This Is Real

(note: I work Sundays and game Sunday nights, so Sunday posts are always going to be short snippets.)

This is a true story. This is also an insane story. If I could find four or five comparably insane stories, I'd write them all up and submit them to Cracked.com, but I can't, because this story is incomparably insane.

So, back in the days of the Old West, there was a guy named 'Big Nose' George Parrot. Apart from having a hilarious name, he was one of the murderous outlaws of the period. His claim to fame begins when he tried a train job with the James brothers, screwed up, and the outlaws had to shoot two lawmen to make their escape.

Now, the James brothers immediately fled the state, but Mr. Parrot did not. This was a mistake, because the Union Pacific Railroad put a $10,000 price on his head. That's almost a quarter of a million dollars in modern-day money. I have to assume one of the lawmen was a relation to the head of Union Pacific or something because that is crazy money for one hilariously-named outlaw.

George got caught and hanged, but that was only the beginning. His body was turned over to a doctor for scientific purposes. The doctor sawed open George's skull to examine his brain for 'signs of criminality,' and gave the sawn-off top to his assistant. He then had George's torso partially flayed, and sent the skin to a tannery to be made into a medical bag.

Read that last sentence again and let it sink in.

That's not science. That's not even mad science. That's just mad.

The doctor also wanted some of the skin to be made into shoes, and instructed the tanners to leave the nipples on.

The doctor got his shoes and medical bag. He only wore the shoes once, at the inaugural ball for the first Democratic Governor of Wyoming. That was him, incidentally. Yes, the first Democratic Governor of Wyoming was an insane doctor who wore human-leather shoes made from the skin of a murderer. Do not fuck with that guy.

Indeed, this story came out seventy years later in the 1950s, when construction workers digging up the former Governor's back yard found George's skeleton (with open-top skull) sealed up in a buried whiskey barrel. The guy who dug that up must have really thought hard about his politics after that. I mean, nobody knew it was George Parrot's skeleton at the time. My impression would have been that that Governor had disposed of one of his political enemies in a gruesome fashion.

The authorities tracked down the madman's former med student, who had become the state's first woman doctor, and was still alive. She still had the skull top, and had used it as an ashtray and a doorstop over the decades, continuing her mentor's tradition of flagrant contempt for the dead. She told everyone the whole story.

The skull and shoes are on display in a museum in Nebraska. The medical bag has never been found.