The Life-Sized Doll
Her body was falling apart, and her state of decomposition was very noticeable once he got her back to his house by dragging her corpse in a toy wagon. Once he was back home, he began stuffing her body with wire coat hangers in place of bones, glass eyes in her sockets, and even made a wig out of her real hair. He would use oils and tonics to try to help the smell, and slept next to her corpse every night. After a while, she no longer looked anything like the real Elena. It looked like a life-sized dummy that was crudely made to resemble her. Its unblinking eyes resembled a doll, and her skin was stretched, waxy, and filled with chemicals. Tanzler would prop up Elena’s body in chairs, and he slept next to it every single night as if she was actually his wife.
The hospital figured out that he was stealing supplies and expensive equipment from them, and he got fired. He survived by receiving money in the mail from his estranged wife. He lived in a shack that was barely a shelter, which he also used as his workshop. With the money he got from his real wife, Tanzler would go out and buy women’s clothes, so he could dress up Elena in clothes, very literally like a life-sized doll that was rotting in the Florida heat.
As if this wasn’t crazy enough, Carl Tanzler believed that if he took Elena’s body into space, the radiation would bring her back to life, kind of like electricity running through Frankenstein’s monster. He build a spaceship that he planned to take into space one day. He called this “Elena’s Airship”. Of course, he would never be able to have the technology to bring it into space. This was years before the first man would even walk on the moon, so the idea that he could build a spaceship in his own backyard was even crazier than it sounds.