The Jig is Up
His neighbors began to get very suspicious. He was living alone, and yet he was spotted buying clothes for his “wife”. Some witnesses also saw him through his window, dancing with what looked to be a life-sized dummy. Once someone finally figured out what was going on, they called the police, and Carl Tanzler was arrested.
When he was finally caught, it had been seven whole years since he committed the grave robbery and started living with Elena’s corpse. He was interviewed by a psychologist, who declared that he was mentally incompetent, as well. The statute of limitations was already up, so he was set free. And to the outside world, they just saw this as a loony, eccentric old man who just really missed his “wife”. Many people misunderstood the story to be that an elderly man refused to bury his wife, and lived with her body. Some people actually thought that was kind of romantic, rather than psychotic. So he never even received a lot of public backlash for his horrific behavior.
After Carl Tanzler had been detained, medical examiners peeled away the layers of abominations that he had placed on the corpse. At first, they thought it would not have been possible for Tanzler to be an actual necrophile with his corpse bride, but without indulging the details, the medical examiners said that it was actually “possible” for him to make love to the corpse, if he chose to, but they could not find and definitive evidence that he was doing that. The authorities did not want him to get his hands on her again, so they buried her body in an unmarked grave to ensure that he would never find her.
In his later years, Carl Tanzler wrote an autobiography for a pulp magazine called “Fantastic Adventures”. His real wife took pity on her mentally damaged husband and continued to support him. He earned his US citizenship, and moved to Tampa, Florida to have a better quality of life. There was a rumor that he rebuilt a life-sized replica dummy that looked exactly like the doll he made out of Elena’s corpse. When he died, some say he had his arms wrapped around the dummy for comfort. This, of course, is a rumor, but considering the details of this story that are true, it doesn’t seem all that hard to believe.
Where did we find this stuff? Here are our sources:
The 13th Floor – The Macabre True Story of Carl Tanzler and His Corpse Bride
Hyperallergic – How Tuberculosis Symptoms Became Ideals of Beauty in the 19th Century?
Museum Facts – 11 Bizarre Facts About Carl Tanzler – The Man Who Loved A Corpse
Medium – The Corpse Bride: The True Story
Ranker – Inside Carl Tanzler And His Messed-Up Relationship With A Corpse
Sinister Isles – Carl Tanzler Dug Up His Dead Patient Elena And Made Her His Corpse Bride
OZY – The Woman Of His Dreams Died. But He Didn’t Let That Pull Them Apart
Ask a Mortician – Iconic Corpse: Elena de Hoya & Carl Tanzler
History of Yesterday – The Hopeless Romantic Who Proved Love Never “Dies”