![]() ![]() 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. ![]() 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. 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. Whatever you think about your friends, you probably don’t expect them to steal your skull. Thomas Hardy, Wikimedia Commons // Public Domain If there is an afterlife, perhaps the ghosts of these men can provide F.W. While heads go missing from a variety of contexts (museum cabinets, the tops of flagpoles, people’s houses), the ones listed below have all been dug out of their famous owners’ graves. In some ways, it's an ancient story: in traditional societies, headhunting was often a way of harnessing another person's spiritual power, and European societies engaged in their own head-hunting to fill the halls of museums.īut as Colin Dickey, author of Cranioklepty: Grave Robbing and the Search for Genius notes, when it comes to the heads of dead celebrities, the motive may be an extreme version of the drive to collect other celebrity ephemera: “To touch a bit of someone’s greatness, to possess something that radiates with the aura of a legend: this is what drives us to collect autographs, memorabilia, vials of Elvis Presley’s sweat.” Throughout the past few centuries, an assortment of famous people have seen their graves robbed by trophy-seekers, souvenir hunters, mad scientists, and other plunderers. Yet Murnau is far from the only celebrity to be relieved of his head after death. Murnau went on to make other films before dying in a car accident in California in 1931, but it’s the looming Count Orlok as played by Max Schreck, his shadow slinking across the wall, that sticks in everybody’s mind. The incident could almost be a scene out of Murnau’s best-known film, Nosferatu, a 1922 German expressionist retelling of the Dracula story (it also includes one of the most memorable uses of fake nails in film history). ![]() Cemetery manager Olaf Ihlefeldt told the Washington Post: “There was a candle … A photo session or a celebration or whatever in the night. Police are investigating the crime, but despite tabloid speculation about occult involvement, the motive is murky. It's not the first time someone has broken into Murnau's tomb, which cemetery managers say was desecrated in the 1970s and back in February. Neither are the managers at the Stahnsdorf South-Western Cemetery outside Berlin, where, on Monday, officials discovered that someone had broken into the Murnau family plot, opened up the famed film director’s iron coffin, and made off with his head. ![]()
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