Despite being one of Lafayette, Indiana's most well-known landmarks and the site of that city's first hotel, the Lahr House Hotel has another claim to fame which is far more macabre.
When a guest named James Moon first checked into the hotel on June 10, 1876, nobody paid much notice despite the rather large and bulky trunk he had with him. While living with his wife and six children on a farm in a nearby Quaker community, the 37-year-old Moon still traveled into Lafayette often enough to be fairly well-known to staff from his previous stays at the hotel. He also had a reputation of being an inventor and all-around "jack-of-all-trades" so nobody thought much about the trunk itself. On checking in, however, he asked hotel staff for a quiet room as he was a light sleeper who didn't wish to be disturbed. After hearing some suggestions, Moon decided on a third-floor room located to the rear of the building and stated that he would only need it for a few days.
After settling in his room, Moon then left to run several errands in the city. Though he mostly kept to himself, he did mention in passing to one of the hotel's owners that he was working on "perfecting a patent of considerable importance." What nobody knew at the time was that, during the course of his errands in the city, he bought a large ax-head at a nearby hardware store two thick iron plates at a foundry. At that same foundry, he instructed staff to bore holes through the ax head and the plates and stated that they would be part of a machine he was building for creating "fruit baskets". While this foundry work was being done, he went to a barber shop and had his heavy beard shaved off and then stopped at a drug store and bought cotton padding and chloroform (it was a simpler time back then).
Finally, he picked up his order from the foundry and placed his purchases in the heavy trunk which was still on his carriage. After paying a visit to several of his comrades from his days fighting in the Civil War, Moon then returned to the hotel where he arranged for his trunk to be brought up to his room. Despite being well over six feet tall and weighing close to 200 pounds, the trunk was still too heavy for Moon to carry himself and he needed help from two baggage handlers to lug the trunk up to the third floor. With that final chore taken care of, Moon then locked the door.
On Sunday, June 11, a maid named Bridget Clogan tried several times during the day to enter Moon's room for cleaning but got no response. At 5 pm, she tried once more and, getting no answer, she used her passkey to enter the room. What she saw there sent her into a fit of screaming that alarmed all the guests in nearby rooms. Two of these guests rushed to her assistance and found Moon's decapitated body strapped to the floor with his head lying nearby. What he had passed off as a machine for making fruit baskets was actually a crude guillotine which he had used to cut off his own head in one of the most bizarre suicides on record.
Hotel staff called the police who then began examining the crime scene in elaborate detail. He had apparently been carrying the disassembled pieces of the guillotine in his trunk and, once he got the ax head and metal plates needed to complete his device, had carefully assembled the device in the hotel room. Moon's contraption basically consisted of a broadax attached to a jointed wooden arm that swung on a hinge screwed into the floor. The ax head had two thick wooden bars which were bolted together to provide a counterweight. But Moon's ingenuity didn't end there. He also prepared a soapbox to hold his head secure and placed a large wooden block under his neck to ensure that the blade would make a solid hit. He had then carefully fastened a cord to the wooden arm and attached the other end to the windowsill. All that remained was for Moon to set a candle holder by the window with the flame being lit so that it would burn through the cord. This allowed Moon enough time to get his head in position and wait for the cord to be burned all the way through. It was a testament to Moon's ingenuity that this bizarre suicide method worked on his first try.
Since Moon failed to leave behind a suicide note, police were baffled over his motives for killing himself in such a bizarre fashion. All that they could determine was that he had been dead for about ten hours before his body was discovered which put the time of death around 7:00 am on Sunday. The body was moved to a nearby funeral home and his widow, Mary, came up with several relatives to make arrangements to ship the body home (no word on how long it took hotel staff to clean up the room to prepare it for the next guest).
As you might expect, stories about Moon's bizarre suicide were carried by newspapers across the country. Most of the coverage on the story came from the local paper in Lafayette which also provided further details about Moon's life. This included his being a self-taught blacksmith and his various attempts at creating a perpetual motion machine. But most of the details that we know about James Moon came from the coroner's inquest and the various people who provided testimony about the deceased inventor.
Many of the witnesses called were former neighbours who described Moon as a well-educated man who was kind to his family. Being the son of a Quaker minister, it was likely no surprise that he was thoroughly familiar with the Bible though, intriguingly enough, he was also a bit of an atheist. Other people who knew Moon also described his fascination with machines for causing death. One of these neighbours, O.W. Phillips, testified that Moon had told him back in 1875 that he could "make a better machine that could take life than has yet been invented." To nobody's surprise, the jury returned a verdict of suicide though the reason he chose to kill himself they way he did died with him.
James Moon was buried in the Farmer's Institute Cemetery, not far from his farm. As for the guillotine used to kill Moon, that went on display at a site not far from the hotel where the bizarre death took place. Thousands of men, women, and children came to see the device before it was finally disassembled. Photographs of the bizarre apparatus can still be found online.
Comments