A Tale of a Corpse

As Halloween approaches, what better time of year for a tale of skeletons and corpses? **Warning! Gruesome details ahead.**

A skeleton and cadavers prepare to dissect a sleeping medical student in "A Student's Dream" by A. A. Robinson. Digitized by Harvard's Countway Library.

It was the spring of 1891 and Cuba City residents had high hopes for their little town, founded just sixteen years earlier. A renewed interest in mining was stirring in the region, business was picking up, a new high school was being discussed, and the village would soon be incorporated. Despite all of this activity, Cuba City had no idea that it was about to go viral in newspapers across the country.

Our story begins in Chicago. On April 3, the busy workers in the freight depot of the Illinois Central Railroad must have sensed that something was "off" about one of the packages they were handling that day. The employees got the shock of their lives when, upon opening the suspicious box, they discovered the naked body of a man. And it got worse. The corpse had a strap around the neck and was sawed in two! The decomposing body had been packed with chloride of lime, a white powder used for bleaching, disinfecting, and deodorizing.

Horrifying, indeed. But what does this have to do with Cuba City? Naturally, the railroad workers checked the box's address label and found it was addressed to one W. H. Harris of Cuba City, Wis., Cash On Delivery. After the grisly discovery, the package was taken to a Chicago morgue, and news of the incident quickly spread, appearing in newspapers across the country. Several articles speculated about the nature of these remains. Was it murder? Was it a medical student joke? Both were offered up as explanations.

Published in the Akron Beacon Journal (Ohio) on April 4, 1891.

Not surprisingly, news of the incident reached the package's intended recipient and, on April 7, 1891, the Chicago Daily Tribune revealed that Harris sent a letter to police, explaining that the body had been dissected at the "Dental Medical College" in Chicago. Furthermore, "he asked that the skeleton be reshipped to him." Sadly, this is the last bit of information to be found about the event. It quickly fell off everyone's radar, leaving us with all kinds of questions like, did the corpse eventually arrive in Cuba City? Ironically, despite the national coverage of the body's discovery, no mention of the incident could be found in local newspapers.

So, who was this "W. H. Harris"? Likely the man in question was T. H. (Thomas Henry) Harris, one of the eleven children of wealthy pioneer farmer and politician Joseph Harris, Sr. It is not clear what T. H. planned with the dental school corpse in 1891 but, a few years later, he was attending dental college in Chicago. Perhaps he was already a student of the school at the time of our story, or he was studying toward that goal.

Harris brought his new dental skills back to Cuba City in the winter of 1897. On February 24 of that year, the following appeared in the Galena Gazette: "Dentist T. H. Harris of Cuba City is now comfortably located with Dr. T. L. Edwards in the Kivlahan building and like the doctor has all the business he can well attend to. Tommy has a bright future before him." The Kivlahan building mentioned is located at 117 South Main and today is the southern building of the Junque Stops Here. 

"Tommy" may have had a bright future ahead of him, but he quickly opted to pursue that future elsewhere. The same year he hung out his shingle in Cuba City, he announced he would return to Chicago for further study. Harris and his new wife, Sarah, moved to the city and, by 1900, the dentist was practicing in Beresford, South Dakota. He and his wife had a son and daughter together but, by 1910, the couple had divorced and, while his ex-wife and children moved on to California, it is unclear what became of the Cuba City dentist who once went viral.