Manchester mummy

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The Museum of the Manchester Natural History Society around 1850, in which Hannah Beswick's mummy was exhibited

The Manchester Mummy ( German  Manchester mummy ) was a well-known exhibit in the Museum of the Manchester Natural History Society in the 19th century. The mummy was the embalmed corpse of Hannah Beswick (* 1688, † February 1758); because of the house in which the embalmed had lived before her death, Birchen Bower, the mummy was also called the Mummy of Birchen Bower . Beswick was terrified that she would be buried alive and therefore ordered in her will that she would not be buried until she was clearly dead. Her family doctor Charles Pollock White, a curiosity collector , embalmed her in 1758 and displayed her in the body of a grandfather clock, which is why the mummy was also called Mummy in the clock . The mummy reached the museum via detours and was exhibited there in the entrance area. The mummy eventually went to Owen's College. There it was decided to bury the clearly deceased in 1868 in an unnamed grave in Harperhuy Cemetery near Manchester. After her death, rumors of treasure buried near her home in Birchen Bower began to circulate. The late Hannah Beswick has been haunted by a number of haunted stories in the Manchester area , and ghostly apparitions have been reported since the demolition of Beswick's former home.

background

A man buried alive
(L'inhumation précipitée)
Antoine Joseph Wiertz , 1854

From the middle of the 18th century, taphephobia (from the Greek: fear of being buried alive seemingly dead) was a widespread fear with an entirely real background. When corpses were reburied, it was found that some of the supposedly dead had been buried alive and suffocated in agony, as demonstrated by scratches or twisted skeletons in the coffins. The people of the 18th century made some effort to make sure that the dead were really dead, and not just seemingly dead . Some of the suggested attempts to determine death included the oral administration of vinegar and pepper; others suggested examining the corpse for signs of life with red-hot iron bars on the soles of the feet or in the rectum. Various doctors gave numbers for people buried by mistake; a Swedish doctor estimated that one in ten people would be buried alive, according to the English doctor JC Ouseley about 2,700 people were buried prematurely in England and Wales every year , others assumed about 800 funerals of apparent death. These premature burials actually did occur, with William Tebb describing 219 cases of pseudo-dead people who were barely rescued, 149 cases of those actually buried alive, and 10 cases of pseudo-deaths being dissected.

Beswick's life and testament

Charles White, Beswick's doctor and embalmer

Hannah Beswick, the future Manchester Mummy , was born in 1688 to John and Patience Beswick of Failsworth on the Birchin Bower estate in Hollinwood near Oldham , a small town near Manchester in Lancashire . After the death of her father in 1706, she inherited a considerable fortune. Beswick saw one such case of mistaken death with her own brother John. At his funeral, before the coffin was nailed up, the undertaker found that his eyelids seemed to move. The responsible general practitioner Dr. Charles Powell White confirmed that Beswick's brother was still alive, and John regained consciousness a day later and lived for many more years.

The fear of suffering her brother's near-fate and being buried alive did not leave Hannah Beswick. She spoke to White, a trusted family doctor, about her fears and asked him not to bury her after her death until her death could be clearly established. The exact agreements that the two made have not survived. On July 25, 1757, just under a year before her death, Beswick wrote her will. She wrote in it that she wanted to stay above ground and be examined regularly until doctors confirmed her death. The will stated that White should receive £ 100 and that £ 400 should be kept for funeral. It was believed that White, as executor, received the £ 400 and was allowed to keep the rest of the money after the funeral. With her embalming he was able to get the whole sum. Another assumption concerns a not inconsiderable debt that White could have had with Beswick and the repayment of which he could postpone if the funeral was prevented. However, Beswick's will does not name White, but Mary Graeme and Esther Robinson as executors.

The embalming

Although Beswick's will does not mention embalming and presumably was not in the interests of the deceased, it was embalmed by White after her death in February 1758. Perhaps White, the founder of Manchester Royal Infirmary Hospital , couldn't resist the temptation to add another curiosity to his collection. He already owned several mummies and the skeleton of Thomas Higgin, a hanged sheep thief. White had been obsessed with anatomy since studying medicine in London and fascinated by the Egyptian ritual of mummification .

The exact nature of Beswick's embalming is not known, but after White studied with the anatomist William Hunter , who developed an early form of arterial embalming , such a technique is likely. As with modern embalming, a fluid was introduced through the large arteries. In contrast to the formaldehyde solutions used today, Hunter used a mixture of turpentine oil , cinnabar , lavender and rosemary oils . The organs were then removed and attempts were made to squeeze as much blood out of the body as possible. The organs were washed with alcohol and put back into the body. Then the body cavities were filled with plaster of paris or a resin mixture . After suturing the opened body cavities, camphor was introduced into the body orifices. According to later descriptions of the mummy, it can be assumed that it was then wrapped in strong fabric, but the face remained free.

Exhibition of the mummy

Jeremy Bentham's iconic car

Initially, Beswick's mummy was kept in a wooden box with relatives at Ancoats Hall . Shortly afterwards it was brought to White's house in Sale and placed in the body of a former grandfather clock, the face of the mummy could be seen through the removed clock face. Exhibitions of human remains were common in the 19th century, ranging from more professional approaches, such as Jeremy Bentham's auto-iconization for educational purposes, to entertainment -only events in which mummies were unwrapped and dissected; a trend called Mummymania . Beswick's eccentric last will made her a celebrity and many visitors came to Sale to see her, including Thomas de Quincey . White bequeathed the mummy to a Dr. Ollier, who after his death in 1828 donated the mummy to the newly built Museum of the Manchester Natural History Society . It was displayed in the entrance hall of the museum, along with other human remains, a Peruvian tarred mummy, a Maori head, and an Egyptian mummy named Asroni. There are no drawings or photographs of Beswick's mummy, but a local historian described her face as wrinkled and black, her legs and torso tightly wrapped in bandages. The body was that of a little old woman in a coffin-like display case.

Whereabouts and burial of the mummy

The display of the mummy in a museum that focused on flora, fauna and conchology (shells) is an example of the often arbitrary methods of collecting, and their display as a curiosity emphasized this. The museum guides tried to convey background information on the mummy, but it was obvious that it could not be classified in the taxonomy . This situation was only ended when the mummy and the entire collection were sold to the newly founded Owen's College in 1868 for financial reasons. Owen's College collections director, William Boyd Dawkins , clearly expressed his displeasure with the lack of organization in the museum's taxonomy.

While other exhibits, such as the Egyptian mummy on display next to Beswick, were transferred to the museum's new collection in 1889, the question of what to do with Beswick's remains remained, because in the museum's opinion it was "irrevocably and clearly dead." Unfortunately, a change in the law in 1837 made it necessary to have a coroner's death certificate prior to a funeral. The burial of the mummy could only be ordered through the intervention of the interior minister. With the permission of the Bishop of Manchester and surviving relatives, Beswick was buried discreetly and inconspicuously on July 22, 1868 in an unmarked grave in Harperhuy Cemetery near Manchester, according to a newspaper report 110 years after her death. This burial, which was later described as inglorious, was justified with the fear of grave robbers, which however turned out to be unfounded.

A wax figure of the mummy is now in Ripley's Believe It or Not! in Amsterdam.

Treasure and apparitions

Artist's impression of a ghost

While Beswick was still alive in 1745, Charles Edward Stuart marched into Manchester with his invading army while trying to conquer the English throne. Concerned about her fortune, Beswick decided to bury it. She died before she could tell anyone the exact location. After her death, the Birchin Bower house was converted into workers' accommodation. Many of the workers who lived there said they saw a ghost there. The apparition was described as Hannah Beswick, a figure in a black dress and a white lace bonnet. It haunted the house and always disappeared on the same stone slab. Allegedly one of the workers, a weaver, found the buried gold treasure under this plate.

Another sighting involves a farmhouse on the property from which the figure migrated to a small pond nearby. The house supposedly glowed in an unearthly glow on winter nights. People from the area began to avoid the house after dusk. It was created by poltergeists reports and other phenomena. The farmhouse and Birchin Bower were eventually demolished to make way for a Ferranti factory , but ghosts continued to be reported.

Further sightings of this apparition related to the former family residence Cheetwood Old Hall , where not only did Hannah Beswick's ghost appear unannounced at dinner parties of the new owners, but human remains were also found in a wooden box under the entrance stairs when the building was demolished. Another narration says that a double coffin was found under the house, but it has never been established whose remains it was or whether there was any connection to the Beswick family and Dr. White gave.

literature

  • Jan Bondeson: A Cabinet of Medical Curiosities Cornell University Press, 1997 ISBN 0-8014-3431-9 (English)
  • Jan Bondeson: Buried Alive: the Terrifying History of our Most Primal Fear WW Norton & Company, 2001 ISBN 978-0-393-04906-0 (English)
  • Matt Cardin: Mummies Around the World: An Encyclopedia of Mummies in History, Religion, and Popular Culture ABC-CLIO, 2014. ISBN 978-1-61069-419-3 pp. 214ff. Cape. The Manchester Mummy (English)
  • David Long: English Country House Eccentrics e-book, chap. Birchen Bower, Oldham (English)

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d Miriam Bibby: Hannah Beswick: The Mummy in the Clock , Historic UK (English) accessed on June 18, 2020
  2. ↑ Jan Bondeson: Buried Alive: the Terrifying History of our Most Primal Fear WW Norton & Company, 2001 ISBN 978-0-393-04906-0 p. 56 and 71 (English)
  3. ↑ Jan Bondeson: A Cabinet of Medical Curiosities Cornell University Press, 1997 ISBN 0-8014-3431-9 p. 113 (English)
  4. ↑ Duncan Alexander Mckenzie: The Near Death Experience: A Clinical Investigation Lulu, 2014 ISBN 978-1-312-39008-9 p. 7 (English)
  5. ↑ a b c d e Sophia Dellapina: Myths of Manchester: The Curious Tale of the Manchester Mummy at Manchester's Finest on September 3, 2019 (English) accessed on June 18, 2020
  6. ↑ a b BBC: The strange fame of Hannah Beswick from August 11, 2009 (English) accessed on June 18, 2020
  7. ↑ Jessie Dobson: Some Eighteenth Century Experiments in Embalming in Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences Oxford University Press, 1953, Volume 8 Number 4. pp. 431-441, doi: 10.1093 / jhmas / VIII.October.431 , PMID 13109185 (English)
  8. ↑ Julian Litten: The English Way of Death: The Common Funeral Since 1450 Robert Hale Ltd, 1992 ISBN 978-0-7090-4777-3 p. 45 ff Embalming Techniques (English)
  9. ↑ Jolene Zigarovich: Preserved Remains: Embalming Practices in Eighteenth-Century England in Eighteenth-Century Life Duke University Press, 2009, Issue 33 (3), p. 86 (English)
  10. ↑ a b Frances Wilson: Guilty Thing: A Life of Thomas De Quincey Bloomsbury Paperbacks, 2017 ISBN 978-1-4088-4013-9 chap. 1 (english)
  11. ↑ Arthur MacGregor: Curiosity and Enlightenment Yale University Press, 2008 ISBN 978-0-300-12493-4 pp. 279-80 (English)
  12. ↑ Beverley Rogers: Unwrapping the Past: Egyptian mummies on show in Popular Exhibitions, Science and Showmanship, 1840-1910 Routledge, 2012 ISBN 978-1-315-65512-3 pp. 199-218 (English)
  13. ↑ Jan Bondeson: A Cabinet of Medical Curiosities Cornell University Press, 1997 ISBN 0-8014-3431-9 p. 102 (English)
  14. ↑ Asroni is now exhibited under the name Asru in the Egyptian Gallery of the Manchester Museum.
  15. ↑ 'shriveled and black, [her] legs and trunk were tightly bound in a strong cloth… and the body, which was that of a little old woman, was in a glass coffin-shaped case.'
  16. ↑ Sam Alberti: Nature and Culture: Objects, disciplines and the Manchester Museum Manchester University Press, 2009 ISBN 978-0-7190-8903-9 pp. 20-22 (English)
  17. ↑ Sam Alberti: Nature and Culture: Objects, disciplines and the Manchester Museum Manchester University Press 2009 ISBN 978-0-7190-8903-9 p. 22 (English)
  18. ↑ Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society: [ Memoirs and proceedings of the Manchester Literary & Philosophical Society ] 1888, issue 58, 1913-1914 (English), accessed June 18, 2020
  19. ^ William Grimshaw: Miss Ann Beswick in The Manchester Guardian, May 4, 1900
  20. ↑ Photograph of the wax figure on Weird Historian: The strange afterlife of the eccentric Hannah Benswick (English) accessed on June 18, 2020
  21. ^ Matthew Hyde, Aidan O'Rourke, Peter Portland: Around the M60: Manchester's Orbital Motorway AMCD Limited, 2004 ISBN 978-1-897762-30-1 pp. 43-44 (English)
  22. ↑ Clive Kristen: Ghost Trails of Lancashire AUK Authors, 2012
  23. ↑ Peter Hough, Jenny Randles: Mysteries of the Mersey Valley Sigma Leisure, 1993 ISBN 978-1-85058-355-4 p. 43 (English)
  24. ↑ James Garland: The Manchester Mummy New Mills Local History Society: Newspaper cuttings as PDF approx. 1930 (English) accessed on June 18, 2020
  25. ^ Report in the Dundee Courier of March 3, 1890.
personal data
SURNAME Manchester mummy
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Beswick, Hannah (real name); Mummy in the clock; Mummy of Birchen Bower
BRIEF DESCRIPTION embalmed woman from Manchester, mummy
DATE OF BIRTH 1688
DATE OF DEATH February 1758
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