Carla Valentine

Carla Valentine Instagram – This is the skeleton of ‘The Yorkshire Witch’ Mary Bateman, 1768- 1809, and an image of a cup made from her skin. (Straight off the bat I want to give @thepoisonerscabinet a shoutout because I learned about this woman in Ep 14 of their podcast and they recently reached over 200!)
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Although Mary was known as ‘The Yorkshire Witch’ she was actually a con artist and murderer of 5 people. There’s so much to tell about her crimes but my favourite has to be when she claimed she had a chicken who could predict the Apocalypse. It was known as “The Prophet Hen of Leeds” and it laid eggs which said CRIST IS COMING (she misspelled ‘Christ’, and I think it would have been even funnier if she’d written ‘Chris’!)
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Mary very cleverly etched this phrase into the shells of the eggs with vinegar – rather than writing it on with ink – because it looked more organic; like a part of the surface. This is because the acetic acid in the vinegar neutralises the calcium carbonate in the shell of the egg, releasing carbon dioxide, causing it to lighten in colour and become thinner. The second part of this con, apparently re-inserting the inscribed eggs into the unfortunate hen, is a bit harder to verify…
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After eventually being exposed as a fraud and murderer she was hanged in York Castle and, as was the custom at the time, “anatomised” or dissected publicly. Her skeleton was then displayed to anyone who paid and her skin was flayed and tanned. It was used to bind books, which are no longer in existence, and used to make a folding cup, which I have to say I’ve never really come across before.
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Up until 2015 most of her skeleton, pictured, was on public display at the Thakray Museum in Leeds. However, with changing attitudes towards the display of human remains and the subsequent Human Tissue Act coming into force, she has been in private storage in the anatomy department of Leeds Medical School since then
(Lots of this info is from MURDERERS’ LEATHER By EDWARD ELMHIRST 1954)
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#skeleton #humanremains #witch #poisoner | Posted on 28/Jun/2024 01:31:52