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+--- Thread: 6 Historical Heads Stolen From Their Graves (/thread-3441.html)
6 Historical Heads Stolen From Their Graves - Magical Realist - Mar 8, 2017
http://mentalfloss.com/article/66343/6-historical-heads-stolen-their-graves
"Whatever you think about your friends, you probably don’t expect them to steal your skull. But Haydn had the misfortune (or fortune, depending on your point of view) to be friends with an accountant, music lover, and phrenologist named Joseph Carl Rosenbaum. The phrenology Rosenbaum studied insisted that a person’s innermost being could be divined from the bumps on his or her skull, and the craze for this kind of skull-reading spread throughout Europe and America in the 18th and 19th century. Some phrenologists believed in the existence of an "organ of tune," which was said to protrude above the eye and be a clear sign of musical genius. Phrenologists said they had noticed the telling bump in portraits of Mozart and Beethoven, as well as Haydn himself.
Rosenbaum decided he wanted Haydn's head before the composer was even in his grave, and bribed the gravedigger to deliver the skull a few nights after Haydn's death. The accountant kept it in his house for years, in a black case adorned with a golden lyre. The theft was discovered a decade later, when the Austrian prince who had employed Haydn decided to rebury him in a more lavish tomb, but the wily Rosenbaum handed over a series of fake skulls while keeping the real one for himself. Haydn's true skull didn't join the rest of his remains until 1954, 45 years after the composer's first burial....."