NEWSLETTER

Excerpted from The New Book of Lists by Amy Wallace, David Wallechinsky and Irving Wallace.
ILLUSTRATIONS BY LAURA PARK





ANONYMOUS WOMAN
(buried 1980, US)

On Nov. 20, 1980, a 26-year-old woman met a man she knew slightly at Jumbo’s Bar in Hollywood. The man, 38-year-old James Earl Gibbs, offered to take her home, saying he had to drop by his apartment first. There, Gibbs punched her, tore off her clothes, and raped her. Then he took her to a wooded area on the grounds of Hollywood’s Immaculate Heart College. Gibbs maniacally began to stab her—20 times in all—severing her jugular vein, carotid artery, and larynx. “I kept screaming until I began gurgling with blood,” she later testified. After the stabbing, Gibbs buried her in a shallow grave and covered her with dirt and leaves. These she pressed into her wounds to keep from bleeding to death. After clawing and crawling her way out of the grave, she was discovered by a security guard and rushed to surgery. She was so horribly wounded that Dr. Eugene Flaum said he thought he was “probably operating on a corpse.” Her testimony in May 1982 resulted in Gibbs receiving a maximum sentence of 27 years. About five years before, Gibbs had stabbed and killed his wife and discarded her body in a woody area. He had served only three years in prison for that crime.


ANONYMOUS MAN
(buried 1831, England)

Four days after his burial, this victim of typhoid fever was exhumed and brought to a group of medical students for dissection. He was placed on the marble slab, where a professor cut into his chest. The “corpse” suddenly let out a cry and grabbed the professor’s arm. This Englishman lived for many years afterward and published a rare, lengthy account of his conscious recollection of his death and burial. As his physical strength waned from the typhoid fever, he never lost his mental awareness, but he lost all ability to speak or communicate in any way. He heard his doctor say, “All is over!,” felt his face being covered with a cloth, and heard his family crying. He lay in state, completely alert, as his friends and relatives mourned for three days. Then he was given to the undertakers, who “treated me with revolting brutality.” The following description reads like a story by Edgar Allan Poe: “I heard the crashing of the wood as they drove in the nails in fastening the lid… crammed into that narrow box… I experienced a sensation as if my head and limbs were being torn asunder… I would never have believed that a heart could suffer so much without breaking.” He heard a friend reading his sermon at the graveside and heard the dirt crashing over his coffin. He hoped to die quickly but remained alert for four days and throughout the exhumation. In the dissecting room he recognized two friends from medical school. And finally, with the cut of the knife, “I succeeded in crying out, the bonds of death were separated, and I returned to life.”

VICTORINE LEFOURCADE
(buried 1810, France)

Victorine was young, beautiful, and born to a rich and noble family. She loved a poor young journalist, Julius Bossuet, but her parents would not let them marry. Instead, they “forced her to reject her lover and marry a certain Monsieur Renelle, a banker and politician without any heart, who treated her cruelly.” After a few years of misery, Victorine “fell sick of grief and sorrow, and died.” Her wish was to be buried simply in the village where she was born. When Bossuet heard of her death, his despair drove him to seek a remembrance of his love—a lock of her beautiful hair. He traveled from Paris to the village churchyard and at midnight dug out Victorine’s coffin and unscrewed the lid. As he was about to cut off a lock of hair, she opened her eyes. Reunited, the lovers stayed hidden until Victorine had regained her health, and then went to the US. After 20 years, they returned to France, feeling sure that no one would recognize her. However, she was recognized—and when Renelle heard about it, he had her arrested and laid claim to her. The court refused to honor his claim, and Victorine and Bossuet were finally free to love in their native France.


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