Today, our thoughts turn to Halloween. Last year, we published a slew of ghost stories some of which were sent in by guest contributors. We've got even more scary in store for you this year. As Sherill Tippins admits, this isn't much of a ghost story, but it's still kind of scary since everybody in it loses their sanity. (And then at the end the whole country goes bonkers and gives women the right to vote!) It also features a dwarf:
In 1901, the glamorous Mrs. Frank Leslie moved into the Chelsea--probably onto the sixth floor. Born Miriam Florence Follin in 1836 to an old New Orleans family run to seed, she was rumored to be the 
illegitimate product of a liason between the debonair, French-born Southerner Charles Follin and one of his slaves. Be that as it may, Miriam was raised by Charles and his wife as a precious flower whose beauty and brilliant intellect might, through a clever marriage, pull the family out of their economic decline. Tutored at home, she learned to speak and read in four languages, to dress to her advantage and charm well-born gentlemen with her quick wit and deceptive submissiveness.
As she approached womanhood, the family moved to to New York, where the marriage market promised the highest return on their investment. They established a boarding house precariously near the slums of the Lower East Side. When 17-year-old Miriam allowed David Peacock, an older jewelry store clerk, to seduce her in exchange for the chance to adorn herself with the shop's diamonds, her parents efficiently arranged a shotgun wedding and then a quick annullment to preserve her reputation. Peacock ended up in an insane asylum, where he died.
Miriam went on to perform onstage with a new mentor, Lola Montez, and then to become the mistress of a retired United States Senator, before finally making the marriage her parents had hoped for--to the famous archeologist and diplomat Ephraim G. Squier. But Squier was much older, and Miriam was bored. When the couple went to work for the even richer and more powerful Frank Leslie, founder of New York's Frank Leslie Illustrated Newspaper publishing empire, she encouraged Leslie's divorce and invited him to move in. For several years, the Squires and Frank Leslie enjoyed the era's most celebrated menage a trois, until Miriam divorced Squire (leaving him to go mad and die alone), married Leslie, and took over Frank Leslie's Illustrated after Leslie's death.
By 1901 Mrs. Frank Leslie had become a multi-millionaire, building her late husband's business into one of New York's most successful publishing houses. She had dabbled in romance--marrying Oscar Wilde's drunken brother Willie and then returning him to his mother and filing for divorce; and engaging in a flirtation with the Marquis Campo Allegre Villaverde, Court Chamberlain to King Alfonso of Spain. But by the time she arrived at the Chelsea, she had decided to simply give herself the royal title she craved, without the bother of another marriage. She checked into the Chelsea as the diamond-bedecked "Frank 
Leslie, Baroness de Bazus," and began presiding over Thursday evening salons with her coddled Yorkshire terrior, featuring Ella Wheeler Wilcox, the "poetess of passion" ("Laugh and the world laughs with you/ Weep, and you weep alone") and Marshall P. Wilder, the well known hunchback, dwarf vaudeville performer who "broke the ice during dull afternoons" by hiding behind the grand piano and making baby-squalling noises until the others collapsed with laughter.
As the years passed, rumors spread that the Baroness was losing her sanity. She forgot things, they said; her conversation drifted off in directions. The rumors increased dramatically after her death in 1914, when it was learned that she had left her $2 million fortune to the Suffragist movement. Family members sued; reporters sneered, the legal case dragged on. In the end, half of the legacy was wasted on lawyers, administration fees, taxes, and legal settlements. But about $1 million did go to the Suffragists in time for the final push toward ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. -- Sherill Tippins
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