A/N: Maria Elena Milagro de Hoyos (in pic she is alive)
Carl Tanzler, or sometimes Count Carl von Cosel (February 8, 1877 – July 3, 1952), was a German-born. He developed an for a young patient, Elena "Helen" Milagro de Hoyos (July 31, 1909 – October 25, 1931), that carried on well after the disease had caused her death. In 1933, almost two years after her death, Tanzler removed Hoyos' body from its tomb and lived with the corpse at his home for seven years until its discovery by Hoyos' relatives and authorities in 1940.
Name
Tanzler went by many names; he was listed as Georg Karl Tänzler on his German marriage certificate. He was listed as Carl Tanzler von Cosel on his papers, and he was listed as Carl Tanzler on his Florida death certificate. Some of his hospital records were signed by Count Carl Tanzler von Cosel.
Early life
He was born to a Jewish family as Karl Tänzler or Georg Karl Tänzler on February 8, 1877 in Dresden, Germany.
Tanzler grew up in Imperial Germany, but at some point, wound up in Australia just prior to the outbreak of World War I. The following "Editorial Note" accompanying the autobiographical account "The Trial Bay Organ: A Product of Wit and Ingenuity" by "Carl von Cosel" in the Rosicrucian Digest of March and April 1939, gives details about his stay in Australia before and his internment during the Great War, as well as his subsequent return to Germany after the War:
Many years ago, Carl von Cosel traveled from India to Australia with the intention of proceeding to the South Seas Islands. He paused in Australia to collect equipment and suitable boats and to become acquainted with prevailing weather and sea conditions. However, he became interested in engineering and electrical work there, bought the property, boats, an organ, an island in the Pacific—so that he was still in Australia at the end of ten years. He had just begun to build a trans-ocean flyer when the war broke out and the British military authorities placed him in a concentration camp for 'safe-keeping' along with many officers in India and China who were prisoners of war. Later he was removed to Trial Bay to a castle-like prison on the cliffs, and there the work in this narrative was accomplished. At the end of the war, no prisoner was permitted to return to his former residence, but all were shipped to the prisoner's exchange in Holland. When Carl von Cosel was released he set out to find his mother from whom he had not heard since the beginning of the war. Finding her safe, he remained with her for three years, witnessing the chaos that followed in the wake of the war. ... Finally, she suggested that her son returns to his sister in the United States ...
Tanzler's account of Trial Bay Gaol, his secret building of a sailboat, etc., is confirmed by Nyanatiloka Mahathera, who mentions that he planned to escape from the Gaol with "Count Carl von Cosel" in a sailboat, and provides other information about the internment of Germans in Australia during World War I.
Around 1920, following his return to Germany, Tanzler married Doris Schäfer (1889–1977). Together they had two children: Ayesha Tanzler (1922–1998), and Clarissa Tanzler (1924–1934), who died of diphtheria.
Tanzler emigrated to the United States from Germany in 1926, sailing from Rotterdam on February 6, 1926, to Havana, Cuba. From Cuba, he settled in Zephyrhills, Florida, where his sister had already emigrated and was later joined by his wife and two daughters. Leaving his family behind in Zephyrhills in 1927, he took a job as a radiology technician at the U.S. Marine Hospital in Key West, Florida under the name Carl von Cosel.
During his childhood in Germany, and later while traveling briefly in Genoa, Italy, Tanzler claimed to have been visited by visions of a dead, purported ancestor, Countess Anna Constantia von Cosel, who revealed the face of his true love, an exotic dark-haired woman, to him.
