Dear M.A.: I seem to recall a few months back you discussed the sagas of the severed heads of Santa Ana, et al. I therefore naturally thought of you when I saw the enclosed, taken from Beethoven: Biography of a Genius. — Brian A. Barnhorst, downtown

Actually, it was Pancho Villa who started our occasional series on vanished vital organs, though it’s true, Santa Ana met a similar fate. Brian’s story is about an Austrian prison warden named Rosenbaum who bribed his way into a churchyard and decapitated Franz Josef Haydn just two days after the composer’s burial in 1809. Rosenbaum was not only a fan, he was an amateur phrenologist, a student of the art of reading skull bumps to analyze a person’s character and intelligence. (Rosenbaum later confirmed that the lumps in Haydn’s music sector were very well developed, just as he had suspected.) There are a couple of versions of the subsequent fate of the pate, but Haydn the Upper and Haydn the Lower were finally reunited in 1954.

The same year Rosenbaum was handling Haydn, we had our own corpse caper unfolding in Pennsylvania. This item recently infiltrated itself into the Mat Al Missing Body Parts file, but it actually may be a Too Many Body Parts story. Anyway, it’s too good to pass up. Our hero is Revolutionary War General “Mad” Anthony Wayne. He died and was buried in Erie, Pennsylvania, in 1796. The rest of the Waynes, living and dead, were a few hundred miles away in Radnor, outside Philadelphia. By 1809 the family decided they wanted the general back. Wayne’s doctor assured them his body would by then be only a skeleton and would be no problem to transport. But when he exhumed the general, he found him in remarkably good shape, for a dead guy. It was too late to embalm the body, and it couldn’t be moved unpreserved, but Doc couldn’t disappoint the Waynes and all of Radnor. In a stroke of ghoulish creativity, the doctor dismembered Wayne, put him in a kettle, and boiled him — as in Mad Anthony soup. Once the flesh had separated from the skeleton, he fished out the bones, cleaned them up, arranged them neatly in a bed of sawdust in a new coffin, and took them to Radnor, where the general was buried again with full honors. Doc put his surgical instruments and the remains from the kettle into the old coffin and reburied the lot in Erie.