In a Halloween‑themed monologue, J. Anthony Allen recounts the bizarre post‑mortem saga of composer Joseph Haydn. After Haydn’s death in 1809, two men bribed a gravedigger to steal his skull, motivated by the then‑popular but now‑discredited science of phrenology, which linked cranial bumps to personal traits. The decomposed head made the thieves ill, yet they displayed it in a decorative wooden box with a golden lyre. Ten years later, when Haydn’s body was exhumed for re‑interment, the missing skull was discovered. Authorities traced the theft to the two phrenology enthusiasts, who had hidden the skull in a mattress and subsequently passed it through a chain of owners—including a physician, a professor, and the Society of the Friends of Music—before it entered a musicologist’s collection. Around 1930, a Haydn descendant attempted to reunite the composer’s remains, but reports differ on whether the skull obtained was genuine or a fake; a second skull, also likely fake, was placed alongside it. Today, Haydn’s tomb contains two skulls, both presumed inauthentic, making the story a macabre, Halloween‑appropriate parallel to the headless horseman legend.
Chapters
Composer Joseph Haydn died 1809. His head was stolen and it still hasn't been found. No Halloween story would be complete, I suppose, without a headless horseman story. And this is the closest we have to that, but it's a pretty good one. So in 1809, Haydn dies. Haydn was well known as a composer in his day. There was a funeral held after his death in Vienna and he was buried in a cemetery. Now, following the burial, there was two men who bribed the gravedigger to steal Haydn's head. Now why would they do this? This period of time there was this really popular science, which has now been completely debunked. But at the time there was a very popular science called phrenology. It had to do with the shape and the fine details of the bumps of the head being responsible for certain personal characteristics. For example, someone might have a little bump right here and they might find that people who have a little bump right there are left handed or something like that. So people who studied this kind of fake science were really interested in getting their hands on the heads of people considered brilliant because they wanted to see what the patterns were that made someone brilliant. So the gravedigger stole the head and it's worth noting that it was apparently unseasonably warm by the time the gravedigger got his hands on it. And so the head was slightly decomposed and it made him throw up. That's a well known fact, I guess, in the literature about this. And there was identified a bump of music in the head. And Haydn's skull was indeed fully developed in this bump. So he had the bump that they expected him to have, which really means nothing. But at the time it did. But then the head kind of goes on a weird journey. So one of the head stealers had the skull installed in their home collection almost as an art exhibit, so it could be shown to people that came over to visit. They made a nice wooden box for, had a nice little golden lyre on the top and a little window so you could look in. So that might have been the end of it. And we would have never known that Haydn's head was stolen had this next thing not happen. About 10 years later, a former patron of Haydn's went to exhume the body because they had made some arrangement to move Haydn's coffin to a different part of Austria. I believe it was being moved to his ancestral home. And when they did that, they dug him up and found there was no head. Now it wasn't hard to figure out who stole the head, because these two gentlemen that had stolen it were well known for being really into this phrenology phenomenon and also stealing heads. So they were searched, their houses were searched and looked for it. But they just managed to get out of it and hide the skull, apparently in a mattress. After that, the skull was handed down from various people, sometimes in that family and sometimes out of the family, the family of the people who stole it. One person willed it to another. Then it was given to a physician and then a professor, and then to something a German society that was called the Society of the Friends of Music. Then a musicologist got it as part of that society. Eventually, in around 1930, a descendant of Haydn's tried to build a new tomb for him and reunite the body of Haydn. Now, I've read different reports on this. Some reports say that the skull that he was able to obtain was a fake, was not the real skull. Now, a real skull was put on the body way back in the initial transplant to Austria, to a different part of Austria. So there was a fake skull that I think everybody knew was fake. And then now there was a second fake skull given in this attempt to reunite the whole body, although some reports say it was possibly the real skull. At any rate, the current Haydn tomb now has two skulls in it. One we know is fake, the other is probably fake. Sam.
