. It was rumored that the boot of a soldier from Custer’s Battle was prominently displayed on a mantle, bones still inside.ĭr.

SKULL AND BONES GLASS COFFIN SERIES

Pieces of fire engines destroyed in Chicago’s great fire of 1871 were on display, as well as a series of photographs depicting a group of Chinese pirates before and after beheading. Nearby hung a blood-stained shirt taken from the body of a Native American killed at the Battle of Wounded Knee. The bloody slipper of a Chinese merchant killed by a streetcar was nailed to a wall, donated by the San Francisco police force. The walls were decorated with pistols and knives that had been used for murder, all donated from local law officers. Burdick Collection, Metropolitan Museum of Art Omene, a notorious turn-of-the-century belly dancer in the U.S. A heavy oak door led to the club, with a stained glass pane depicting a skull and crossed bones and the quote, “I, too, have lived in Arcady,” instantly setting the tone for all who entered. Just as the belly dancer described, the club’s quarters-handily located in an alley behind the offices of the Herald, the Examiner, and the Times-were a testament to the grotesque. Women were strictly forbidden-Omene was the only female guest in the short, eight-year history of the club. Other than journalists, only two men of each profession could belong at the same time. Also called the Suicide Club, the group’s motto commanded members to “laugh in the face of death.” Although over half of the all-male members were journalists, like-minded men of other professions were allowed to join: bank presidents, police chiefs, and preachers mingling with fringe members of society, including magicians, psychics, and even convicted murderers. Jack the Ripper himself was named (absentee) president.Ĭhicago reporters often lived in a dark and macabre world in order to report the news, and the Whitechapel Club reflected these preoccupations and mocked them. Equally a secret society and a press club, the organization was named after the area of London where Jack the Ripper contemporaneously prowled for victims. The Whitechapel Club was founded in 1889 by a group of young, bohemian, literary Chicago newspapermen, located in a Loop alley that is now West Calhoun Place, between Wells and Lasalle.

Omene closed the lengthy, titillating interview with an aside to the reporter: “I forgot to tell you that the president of the Suicide Club made me promise to tell no one in Chicago about my being entertained by the club, and you are the only gentleman I have ever mentioned the circumstance to.” Tossing aside the notion of secrecy or the expected discretion, she described furniture built from coffins, goblets created from severed human skulls, gas-light fixtures made from human bone-and the coup de grâce, a mysterious urn presented to her as a gift that held the cremains of a man. Diablo!” Omene dramatically described the club's quarters to the San Francisco Morning Call on June 10, 1893.

'It was, in fact, a regular chamber of horrors–far worse indeed than anything I have witnessed before … there was nothing else but skulls and bones and coffins.

So when Omene, a natural self-promoter with a knack for entrancing journalists, came on the scene in 1889, she gained national notoriety.īut it was one particular encounter at a secretive Chicago newspapermen’s club, now known as the “Coffin Dance,” that made the belly dancer, as well as the members of Whitechapel, infamous. Above: A 1945 Tribune story tells the tale of the famously macabre Whitechapel Club.Īt the end of the 19th century, America had still never seen a belly dancer.

Skull and bones glass coffin