The Dead Man’s Razor: 1888

THE DEAD MAN’S RAZOR

Odd Experiences of a Barber With His Deceased Customers

STYLE IN THE COFFIN

 Dead Woman the Worst Subject of the Loquacious Shaver

“Don’t’ be alarmed, sir. We never use that razor on the faces of living men. We call that the ‘Dead Man’s Razor.’”

Grim and hideous enough it looked, too; a long black handle, that insensibly reminds one of the hull of a rakish, piratical craft. Exactly in the middle was rudely scratched a skull and cross bones. The back of the blade gleamed over the ghastly symbol seeming to bring it out in bolder relief. The razor was in a rack in a west side barber shop.

“Just a little fancy of mine,” said the barber, as he slashed the brush around in the lather cup. “Thought it would be better to put that death’s head on the handle, so I wouldn’t be picking it up by mistake and using it on a customer who could turn his head without being helped. Dead men can’t, you know. Most people have an objection to being shaved with the same razor used on the face of a corpse. Don’t know why. Same feelin’, I ‘spose, that prevents a man who would tackle a burglar at midnight from walking through a graveyard at the same hour.”

Rather more loquacious than his kind was this Sir. Tonsor. A cadaverous man with deep set eyes and hair plaster close to his head. A mustache whose ends curled like the horns of a Southdown ram was the only hairy adornment on his face. His hands were long and his fingers were supple. Three of them on his left hand were up in the air when he worked, like the legs of a boy standing on his head. The barber, like all other barbers smelled of pomade and bay rum.

GIVING THE RAZOR A REST

“Haven’t used that razor for nigh on to three weeks, now,” he went on, as he dipped up a brush full of lather; “only wish I had a job for it every day in the week. The pay runs from one dollar up. I’ve had as high as ten dollars, but that included a haircut. Curious, too, the fancies that takes some people. Why, sir, a long durin’ the war I was called to shave a man on Eight street, who had worn a full beard for ten years. His widow, a mighty nice, pretty little woman, got it into her head that her husband didn’t look ‘stylish,’ as she put it, and I took the hair off his upper lip and chin and left him with a pair of side whiskers. All the friends of the family came in to see what sort of a job I had made, and most of ‘em declared that the dead man looked twenty years younger and was just as nat’rel as could be.”

“I guess he must have been about fifty years of age. His beard was gray and he was bald headed, and I tell you he looked pretty well broken up. Consumption, I think it was. The widow didn’t appear to know that the undertaker usually attended to such matters, and she sent one of her boys for me. When I got to the house she says to me, she says: ‘Now, I want my poor, dear husband to look just as nice as possible. I’m going to have a very elegant funeral and everything must be first class. I want you to make him look just like he was when I married him.’ ‘How was that, madam?’ says I, not knowing, of course, how the man looked at that time. ‘Why,’ says she, sort of surprised, ‘he had beautiful side whiskers when we were married, but in the last ten years he let his beard grow, and I couldn’t’ coax him to shave it off, poor, dear man. Now, I want him to look as he used to look.’ ‘All right, madam,’ says I; ‘I’ll do the best I can.’ And if you’ll believe me I blocked out as pretty a pair of whiskers as you’d want to see. Does that razor pull, sir?

A CLEAN SHAVE.

“Cases like that, however,” said the barber, “is what you might call rare. I once took a full beard off a corpse and gave him a clean shave, because just before he died a lamp got upset alongside of his bed and singed all the hair off one side of his face. You never saw a family so broken up as that family was. The man had a very heavy, close beard, and when it was all off he looked like another person. There was a terrible scar on his jaw, and his mouth ‘peared to be kind of twisted. Al this was hidden by the heavy growth of hair. I guess his folks had never seen him with a smooth face. When the widow saw him laid out she pretty near went into hysterics. She sorter half believed, I think, that the dead man wasn’t her husband at all. To tell you the God’s truth he didn’t look in the least like he did before he was shaved.

“About three eras ago an undertaker gave me a job out at Harlem. It was a young man about thirty. He had a week’s growth of beard. I shaved him carefully and let his mustache stand. That night about seven o’clock I was sent to come to the house at once. It scared me a little for I thought I might have made some sort of a blunder. When I got there, however, I found that they wanted me to wax up the man’s mustache. That was the way he used to wear it in life.

DEAD MEN’S BEARDS GROWN.

“I guess you’ve often heard it said that it was nonsense to say that the beard doesn’t grow after death. Well, it isn’t nonsense, and I don’t care who says so. I shaved a man named Farley, on the Bowery, about six years ago, and shaved him a second time before he was buried. Yes, sir, just as true as I’m telling you. He died on a Wednesday night. I did my work early on a Thursday morning, and I never did see such a stiff beard as that man did have. He was dark complected, and the skin on his chin looked almost blue, the beard was so close. He always wore a smooth face. I finished the job, as I said, on Thursday morning. The funeral was set for Sunday. On Saturday afternoon I was sent for again, and I found a very heavy growth of beard on the corpse just as heavy as you would see on a living man. His chin and the sides of his face were black with it. I shaved him again.

“That job made me feel all creepy like. It was like cutting hair off a block of marble. Then his eyes were half open, and, I imagined that he was watching me to see if I was doing the thing right. I got $2 for the first shave, but they couldn’t pay for the second. Said it was all one job. I didn’t kick. If they was too mean to pay I wasn’t mean enough to kick up a row, and a funeral going’ on.

I had one experience,” continued this man of queer experiences, as his razor swept over the customer’s chin, “that I’ll bet knocks out any barber in new York. I shaved a dead woman once!”

The grimace of incredulity on the listener’s face nearly turned the edge of the razor.

“That’s a frozen fact,” said the barber, solemnly, “and the family is living in New York city to-day. I know it sounds rather tart, but you ask any old barber and I’ll guarantee that he will tell you he has shaved living women often enough. I have shaved a dead one. Women don’t have beards? I know they don’t, as a rule. Neither do cows have two heads, nor are calves born with six legs every day in the week, but you’ll run across ‘em once and awhile, you must admit. Same way with human beings. There are lots of women who have hair on their faces, and either shave twice a day or use some sort of a powder. The number is small and the number who intrust the secret to a barber is smaller still. If five hundred women have beards, not more than three out of that five hundred would trust another person with the knowledge. Certainly not half a dozen. Sit up a little higher, please. Because a thing seems out of the usual run that doesn’t argue that it isn’t so, and this experience of mine, while it mightn’t be the experience of one barber in a thousand, is just as true as God made little apples.

SHAVING A DEAD WOMAN

“It was ten years ago last April. I was workin’ in a shop on the east side then, having been driven out of my own shop by family troubles. An undertaker who used to give me a good many odd jobs shaving the dead came to me and said, ‘Frank, I want you to come around to my place to-night and go out to Fifty-seventh street. I’ve got something for you to do.’ That was every word he said. Well, I takes that very identical razor you see there with the death’s head on it, and I reaches his undertaker’s shop about eight o’clock. He puts the icebox in the wagon and off we starts.

“When we gets to the house and old gentleman comes to the door and asks the undertaker if that was the barber—meaning me, of course. ‘I am the barber,” says I. ‘Well,’ says he, “I suppose you’ve got good common sense and don’t want to have the feelin’s of a respectable family hurt. I never want you to tell what you did in this house, and I’m going’ to pay you $10 for doin’ it. ‘All right,’ says I. ‘I think I know my business.’ Then the undertaker fetches me upstairs and takes me into a small bedroom. ‘Now it’s nothin’ to be scared about,’ says he, ‘but I want you to shave a woman.’

“Well, sir, you can depend—which side do you part on? You can depend I was surprised, but I said nothin’ at all. The undertaker pulled down the sheet and there I saw the body of a rather stout woman who looked to be forty or forty-five. Her hands were shut tight and her face was all drawn up and twisted. It looked horrible. I gets up a little closer and see that she has hair on her upper lip and chin, and I could tell by the stiffness that she had been shaved before.

SHE HAD BEEN CRAZY.

“While I was latherin’ up I asked the undertaker why the woman hadn’t shaved herself before she died. It was a month’s growth, I should judge, and I supposed—like most women with beards—she was her own barber. ‘Well,’ says the undertaker, ‘she was crazy for three months—clean gone, a maniac—and never still for a minute. She had shaved herself for more than twenty years and not a living soul outside of her family knew the secret. When she went out of her mind she forgot all about her beard and no one dared to use a razor on her. For the last three weeks she was strapped down in bed, but her head kept wagging from morning till night and from night till morning. Her people don’t want the world to know what has been so long concealed. Do you understand?’

“I just kept on latherin’ and when I got her lathered I shaved her, and when I shaved her I puts up my razor and says to the undertaker, ‘Excuse me, if you please. I don’t want any more such jobs as this. That corpse looks ready to jump out of bed. I’ll shave dead men, and all you want of ‘em, but when it comes to this kind of work, why, just leave me out. I think I can say that I’ve seen some things out of the common, can’t I? Of course, in a hundred dead men’s jobs you see ninety-nine dead bodies with a week’s beard on ‘em and nothing more. The hundredth case might be something strange.

“Shaving a dead man is easy enough, easier, in fact than shaving a living one. Death makes the flesh firm and the razor slides over the face just as if going over ice. Then, if you happen to make a slip there is no blood to tell on you, and a dead man never kicks about not being shaved close enough. Good day, sir.”

New York Herald 7 August 1888: p. 2

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 visit her newest blog, The Victorian Book of the Dead.