Let's dig up that little green stick

On the road to nowhere

Leo Tolstoy, the great Russian novelist (War and Peace), died on this day in 1910. Near the end of his life he wrote:

"The meaningless absurdity of life is the only incontestable knowledge accessible to man."

In his later masterpiece, The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Tolstoy tells the harrowing story of the slow, and then rapid, decline of Ivan Ilyich, a judge who has never before given death a second thought. Ilyich the materialist, forced to confront the stark truth of his inevitable passing, turns metaphysical: Will his death be his destruction?

"Death is over; there is no more death," are Ivan Ilyich's last words.

Tolstoy himself, as he neared death, resolved to find a more spiritual life on earth – at the age of 82, he ran away from home. He contracted a chill on the train, forcing him to disembark at a station along the way. The chill turned to pneumonia, and he died in the stationmaster's room, surrounded by journalists, who recorded his last words:  "But the peasants – how do they die?"

As he had requested, Tolstoy was buried on his estate, at a spot where his brother once claimed to have buried a little green stick on which was written the secret of universal love and understanding.

Read Ivan Ilyich's story:

The mouse that roared

Mickey Mouse was born on this day in 1928. He starred in Steamboat Willie, an 8-minute animated short.

Walt Disney wanted to call his creation Mortimer Mouse, but his wife didn't like the name and suggested Mickey.

Disney died Dec. 15, 1966, of complications from lung cancer. It was rumored that his body had been cryogenically frozen, and, alternately, that he was buried somewhere on the grounds of Disneyland. Actually, he was cremated and his ashes interred at Forest Lawn Cemetery. His death was not publicly announced until after his funeral, which was attended only by close family members. He left the bulk of his estate to his wife, Lillian.

It is Hollywood legend – and we'll go with it – that from his deathbed in St. Joseph's Hospital in Burbank, across the street from Disney Studios, Disney's last words were about how shabby the studio's water tower looked. The tower is adorned with the image of Mickey Mouse. Studio executives have made sure the tower is repainted every year.

Walt Disney once said: "I love Mickey Mouse more than any woman I've ever known."

Love Mickey too? Then splurge a little:

What does a cold beer feel like?

Marcel Proust, French novelist, died on this day in 1922.

"Do not the indiscretions which occur only after a person's life on earth is ended," Proust wrote in Remembrance of Things Past, "prove that nobody really believes in a future life?

"If these indiscretions are true, we ought to fear the resentment of her whose actions we are revealing fully as much as on the day when we shall meet her in heaven, as we feared it so long as she was alive, when we felt ourselves bound to keep her secret.

"And if these indiscretions are false, invented because she is no longer present to contradict them, we ought to be even more afraid of the dead woman's wrath if we believed in heaven. But no one does believe in it."

Proust's last words were: "I feel like a cold beer."

Forget about Proust--you'll never finish him.  Remember to read this:

A boy's best friend is his mother

Ed Gein killed his final victim on this day in 1957.

Ed Gein is the most famous son of Plainfield, Wisconsin.

Gein lived on a 160-acre farm with his brother, Henry, and a domineering mother. Henry died in 1944 under mysterious circumstances, and his mother passed away the next year. Ed was 39, unmarried, and in need of a hobby. He began to dig up female corpses by night in remote cemeteries. He dissected these, keeping some heads, sex organs, livers, hearts and intestines. He would flay the skin from the body and wear it himself, dancing and cavorting around the house. (He kept his mom's bedroom locked and undisturbed, and also sealed off the drawing room and five more upstairs rooms.)

Deciding he needed some newer clothes, he began making his own corpses. 54-year old Mary Hogan disappeared from the tavern she ran in December 1954. Bernice Worden, who ran the local hardware store, disappeared on this day in 1957. Mrs. Worden's son, Frank, a sheriff's deputy, learned that Eddie Gein had been seen in town on the day of his mother's disappearance, so he and the sheriff went out to the old Gein place, already known by local kids as a haunted house.

Sound familiar? Gein was the inspiration for Norman Bates, the deranged mama's boy in Hitchcock's Psycho and Robert Bloch's novel of the same name, and the serial killer in Silence of the Lambs was based on him.

In a woodshed on the farm, the men found the naked, headless body of Worden's mother hanging upside down from a meat hook and slit open down the front. Her head and intestines were discovered in a box, and her heart on a plate in the dining room. The skins from ten human heads were found preserved, and another skin taken from the upper torso of a woman was rolled up on the floor. There was a belt fashioned from carved-off nipples, a chair upholstered in human skin, lampshades covered in flesh pilled taut, a table propped up by a human shinbones, and a refrigerator full of human organs.
The four posts on Gein's bed were topped with skulls and a human head hung on the wall alongside nine death masks - the skinned faces of women - and decorative bracelets made out of human skin. There were soup bowls fashioned from skulls, a shoebox full of female genitalia, faces stuffed with newspapers and mounted like hunting trophies on the walls, and a vest flayed from the torso of a woman. Gein later confessed that he enjoyed dressing himself in skin-garments and pretending he was his mother. The remains of 15 bodies were found; Gein couldn't recall how many murders he'd committed.

After ten years in a mental hospital, Gein was judged competent to stand trial. He was found guilty but criminally insane. He spent the rest of his life in insane asylums, and died in a geriatric ward in 1984, aged 77, always, it was said, a model prisoner - gentle, polite and discreet.

His gravesite in the Plainfield cemetery was frequently vandalized over the years; souvenir seekers would chip off pieces of his gravestone before it was stolen in 2000. It was recovered in 2001 and is presently displayed in a Wautoma, Wisconsin museum.

In the last interview Gein gave, he said: "I like this place, everybody treats me nice. Some of them are a little crazy, though."

Read more about kooky Ed Gein: