Shark Attacked

Published Aug 13, 2019, 9:00 AM

Today we meet two very unusual individuals, although the things these people were famous for couldn't be more different. Either way, they're both great additions to the Cabinet.

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Our world is full of the unexplainable, and if history is an open book, all of these amazing tales are right there on display, just waiting for us to explore. Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosities. When the stress of life is getting you down, it's normal to want to find a quiet place to decompress, somewhere far from the hustle and bustle, where your troubles just sort of fade off into the distance. Charles Blondine had a place like that, and nothing could get to him while he was there. Charles was born in northern France in eighteen twenty four and took up gymnastics when he was five. Unlike other boys at the time who studied to become doctors or bankers or go on to do manual labor, Charles dreamt of becoming a performer. He trained as an acrobat and eventually debuted to the world as the Little Wonder, a graceful performer who enthralled crowds with feats of agility. As he got older, though his dreams of stardom grew bigger and France was honestly just too small to contain them. He got married, had three children and took his show on the road well overseas. In eighteen fifty five, Charles traveled to New York City to join a family of French circus performers. They've been entertaining audiences for four generations and often took on outsiders to flesh out their act. Now that he was part of a large group, though, Charles needed a way to stand out more importantly, he had to earn his keep, and then it came to him away to put his skills to the ultimate test. To draw the largest crowds he'd ever seen, Charles would cross Niagara Gorge on a tight rope. The woven hemp tight rope he'd walk across would measure feet long and about three inches in diaetter, which is smaller than one of the credit cards in your wallet. It would be suspended on sixty feet over the gorge, with the Niagara River churning beneath him, and he refused to use a net, claiming that preparing for disaster often invited it. Thankfully that stubbornness worked to his advantage by furthering the attendance of his audience. One thing was true about performances such as his, as much as people wanted to see him cross the gorge safely, they also wanted to see him fail. It was something he got a kick on of two. He loved it when people bet on the odds of him falling to his death. On the morning of June fifty nine, twenty five thousand cheering spectators gathered to watch Charles attempt across the gorge. Among them were congressmen, judges, generals, and reporters. Anyone who was anyone was at Niagara Falls watching Charles put his life on the line, literally ultimate. For all his preparation, Charles couldn't predict the deep sag in the middle of the rope. It hung low in the middle, and everyone said the dip would throw off his balance and that the rope itself couldn't support him. One person said he deserved to be dashed to atoms for his desperate, foolhardiness. Charles, though, ignored them all. At five pm that afternoon, he took his first step off the American side. He carried a twenty seven foot long balancing pole in his hands to steady himself. The crowd grew silent, Some averted their eyes, unable to watch in case he didn't make it. After several minutes, though roughly one third of the way across, something unbelievable happened. Charles took a seat. Yeah, He sat down on the rope and invited the tourist boat that made of the mist to stop just below him. Using a separate line, he pulled up a bottle of wine from the boat and drake it as everyone's stare and awe. When he was finished, he tossed the bottle and began to walk again, at one point even running. He'd done it. Charles Blondine had successfully crossed the Niagara Gorge on a tight rope and enjoyed the tasty beverage along the way, but his show wasn't over. After a brief rest, he set out again, this time with something strapped onto his back. About two feet out from the Canadian side, he stopped and fastened his balancing pole to the rope, Then untying the load on his back, he set up a Daguero type camera on a stand and took a photograph of the crowd before packing it back up and finishing the journey back to the American side. He repeated his feet again a few days later on July four of that year, and several more times after that, varying the different tricks he performed along the way. He once walked half the rope facing forward and the other half backward. On another attempt, he pushed a wheelbarrow all the way across, and during was perhaps his most daring performance, he stopped in the middle of the rope, unpacked a camp stove he'd been carrying on his back, and cooked himself an omelet right there on the rope. Now that's what i'd call a well balanced breakfast. A good card shark can build up a kind of reputation. They can be shifty, They know how to read people, and they know exactly how much trouble they can get themselves into before they're in too deep. Joseph Lwell was quite the shark himself, and he was known for it all around New York City in the early nineteen hundreds. But it wasn't just his prowess with a deck of cards that earned him a reputation. It was his other passion, one even more dangerous than any ticked off gangster waiting for his loan payment. You see, Joseph loved the ladies, particularly the newly married ones. Aside from the obvious problems with his vice of choicewies, New York was nothing like current day New York. Women were still seen more as virtuous property of their husbands and fathers as opposed to people in their own right, and if word ever got out about their misdeeds with Mr Elwell, their reputations would be dragged down right along with his. But Joseph couldn't help himself. He'd flashes bright white smile, say a few charming words, and they'd fall head over heels for the bridge King of Manhattan. Yeah that's right. Joseph Elwell's game of choice wasn't Texas Hold Him or five cards stud the kind of games you might associate with a card shark. Now, his game of choice was bridge, and if it was a sport, Joseph would be It's Michael Jordan's. His skills, both at and away from the table were legendary, as was the list of men who wanted him dead. Jilted lovers and overprotective fathers threatened him with all manner of violence. Even his own wife hated him, and, as you might imagine, his infidelity eventually caused their separation. However, none of the angry husbands ever seemed to seriously threaten him. They'd all been angry, or jealous or hateful, but it was all for posturing. Joseph just laughed them all off and moved on to the next woman he saw, which is what made what happened on jule N so strange. The night before, Joseph had spent the evening with Viola Cross, who had recently divorced from her husband and was looking for some fun. The two head dinner and drinks at the Ritz Carlton Hotel, followed by some revelry at Zigfield's Midnight Frolic, a late night performance put on by the women of Zigfield's Follies, just a less family friendly version. Around three in the morning, Joseph arrived back home, where he spent a few hours making phone calls. He placed the last call just after six am, and then stepped outside to fetch his morning paper from his stoop. Later that morning, Joseph's housekeeper arrived to begin her daily cleaning. As she started tidy and she noticed the door to his living room was locked from the inside. She let herself in and saw a man sitting in a chair with the day's newspaper folded in his lap. He was nearly bald, had no teeth, and looked deathly ill. For a moment, she was taken aback by the presence of a stranger in her employer's house. But then she took a second look and realized she recognized the man. After all, it was Joseph Elwell. The housekeeper said hello to him, but he didn't respond, so she went over to check on him, and that's when she saw it, the red hole between his eyes. She screamed and fled the room to call the police, and surprisingly, Joseph shot to the head hadn't killed him. He was still breathing when the authorities arrived to inspect the scene. He was too far gone to speak, though, and shortly after paramedics carded him off, he passed away. The NYPD noted that Joseph had been shot at point blank range with the forty five, and yet they ruled out suicide. That's because the police found a single bullet on the table in front of him and the cartridge on the floor beside him. The gun that fired it, though, was gone. Nothing in the room had been disturbed. Joseph hadn't been robbed, and there were no signs of any kind of struggle. And the most interesting detail of all was that the blood spatter on the walls indicated the shooter had been crouched in front of the late bridge player, suggesting that they probably knew each other. But despite the evidence left behind, there was one question still buzzing inside everyone's heads. How had the shooter gotten away? All the windows in the room were sealed and the door had been locked from the inside. No way in, no way out. Joseph Lwell's murder remains unsolved to this day, and after all these years, it's unlikely anyone will end up cracking it. Mysterious end to a complicated character, if there ever was one. Now that's what I'd call curious. I hope you've enjoyed today's guided tour of the Cabinet of Curiosities. Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, or learn more about the show by visiting Curiosities podcast dot com. The show was created by me Aaron Mankey in partnership with how Stuff Works. I make another award winning show called Lore, which is a podcast, book series, and television show, and you can learn all about it over at the World of Lore dot com, and until next time, stay curious.

Aaron Mahnke's Cabinet of Curiosities

From the creator of the hit podcast Lore comes a new, bite-sized storytelling experience. Each twice 
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