Carl Tanzler-The Man Who Fell in Love With a Corpse

In 1931, Dr. Carl Tanzler fell in love with a tuberculosis patient he was treating. He sought to keep his patient alive by removing her corpse from the tomb in which it was held and using coat hangers, wax, and silk to hold it together.

Carl Tanzler was supposedly born in 1877 and investigated weather patterns in Austria from 1910 to the end of World War I.

Tanzler married and had two children in 1920, after which the family moved to Zephyrhills, Florida. As soon as he accepted a post as a radiologic technician at the U.S. Marine Hospital in Key West under the alias Count Carl von Cosel, Tanzler abandoned his family.

When Maria Elena Milagro de Hoyos, a Cuban-American woman, entered the hospital, he witnessed a dream come true.

Hoyos was born in Key West in 1909, the daughter of a cigar maker and a housewife, and was reared in a large family. Her mother brought her to the hospital when she got sick.

Tanzler frequently had visions of a beautiful, dark-haired woman who was meant to be his one true love when he was a little boy in Germany. The 22-year-old beauty resembled his childhood visions so precisely that he was convinced their love was destined.

In the early 1900s, tuberculosis was still regarded to be a deadly disease, therefore Tanzler's prognosis for young Hoyos was not favorable. Despite lacking the credentials required to treat a tuberculosis patient, Tanzler was determined to save Hoyos and utilized a variety of custom-made tonics, elixirs, and medications to do so.

Carl Tanzler provided these treatments at the Hoyos household, lavishing her with presents and professing his love throughout.

In October 1931, despite his best efforts, Hoyos succumbed to her sickness, leaving her family and her newly obsessive lover distraught. Tanzler insisted on buying an expensive stone mausoleum in Key West Cemetery for her remains, and with her parents' consent, she paid a mortician to prepare her body before sealing her within.

The relatives of Hoyos did not realize that Tanzler would retain the lone key to the grave. Tanzler would swiftly take advantage of this opportunity, resulting in one of the most gruesome stories ever written.

Tanzler visited Hoyos' cemetery nightly for nearly two years, a practice that unexpectedly ended when he lost his job for undisclosed reasons. Although her family found this abrupt change in behavior to be a bit odd, they could not have guessed the cause behind it.

In April 1933, Carl Tanzler took Hoyos' remains from the mausoleum so that he would no longer be need to make nightly visits to the cemetery, as she was now housed in his home.

Now two years deceased, Carl Tanzler was left with the task of maintaining Hoyos’ corpse. He did this, as needed, inside of an old airplane he had repurposed into a makeshift medical laboratory.

There, he used a variety of do-it-yourself techniques to preserve the decaying body of the young woman, including plaster of Paris and glass eyes to maintain the integrity of her face and coat hangers and other wires to stabilize her skeletal frame.

He attempted to preserve her original form by stuffing her torso with rags and covering her head with genuine hair. Tanzler applied large amounts of perfumes, flowers, disinfectants, and preservatives to Hoyos' face in an effort to keep the putrid odor away, and he applied mortician's wax to her face on a regular basis to keep her "alive."

Carl Tanzler clothed the corpse in a dress, gloves, and jewelry before placing it in his own bed, which he shared for the next seven years.

Hoyos' family began to believe that something was amiss when the entire town began talking about a reclusive guy who was frequently spotted purchasing women's apparel and perfume, and a local youngster reported seeing the doctor dancing with what appeared to be a huge doll.

In 1940, the game was up when Hoyos' sister appeared at Tanzler's house. There, she discovered what she believed to be a statue of her deceased sister. Tanzler was arrested for tomb robbing after officials immediately realized that this "doll" was in fact Hoyos herself.

An autopsy of the deceased showed the intricacy of Tanzler's work, including a paper tube put between her legs to form an improvised vagina, although Tanzler never acknowledged to necrophiliac acts.

A psychiatric evaluation ruled that Tanzler was fit to stand trial, despite claiming that his ultimate plan was to fly Hoyos "high into the stratosphere so that radiation from outer space may infiltrate her tissues and restore her life"

Despite this, the statute of limitations for the alleged offense Tanzler committed had expired, releasing him from custody.

Hoyos's corpse was put on display at a nearby funeral home, where approximately 7,000 people gathered to view the decomposing remains. Her remains were finally laid to rest in Key West Cemetery in an unmarked burial.

During his trial, Carl Tanzler actually garnered a great deal of sympathy, with some even considering him as a hopeless, albeit eccentric, romantic. However, he continued to live alone for the remainder of his life and died in his home in 1952, where he was discovered three weeks later.