The Manning times. [volume] (Manning, Clarendon County, S.C.) 1884-current, 1904-11-02
SHE SEES GHOSTS.
Jane Toppan, Who Poisoned Thirty
One Victims, Herself Haunted
BY VISIONS CT GEosTLY FORMS

She Has Gone Mad and Screams in
Terror at Every Bowl Of Soup
OF Cup of Tea offered,
Fearing Poison.
Jane Toppan, the poiSoner Of thirty.
one people by her own confession,
during her career as professional
nurse, the most cruel woman murder
er known in modern criminal history,
is now suffering for her sins by ter
rible punishment at natures own
hands ur Gods, in the State insane
asylum at Taunton, Mass, where she
is kept. Her punishment is exquis-
itely more torturing and crueller than
death or the grave. She imagines
that the dead victims have risen from
their tombS and are trying to poison
her. As the nurses bring bowl Of
Cruel or cup Of tea to Der In her mar
row cell she screams out:
It's poisened!'
She pushes it away and covers her
face with her hands to hide the SIGHT
of the bony fingers Of her dead patients
c!utcaing at her, and to shut cut the
vision Of their Deaths heads lowering
over her.
Il is as if the ghosts Of all whom
she killed had burst loose from their
cofins and come forth to torture her
to death.
From the plump, good looking,
happy woman who entered the asylum
two years ago, chuckling over her
own clevernesS in ''fooling the doc
tors" as she called it, into calling her
insane, she has become raVing ma
MAC, and a mere skeleton.
When Jane Toppan was committed
here in Juoe, 1902, many people
thought that the electric chair had
been robbed Of its rightful victim,
declared that no form Of execution
known to law could te torturesome
enough for this inhuman woman.
Some even went so far as to cell it
a travesty on justice to allow such
.igresS in human form to escape legal
execution.
But now the wisdom Of the insanity
experts and Of the courts has its fair
right to consideration.
Nature, through Gcd, iD it's own
way, is working punishment more
terrible than ~ odiayial torture could
have devised upon this woman, who
darsd to violate one Of the great Ten
Commandments:
Thou shalt not kill"'
Day and night she is living over
the crimes she committed.
Sometimes tae wing in which she is
confined is aroused at night by pierc-
ing shrieks and the cry Of Fire, fire."
It is Jane Toppan in her cell imag-
ining that some one is setting FIRE tcs
the bed OF which she is sleeping.
Four times she set fire to houses
where she was living-at Professor
Wilson'S, in Cambridge, in the hope
that the shock and excitement would
kill weak, sickiy Mrs. Wilson. But
this plot failed. Again at the Dakln
cottage, at Cataumet, on Cape Cod,
she started blaze in closet to de-
stroy aged Mr.. and Mrs. Alden P.
Davis. This attempt also failed, so
she poisoned both Of them a few weeks
later. On two other occasions she is
known to have set freS to see her vic
tins roast.
Now she is haunted by the fear that
others are trying by burn her alive.
Week by week Jane Toppan IS
growing weaker as her crazed mind IS
racked by torments.
Within the last week the physicians
at the asylum have me to think she
cannot live the year out.
Nearly every day OF night she
breaks out with some new phantom OF
fear.
Oae night she alarmed the patients
aud attendants in the north wing
with frantic cries Of
''Help, help-doctor-they're poi
soning me-"
When nurse reached her cell Jane
Torpan was dashirg round the small
room with padded walls, fighting OF
scme imaginary assailants.
'See," she moaned to the nurse,
''see how Minnie Gibbs has put NOR
ph:a into my arm," and she barred
her arm to the shoulder. The blood
was dripping from it where she had
scratched it with her own finger nails
| in ner wild desire to dig out the i'm
aginary poison.
Jane T0ppan killed Minnie Gibbs
by injecting morphia and strophia
hyperdermically into her arm when
her patient was too weak to swallow
poison in liquid form.
DR.. Stedman, the famous alienlst,
who still continues to study Jane
Toppan's case, tells of her physical
collapse this year by starving herself
and bee. ming reduced almost to a
skeleton through fear OF being poison
ed through her food:
She had bee; me very abusive to the
purses, defyipg their authority ano
melting patients to DO the same, 60
ing 50 far as TO shout to meianchollc
whom the nurse was trying to fee rot
to eat the food as it was poison. her
physical condition had fallen Oh
greatly. She had lost fifty pounds in
weight in few months in conse'
uuence Of her refusal Of food because
of false belief in regard to it. Owing
to her weak condition she was remoV'
ed to the intlrmarY.
By February, 1904, she was greatly
enaciated, having lost oyer eighty
pounds, or about balf her norma!
weight, ard was SO weak that fo;cso
feeding with the tuoe was resorted to
for several days, since which time she
has eaten emporarily, but just enough