Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Wonderful World of Odd (7 page)

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Revenge:
A wildlife officer in Saskatchewan was attempting to shoot a moose—when he shot a fellow officer instead. The officer was trying to “mercy kill” the wounded animal when the shot from his shotgun missed, hit a tree, and ricocheted into the other officer’s leg. The officer was treated at a local hospital.

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Whale of a Vacation:
In the summer of 2003 the Johnson family of Coventry, England, took a 10-day sailing vacation in Australia. But their trip came to a sudden end when a 10-ton humpback whale leapt out of the water and onto their 40-foot sailboat, damaging the rigging and pulling down the mast. “It’s amazing no one was hurt or killed,” 61-year-old Trevor Johnson told reporters. Total cost of chartering the boat: $238,000. (No word on whether the Johnsons got a refund.)

Think about this next time you’re wondering how much of a tip to leave.

T
HIS GUINEA PIGGY WENT WHERE?

In December 2005, a health inspector was examining the contents of a freezer in the La Sabrosa restaurant in DeKalb County, Georgia. He found a dead guinea pig in it. The restaurant’s owner said it was his, and insisted that the rodent wasn’t intended to be a menu item…he was going to eat it himself. Even stranger, the restaurant received a score of 87 out of 100 for the inspection, up from the 79 it got the previous year (when it didn’t have any guinea pigs in the freezer).

In 2003 mall security workers in Edmonton, Alberta, called health inspectors when they found some suspicious items in the freezer of a Panda Garden restaurant. “They took me back to the walk-in freezer and when you open the door there were four carcasses,” said inspector Richard Reive. “Two were inside black garbage bags and the other two were exposed on the floor of the freezer.” They were coyotes. They’d been skinned and gutted, and were definitely intended for human consumption. Amazingly, the owners were never charged with any crime, since serving dog meat is technically legal in Canada. (But the restaurant did have to close due to the bad press.)

In June 2002, a power outage knocked out the walk-in freezer at Ricardo’s Pizza in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and all the food in it had to be thrown out. A few hours later employees were surprised to see that many of the boxes of food—containers of pepperoni, jalapeño peppers, cheese sticks, and other snack items—they had thrown in the dumpster were gone. The owner called the health department because he knew the food was bad and he didn’t want
anybody eating it. A few days later, inspectors were doing a routine check of Eleanor’s restaurant, down the street from Ricardo’s… and they found the dumpster food, which was clearly marked “Ricardo’s” and still had the expired “freshness” dates on them. Eleanor’s owner, Gerard Symes, denied taking the dumpster food at first, then blamed it on his employees. Then he was fined (a whopping $197).

A manager of a McDonald’s restaurant in Roodepoort, South Africa, was turned in to police by her employees because of the contents of the restaurant’s freezer: a six-year-old boy. The child had come to McDonald’s begging for food when the angry manager grabbed him and threw him into the walk-in. She left him there, without shoes or a shirt, for about 10 minutes. As soon as the door was opened, the boy ran away—shivering, according to news accounts. The manager was suspended for two weeks.

If you go to the Guolizhuang restaurant in Beijing, China, there’s a good chance you’ll find a variety of animal “private parts” in their freezer. The restaurant specializes in dishes made from the odd culinary choice, the BBC reported in 2006, and it’s a popular place too. The male organs of sheep, horse, ox, and seal are all good for circulation, says the restaurant’s “staff nutritionist,” adding that donkey “privates” are good for the skin, and snake “privates” are the cure for impotence.

In 1996 a crew was sent to repossess equipment from a Middle-Eastern restaurant in Brussels, Belgium, called the Baalbeck when the restaurant owners failed to make their loan payments on time. They found a human hand in a freezer. A subsequent search by police uncovered the remains of three human bodies in the restaurant’s other two freezers. Their investigation found that the bodies were just being hidden—and weren’t intended for consumption. (Three years later three men were convicted of the murders and imprisoned.)

Here’s the story behind one of the most peculiar (and most popular) grave sites in the entire United States. More than 60 years after it was completed, it still attracts tens of thousands of visitors a year.

F
ORBIDDEN LOVE

In the mid-1870s, a college student named John Davis was forced to drop out of Urania College in Kentucky after his parents died and he was unable to pay the tuition. He became an itinerant laborer, taking work wherever he could find it, and in 1879 he signed on as a farmhand for Tom Hart, a wealthy landowner in tiny Hiawatha, Kansas. Davis was a good worker, but that didn’t count for much when the penniless lad fell in love with Sarah Hart, the boss’s daughter. When the two announced their plans to marry, Mr. and Mrs. Hart, furious that Sarah would marry so far beneath her station, disowned her.

Ever heard the expression “living well is the best revenge”? John and Sarah got back at the Harts by becoming one of the most prosperous couples in Hiawatha, though it took them a lifetime to do it. After scraping together enough money to buy a 260-acre farm, they managed it so wisely that they were able to use the profits to buy a second farm, which also did well. Then, after 35 years of living in the country, the childless couple moved to a stately mansion on one of Hiawatha’s best streets. They were still living there in 1930, after more than 50 years of marriage, when Sarah died from a stroke.

At first John commissioned a modest headstone for Sarah in Hiawatha’s Mount Hope Cemetery, but soon decided it wasn’t enough. He’d never forgotten how Sarah’s family had spurned them when they had nothing; now that they were more prosperous than the Hart clan, he decided that he and Sarah should be laid to rest in the nicest, most expensive memorial in town.

Davis was friends with a local tombstone salesman named Horace England, and together the two men designed a memorial consisting of life-size marble statues of John and Sarah as they looked on their 50th wedding anniversary. The statues would stand at the foot of the graves and face the headstones; the cemetery plot would also be protected from the elements by a 50-ton marble canopy supported by six massive columns.

England stood to make a small fortune on such a grandiose memorial. Even so, he suggested that it might be a little much, especially considering that the country was in the depths of the Great Depression and folks in Midwestern towns like Hiawatha had been hit especially hard. Davis thanked him for his opinion and then offered to give the business to another tombstone salesman. England assured Davis that that would not be necessary and committed himself wholeheartedly to the task at hand. As far as anyone knows, he never raised another objection.

Davis approved the final design and sent his and his wife’s measurements off to Carrara, Italy, where master craftsmen carved their likenesses out of the finest Italian marble. Completed in 1931, the Davis Memorial was easily the most impressive in Hiawatha, probably in the entire state. And yet when Davis got a look at it he felt something was missing. The giant stone canopy dwarfed the pair of statues beneath it. The solution? More statues. “I thought it still looked too bare, so I got me another pair,” Davis explained. The second set of statues depicted John and Sarah as they would have looked on their tenth wedding anniversary, much earlier in life than the first pair of statues showed them.

By now Davis was pretty much out of loose cash, so he signed over his two farms to Horace England for $31,000—more than enough money to pay for the second set of statues. What did he do with the money that was left? He bought a
third
set of statues, showing Sarah and himself seated in comfy chairs as they would have looked in 1898, after 18 years of marriage. (John is depicted clean-shaven —in the late 1890s, he had burned his beard off fighting a brush fire and for a time went without his flowing beard.)

Why stop at three pairs? Davis then decided he wanted a
fourth
pair of statues. Again John is shown seated, this time missing his left hand, which he lost to infection in 1908 after he injured it while trying to trim his hedges with an axe. (The axe is on display in the nearby Brown County Agricultural Museum.)

Because this fourth set of statues depict John after his wife’s death, her absence is represented by a statue of an empty chair. (Just in case anyone misses the symbolism, the words “THE VACANT CHAIR” are carved into the chair.) Unlike the other statues, this pair was done in granite instead of in marble. Davis claimed it was because he thought men looked better carved in granite.

Who says four pairs of statues are enough? Davis commissioned a fifth and then a sixth. When the money from the sale of his farms ran out, he signed over his mansion to Horace England for $1, on the condition that he be allowed to live in it for the rest of his life. That solved Davis’s money problems, which may be why the fifth and sixth pairs of statues were once again done in Italian marble. The sixth—and final—statues depict John and Sarah as angels kneeling over each others’ graves.

When the odd jumble of statues started to attract visitors, some of whom were disrespectful and climbed the statues or sat in The Vacant Chair, Davis had a three-foot-high marble wall built around the entire memorial, with marble urns at the corners inscribed “KINDLY KEEP OFF THE MEMORIAL.” The wall is just low enough for the seated figures to be seen peeking over the top.

Why did Davis keep adding statues? Some people speculate that with no family of his own, he was determined to blow his entire fortune to keep his wife’s relatives from getting a penny of his money. Others speculate that Davis was motivated by guilt—he was apparently a very jealous man and during the more than 30 years that he and Sarah had lived on the farm, he had rarely let Sarah go into town alone or even visit the neighboring farm wives. Now, realizing too late how hard that must have been for Sarah, he was making it up to her in marble.

A third theory, simple but compelling, is that Davis was just
plain nuts. He became a compulsive memorial builder in much the same way that some people are compulsive collectors. Even if he did realize that each new addition of statues further cluttered an already crowded memorial, he couldn’t stop himself.

In 1937, the same year that he signed over his mansion to Horace England, John Davis learned from his doctors that he had less than six months to live. Davis quickly gave away the rest of his fortune—possibly as much as $55,000—and prepared to join his wife in their final resting place. Six months passed…and then a year…and then two years, until eventually Davis realized that the same doctors he blamed for losing his hand after his axe incident had also botched the diagnosis of his “terminal” illness. He didn’t have six months to live, he had
ten years
to live, and now that he had given away his entire fortune he couldn’t even afford to live in his mansion, even though it was rent-free. He moved into the local poorhouse and lived there for the rest of his days, though he did spend a lot of time out at the cemetery, proudly showing off the 11 life-size statues and The Vacant Chair to the throngs of people who came to see it. He died in his sleep in 1947.

In all, Davis is believed to have spent $200,000 on his memorial, the equivalent of well over $1 million today. (Many locals also credit him with giving tens of thousands of dollars to the needy during his lifetime, usually in small sums. But since this giving was done in private, it has been overshadowed by the memorial.)

The Davis Memorial isn’t the prettiest grave in America. It looks like a cross between a gas station and a statue-company showroom. Nevertheless, it attracts as many as 30,000 visitors a year, many of whom go straight to the cemetery without bothering to visit the town. Perhaps it’s only fair, then, that Hiawatha’s townspeople are as ambivalent about Davis today as they were during the Depression, when he memorialized his wife in stone instead of building a library or a hospital that would have honored her memory while contributing to the common good. But Davis wouldn’t have had it any other way. “They hate me,” Davis admitted late in life, “but it’s my money and I spent it the way I pleased.”