The Undying Love of Count von Cosel
Ten years ago, I wrote my novel Buried (2008) about a curious case of "forbidden love" that took place many, many decades ago, in Key West Florida. The story, that of German immigrant "Count" Carl von Cosel, in reality one Otto Carl Tanzler, captured my creative imagination in a way few stories ever have: what he termed his "undying love" for his chosen bride, the tragic Elena Milagro de Hoyos, the young Cuban immigrant girl who succumbed to a tuberculoid lung at the tender age of twenty-two. Carl, the putative "Count" (he swore he was descended from a German countess whose poltergeist-like phantasm frequently haunted him) commenced, upon the death of his beloved, to exhume the body and steal away with it to his squalid home. He did this after perpetrating medical quackery upon the luckless Elena, trying, through dint of his bizarre "treatments," to cure her of her disease. Predictably, this did NOT work; but, of course, if it actually had, we wouldn't know this story.
