When fully constructed, the lever was seven feet long and divided into three sections. The lower, wider two thirds were made of wood and attached to the base by means of a hinge to prevent any possible lateral motion. (One source states that the base was “two pieces of lumber, 1" x 6", and about six inches apart,” though this sounds unnecessarily complicated.)14 The free end of the lever, the upper one third, consisted of the broadax and upright pieces of bar iron fastened with bolts and screws. They were very heavy, in order to give the machine great effectiveness when put in motion.15
With everything in place, Moon could have beheaded himself, but he had ambition. The nineteenth century saw surgery, childbirth, and dentistry become truly painless for the first time in human history, and the same could be done with autodecapitation. Furthermore, he had experience with anesthetics.
Three years earlier, Moon reportedly attempted suicide with chloroform in room 41, but hotel employees mistook the smell for coal gas and broke down the door. A doctor revived Moon, who was convulsing and later claimed that he took the drug to relieve cramps.16 By 1876, he abandoned chloroform as a means of committing suicide and incorporated it into a larger plan in which he would drug himself into unconsciousness and use a delayed-release mechanism to free the ax.
The iron bracket Moon bolted to the window frame was fitted with a candleholder that allowed a candle to be inserted between the two strands of cord supporting the ax. It was positioned so the candle could burn for some time before reaching the cord, burning through it, and releasing the ax. (There are several different versions of how the candle and cord were arranged.) Moon put brown paper over the transom, presumably to keep stray drafts from interfering with the candle and perhaps to keep anyone from seeing what he was doing (“transom peeper” was once synonymous with “snoop”).
In order to inhale the chloroform and keep his head and neck in place, Moon laid a wooden soapbox on its side and screwed it to the floor so that the box’s opening was parallel with where the blade came to rest. The box’s upper edge was shaved back so it would not interfere with the ax’s progress, and cotton batting was put inside to absorb the chloroform.
To make sure that he did not change positions or otherwise disarrange the preparations while losing consciousness, Moon screwed a leather belt to the floor and used it to pinion his legs. The soapbox had two holes drilled opposite each other, and, after putting his head inside, he slipped a wooden dowel between them to hold his chin up. A block of pinewood was also screwed to the floor under the back of his neck, and this, along with the rod, kept his head in position before and after the beheading. Moon’s final act might have been placing both hands under his suspender straps to keep them in place and, with that done, he stretched out, breathing in sweet heavy fumes, and waiting. (A picture taken by photographer P. W. Wolever shows the photographer’s assistant posed like Moon, with the ax hovering overhead.)
Dr. Vinnedge believed Moon was no more than “somewhat stupefied” by the chloroform, while a Dr. Glick thought that it killed him; everything else, however, went according to plan; when the ax dropped, it severed the neck neatly and fully.17 The resulting jets of blood pooled on the floor or were absorbed by his clothing and the batting.
Moon did not leave a note, but at some point he decided to lighten the proceedings with gallows humor, and wrote on the lever, Kari kari, Patent applied for, and For sale or to let. Kari kari was apparently his name for the device; it is believed that Moon was thinking of the word for Japanese ritual suicide, hara kiri. At the inquest, a witness testified that “Moon used that pet word or phrase penciled on the arm [of the machine]—‘Karikari’—in conversation . . .”18
The Guillotine Show
Word of a suicide at Lahr House spread quickly, and crowds were already gathered at the hotel when Tippecanoe County coroner Dr. William W. Vinnedge arrived.
First, he examined the scene and the body, then impaneled a coroner’s jury of prominent Lafayette citizens. They heard testimony about Moon’s previous suicide attempts, including the 1873 incident, and another in which he first chloroformed and then tried asphyxiating himself in a hayrick. Hereditary insanity was possible since Moon’s mother “was more than eccentric; she was remarkably peculiar” and his sister “was very much like his mother” and “would speak often and ably on strange subjects at the quiet Quaker meetings, and frequently appeared in gorgeous attire, so offensive to her sect.”19 Moon and his sister may have been unbalanced, but there also seems to be an element of rebellion in their behavior. Another witness recalled Moon’s interest in inventing, particularly the possibility of perpetual motion, and a tendency for his mind to “‘run on’ methods of causing death, [and] . . . a great admiration for men who had rendered their names famous as inventors of machines which would cause death, suddenly and with dispatch.”20
The jury decided that James Moon was mentally unstable and died by his own hands, but the circumstances were so unusual that the coroner spent two days studying the room and later wrote an article about it. (A formal autopsy might have explained another curious aspect of the case: Vinnedge estimated the time of death as seven A.M., yet ten hours in a small, hot, unventilated room had produced no visible signs of decay on the body.) He probably had to inform the widow as well, and Mary Moon did not take it well. Neighbors said her grief was beyond description and the thought of what Moon did “nearly destroys her reason.”21
An undertaker named Caleb R. Scudder was authorized to remove the corpse, and he moved it across Main Street to his funeral parlor; Scudder also installed Moon’s apparatus in an empty room in the Scudder Block. The body was claimed on Monday and buried that afternoon in the Farmers’ Institute Cemetery under a sturdy, ogee-shaped headstone. Back at Lafayette, three thousand residents of the city and surrounding areas formed a “large, excitable, and noisy” crowd that turned out to see room 41, the places Moon visited on Saturday, and the bloodstained machine.22 Morbid curiosity was doubtless part of the attraction, but Americans of the period were also fascinated by inventions.
Even as thousands descended on downtown Lafayette, millions were attending the Centennial International Exhibition at Philadelphia, a celebration of arts and sciences of the United States. Displays included the massive Corliss Centennial Steam Engine, Remington’s typewriter, and Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone, which, along with countless other useful devices, prompted the London Times to write that the “American invents as the Greek sculpted and the Italian painted. It is genius.”23
This passion for technology may explain why newspapers printed such detailed descriptions of Moon’s machine, as well as expressions of admiration. The admiration might be reluctant, like the author of a letter to the editor of the Sunday Morning Leader who pointed out how “[t]he idea was original and amazed the country . . . Such ingenuity, although fatal, should not sink into oblivion,” or straightforward: “The sight and action of the machine amazed the most gigantic mind and heads of the Star City.”24 Interest in “Moon’s Method” even extended overseas, with Britain’s Illustrated Police News telling the story with a woodcut in their trademark penny-dreadful style.25
On Tuesday, Moon’s oldest son, sixteen-year-old Arthur, arrived at Lafayette and angrily demanded the machine, which was disassembled, packed into the trunk, and hauled away to be destroyed. A man from Indianapolis reportedly tried to buy the device for $1,000, but the family refused all such offers, saying they would burn the lumber and bury the hardware (the determined entrepreneur then vowed to get a job on the neighboring farm so he could spy on the Moons and dig up the pieces). By Friday of that week it was back at Lafayette, apparently the property of Mr. Scudder, who was doing a good business charging the curious a nickel to see the Kari-kari. (Maybe the family came to a private arrangement with the undertaker, exchanging the machine for the coffin and funeral services.)
Mary Moon was criticized for allowing the exhibit (“Could anything be more revolti
ng?”), but the widow had six children and a bisected husband to bury.26 Sympathizers pointed out that the display “greatly helps a distressed and unsupported family, whom he left in deplorable circumstances!” (Moon might have even expected the machine to earn money and was half-joking when he wrote that it was “For sale or let.”)27
The guillotine was shown in cities around Indiana, including Lebanon, Logansport, and Indianapolis, after which it was disassembled, placed in the original trunk, and stored in Caleb Scudder’s attic. A reporter who inspected the pieces in 1880 saw dried blood on the blade and batting, which he described in an article that is the last known eyewitness description of the machine. It apparently went on tour for the last time in 1886 and its present whereabouts are unknown. (A novelist writing about Moon believes the machine might be in the Museum of Transport’s collection at Kirkwood, Missouri.) Assuming the pieces were not swallowed up by fires, floods, or wartime scrap-metal drives so that Moon’s creation ended up flying missions over Tokyo, it could well be in a dusty corner awaiting rediscovery, a unique artifact of death in nineteenth-century Indiana.
When the crowds thinned and the coroner left, the proprietor of Lahr House had room 41 locked, declaring that it would not be opened or rented for ten years. The building, however, underwent extensive renovations in the 1880s, and then again in 1998, when it was converted into the Historic Lahr Apartments.28 There are stories about it being haunted, but these are mostly unrelated to the most notorious death on the premises.
A Bevy of Self-Beheaders
James Moon, of course, is not the only American to build a machine for cutting off his head.
In 1901, a man named Connelly decapitated himself in a cabin in California’s Santa Cruz Mountains with either a broadax “in such a position that when he cut the cord the axe fell across his neck, stretched out on a block of wood,” or “by allowing a huge saw with teeth filed off and edge ground to the sharpness of a razor, to fall upon his neck.”29 A Mr. Koetpnickger built a beheading machine in his apartment on Scholes Street in Brooklyn in 1894, but when it failed to work, he struck himself in the head with an ax and was hospitalized with a concussion.30 A case similar to Moon’s took place four years later in Chelsea, Massachusetts, in April 1880, when a thirty-year-old farmer named Stephen M. Pillsbury built a homemade guillotine in his father’s barn.
He also used an ax blade, mounting it on a frame weighted with fifty pounds of stones; this frame moved up and down in the grooves of two tall wooden uprights. One upright was fitted with a lever on a pivot; a three-gallon tin watering pot was tied to one end of the lever, and its weight pushed up the other end of the lever, holding the frame, blade, and stones in place. A number of tiny holes were punched into the pot and, while the water dripped out, Pillsbury lay facedown between the uprights, inhaling ether. As the watering pot rose, the end supporting the frame dropped, until the blade was released and slid down the grooves and through Pillsbury’s neck.
The citizens of Massachusetts were as interested in beheading as those of Indiana, and thousands went to see the guillotine. Newspapers were enthusiastic. “If anyone says the Yankees are not the most ingenious people in the world,” wrote The Illustrated Police News, “and that the quality is not strong even in death, call his attention to Pillsbury’s invention.”31 The machine did not go on display, though, and by July, Pillsbury’s father was using “the axe that decapitated his son to cut wood and the uprights of the machine are used as side rails of a hot-bed at his farm, on which the deed was committed.”32
Moon’s death was somewhat different. He was presumably as unhappy as the long-unemployed Koetpnicknger, or Pillsbury, who apparently feared he was going mad, yet never seemed to express despair or hopelessness. There were also suicides in the family. Various sources claim that Moon’s mother and sister killed themselves, that his brother shot himself at Indianapolis in 1881, that one of his sons attempted suicide with poison at Kansas City in 1900, and that his daughter Adella killed herself with gas in Chicago in 1911.33 (In contrast, Moon’s widow, the former Mary Fox, married a Mr. Dudleston in 1903, and lived another ten years. She is buried next to James.) While people commit suicide for different reasons, Moon is unusual for using it to achieve recognition.
On the face of it, self-beheading is an improbable route to celebrity. Looking at it from the perspective of Moon, who had “great admiration for men who had rendered their names famous as inventors of machines which could cause death” and believed that he could “make a better machine for taking life than has yet been invented,” it makes a kind of sense.34 And though he did not mention any inventors by name, he was probably referring to a thirty-eight-year-old French artisan named François Auguste Chere.
Chere moved from France to England after the Franco-Prussian War and started a business that failed. He resolved to “quit the world” when he was penniless and in 1876, when Chere was living at London’s New Cross Road, he bought some boards and a large, two-handled knife used by tanners for scraping hair off hides.35 After he was not seen for a day, the door to his room was forced and Chere was found beheaded by a guillotine of his construction with stones tied to the blade for sufficient weight. The story was widely reported and for a brief time in February 1876, François Chere’s name was known around the world.
There is no proof that Moon knew about Chere, but his own suicide took place just five months after the Frenchman’s, and, of all the possible ways of bringing about death, Moon set out to improve decapitation. The result was a superior means of suicidal beheading, the Kari-kari.
Compact, easily stored, and transported, it could be quietly set up and torn down by one person using basic tools. Guillotines can be balky, but Moon’s device has few moving parts to get out of order, and, assuming the candle and cord are properly arranged, autodecapitation can be done privately, painlessly, and with relatively little mess. Beyond such practical considerations, however, are elements that take both Chere’s and Moon’s machines into another realm and raises them from instruments to personal statements.
Guillotines and guillotine-like devices have a long history, but for the French the guillotine became more than a means of execution and represented the Enlightenment, Revolution, and, like the fleur-de-lis or the Eiffel Tower, France itself. For Chere to kill himself with one in a foreign country was not just suicide but a proclamation of “Je suis Francais!” expressed in boards and blades. To an American the guillotine was not the “National Razor” or “Madam Guillotine” but a beheading machine and, like all machines, susceptible to improvement. If Chere’s device is understood as a declaration of nationality, then Moon’s might be one about sanity.
Mad Ambition?
The name Moon suggests lunar and lunacy, and a jury declared that James Moon was mad, pointing to his behavior and family history. Some suggested that wartime service in the 16th Indiana Battery Volunteers had unhinged Moon’s mind, but the unit spent most of their time guarding Washington, D.C., and its eleven fatalities were from disease. Others thought Moon had “the face of a man of unsound mind”; phrenologists would doubtless have detected insanity in the shape of his skull, and modern writers in the difficult relationship with his father.36
Moon might have been mentally ill, yet he could not have committed suicide the way he did without clear thinking, long-range planning, and carefully orchestrating events to achieve a specific outcome. He seems to have realized that dying in an extraordinary manner was not enough, so he did it in downtown Lafayette, with its crowds and newspapers, inside a landmark hotel where Mark Twain and U. S. Grant had stayed and thereby associated his name with two of the most famous living Americans. There was also timing. Because he beheaded himself on the Sabbath, people were free to discuss what happened and he distracted them from church.
Did James Moon get what he wanted? The man who never did anything worth mentioning apart from killing himself was discussed on both sides of the Atlantic, his invention went on
tour, and he is remembered when arguably worthier contemporaries are not. In short, his suicide must be accounted a perverse and somewhat tawdry success. Only Moon knows if it was worth it.
The Man in Room 13
Today, Moon is an oddity in the history of Tippecanoe County history, but he became a legend in the lodging trade.
In 1889, humorist Edgar W. “Bill” Nye heard a story from a bellboy, who heard it from another bellboy, who claimed to have once worked at Lahr House. Nye’s informant said a man had rented room 13 at the hotel and that he was “a kind of inventor, somehow”:
He had been staying at the Lahr House a week or so, I believe, and carrying up tools and pieces of board and stuff because he was building some kind of a machine and was quiet about it for fear someone would beat him on the patent, he said.
The man did not respond to being called and the bellboy was finally put over the transom. He unlocked the door from the inside and came out looking “quite pale.”
No. 13 had, it seems, got his machine done the night before, and had tried it to see if it would work. It was a kind of meat axe running in a groove like the French do—funny, and it was hung with a cord and trigger, fixed so that a little thread that run the trigger was pulled through a wax candle. A man could load up with morphine, or something kind of soothing like that, lay down with his head on the upholstered headrest, light the candle and go to sleep. He had greased up the running glass of the thing and then begun to experiment. It worked first rate. They didn’t have any autopsy. Friends thought it wasn’t really necessary.37
Mrs. Wakeman vs. the Antichrist Page 11
