Into The Madhouse: The Complete Reporting Surrounding Nellie Bly's Expose of the Blackwell's Island Insane Asylum

By Nellie Bly

"PLUCKY NELLIE BLY!"

 

Nellie Bly's undercover story on Blackwell's Island propelled her to fame. Yet today no one knows the incredible uproar she caused, first as a "madwoman", then in her own person. For the first time, readers can experience the battle that raged for weeks in the press, the fierce effort to undermine her before she could complete her tale, and the many accusations by the doctors and nurses to discredit her. 

 

"No young writer has ever leaped into such sudden fame in New York as Miss Nellie Bly, who did that lunatic asylum exposure for the New York World. She is a bright, handsome young lady, less than twenty years old, who came to the metropolis from Pittsburg a few months ago, and pluckily undertook to make her living by newspaper work in the great city. She deceived the expert physicians who examined her, and pronouncing her insane they consigned her to one of the insane wards of Blackwell's Island, where she dwelt among horrors for ten days, noting down in her quick brain all that she saw and heard. The old song says:
"Nellie Bly, shuts her eye
When she goes to sleep," 
but she seems never to have closed a peeper during the whole of that trying ordeal. Her narrative of the horrors of the place—the indifference of doctors, the neglect and cruelty of the nurses and the tortures inflicted upon the unfortunates, is told in a plain, straightforward manner and attests at once to her humanity and truth." - November, 1887

 

This volume collects all the reporting surrounding Nellie Bly's blockbuster undercover story that launched her to fame, including all three versions from her own pen: 
- Bly's initial account across three articles for the New York World
- Bly's bestselling book Ten Days In A Mad-House
- Bly's long-form 1889 article Among The Mad for Godey's Lady's Book

Also included are over two dozen contemporary articles relating to Bly's madhouse stay, including the attempt by the New York Sun to scoop Bly on her own story! With a foreword by David Blixt, author of What Girls Are Good For: A Novel Of Nellie Bly, The Master Of Verona, and Her Majesty's Will.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Sordelet Ink
• Release date: Jan 18, 2021
• ISBN: 9781944540883

Nellie Bly

Nellie Bly (1864-1922) was an American investigative journalist. Born Elizabeth Jane Cochran in a suburb of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, she was raised in a family of Irish immigrants. In 1879, she attended Indiana Normal School for a year before returning to Pittsburgh, where she began writing anonymously for the Pittsburgh Dispatch. Impressed by her work, the newspaper’s editor offered her a full-time job. Writing under the pseudonym of Nellie Bly, she produced a series of groundbreaking investigative pieces on women factory workers before traveling to Mexico as a foreign correspondent, which led her to report on the arrest of a prominent Mexican journalist and dissident. Returning to America under threat of arrest, she soon left the Pittsburgh Dispatch to undertake a dangerous investigative assignment for Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World on the Women’s Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell’s Island. After feigning a bout of psychosis in order to get admitted, she spent ten days at the asylum witnessing widespread abuse and neglect. Her two-part series in the New York World later became the book Ten Days in a Mad-House (1887), earning Bly her reputation as a pioneering reporter and leading to widespread reform. The following year, Bly took an assignment aimed at recreating the journey described in Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days (1873). Boarding a steamer in Hoboken, she began a seventy-two day trip around the globe, setting off a popular trend that would be emulated by countless adventurers over the next several decades. After publishing her book on the journey, Around the World in Seventy-Two Days (1890), Bly married manufacturer Robert Seaman, whose death in 1904 left Bly in charge of the Iron Clad Manufacturing Co. Despite Bly’s best efforts as a manager and inventor, her tenure ultimately resulted in the company’s bankruptcy. In the final years of her life, she continued working as a reporter covering World War I and the women’s suffrage movement, cementing her legacy as a groundbreaking and ambitious figure in American journalism.

Book preview

Plucky Nellie Bly

No young writer has ever leaped into such sudden fame in New York as Miss Nellie Bly, who did that lunatic asylum exposure for the New York World. She is a bright, handsome young lady, less than twenty years old, who came to the metropolis from Pittsburg a few months ago, and pluckily undertook to make her living by newspaper work in the great city. She deceived the expert physicians who examined her, and pronouncing her insane they consigned her to one of the insane wards of Blackwell’s Island, where she dwelt among horrors for ten days, noting down in her quick brain all that she saw and heard. The old song says:

"Nellie Bly, shuts her eye

When she goes to sleep,"

but she seems never to have closed a peeper during the whole of that trying ordeal. Her narrative of the horrors of the place—the indifference of doctors, the neglect and cruelty of the nurses and the tortures inflicted upon the unfortunates, is told in a plain, straightforward manner and attests at once to her humanity and truth. It will be strange if the story of Nellie Bly does not impel some reforms at Blackwell’s Island.

—Texas Siftings

Foreword

by David Blixt



Thus began the mystery of Nellie Brown, a captivating puzzle that transfixed New York newspaper readers for two whole weeks, from September 25th to October 9th, 1887. A young woman had taken a room in a boarding house and, during her stay, had gone inexplicably mad. Never violent, never a danger to herself or others, she was nonetheless a figure of terror for the other women in the house. She was too quiet, too wild-eyed. She had no luggage, could not recall anything of her past, and kept accusing those around her of being crazy. Hauled before a judge, she was deemed insane and sent to the Insane Asylum on Blackwell’s Island (today known as Roosevelt Island).

Of course, Nellie Brown was none other than Elizabeth Cochrane, the reporter who for the last three years had written newspaper stories for the Pittsburg Dispatch under the name Nellie Bly, and she was about to make history.

Ornament 6 Ornament 6

How it happened is as good a story as the madhouse stay itself. On September 22nd, 1887, Bly was at the end of her rope. She’d moved to New York earlier in the year, confidently expecting to be snapped up by one of the great New York newspapers on the strength of her provocative stories from her time in Pittsburgh and Mexico City. She’d made quite a name for herself in those places, writing about the oppressed and the forgotten, often with herself at the center of the story. Although not a brilliant writer, she was an amazing journalist because she owned two innate skills: an unerring notion of what makes a good story, and a keen talent for interviews. Through charm, flattery, and pure openness, she could make people speak of things they’d never before revealed to a reporter.

None of that, however, was of interest to the newspaper gods of Gotham. They spurned her. Even when she happened upon a neat trick to get in to see every major editor, interviewing them about women reporters as a means of getting an unofficial job interview, each and every one of them said they had nothing against women reporters, per se, but women were not as dedicated or daring as men (shades of today’s "I’d vote for a woman. Just not that woman").

Furious, Bly was determined to show them they were wrong.

Matters came to a head on that Thursday evening in September when her purse was stolen during her train ride home. It had contained nearly $100, every cent she had in the world. Suddenly broke and alone, she did not flee back to her mother in Pittsburgh. Instead she did what only she could have done. Borrowing train fare from her landlady, she rode back into the city and marched into the offices of Joseph Pulitzer’s trendsetting newspaper the New York World and demanded to see the editor-in-chief, John Cockerill.

Getting in by sheer determination and persistence, she pitched the Colonel a story idea: she would travel to England, then return in steerage with all the immigrants to write about the difficulties of coming to America.

Intrigued, Cockerill took the idea to Pulitzer, who nixed it—not because it was bad, but because it was too foreign. They wanted a homegrown sensation. So when Cockerill returned to his office, he pitched the twenty-three-year-old Bly a different story. If you’re brave enough to tackle the crossing in steerage, maybe you’ll be brave enough for this. We’ve heard rumors about Blackwell’s Island…

In 1887, Blackwell’s Island and Ward’s Island were the city’s repository for society’s inconvenient souls, those no one wanted to look at. For fifty years they had held a prison, the prison hospital, and the insane asylum. The criminal, the poor, the sick, and the insane—they were all shipped off to these vast institutions smack in the middle of the East River. Underfunded and disregarded except by those across the water who pointed and stared, the islands were forever spawning rumors of mistreatment and cruelty.

Who actually thought of it, we’ll never know for certain. Bly’s first account says that she was asked. According to a World biography of Bly, it was Joseph Pulitzer himself who concocted the plan. A private internal memo gives the credit squarely to Colonel Cockerill. But a crony of Cockerill’s wrote him after the story came out, claiming credit for having slipped the Colonel the idea.

What we do know was that the twin islands had certainly been in the news of late. For two months every newspaper was reporting disgraceful conditions. Headlines were made when two keepers on Ward’s Island were charged with manslaughter for killing a lunatic. Every paper had reporters trying to get the scoop on what was happening in these public institutions, to no avail. What they really needed was someone on the inside.

Bly accepted at once. Even had she not been destitute, it was exactly the kind of story that appealed to her: it was about injustice, and it involved women. Nellie Bly could never hide her outrage at an injustice against women.

Feigning madness, she got herself arrested, committed, and spent ten days in the asylum on Blackwell’s Island. The most dangerous part of her plan was that she had no real means of escape. She had to rely on her erstwhile new employer to see her freed.

What happened next made history. 

Ornament 6 Ornament 6

When I set out to write What Girls Are Good For: A Novel Of Nellie Bly, I was initially drawn to everything other than the madhouse story. It seemed familiar, commonplace, old hat. Comedy Central’s Drunk History had done a hilarious version of it, it had been the subject of a Google Doodle, and the tale had been translated to film several times over.

Then I read it again, and was reminded why it lives on to this day.

Bly’s experiences are so very personal, and so very real. What Nellie endures is a heroic journey, a crucible of her own making. She becomes the voice of the voiceless, and she does it by walking a mile in their shoes.

The characters are all the more tragic and terrible for their realness. Her fellow inmates, especially Anne Neville and Tillie Mayard, are too familiar. The callousness of the doctors rings frighteningly true. And the nurses! Apparently the character of Nurse Ratched in Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest was inspired by Nurses Grady and Grupe.

Even the way Bly tells the story feels like a descent into madness. She begins methodically, with a clear chronology of events right up to her entrance and first night on the island. After that the storytelling becomes episodic, with no clear sense of which day is which, or the order of events. It’s as if we’re living that life with her, each dull and endless day punctuated by some horrific or malicious event. The events remain, the rest fades in the memory…

Except this story has never faded. It has gripped one generation after another, right from the moment that copy of the Sunday World hit the stands that chill October morning in 1887. 

Ornament 6 Ornament 6

Bly’s breakout story could not have come at a better time for the New York World. Though it had been around since 1860, it had been a rather moribund enterprise, bought and sold by wealthy financiers in the hopes of touting their own monetary enterprises. Both Thomas Scott, the president of the Pennsylvania Railroad, and Jay Gould, one of America’s great robber barons, owned the paper for a time. But by 1883, when Gould sold it, the World was losing $40,000 a year.

It was bought by Joseph Pulitzer, and he immediately set about building circulation in the most innovative ways. Hiring Colonel John Cockerill (who had once shot a man dead in his office at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch) as editor-in-chief, the two men set about building a tireless journalistic titan. Cockerill innovated the frequent use of illustrations (photographs still didn't copy well) to grab readers’ attention. Then came the campaign to raise funds to build a base for the Statue of Liberty. Pulitzer didn't shy away from using the paper to promote his politics, but he and Cockerill both had an innate sense of showmanship, and together they pioneered what would come to be known as yellow journalism.

In the fall of 1887, they were about to launch a new enterprise: an evening edition entitled The Evening World. Half the length at half the cost, the one-penny paper would be a brief of the day’s events and scoop the competitors on anything that had happened since morning.

But they needed a story to draw attention to the World and boost sales.

And along came Nellie Bly. In a coup of timing, planned or not, they were set to launch the Evening World the day after her madhouse story was to run. They were certain it would create at least a modest splash—the plucky young girl braving untold dangers to uncover a scandal.

Her gender mattered in several ways. Artist Walt McDougall, who accompanied her on stories for the World and provided the drawings for her madhouse articles, said this of the timing of her arrival: Her appearance was at the precise moment when sensations were coming so fast and so plentiful as to begin to pall and a fillip was needed. This was supplied by femininity.

Pulitzer and Cockerill had no idea the phenomenon they were about to unleash, or what a discovery they had made in the girl reporter from Pittsburgh. 

Ornament 6 Ornament 6

The public was immediately made aware of the pretty insane girl thanks to the press accounts that saw in her story all the romance and gothic drama their readers craved. Newspapers penned breathless accounts of the mysterious young lady who had no memory of who she was.

No paper was more shameless in their promotion of Nellie Moreno than the New York Sun. They played up the sensationalism to the hilt, only to be skewered by their own thirst for drama when the truth was revealed.

Freed from the asylum at last by Cockerill’s lawyer on Wednesday, October 5th, Bly knocked out pages of text in just twenty-four hours, and by Friday it was in the hands of the delighted editors. McDougall went to work on the art while Cockerill began clearing the decks for the big reveal.

The World published the first part of her account that Sunday, October 9th. To say it was a sensation is understating the effect. It caused a furor. One can only imagine the eagerness with which the World’s readers devoured the tale of this slip of a girl outwitting doctors and undergoing near-torture to get her story.

One can also imagine the reaction of the doctors and staff on Blackwell’s Island. This was beyond mere egg-on-the-face embarrassment. This was utter humiliation, one that would dog their careers for years. They had to find a way to salvage the situation before the second half of the story ran.

Fortunately for the doctors, they had an eager ally. Having been entirely duped alongside the doctors, the Sun hastened to smear Nellie Bly. Worse, it attempted to scoop her on her own story. Over four days Sun reporters conducted interviews on Blackwell’s Island, viewing every document relating to Nellie Brown. Certain that disaster was in the offing, the officials on the Island dealt alternately in self-serving excuses and backhanded compliments to the cunning reporter. The nurses, rightly suspecting themselves to appear as the worst villains of her next piece, were allowed to concoct wild stories about her behavior, from violence to threats of suicide. Their aim was not only to discredit Bly, but also to inoculate themselves by asserting firmly that any trouble on the Island had been caused by Bly herself.

The Sun’s story ran on Friday, October 14th, 1887. They had been fooled, yes, but due to the World’s tantalizing delay to maximize their Sunday sales, the Sun could respond to the public’s demand for the full story, beating Bly to the punch by two days.

They didn’t stint on space. Spread over six columns, two on the front page, four on the second page, their account was a hatchet job. Starting off with praise, little by little they chipped away at Bly’s actions, making her seem like a skilled liar, a fabulist, a sensationalist, not an actual reporter.

Bly’s story was so ubiquitous that on the same day the Sun published their story, the Brooklyn Times ran a single line at the bottom of Page 2: Oh, give us a rest about Nelly Bly. Couldn't even spell her name right.

The second half of Bly’s madhouse story was published the following Sunday, and she gave no quarter—the bath, the food, the chloral, the cold, the cruelty, all of it was there, and the World’s readers devoured it. The vindictive Sun had only succeeded in whetting the public’s appetite for the full story from Bly’s own Blackwing pencil, which was more horrific than anyone had imagined.

It was impossible to do anything but believe Bly’s unvarnished, blunt, and sympathetic account of her asylum stay. Horrors aside, here was Bly doing what she did best—humanizing the downtrodden. Through a magical alchemy of empathy and anger, she transformed paupers into people, transmuted the insane into intimate friends, souls in need.

But she wasn’t finished. The Sun’s story clearly hit a nerve, tarnishing her amazing achievement. On Monday the World ran a rebuttal piece in which the furious Bly savaged the Sun’s reporting. Its title alone was damning: Untruths In Every Line. Starting with a shot at the Sun’s legendary editor himself, she tore their scoop to shreds, ticking off point by point every falsehood they had printed in their attempt to scoop her on her own story. Pulitzer's other papers joined in the fun, and the Sun had to retreat to lick its wounds.

By then Bly was already working on new undercover stories, pioneering what became known as stunt journalism. Declining offers to go on the stage and relive her experiences in the madhouse, she went on to do two solid years of stories, some silly, some sordid, some so dangerous as to defy belief.

Over the course of Bly’s career, we are only treated to rare glimpses of the aftermath of her stories. In this case, however, we have a clear picture of the reaction at the time. There was an investigation, and thanks to her, changes were made to how such institutions were run. The story Bly emerged with was more damning than anyone could have imagined, and spurred a massive crusade to improve asylum conditions on the part of Pulitzer’s paper. They even proudly referred to their push on it as newspaper bossism.

On the personal side, Bly was able to afford an apartment, and invite her mother to come live with her. She was also asked out by one of the doctors she had fooled, and their names were linked through the following year.

Then came the book. Today reporters routinely write books as long-form versions of stories they have reported. Nellie Bly was a trendsetter for this as well. It seemed perfectly natural at the time. After the sensational uproar her exposé caused, the demand from readers who had missed the newspaper articles was enormous.

That demand was met by Norman Munro (called Ian Munro in the book’s frontispiece), younger brother to famed publisher George Munro. Splitting from his brother, Norman had set up a rival publishing firm, and was in need of something that would cause a stir. He saw just that in Bly’s account, and rushed Ten Days In A Mad-House to print at the end of 1887, complete with McDougall’s original art.

Munro had such good results with Mad-House that he then collected her earlier Mexican stories for another volume, Six Months In Mexico. Then, in 1889, after she made her famous globe-girdling race, Bly released Around The World In Seventy-Two Days. Though Munro did not publish that book, that same year he paid her an unheard-of sum to pen serialized novels for his weekly paper.

Lost for over a century, those eleven newly-discovered novels offer a fascinating glimpse into Bly’s mind as again and again her real-life articles serve as inspiration for her fiction. In two of those novels Blackwell’s Island plays a prominent role. The protagonist of In Love With A Stranger is twice committed to the insane asylum, once escaping Bellevue before she is transported, and again by leaping into the river and risking drowning rather than be beaten and sent to The Lodge. Then, in The Love Of Three Girls, one of the titular trio is an orphan raised on the island. In that book Bly turns one of her real-life tormentors into a fictional villain by having Nurse Grupe shake a baby to death.

But it was Ten Days In A Mad-House that first etched the persona of Nellie Bly into the American imagination, and it is how we still perceive her. Brave. Smart. Determined. Vulnerable. Undaunted. And angry. 

Ornament 6 Ornament 6

At the close of 1887, Pulitzer’s World had a new marquee name for its bylines. A woman. Nellie Bly had done more than expose the conditions at Blackwell’s. She had changed journalism on three fronts:

First, she had made popular undercover reporting, something that had existed, but not been in the public's imagination before her feat.

Second, she had advanced the cause of women in journalism, putting the lie to the canards she had been fed just that summer by all the editors she had interviewed about women not being brave or tough enough for hard assignments. Her achievement lent itself to a whole new perception of a woman’s capabilities, and forged more than a century of popular culture, not only through real-life reporters but also fictional ones such as Lois Lane, Lana Winters, Maggie Dubois, and all the silent film heroines who portrayed plucky girl reporters. It has been my motto since I started writing about Bly that the real Lois Lane never needed a Superman.

Third, she had fed the beast of stunt journalism. Thanks in large part to her, the World’s circulation started a meteoric rise, first reaching 250,000 readers a day, then as she continued risking more and more, past 300,000. On the day she returned from her race around the globe in 1890, the World’s circulation exceeded 350,000 copies sold.

It might have been Pulitzer’s paper, but it was Nellie Bly’s World. 

Ornament 6 Ornament 6

This volume collects for the first time all three versions of Bly’s retelling of her stay on Blackwell’s Island—her original World articles, her book Ten Days In A Mad-House, and her 1889 story in Godey’s Lady’s Book, the bestselling magazine published from 1840 to 1898.

Ten Days In A Mad-House is only slightly longer than the original World articles, but given the rush to print it is understandable—Bly had nearly no time to make changes to the text before sending it to Munro for typesetting. Nevertheless she did manage to add something to every chapter save one, sometimes adding quite a bit. She fixed seeming infelicities, peppering the text with commas. Sadly she did not break up the paragraphs that had been crafted to save column inches in a newspaper, where space was at a premium. But she did insert two wholly new chapters (Chapters 15 and 17) to fill out her experience and note the after-effects of her story.

The published edition of Mad-House included two more Bly articles unrelated to the asylum experience, likely present only to flesh out the page count. They have been omitted here, but can be found in the collection Nellie Bly’s World: Vol. 1, 1887-1888.

This volume also includes all the important articles relating to the madhouse exposé. To my knowledge none of these articles have appeared in print since their original publication in 1887, and they provide a fascinating context to Bly’s stay on Blackwell’s Island. Starting with the breathless coverage of the mysterious insane girl, readers can follow along with the story as it unfolds in real time, and watch as the Sun goes all-in on its coverage of the Insane Cuban Girl. The World, naturally, remains silent, not wanting to give away the game, and also not wanting to be accused of deliberately misleading the public before the big reveal.

What’s absolutely fascinating, yet utterly predictable, are the reactions by everyone involved once the story is told. The head doctor on the island denies, denies, denies. The government official in charge of oversight claims to be thankful for the story, and points out that the whole thing wouldn’t be an issue if there were just more funding. The nurses accuse Bly of stirring up all the trouble herself, even down to trying to borrow a cigarette(!). And the two major newspapers trade blows, one trying to tear down the girl reporter who made a fool of them, the other building her into an icon for the age.

The best part is Nellie herself blackening the eye of the Sun and of the nurses. The hefty amount of praise she lavishes upon Dr. Ingram is telling, especially as his was the name linked to Bly's socially after the whole ordeal was over and he had moved into private practice.

There are a few other articles, added for color: a letter to the editor, a meditation on women journalists that acknowledges Bly’s achievements with incredibly backhanded praise, and a snake-oil salesman leaping upon the story to peddle his patent medicine.

All these stories are presented in chronological order, right up to the World’s triumphant declaration of Bly’s achievement in getting the system overhauled, blazoned with the headline Nellie Bly Led the Way!

Next comes the most familiar version of the story, Ten Days In A Mad-House, followed by the third iteration of the mad-house story in Godey’s Lady’s Book.

In short, this book is an attempt to collect every relevant scrap of the madhouse story that appeared in print between 1887 and 1889. I have transcribed these articles myself, creating a standard format for their presentation here that somewhat recalls the newspaper style of the time. I’ve done no serious editing, save fixing glaring typos, closing unclosed quotation marks, and standardizing names. For example of this last, Bly alternately calls the policeman who escorted her to court as Bockert and Brockert. As this error appears in both newspaper article and book, I have employed the one she seems to have preferred (complicating that decision, the Sun uses Brockert).

For non-Bly articles, I have left names in place as they appeared, which results in a wide variety of misnomers: Mrs. Irene Stanard is referred to as Mrs. Stenard, Mrs. Stinard, and Mrs. Standard. And Nellie in her guise as a madwoman is called Mareno, Moreno, Marina, and so on.

As Pulitzer posted in his newsroom: Accuracy, accuracy, accuracy! With that in mind, save for a few spelling oddities of the time, any mistakes are entirely my own.

Some of the text might seem a little repetitive, as newspapers quote either Bly or each other. Such is the nature of a comprehensive collection.

I owe a huge debt to Brooke Kroeger for supplying several of these articles. Her biography Nellie Bly: Daredevil, Reporter, Feminist is the definitive one, an insightful and comprehensive work that I refer to constantly in my own research on Bly.

The remainders of the articles gathered here I found myself, and the curation is entirely my own. My aim is to present, for the first time, a comprehensive retelling of Nellie Bly’s madhouse experience.

I hope you enjoy your descent into the madhouse.

— David Blixt

Chicago, 2021

Into the MadHouse

The Collected Articles

Who Is This Insane Girl?

THE NEW YORK SUN

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 25, 1887

SHE IS PRETTY, WELL DRESSED AND SPEAKS SPANISH

she wandered into matron stenard’s home for women and asked for a pistol to protect herself—is her name marina?

A modest, comely, well-dressed girl of 19, who gave her name as Nellie Brown, was committed by Justice Duffy at Essex Market yesterday for examination as to her sanity. The circumstances surrounding her were such as to indicate that possibly she might be the heroine of an interesting story. She was taken to the court by Matron Irene Stenard of the Temporary Home for Females at 84 Second avenue. The Matron said that Nellie came to the Home alone about noon on Friday, and said she was looking for her trunks. She was dressed in a gray flannel dress trimmed with brown, brown silk gloves, a black straw sailor’s hat trimmed with brown, and wore a thin gray illusion veil. The closest questioning failed to elicit any satisfactory account of her. During the night she frightened the minister by insisting that she should have a pistol to protect herself. She said that she had some money in a pocketbook, but somebody took it away from her. Her voice was low and mild, and her manner refined. Her dress was neat fitting. The sleeves were the latest style.

In court Nellie was not even terrified into giving any account of herself when informed that she was charged with insanity. She was perfectly quiet and went willingly with the matron. The burden of her talk in reply to many questions put to her by the matron and Justice Duffy was this:

I have no father. He is dead. So is my mother. I had a grandfather, but he is dead. I don’t know where I came from. I am going to New York. I want to get my trunks. I have got nice clothes in my trunk. The hat is not mine. I was trying to remember this morning where I came from. I used to live in Cuba. I have forgotten how to speak Spanish. Oh, how many questions they ask me, why should they ask me so many questions? I want these men to go away. That man is a reporter. I don’t want anything to do with reporters. I came on a railroad. That is the way I always go. I don’t see why my private affairs should be made public. I came to try and get work. But I do not know how to work. I tried to do type writing, but I could not work at that. They used me very well yesterday, but they don’t cook well there. I don’t remember where I came from. I am going to New York.

The girl had in her pocket thirty-three cents wrapped in white tissue paper, and a black memorandum book in where there were some rambling and incoherent writings. One sentence was: Jay Gould sends people to Siberia. Justice Duffy took a good deal of interest in the girl, and telegraphed for an ambulance. A physician from Bellevue Hospital, who came with the ambulance, talked with the girl, and could get no definite information from her. He expressed the opinion that she was demented. She was taken to the hospital, under commitment for five days, for examination as to her sanity. If pronounced insane she will be committed permanently to the insane asylum. All officials who have seen her are of the opinion that she has come from comfortable surroundings.

Justice Duffy expressed the opinion that the girl was under the influence of some drug, and that she had been ill-treated.

Matron Irene Stenard said last night that when she was in Brooklyn last Thursday she saw the girl wandering aimlessly about. She noticed her from the fact that she had on no wrap, and it was quite cool, and then she wore two veils. The next she saw of her was on Friday, about noon when the girl came to the Home. She said her name was Nellie Brown, and that she had come to stay. At dinner she was perfectly rational, but about 5 o’clock in the afternoon she began to cry, and complained of pains in her head. Matron Stenard asked her if she was in trouble, and she grew hysterical. When asked her name a second time, she gave it as Nellie Marina. That matron said, But, Nellie, you gave it as Brown a few minutes ago.

Yes. I know it: but I don’t know why I did it.

She remembered being educated in a convent near New Orleans, and spoke of the rigid rules. When asked where she used to live, she replied on the hacienda, but could not tell where that was. The servants, she said, were peons. An inmate of the home who had been taking Spanish lessons spoke a few words in that language, and the unfortunate girl began to converse in Spanish. Suddenly she put