A Strange Christmas Dinner: 1908

PHANTOM GUESTS AT FEAST

HAS DINNER SERVED FOR HIS DEAD RELATIVES.

Rich Miner Returns From Nome to Find Sister and Children Are Buried.

New York. December 26. Seated at a table, at which there were four other chairs, all vacant, but in front of each of which a complete dinner had been placed in courses and then carried away untouched, Henry B. Tannehill, once of New York, but now of nowhere in particular, ate his Christmas meal yesterday in the Hotel Marlborough. His phantom guests were his sister and her three children, all dead, but of their deaths he knew nothing until he arrived in this city and registered at the hotel Monday last after a leisurely trip across the continent from Nome, Alaska. Tannehill’s return to New York just at this time was in fulfillment of a promise which he was able to carry out only to the extent of his presence here. He had planned a reunion with his kin, which he intended should be memorable for its gladness and good cheer. He had been dazed upon his arrival here to learn that in his nine years’ absence, during which he had no word from them nor they from him, disease and sudden death had robbed him of all but one of his living relatives.

In his absence he alone had prospered. Nine years ago Tannehill, unmarried, lived with his sister and her husband, John Vanderveer. at No. 271 West 68th street. One night Vanderveer was struck by a New York. New Haven and Hartford train. He was dead when trainmen picked him up.

Not long afterward Tannehill, with two venturous comrades, wandered away to the frozen Klondike region in search of gold. After many vicissitudes he went to Nome, where fortune favored him.

“On the day I left my sister’s home I told her that I would be back next Christmas, or the one after and that the treat for them would be the finest that money could buy. I got out and hustled and saved considerable money in the Klondike, and when I got in here the other night.” he said, his voice quivering. “I ran over to the East Side and began to look the folks up. It didn’t take me long to find out what I least expected. My sister went out to a store one day and left the children in the house: when she came back they were dead–burned. Then she died herself of pneumonia–and worry, too, I guess. She wasn’t the sort to live long after a thing like that.”

Tannehill says he has only one living relative, a cousin, in New Zealand, whom has never seen, and to whom he may pay a visit.

Evening Star [Washington DC] 26 December 1908 p. 12

Chris Woodyard is the author of The Victorian Book of the Dead, The Ghost Wore Black, The Headless Horror, The Face in the Window, and the 7-volume Haunted Ohio series. She is also the chronicler of the adventures of that amiable murderess Mrs Daffodil in A Spot of Bother: Four Macabre Tales. The books are available in paperback and for Kindle. Indexes and fact sheets for all of these books may be found by searching hauntedohiobooks.com. Join her on FB at Haunted Ohio by Chris Woodyard or The Victorian Book of the Dead and on Twitter @hauntedohiobook. And visit her newest blog The Victorian Book of the Dead.