The Case of the Petrified Madame
Our first strange case involves one of Seattle’s first real characters, Mary Ann Conklin, better known to early settlers and travelers as Mother or Madame Damnable. Conklin was said to have washed up on Seattle’s shores in the 1850s. She had married a sea captain who abandoned her in Port Townsend. In Seattle she took over running the city’s first hotel, the Felker House, a two-story prefab affair shipped around the horn from back East.
It seemed to offer a touch of civilization — it would rent rooms for guests, but also for temporary
courtrooms or meetings. It was also said to be Seattle’s first bordello. In the mid-1850s an uprising of Indigenous people threatened the settlement — the so-called “Battle of Seattle.” At this time the hotel appeared on the first map of the city as “Madame Damnable’s.”
In addition to what was said to go on inside its walls, Conklin herself was apparently something of a terror. When the U.S. Navy was in town to offer protection from attack, they sought to improve a road near the house. The navigator of the sloop-of-war Decatur recorded an encounter: “ ... [T]he moment our men appeared upon the scene, with three dogs at her heels, and an apron filled with rocks, this termagant would come tearing from the house, and the way stones, oaths, and curses flew was something fearful to contemplate, and, charging like a fury, with the dogs wild to flesh their teeth in the detested invaders, the division invariably gave way before the storm, fleeing, officers and all, as if old Satan himself was after them.” She was, he wrote, a “demon in petticoats.”
Mary Ann Conklin, aka “Mother Damnable.” (Public domain)
Conklin died in 1873. In 1886, the bodies in her cemetery were exhumed to turn the burial grounds into Denny Park. When they dug up Conklin, the head of the reburial project told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer: “On removing the lid of the coffin we found she had returned to stone. Her form was full size and perfect.” She seemed intact, but she was “white as marble and hard and [as?] stone.” He estimated the coffin weighed 400 pounds. She now rests in a cemetery on Capitol Hill, but what caused the supposed petrification of this “demon in petticoats” is unknown. A very hard life, perhaps?
“The Lady of the Lake”
In 1940, fishermen at Lake Crescent on the Olympic Peninsula spotted a body floating. Wrapped in blankets and hemp rope, it turned out to be a female murder victim who had been sunk deep in the frigid waters of the dark, deep lake. While there, something remarkable had happened: saponification. That’s a chemical process that turned her body into soap.
The main questions were who was she and how long ago had she been murdered? She no longer had fingerprints or identifiable facial features. After some months, a dental bridge in her mouth was identified and she got a name: Hallie Illingworth. It turned out she’d vanished in 1937 from her waitress job at a lakeside tavern, and her husband Monty, a beer-truck driver, had left town for California around the same time. Friends assumed Hallie had departed for Bremerton, but no one had heard from her since. It turned out Monty had a history of physically abusing her. He was tracked down, and in 1942 he was convicted of Hallie’s murder. A key piece of evidence: a witness remembered lending Monty a long piece of hemp rope exactly like the rope that bound the body. Monty had never returned it.
The Lady of the Lake was a cold case if there ever was one.
Hallie Illingsworth. (Washington Rural Heritage)
The Tennis Shoe Triangle?
In August 2007 a 12-year-old girl from Washington found a tennis shoe on a British Columbia beach. Inside was a human foot. What was a bad day at the beach soon got weirder. Less than a week later another shoe with a foot in it washed up on another B.C. beach. It also had a right foot in it. A local spokesman for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police told the Vancouver Sun, “Finding one foot is like a million-to-one odds, but to finding two is crazy.”
If that was crazy, what ensued was even crazier. Since then, at least 24 single feet have washed up on Salish Sea beaches in B.C. and Washington, triggering much speculation. Was there a serial killer with a foot fetish at large? Right feet, left feet, big, small, men’s and women’s. What was going on here? Were we the Bermuda Triangle of footloose feet?
It turned out there was a rational, if macabre, explanation. For one thing, the vast majority of the single feet were encased in running or sports shoes — Reeboks, Adidas, Nike, New Balance. And unlike shoes of old, they tend to float because they are light and often contain air pockets. Some of the feet were determined to have belonged to missing persons or presumed drowning victims.
Bodies in the sea can be reduced to skeletons quickly by undersea critters, and corpses often disarticulate at joints like the ankle. Currents within the Salish Sea and the outflow of the Fraser River can keep such things bobbing around. Voilà! Foot flotsam.
A collection of shoes found containing human remains on B.C. beaches. (B.C. Coroners Service)
People may talk about ghosts, ghouls and scary spirits, but often physical changes after death offer examples that are weirder than phantasms — and that make even stranger true stories.
