Composer Joseph Haydn is buried with two skulls. You’ll never believe why (hint: it has to do with phrenology).
Meanwhile Thomas Paine’s bones went missing thanks to an overly enthusiastic fan.
Haydn’s Extra Skull
By Mick Sullivan
Joseph Haydn is buried in a beautiful tomb in Eisenstadt, Austria. If you ever go there and try to open his casket, you…will be arrested by security, why would you do that? But if you are super insistent AND a sweet talker and you somehow manage to convince them to let you take a peek…or you’re just a speedy casket opener and can peel back the heavy lid before anyone can stop your weird mission to see what’s inside, well you’re gonna be surprised to find three things in there:
Yes, that’s right: two skulls. I know what you’re wondering: Did Joseph Haydn, the famed classical composer, hero to Mozart, and so called “Father of the Symphony” have two heads? No, of course not. He was a unihead, a lonedome, a mononoggin. So where, then, did the second head come from? Well, it’s kind of a funny story.
Maybe you’ve heard the word pseudoscience before? Maybe you heard it recently? A pseudoscience is any belief that claims to be scientific and based in fact, but does not actually hold up to the scientific method. In other words, it seems logical if you don’t question it or investigate it with honest information or actual scrutiny. There’s a lot of pseudoscience flying around these days. But that ain’t new. Beginning in the 1700s, one of the most popular pseudosciences was Phrenology.
Put your hand on your head and rub it around. If you’ve got hair, try to feel through that hair and notice any bumps or dips your skull might have. We’ve all got lumpy skull bones, and like a fingerprint, all of our lovely skully lumps are different. Unique. That’s great. None of us are walking around with a head that’s a perfect sphere. We’d look like a crudely drawn balloon-headed cartoon character, if we did. But people who believed in phrenology thought that those subtle bumps and different shapes could tell you everything you needed to know about a person’s mental traits. By feeling bumps in one place and dips in another, they believed they could predict things about a person, even judge their character. In their own bumpy minds, some believed that head bumps could indicate things like a person’s ability to be good with numbers, their likelihood to be honest, potential to excel at art, or even be a criminal. Of course this is bunk. We are far more complex than this, and you certainly can not tell character traits from someone’s physical body.
More than one person with a bony head lump or particular skull shape was probably told they would be a violent criminal, when all they wanted to do was make horseshoes or read books, or whatever. It’s a bad idea to place limits on people like this. Nevertheless, Phrenology fans were always looking for skulls to prove that their belief was real, and unfortunately that often meant stealing skulls from graves. Two phrenology fans recognized the death of musical genius Josef Haydn as an opportunity that doesn’t come along often.
Not long after his death, Josepf Rosenbaum and Johann Peter, stole Joseph Haydn’s Skull from his buried body. While carrying the relatively fresh skull secretly away in a carriage in the summer heat created some unpleasant smells. Rosenbaum was committed to the job, but he still couldn’t help but throw up as he transported the musician’s noxious noodle.
Haydn was a really important musician. Born poor in Austria, he was a very talented singer as a young boy, and then turned his attention to piano and composition. After years of struggle, he found success thanks to the patronage of Prince Esterhazy. With the money from this employment, he could focus on writing more and more ambitious music. He became friends with Mozart, and was a teacher to Beethoven. Haydn’s compositions explored the possibilities of different types of instrumental ensembles and he was important in defining the traditional string quartet – two violins, a viola and cello. A very common arrangement for classical composers to write for after him. He also had a sense of humor. Tired of people falling asleep in concerts he wrote his famous Surprise symphony, which starts of soft and pretty and then features a loud chord out of nowhere – to keep people awake and on their toes.
By the time he died in 1809 he was a celebrity and an agreed upon genius. Which is why Rosenbaum and Peter wanted to steal his skull. They could analyze it to see which skull bumps indicated someone was a musical genius. And lucky for them, a man named Napoleon and his army had just marched into Austria and were shooting canons all over the place. Everyone was very distracted. Plus the invading French army prevented Prince Esterhazy from giving his pal Haydn the full burial he deserved. So other than a little barf, the Haydn head heist was pretty easy.
Johann Peter kept the skull for years in a fancy box. With a twisted pride, he would show it off to friends. But 11 years after Haydn’s death, Prince Esterhazy thought about his old friend. With Napoleon gone and everything relatively calm he decided to finally give Haydn a burial worthy of a musical genius. So they exhumed his body for a fancier final resting place. What did they find inside? They found a fancy grey wig, a skeletal body, and zero skulls.
Who stole Haydn’s noodle? His cranium has gone AWOL! It’s a misplaced braincase!
Esterhazy figured out who had probably stolen it – Peter and Rosenblum were notorious phrenologists who had known Haydn when he was not a skeleton. So he sent officials to Peter’s house.
Come out, come out, we know what you’re hiding in there.
What do you think I’m hiding?
Haydn. You’re Hidin Haydn and we know it. So just make this easy.
I’m not Hidin Haydn. That’s absurd. Come on in and look around.
But Johnan Peter was hidin’ Haydn – and doing a pretty good job of it at that. The man had tucked the musician’s bony noggin into a mattress in his bedroom. There his wife pretended to be sick, so the men would let her be, undisturbed as she covered the skull like a mother goose on an egg. The skull searchers scoured the rest of their home, found nothing, and left empty handed.
Eventually Peter gave the skull to Rosenblum. Perhaps it was still stinky, or maybe the heat from the search for the hidden Haydn became too much. They had come awfully close.
As you might expect, Rosenblum was confronted as well.
Okay, okay, you got me. I’ve got the skull. I’ll give it to you. Here it is, one geniune musical genius skull. That haydn, boy oh boy, wasn’t he great? I’m gonna miss you brosef. Say hello to the rest of your bones for me.
And he handed over a skull which the Esterhazy family believed to be Josef Haydn’s skull. Were they right? They were worse than right – they were wrong. They bought the ruse hook line and sinker. It was not Haydn’s head. It was someone else’s. Why this dude had a random head sitting around is another question entirely, but I think it gives you a clear glimpse of the kind of guy he was. As a result, some random skull was put into Haydn’s fancy new tomb with his wig and the rest of his bones. And there the mismatched skeleton sat, undisturbed for over a century.
Meanwhile, Rosenblum chuckled to himself about his deceptive genius. He probably felt around on his own skull and searching for bumps to prove to himself that he was destined to outsmart an Austrian Royal Family. He had Haydn’s skull until he died in 1829, when the details of his will sent the cranium back to his old friend in phrenology, Johan Peter. But Peter didn’t keep it for long. Soon the skull was the token in a game of hot potato – he gave it to his doctor, who gave it to a friend, who then gave it to a music club in Vienna. There it remained for decades and decades. Sometimes on display, sometimes rubbed for good luck berfore a performance, and sometimes hidden away.
In 1954 – 145 years after Haydn’s death, descendants of Prince Esterhazy learned the truth and decided to put the matter to bed once and for all. They finally took possession of Haydn’s actual, genuine, really real skull and built a beautiful marble tomb for the now-complete composer in Bergkirche, Austria. Finally, Josef Haydn’s skull was reunited with the rest of his remains.
Of course, that brought up the odd issue of what to do with the mysterious and incorrect skull that had been with the bones until the reunion. With no clue about who had once called the substitute skull their head and no other ideas on what to do with it now, it was decided that the best plan was to just leave it in there. So to this day, Joseph Haydn’s tomb holds not one, but two human skulls. One is his. The other is a mystery.
T.Paine and The Missing Bones
By Mick Sullivan
Thomas Paine was one of the most important figures of the American Revolution. Some would argue that in some ways he was as important as George Washington himself. But while Washington rests in a tomb visited by millions, has monuments galore, and states and cities and counties named after him, Thomas Paine has almost none of this. In fact, here’s a weird thing about Thomas Paine: we don’t even know where his bones are. They’ve been lost for two centuries. How do you lose the bones of a founding father who influenced the minds of Revolutionary Americans more than anyone else? Well, it’s easier than it might seem and it involves many trips across the Atlantic Ocean.
If you don’t know who Thomas Paine is, that’s okay. Not many people do. (T-PAIN! – vocoder) He was almost forgotten in his lifetime, but once upon a time he was the best-selling writer in America. And with his Pen he might have inspired as many people as Washington inspired with his sword. But he was a latecomer to an America that was boiling over in the 1770s. He arrived in Philadelphia in 1774, when he was 37 years old. But he got to work pretty quickly.
Born in England in 1737, Thomas Paine went to school until he was 12 and then joined the workforce – making stays for ship sails. By adulthood he had tried a bunch of jobs. He didn’t like any of them or wasn’t good at them. Or both. He made his first notable writing while working in the excise tax office in England. He didn’t like that he and others with the same job were not getting paid a livable wage. So he wrote and published a pamphlet that logically argued for a pay increase for he and his fellow workers. He got fired. That was 1772.
After Benjamin Franklin agreed to introduce him to friends back home in America, Thomas Paine and all of his bones crossed the Atlantic for the first time in 1774. People there were already mad at King George, and Thomas Paine, despite having lived all of his life in England felt no allegiance to the king. In fact, he thought the Americans had a point.
As you probably know, 1776 was a milestone year. The Declaration of Independence was written, armies were fighting, and George Washington was struggling to convince Americans that A) they should fight and B) they might have even had a tiny chance of winning.
Not everyone believed him. But in January of that year, more and more people made up their mind to join the cause for Independence. That is because Thomas Paine published Common Sense. At 47 pages long, it was called a pamphlet, not a book. But today we’d probably call it a booklet. Written in simple, clear, and persuasive language, Paine advocated for American Independence and the potential of the new country. It struck a big beautiful chord with the public. At the time, there were about 2.5 million Colonists in the 13 colonies. Paine sold 500,000 copies of Common Sense. Half a million! That’s a copy for one in every five people. That’s an amazingly high number. Paine’s writing truly convinced a lot of people, helped build momentum towards the soon-to-come Declaration of Independence, and kept up people’s spirits when things got bad.
(T-Pain tries to Join the army)
Yeah, Paine tried to join the army, but Washington realized he was more valuable to the cause as a writer, so Paine instead travelled with troops as an embedded journalist writing from the field and giving people across America a clear picture of the crises America faced.
“These are the times that try men’s souls: The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of his country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.” were some of the famous words he published as the American Army struggled through the famously bleak winter at Valley Forge.
Paine even used his sales earnings to pay for supplies for the under-supplied troops. Then Thomas Paine and all of his bones sailed back across the Atlantic and where he was a big part of the team who convinced King Louis XVI of France to help the Americans against the British with money and soldiers. Then Thomas, bones and all, sailed back across the Atlantic again and wrote more.
When the war ended, he had little money but still felt the revolutionary spirit. So back across the Atlantic he went, landing in England. He had an idea for a new kind of bridge and thought that might put some money in his pocket, but that got sidetracked by the news of the French Revolution. Putting pen to paper once again, he wrote a new pamphlet, The Rights of Man. This booklet was in favor of the French Revolution, but also critical of European society in general. England didn’t like this at all, so he was charged with treason, the book was banned, and he had to flee before he wound up in jail. Rights of Man was an international best-seller, and once again convinced the minds of many, many people about ….
(T-Pain sneaking out of England)
But to avoid the mess in England, he snuck to France. Thanks in part to the success of the American Revolution, France was in the midst of revolution of its own. King Louis XVI probably regretted helping out with that American revolution because it started one in his own backyard – and this French revolution was very much against him. The whole messy affair could cost him his head. Though T-Paine wanted to end the rule of Kings and wanted people to have power, not monarchs, he still plead with the revolutionaries to spare Louis’s head. His appeals to keep Louis in one piece rather than two backfired. Louis went to the guillotine and Paine went to jail for sticking his neck out for the King.
He wrote more while in prison, and finally in 1802, after being released, he and his aging bones returned to America. There, people either had no idea who he was anymore, or they just did not like him anymore. Over the course of all of his writings and publishing success he managed to anger just about everyone. When he died, his body was not welcome to be buried in any of the nearby church burial grounds. Six people attended his funeral and a lone grave was dug on some remote farmland he owned in New York State. There he sat for the next ten years. One of the very, very, very, few people to come visit this grave described it as a little hole under the grass and weeds. The lonesome visitor who said this was a man named William Cobbett, a British man who had come to admire Thomas Paine very much. And what he saw broke his heart. He believed that Thomas Paine was a hero – to America, to the World and to his native England. And William thought Thomas Paine would be welcomed back as a hero, albeit a dead hero, to his native soil. Was he right? He was worse than right. He was wrong.
(TPain’s sad end)
Well, Cobbett was right about one thing – he figured no one in America would care if he dug up T-Paine’s bones. He dug them up, put the bones in a crate, and took them. Didn’t even cover his tracks. And yeah, no one cared. So one last time, Thomas Paine’s bones travelled across the Atlantic Ocean.
Cobbett’s plan was to take the bones around the country, charge admission to see them, and then use the profit to build a memorial to Thomas, in which he’d place the writer’s well-travelled bones. It’s unclear if the British public had no interest in paying to see Thomas Paine’s bones, or if they had no interest in paying to see any bones at all. I mean, money for a peek at some bones seems like a waste of money to me and not a great business model in general. At any rate, Cobbett was mistaken about even a bit enthusiasm for poor old Tom. For the most part people were still mad at him in England.
So Cobbett gave up. He put T-Paines bones in a box and stuck them under his bed. You might assume sleeping just above the bones of a Founding Father would lead to great revolutionary revelations in one’s sleep, or even historical hauntings, but this was not the case. The bones just sat there, basically forgotten about in his bedroom. Over the Atlantic in America barely anyone noticed they were gone.
Cobbett kept the bones of T-Pain for 16 years until he died in 1835. Then they became his son’s problem. Not wanting to share a bedroom with the bones, his son tried to sell the Paine remains but found, just as his father had, that no one really cared. Somehow he got rid of them. There were reports that some finger bones wound up in a private collection, but that’s unclear. It is just as likely that those fingers disappeared along with everything. Still today no one knows where the bones of Thomas Paine are. And at this point, we’ll probably never know.
When Paine died, newspapers reprinted an obituary an simply read: He had lived long, did some good and much harm.
In the many years that have followed, he has earned back a significant place in the history books. It is unquestionable that his writing helped convince everyday Americans that independence was a worthy cause. And his views on human rights, democracy, and the safety of people have shaped views today. Many still read his writing – his words are as close as you can get to him these days, because T-Paine’s bones are long gone!
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