Short Stuff: The Body in the Cylinder

Published Feb 24, 2021, 10:00 AM

In 1945, residents of a Liverpool neighborhood found a desiccated body in a long cylinder they’d been using for years using as a bench. It launched a mystery that’s still alive today.

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Hey, you welcome to the short Stuff. I'm Josh. There's Chuck and Jerry's lurking there on mute, just hanging around being a weirdo, looking all weird. And this is short stuff. As I said, already, we should tell everyone. The other day, it was kind of funny. We were recording and about five minutes in Jerry somehow a muted herself and she was in some sort of a conference call. We couldn't get ahold of her and it was just like, shut up. Yeah, I mean, she wasn't recording, but it was very distracting to us. And that's the important thing, you know. Yeah, I have a thing in my brain where they're and this happens a lot when you have a kid, Like You'll be listening to music and then she'll come in with some dumb toy that's playing different music and it it just it breaks my brain and makes me want to break things. It's not good. I don't know what it is. It's a big trigger. Yeah. Well, I like the anecdote. It was very charmed. Right now, we're not going to be able to get to the end of this episode. Alright, let's do it. We've wasted Uh, I don't know a minute. So all right, well let's start by talking about the Blitz, because that's kind of where the story technically begins. And the Blitz is like this, the German bombing of England, and Germany really really bombed England in general. But most people think of London being bombed the most as the Blitz. That's not entirely true. Well, London was for sure bombed a lot. We don't want to, you know, take anything away from what they suffered. But Liverpool, I think was number two in England is getting walloped by the Germans. And there's a there's a place in Liverpool where after the bombing they I think it's near uh what was then called Great Homer Street. And after the bombing they kind of left it that way for a little while because I think everyone was just recuperating from the war. And then in nine some American soul just finally started clearing out this area and found a little something interesting. Yeah, well at first they didn't think it was interesting. It was part of the rubble that was cleared out by those American soldiers, but it was a long tube of cylinder um. Let me say this found something that would prove to be interesting exactly, but we are in agreement that at the time they didn't think it was interesting at all. Yeah, it just looked like a tube, you know. I think it was a little under seven ft long um less than two feet in diameter, and it was just made of steel. It just looked like some big, dumb thing. But apparently it was heavy enough and big enough that rather than being removed with all the other rubble, it just kind of got left in the area and became kind of a fixture in this little little part of the neighborhood, so much so that people would like sit on it as a bench sometimes and children would play on it and roll it along and all that stuff. And that's the way it stayed for at least a good two years between ninety three when they cleared out the rubble in when something kind of big happened. Yeah, I think one end was sort of factory sealed, and one end was kind of uh stamped shut by the bulldozers and stuff that we're clearing stuff out. And over time over those couple of years, that end that was sort of stamp shut kind of worked its way loose a little bit, just enough for a little kid that was climbing on it to see a bony skeletal foot. Yeah, a little boy named Tommy Lawless who appropriately found the skeletal foot in the cylinder on a Friday. So the little boy, um who went on to become Ringo star, went and fetched a cop, the local cop, Robert Baile or Bailey would be Bailey, I guess, but I've never seen it spelled that way. Be a I L L I E. Yeah, sure, that's that's Bailey, right. And he said, well, this is way above my pay grade, rather famously, and went and got the detectives and they all kind of came together and said, what is going on here? And this mystery was launched. That's right. Uh. I think it's too early for a break, but that is a good cliffhanger. I thought so too. I can do whatever we want. We're God's here. That's right. Let's let's take an early break since you set it up so well, and we'll come back right after this. Alright, great cliffhanger. They find this thing, they find the skeletal foot. They need to get inside of it, so they get a welder to open it up, and they get some corners and some forensics people in there, and what they end up finding it was an entire skeleton of a man about six ft tall, dude, Victorian dress, and they had it was it was a little bit of hair still left even on the skull. And here's one key that kind of flummixes me that I'll kind of harp on a bit later, but yeah, me too. There was a brick wrapped in burlap as a little pillow. Yeah, which to me kind of confuses a lot of the a lot of the ideas they had of what might have happened to this guy. It really does. And it's weird that the brick was there and wrapped in burlap. I don't know if it was the guy who writes Passing Strangest, which huge shout out um this this is actually kind of a somewhat well known mystery. The body and the cylinder is what it's called. But Um Passing Strangeness did far, in a way, the best job of kind of getting this point across. And that guy Um describes it as as a pillow. So I don't know if that's if it was just Tamm or if that's generally what it's love, but it is very weird that it was there and in that position. Do we have his name? From what I can tell, the guy who wrote that, and probably the guy who has the the blog Passing Strangeres, which seems to be defunct, which is a shame because it's pretty interesting. UM is named Paul Dry. At the very least, that's the name of the person who's accepting um compliments on the comments under the blog. But you want to hear something truly bizarre, Chuck. Sure. There is a little tag called trackbacks. One of them is Indonesia Blowing Up Boats and C g I Pompeii. Another's fishing Shop. The third one is s y s K Internet Roundup. Really isn't that cool? Does that mean we covered this before? No? I think this guy UM is just a fan. I don't think the trackbacks mean anything. I think he's saying, like, go check this out. Maybe, I hope, let's find out. Well that's small world. So all right, they've got this body in there, and there's a lot of other stuff in there, and we'll kind of just list out what else was in this cylinder with the skeleton. UM, they discovered a London north Western Railway notice that had a tag about arrival of some goods that was dated June five. I think there was a postcard from Birmingham dated July three, eight five, a couple of diaries which they couldn't read. It was illegible. I would guess just sort of damage to time would be my guess. Uh. And then they found some papers and this proved to be I guess the biggest key. They found some papers under the body, um, one of which was a receipt and account sheets for a company T. C. Williams and Company, and then some other kind of stuff that didn't prove to be useful, right right. One of the things that got me though, is that it was found in a bunch of grave wax, like a pool or puddle of grave wax from the body decomposing onto the papers. That's called yeah, grave wax. I think we ran into it for Center Urban Explorers episode because like, people find it in catacombs, but it's um the what's astounding is that these coroners from the mid century were able to kind of um uh get the papers back in tax so that they could read them again. That's astounding to me. Pretty cool. They also did find that his skull was damaged, but I think they thought that was kind of due to the bulldozing and trying to get the body out of there, that's right, or the cylinder. Yeah, So there didn't seem to be any any um evidence of violence. There was just a dead body. So they have no idea what happened to this guy. And at first I guess the coroner thought, um, this is like maybe a ten year old cadaver that we're looking at. Everybody else said, um, what about every other piece of evidence that that you've discovered along with this guy? And he's like, well, technically somebody could have dressed up like a Victorian person in and gotten a bunch of old papers and keys and stuff in a ring, and um, you know, died within the last ten years. And I think everyone kind of said, you know, that's bosch. The coroner wasn't ready to give that up yet. They actually investigated a theory that it could have been, um, a man named TC Williams son whose name was also TC Williams, and maybe it was him and he just happened to have some old papers with him. And they said, I think we already said bosh to that, Yeah, because I don't think we mentioned, Uh, there was a paint manufacturing plant in that area that was owned by Thomas Kreegan Williams. That fit the time period. So they're like, it can't be that guy, Like you said, maybe it's his son, but did They ended up finding him and that went in that right They found the sun his body. Yeah, the son had been buried back in nine nine and leads so he was accounted for. His strange Chuck, is that the older man, his father, had not been accounted for. The man who owned this manufacturing plant in the eighteen seventies and eighteen eighties in this area of Liverpool, Um had suddenly just vanished right around right. Uh. They did end up kind of figuring out that the tube and the cylinder itself was part of a ventilation shaft, which to me sort of only confused things a little bit. Um that it was put forth and I don't know if this was Paul who kind of put this forth, or or or general evidence that perhaps this man was despondent and suicidal over the loss of the factory and crawled into the shaft for final privacy. That seems a little a bit of a stretch to me. Um. Yeah, it also seems like a stretch that a ventilation shaft should be closed off on one side. What kind of ventilation shaft is that? Yeah, I guess, But don't they all end at some point they're supposed to end into like the open air? You know, Like I think that's just really weird, like a a a one ended a ventilation shaft. It just I'm sure there's some kind out there, but it just escapes me. And then the pillow also seems a little weird, that brick burlap pillow. Yeah, that's the weirdest part to me is that that that is clearly some sort of a a purposeful thing that someone has done, um right, I mean like like for comfort. Yeah, but also it's like do you hate yourself to um? Like a brick wrapped in burlap is not a comfy pillow. Like you could use almost anything else on the planet and wrap it and burlap and it will be more comfortable than brick. Uh. Yeah, And they had pillows back then, you know, right exactly. Um. There was another theory put forth that it wasn't Williams, it was someone else that was maybe murdered, uh in retaliation for that factory closing and maybe they stuffed them in there and Williams maybe just like disappeared after that, changed his name and skipped down. Who knows. Yeah, so I think they finally closed the case in nineteen forty seven, forty five, actually right up right off the bat, they closed the cases that we're never going to solve this um or we've totally solved it. We just can't say with a percent, But they basically said, we don't know who it is, we don't know how he died, but you can probably surmise yourself. And the prevailing theory is that it was TC Williams, upon the ruination of his um paint business, uh possibly took his own life. The fact that he wrapped a pillow or a brick and burlap and took it into ventilation shift with him with all this other stuff would suggest he didn't accidentally go in there and and get stuck. He probably died by suicide or it was somebody else made to seem like TC Williams. But the astounding fact is that this happened in five. He was in that ventilation chef all the way up and through the bombing of Liverpool during World War Two and used to be rolled around the playground by children until they finally figured out he was in there. Yeah, I'm sure there was more than one adult walking around that remembers playing on that trip. I know, I know. Um. And then a very special shout out to Josh and Chuck from the past because it turns out, Chuck, we did talk about this in an Internet roundup which explains the track back, So this is probably the last time we'll ever talk about the body, and I think memory of that, I think this is the best version. I don't either, and plus no one saw an Internet round up anyway, so I think we're all good. Enjoyed that show. But big thanks and hats off to Passing Strangeness for making such a great blog post. And if you haven't been on that blog yet, go it's very good. And since I said that, that means short stuff is a happening. Stuff you should know is a production of I Heart Radio for more podcasts for my heart Radio. Is it the I Heart Radio app Apple podcasts where every listen to your favorite shows. H m hm

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