UPI reports "A lock of Abraham Lincoln's hair wrapped in a telegram stained with the 16th president's blood is up for auction online."
An auction house called RR Auction, up in Boston, is peddling the lock of hair and the stained telegram, and they figure to get about $75,000 for it.
Anyone who paid attention in History can tell you, Lincoln was shot by John Wilkes Booth (the first in a long line of three-named assassins) at Ford's Theatre in Washington, April, 1865. Soldiers carried the poor man across the street to the Petersen family boarding house, where his dying body was laid diagonally on a bed, awaiting the end.
And as the postmortem examination was conducted, someone said, "Hey! Hand me the scissors, so's I can snip off a couple of inches of his hair!"
In death there is no dignity. But there will be no snipping around my recumbent form, if death should ever overtake me, or those responsible will be plagued with everything I can throw down on them.
Anyway. Dr. Lyman Beecher Todd, a cousin of Lincoln's widow, Mary Todd Lincoln, and great-grandfather of Abigail Beecher, scooped up the lock of hair and wrapped it in a telegram he had received the day before. It was fortunate for him that he had the telegram, as ZipLoc bags were not invented until 1968.
The message said "All goes well but you are missed," and that had to be the eeriest harbinger since Keith Moon sat down in a chair stenciled 'NOT TO BE TAKEN AWAY' three weeks before he died and was, indeed, taken away.
If you want to buy the hair and telegram, be aware that bidding closed September 12. I wonder where Moon's chair ever wound up.
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