Countess Ida von Claussen

claussenfinal

Cameron: [00:00:00] Welcome back to Lost Threads, episode three. My name is Cameron Ezell.

Cory: And I'm Cory Munson.

Cameron: And we've got a big episode today, don't we, Cory?

Cory: Yeah. You kind of hit some research paydirt here.

Cameron: I was like searching around for different like cults or religions and some old newspapers and completely unrelated. I just found this thing about an Ida Von Claussen, and so I just searched her name and it's led to this huge just amount of information. You can't find a Wikipedia page on Ida Von Claussen. If you Google search her, there's like one article that comes up. It's truly amazing how much she was written about

Cory: all, all of your sources are [00:01:00] from newspapers. It's all between, what was it like 1906, 1907

Cameron: and I think the latest is up somewhere into the 1920s.

So she was written about for, you know, a good 20 years or so. So with all that being said, let me go ahead and introduce today's subject. Mrs. Ida Von Claussen, sometimes known as Countess von Claussen. She was an eccentric rich heiress who spent most of her life bouncing around between fancy hotels in Europe and the US.

She never worked a day in her life and was often found rubbing elbows with European royalty such as Italian, Swedish, and Russian princes. So Ida wasn't really written about much prior to 1907. That's kind of where she became known to the world.

Cory: Can you go into her pedigree a little bit here? Because she does come from, if there ever was an American aristocracy, she, she comes from some wealth.

Cameron: She was the daughter of Adolph Claussen, a wealthy sugar merchant from Germany. And her mother, [00:02:00] Jenny, was an American who died when Ida was only seven. Most of Ida's Wealth came from her great-grandfather on her mother's side, who was named Matthew Burns. He was a wealthy real estate developer in New York during the 19th century.

Cory: So her father was a, a sugar merchant.

Cameron: Yeah. That's where he made his money and was actually pretty well known.

Cory: And he didn't, so his name was Adolph Claussen. He didn't use the Von Claussen. Um, I, I remember seeing in a paper that the, the Von Claussen was something that Ida took up for herself whenever she was referring to herself.

Correct?

Cameron: Yeah. She was basically the only one in the family who used Von Claussen. She kind of became interested with Germany. She spent a lot of time there, and that's kind of where the story all starts in 1907. Before we get to that, uh, just to fill in a few things here. So at age 19 in 1893, Ida was married to Dr. William Francis Honan of South Dakota, and years later, they adopted a baby daughter named Natalie. In 1905, they [00:03:00] were divorced and Ida maintained custody of Natalie, who was about three years old at the time. And that brings us to our story in 1907. So Ida and her daughter Natalie are in Wiesbaden, Germany, and King Oscar II of Sweden happened to be there celebrating his 78th birthday.

Ida sent her daughter over to the king with a bouquet of roses and wished him a happy birthday. The king supposedly was very pleased and asked that the mother of the girl be presented to him.

Cory: So she's going to see King Oscar II with her daughter. Just a little bit about King Oscar. He is the king of Sweden.

This is going to come up a little bit later, so I do want to give a little bit of background politically what's going on in Sweden at the time. Only a couple of years before this, Sweden and Norway were the same country under King Oscar's reign, there was a more or less an amicable separation between the two countries.

Oscar II, who's a bit of a [00:04:00] philosopher king, he was a composer. He wrote poetry. I read that he, he submitted poetry for a contest in Sweden under like a pseudonym, and he got second place in that national contest for his poetry. So he was, he was definitely, um, a man of the arts.

Cameron: Yeah, I, I, from what I read, he was pretty popular because he just looked over this dissolution as something that the populace wanted.

Now suppose, Cory, that a king came to you and asked you of all the things you most desire, what you would like.

Cory: Um, I mean, honestly, if we're being honest, I would probably just ask for a signed picture of him.

Cameron: Well, that's close to what Ida did. Uh, she actually replied that she desires more than anything, the pleasure of, again, meeting your majesty.

That's all she wanted in the world was to meet King Oscar II again. Uh, so what Oscar did is he told Ida if she ever comes to Sweden, she must at once come to see him. So [00:05:00] he gave her a signed portrait and says this, my signed portrait, will always prove your passport among my people in Sweden. And then King Oscar also gave Ida permission at this time to add his name to her child's.

So Ida renamed her daughter to Natalie Oscar von Claussen. So after changing her daughter's name, Ida talks with some of her Swedish friends and they insist she has to go and meet him. So she goes with her Swedish fiance, Baron Lindberg, and when they arrive, they're told that the typical process is to be presented to the king through the formality of asking the American ambassadors at Sweden.

Who at the time was Mr. Charles H. Graves and his wife, who also plays a part in this, Mrs. Alice Graves. So Ida writes a letter to Mrs. Graves and then three days later writes one to Mr. Graves requesting a presentation. What she gets back is a very rude reply saying that she needs [00:06:00] actual credentials. And what she sends back is a bill from a notable surgeon for removal of her appendix.

She sends some letters showing that she has money in the bank, in a New York trust. She sends what is essentially like a business card that has the phrase written: "this is the handsomest man in Paris". She also included a letter from a Frenchman saying that he could not work with us. Wait, well it say this is the sexiest man in Paris.

I know him.

Cory: I mean, it's interesting to me, like she's just saying like, I am part of the upper crust. Here's a very wealthy and well-known doctor. Here's a sexy man in Paris. People know who I am.

Cameron: Exactly.

Cory: Let see the damn king.

Cameron: Yeah. That's all she's trying to do is say, I have rich and powerful friends. And one of the things she also included was a letter from a Frenchman saying that he could not live without seeing her again.

I don't really know how that plays into her knowing rich people, but, uh, these made their way to Mr. And Mrs. Graves, and they found it all to be kind of ridiculous. They actually called them quote "scraps of [00:07:00] introduction".

Cory: Do you think that what they, what they really wanted was like a letter from the state department or a letter from like someone in, in, in the, in the royal court saying like, yeah, please admit her entrance.

Cameron: Essentially at first it was basically they just wanted a passport and she only had three-

Cory: Oh, she was, she was traveling without a passport.

Cameron: Yeah.

Cory: And you can just do that back then, huh?

Cameron: Well, kind of. I mean, at some point she runs into problems with that, but she only has three days to come up with it.

You can't get a passport in three days while you're overseas back in 1907. So that's what she sent in lieu of a passport.

Cory: Maybe she'd kind of lived off of her, her charms and her connections for so long. She just was like, uh, passport? I don't need a passport.

Cameron: I mean, we do find throughout this story that her charm really took her a lot of places.

So when Mr. And Mrs. Graves called these scraps of introduction and said that she can't meet the king, this really pissed off Ida because she has [00:08:00] met King Oscar II. He said, come to Sweden. Here's my signed picture. This will get you everywhere. For some reason, this whole story just blew up. So she reaches out to these papers in the US and gets her entire story told about meeting King Oscar and getting this photo and these ambassadors not allowing, uh, her to be presented to the king.

And she claims that if she doesn't get a personal interview with President Roosevelt, she'll spill so much gossip about the ambassador that there will quote "be strewn about the official corpses of a number of diplomats besides their often interfering wives".

Cory: So let's pump the brakes just a little bit here.

She meets the king. The king says, come to Sweden. She goes to Sweden. She visits the ambassador. The ambassador says, no, I'm not gonna let you see the king. It, it's an understatement to say like news coverage. If you look at the newspapers from the [00:09:00] day that she decided to go to the press with this incident, it is not only national news in all of these local papers and all of these major papers, it is just dominating the front page.

Cameron: There was the Washington Times, the New York Times, the Washington Herald, the Times Dispatch, the Los Angeles Herald, San Francisco call. This is all over. It's not some mention on the third page of the paper. This is like they put her photo, they put her entire story in her own words, like two pages worth.

It's amazing.

Cory: And so like this is the part that caught your eye, right? Where it's, what's the big deal here? Like we'll get into more like what she did about being spurned and whatnot, but just the heavy, heavy media focus that there was on this incident.

Cameron: Yeah, she was just amazing at getting press coverage.

She really knew how the media worked back then, I think. And we'll see examples of that. And uh, so at this point, Ida is calling on President Roosevelt to meet with her about this [00:10:00] situation and to punish Charles Graves, the ambassador. The White House is refusing, directs her to the State Department if she has an issue, but President Roosevelt is not gonna waste his time talking to Ida Von Claussen.

Cory: So let's talk about Roosevelt really quick, just in terms of how he comes up in the story. Roosevelt was one of the first presidents in the 20th century. He is up there with George Washington and Abraham Lincoln in terms of having just this, um, this,

Cameron: he's one of the iconic presidents.

Cory: Yeah, this, this tough guy. Mustache wielding independence.

Cameron: He's a badass.

Cory: Um, another thing that I think we should bring up is how thoroughly modern Roosevelt was in terms of how he dealt with the media. You know, today we see the president use the press as a tool for accomplishing tasks.

Cameron: Yeah. He was probably the first president to start using the media as a tool for his own benefit where he would just leak things out and if it got a bad response [00:11:00] when it was written about, he'd just claim, no, I never said that.

Cory: Before the 20th century, you could argue that it was Congress, it was the legislature that had the most power of the three branches.

But kind of starting with Roosevelt, it became the executive branch had all the decision making power and could play to the public. And a lot of it came from, from working with the media and being able to change public opinion or test the waters directly with the public. They don't need to go through any other source.

They don't need to. You know, the president doesn't need to debate anything with 400 other people in a room. The president can just say something, it immediately gets put in the papers and they can instantly have a, a finger on the pulse of, of where the American public is and try and sway the American public with, without worrying about the other branches of government so much.

Cameron: Now speaking of using the press as a tool, Ida was very skilled with this. She mainly used it to get the public on her side, so she reached out to the press once [00:12:00] Roosevelt refused to meet with her. So she gave a prepared statement to a group of journalists asking for Roosevelt to at once appoint a committee of experts to make sure that she is of sound mind before she proceeds further in this case for she knows well from previous reports that when President Roosevelt is cornered, he has a habit of appointing such committees to help him out of his difficulties.

And again, she's just trying to meet with Roosevelt so that he can punish Charles and Alice Graves, the ambassador to Sweden and his wife. Now, this is not the first time President Roosevelt has had a big public spat.

Cory: Yeah, I mean, it wasn't hard to find, if you look at any of the articles that were written about Ida during this, principally in the first week, but this stuff continued on for, I don't know, would you say months?

Cameron: Oh, like probably a year or two.

Cory: Often at the end of these articles, there will be a paragraph that brings up the fact that this is not the first time that, um, Roosevelt has slighted somebody and slid into controversy. [00:13:00] Two that come up really, really often are the Morris incidents.

You know, the, the infamous Morris incident. Ida von Claussen should be careful that she doesn't tread into the same waters. Um, and then there's the Dear Maria incident. Let's talk about the Morris incident first. So this is in 1906. So one year earlier, Mrs. Minor Morris attempts to visit Roosevelt at the White House.

She was there because she wanted Roosevelt to investigate an incident involving her husband. Basically her husband was in the Army doing some sort of logistical stuff. He was laid off. She went to the war department to ask why he was laid off or get more details. They refuse to see her, so she decides to go directly to President Roosevelt.

Um, when she's at the White House, she gets as far as the president's secretary who says, uh, you can't see President Roosevelt. You can't just march in here. She's like, I don't mind waiting. And she sits down and the president's secretary again is like, [00:14:00] you don't get to see the president. You gotta go. She refuses to go.

And so the president's secretary summons some policemen and quoting from the article: "they rushed forward and seized this lady and began to drag her out of the White House". Another policeman joins in, grabs Mrs. Minor Morris by the legs. So right now they're holding her like by the shoulder and by the legs, and she's just like screaming while they drag her out into the White House lawn.

They throw her into a police car, they take her to a station. She's charged with disorderly conduct. And then the president's secretary is like, oh, throw insanity in there as well. I'm gonna get her charged with insanity. She's released and then she spends weeks bedridden. This was a huge, huge national scandal.

It was called the Morris Incident. It was picked up in all the papers. Congress even got involved and called out Roosevelt on the floor for how this whole situation was handled. So that's the Morris incident. The Dear Maria incident happened a couple years earlier. This one's not as violent, but there [00:15:00] was, um, this lady named Maria Storer.

She was a wealthy aristocrat from Ohio. Um, she had really close ties with Roosevelt. Roosevelt even appointed Maria's husband as ambassador to Austria-Hungary. So like they're tight. Maria was Catholic and she really wanted this guy named Archbishop John Ireland to be appointed as a cardinal. She gets a lot of support from politicians, including Roosevelt.

Back when Roosevelt was a governor of New York, like 10 years earlier than this, Roosevelt was all on board for it. He was like, yeah, cool. I'll, you know, I'll endorse this guy. As soon as Roosevelt becomes president, though, Maria starts lobbying him again. And at this time Roosevelt's like, um, listen, I'm president and I can't really, a little bit of a conflict of interest with church and state.

I'm sorry, I can't do this. Maria is like, well, you wrote me these really nice letters 10 years ago. I'm just gonna send them to the Pope. President says, please stop doing that. Maria keeps doing it. She keeps using Roosevelt's name. Roosevelt ends up firing her husband as ambassador to [00:16:00] Austria-Hungary.

Cameron: Ooh.

Cory: And they, uh, they just, it's, it's a big feud. It's a huge, huge feud in the papers. So it's called the, the Dear Maria incident. There are others, and the papers are more than happy to point out all of the separate scandals that, that Roosevelt has had.

Cameron: And I think Ida probably saw this and came to an understanding, that outspoken, eccentric woman that go against the President, they're often labeled as insane.

So she quote says, "the trouble at the White House is that they often mistake cleverness for insanity".

Cory: So this is a weird place, right Cameron? Because it's 1907, the 19th Amendment doesn't come out until 1919, right? The 19th Amendment that lets women not be second class citizens anymore, and um, gives them the the right to vote and to participate in government.

That's still a decade out. But it was still very, very possible to say "that woman is insane". Right? "Lock her up."

Cameron: [00:17:00] Yeah, it happened, uh, very often back then, as we will see later in this story. So another interesting note at this point is that Ida speaks to the press and says that there's apparently a contingency of people working against the king in Sweden who never reconciled to the separation of Norway and Sweden.

And there's apparently a paper in Sweden run by this party and is the only one which Mr. Graves, the ambassador to Sweden would provide a quote for. And what I think is kind of a very Tucker Carlson style, Ida just asks the questions, "how much does Mr. Graves know about the workings of this so-called revolutionary party? Does he dare tell?" And Cory, I told you this and you told me that this party just didn't even exist.

Cory: Well, I'm not sure. I mean, I don't think it did, but there's no evidence that it didn't, you see? But it could have, we're, we're gonna, we'll, we'll, we'll get into that part a little bit later.

Cameron: [00:18:00] So at this point, we're in September, 1907, few months after this all began, and Ida has left the US as well as her fiance, Baron Lindberg.

Um, there's a story in the papers now about how Ida is now engaged to Prince Paul Ouroussoff, son of the Russian Ambassador to Austria. Prince Paul-

Cory: wait, what happened to her fiance?

Cameron: I mean, it didn't really say just She's done with her fiance, Baron Lindberg. Now, uh, prince Paul's father, the ambassador, was against this marriage to an American woman.

So he has Russian secret agents scout out her villa in Godeburg, Germany to make sure they didn't flee and get married in secret. Almost a year later, Ida is back in the news because not only is Prince Paul Ouroussoff still interested in marrying Ida, but now so is Prince Sforza Caezarini of Rome. So clearly Ida is very popular with [00:19:00] royalty abroad.

Now, Ida's been out of the news at this point for about a year. So she decides she is going to sue President Roosevelt and Ambassador Graves for a million dollars. This is November 7th, 1908. And one thing I wanna note is the timing of this, because the 1908 US presidential election was a few days before this announcement where William Howard Taft won against William Jennings Bryan. So Roosevelt, he was a lame duck at this point, and I wonder if that plays into this whole decision to try to sue him.

Cory: Oh, like he wasn't going to have any protection after he had left the White House.

Cameron: Right. He'll have less power or, you know, we kind of ran into this with Trump in office that, you know, people were trying to sue him and there was a lot of questions in the press.

Like, can you sue a sitting president? Maybe there was kind of the question back then, and she was just kind of getting the ball rolling before he left office.

Cory: What was she suing Mr. Graves and President Roosevelt [00:20:00] for?

Cameron: (laughs) That's a great question. I never got a clear answer. I think it was, I mean, it all had to do with disrespecting her and I'm not really sure what legal standing she's had, you know, I mean,

Cory: So from, from her point of view, she couldn't get satisfaction from the State Department for her complaint. And then she couldn't get satisfaction from the executive branch, which oversees the State Department. So from her point of view, she was like, I had a complaint, I had an issue, and there was no way for me to have any kind of resolution on it whatsoever.

Cameron: Right. And throughout Ida's life, she's always going through the court system, trying to right every wrong in her life and this being the big one. And you know, just suing for a million dollars back then, that's just like an unheard of amount of money in these kinds of cases. So at this point in our story, Oscar II died back in December 8th, 1907.

There's a new king and queen of Sweden that are now in power, [00:21:00] Gustav V and Queen Victoria of Baden. One interesting note about King Gustav V, he was very athletic and was an accomplished tennis player. He presided over the 1912 Olympic games in Stockholm and actually competed in tennis representing Sweden under the alias of Mr. G. And he was inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame in 1980.

Cory: How annoying would it be to be like a talented person in Sweden and you're like either a good poet or a good tennis player, and then there there's like the king wearing like a fake mustache, you know, just kicking everybody's butt on the court or just like writing a way better poem than you, like, you're already the king.

Give this to me. I need this.

Cameron: I would be so pissed if President Biden killed me in Fortnite, like if he was just amazing at video games. So a year after his death, 1908, Ida lets the newspapers know she has succeeded in meeting the new king and queen of Sweden while in Paris, and she was able to see them by presenting her signed photo of Oscar II.

Cory: Good thing she kept that.

Cameron: A few months later, [00:22:00] Ida let the papers know that she received a visit from the Duke of Murdon of the Swedish Court who told her that on King Oscar's deathbed, he told him he would like for Mrs. Von Claussen to marry a Swede, preferably his son, prince Eugene.

Cory: This is something she told the papers.

Do you know this or is this something that this minister in Sweden said?

Cameron: This was something Ida told the press. There was no quote coming from the Duke of Murdon.

Cory: So she's basically like, oh yeah, and the, huh, funny thing, when the King died, he said that I should marry a prince in Sweden. I don't know

Cameron: man, it's kind of crazy.

Cory: I don't speak Swedish, but,

Cameron: and this is a small story, but I just bring it up. It's important for something later on. Um, Ida is being sued by Baron Lindberg, her ex-fiancee for $16,000. He gave her three loans for $5,000 each, and is suing to reclaim those plus interest.

Cory: Before we move on to other things, just, I think one thing we forgot to talk [00:23:00] about is that she, she has a daughter.

Cameron: Yeah, yeah. We, we mentioned that because she's her daughter, Natalie. Yeah. Her daughter Natalie brought the roses over to King Oscar II initially.

Cory: Right. And then she had another daughter before that, right. With her very, very first husband. Um, they adopted a kid.

Cameron: They adopted a baby, and then it said they had, they had a baby of their own, and so they gave the adopted baby back to the family.

But they're still saying that Natalie is adopted,

Cory: but she was not adopted? I, I don't, that part kind of confused me.

Cameron: Yeah. It's unclear in the papers sometimes they say that Natalie is her own natural born daughter. Sometimes they say that she's adopted.

Cory: So like the first baby was like SPCA. Try it out. If it doesn't work, just give it back to the family.

Cameron: They got a refund. So it's now 1910, 3 years after this whole thing started, this small little story and, [00:24:00] uh, Ida is again being reported on for no real reason, aside from the fact that journalists love her. She makes mention of a book called Forget It, that she's written and she's trying to get it published and it's been banned in England and France for her caustic criticism of President Roosevelt. I think it's more likely she just couldn't find someone interested, even though she's offered to cover the cost of publication and she's also writing another one at the same time called The Hypocrisy of Democracy. She's been assured that it's a classic, but there's absolutely no market for it.

So in this same article, she's also reporting a of a patent application of hers. That's an automatic air cushion balance for airplanes.

Cory: Bit of a Renaissance woman though, right?

Cameron: Yeah, I mean, it's pretty incredible, but I couldn't find any record of it. She said that the idea had been accepted by Baehr & Mayer of the Paris Delahaye Automobile company.

I don't know if that patent exists or not, or what happened to it. [00:25:00] It's possible that it got made. I just don't know. So at this point, Ida is still talking about her million dollar suit against former President Roosevelt, any chance she gets. Ida's also now saying that since she's tried to sue President Roosevelt, there have been six attempts to kill her.

She says, quote, "twice I have been poisoned and escaped still. Other attempts were made to poison me. I've been fired at going from London to Paris, and the bullet passed not two inches over my head. Another time I walked directly up to the revolver, held by the hand of my would-be assassin. His courage failed him and he fled. I have witnesses to prove the truth of my statements."

And around the same time, in 1910, she decides that she wants her former husband to start helping to support their 8-year-old daughter Natalie, who she is also now being referred to as Oscarine. So the reason she's now trying [00:26:00] to get the support, she claims that their divorce was never truly legal because she was only in South Dakota for six weeks, and for the divorce to be legal, she would've had to have been there for six months. We'll come back to this later, but it's important that that's out there. So by June, 1910, again, this is three years after this all started, um, she is now finally filing her suit against Roosevelt, ambassador Graves, Mrs. Graves and Robert Bacon, who was Secretary of State at the time. And I really loved this story. So she actually called a bunch of newspapers, told them she was going to file, and so they all flood over to the county clerk's office with her in New York where she hands over a folder and the county clerk just this nice old man just smiles up at Ida and stamps the folder.

And then he opens it and sees that she's suing President Roosevelt and this former Secretary of State. And he is like, oh, you, you can't file this [00:27:00] here. It belongs to the United States Federal Court. And she just says, "yes you can, and have!" And laughed and floated out of the office.

Cory: But seriously, ma'am, you can't, like, I can't process this, this, this will go nowhere.

Cameron: And so I think like as far as I can tell, some of the papers say that it wasn't really filed due to irregularities, but at the same time, it seems like this case just continued through the county system.

Cory: If this was a movie, that's exactly what would happen and it'd be like, well, he did, he stamped it. You know, so it has to go through, I think like if this happened today, it'd be like, uh, no.

Cameron: Remember I brought up that case against her earlier for those unpaid loans to her ex-fiance, Baron Lindberg?

Cory: Three loans of 5,000 with $1,000 as interest.

Cameron: Right.

Well, she lost the case and the funds were just taken from her trust fund, and she's at the courthouse just absolutely screaming at the top of her lungs at a Mr. [00:28:00] Rolands who just manages the trust for her great-grandfather's estate. This again, seems like another small story that I'm bringing up just about her yelling at some guy in court.

Uh, but the reason I mention this is because of what happens the next month. So Ida shows up at the office of the US Mortgage and Trust Company in New York to withdraw $25,000 and is refused. So she beats up the first vice president and second vice president of the trust company. And here's the quote:

"Mrs. Von Claussen rushed across the room, and as Brewer arose from his chair, she landed a right jab on his jaw that grazed a piece of skin off of his chin. A second blow was warded off, but her diamond ring cut a gash in his wrist. She then swung a right to the side of Brewer's head and he fell over his chair. Rasmus came to his chief's assistance, but Mrs. Von Claussen grabbed him by his coat lapels, shook him like a cat shakes a mouse, and hurled him backwards, sprawling to the floor."

Cory: This is just [00:29:00] John Wicked, this whole, uh bank building up.

Cameron: I love this story. I was cracking up reading this and it is a great story and at the same time, this is where things started to kind of fall apart for me. Like as entertaining as that was, there was one paper, the New York Tribune, which detailed the entire ordeal and spoke to a few more people besides just Ida Von Claussen. So what happens is Mrs. Von Claussen called on multiple newspapers to let them know that she's heading to visit her bankers to withdraw some money, and she knows how much they love reporting on her.

So a few of them follow to get the story while waiting outside the trust company. She's escorted outside by the police and then tells her story, but the New York Tribune talked to the trust company and got their story. They claim she only showed up to withdraw $500, not 25,000. And when they weren't able to provide her with that $500, she began yelling and was escorted out of the premises. No [00:30:00] punches were thrown. So at this point, you know how much of what has been reported on this entire time is the truth and what has been a fabrication or exaggeration by Ida just providing her story to the press?

Cory: It doesn't really matter how much of it she exaggerated, she could say whatever she wanted to. What matters is that this story and everything that you've told me came directly from the newspapers, usually front page newspapers for days and days and days on end. It, I mean, and in terms of the blip of, of national and international affairs at the time, it's, it's all about just like kind of a celebrity worship and sensationalism.

And I think a lot of this has to do with yellow journalism.

Cameron: Yeah. I remember learning a bit about yellow journalism back in high school, and there was the blowing up of the USS Maine and who it was attributed to. And I mean, I don't remember all the [00:31:00] details, but, so if you want to go into that.

Cory: Yeah, sure.

And let me just, let's just set up what kind of yellow journalism is. Um, it was something that was born in like the 1890s and it, it came out of a time when newspapers were trying to reach a wider audience. You had a lot of people, a lot of immigrants moving into the cities. You know, before, before the American Civil War, most Americans did not live in cities and they all had their own independent newspapers.

And it was, it was pretty decentralized. But when you have a lot of people moving into cities, um, the newspapers started to change, right? They started to address things that would be interesting to city dwellers. They started to focus more on, um, corrupt politicians and crime because they noticed that when they talked about those things, they sold more newspapers.

Well, if you're a, a newspaper in the 1890s and you find out that if you talk about this topic and you start to sell more newspapers, well, if you want your paper to do better than all the other competition that's out there in the same city, you're gonna [00:32:00] start publishing more of those kinds of stories. Papers, specifically the New York Journal, um, and the New York World, which are kind of the two poster children, newspapers of yellow journalism. Um, they started, uh, to compete with each other, to take stories and to just blow them up to, to just these proportions where they didn't necessarily have to say things that were true. They didn't have to attribute quotes correctly. All they had to really write was things that the public wanted to read about.

The New York Journal was run by William Randolph Hearst, and the New York world was run by Joseph Pulitzer, the Pulitzer that would go on to have a, um, a legacy of endorsing and recognizing great journalism. Yellow journalism, the two tenets of it is that the press and people associated with the press found out that they could greatly impact public opinion regardless of the authenticity of a story.

And a [00:33:00] byproduct of this also is that people didn't trust newspapers because of this sensationalized reporting. So people still consumed these newspapers, but they still, um, were very wary of what the media was putting out because there was not a lot of fact checking going on.

Cameron: Uh, you know, the story about her beating up the bankers, you know, this is kind of where it fell apart for me.

And we were talking about yellow journalism. These made up facts and this actually kind of seems like it's about the end of her being able to just tell her story unchecked. Um, from here on out, most of what I found in the papers just happened to be, you know, whatever happened in the courtroom. And a reporter who was assigned to, you know, write down the proceedings or whatever, was just hanging out in the courtroom and would write down, oh, Mrs. Von Claussen had this happen. And it seems like it's not these long interviews where she just gets to say whatever she wants. [00:34:00] One of the first things that we find is actually Ida wins her case against Theodore Roosevelt for the million dollars by default judgment. He didn't show up to court and I don't think she's gonna ever see that money.

I don't even know how this went through all the way to the point where she won the case by default judgment. You can't go to small claims court today over a million dollars.

Cory: I won't pretend to know anything about the court system.

Cameron: But there is one place where she was able to get her own voice out and that is her book Forget It, which finally got published.

We actually stumbled upon it. And Cory, you read through this book, right?

Cory: Yes, I did. I'm, uh, so I'm, I'm kind of at a loss of how to categorize or describe this book. It chronicles all of the events that we've talked about so far. It starts with her daughter meeting the king on her daughter's [00:35:00] birthday, and the daughter and, and then and the king giving the signed pictures a passport and saying, come visit me.

And then it goes-

Cameron: Well, wait, wait, wait. It's not Ida though. It's Countess d'Importance.

Cory: Yes. Yes, absolutely.

Let's set that up. It's written as a fictional story. All the names and all the places are different. So like, for example, like you said, her name in the story, it's not Ida, it is Countess Lorraine d'Importance. Instead of Stockholm, she doesn't go to Stockholm, she goes to Stockland. She doesn't refer to America. America is Freedonia. Um, and then there's just lot, like lots of names that are spelt backwards. So instead of King Oscar II, it's King Roscoe II.

So in terms of the style of the book. I guess it's written like a fairytale, but it, it's really, really verbose and it's really, really flowery. I, I'm just gonna give a couple of examples from the text so you can kind of get a sense of how it's written. I will just say this though, Cameron, it is a hard read.

It is not easy to read.

Cameron: Yeah. I read through like the first five pages and then you said you were gonna read it [00:36:00] and I let out a huge sigh of relief.

Cory: Yeah. Like I tried my best. Right. It's, it's 277 pages long. Uh, and I think that without the context of the research that we'd been doing and, and reading the papers, the book is incomprehensible.

And I'm not trying to say this like mean, it's, she, she did a good job with the language. It's, it's written well. She's obviously a very, very intelligent person. Um, she's writing it assuming that you already know everything that's gone on in her life. When we were in parts of the book where we've talked about, like with our research so far, I could follow along. But there were some chapters that were just totally impossible for me to follow.

Also, it's being filtered through like a fantasy metaphor. So everything's changed a little bit. And then there's- you'll see what I mean here in a, in a second. But I think the reason that she wrote the book is that she was just such a media darling for years, and maybe it's because, you know, she was starting to peter out a little bit and her story was starting to go away.

But like, I [00:37:00] genuinely believe that she thought that she was in the middle of a huge conspiracy and that she was the only person that could fight the system. There is just way too much passion in this book and way too much detail for me to think that she was just doing this as another publicity thing.

It's not like she wrote like a 20 page pamphlet, like this is a 277, uh, thick book to get through.

Cameron: Who's the audience for this? That's what I don't get.

Cory: Okay. So the, the book starts with her saying

"Friends, but principally enemies, if this book pleases not, it matters little. It has been written in a week."

So I think she's, this book is for people that doubted her.

Cameron: This book's for the haters.

Cory: The book is for the haters. I'm not gonna try to summarize this book because I don't think that I can. I wanna highlight some specific passages with a focus on how Ida chose to represent those parts of the story.

The book starts with a quote.

"If woman's wits was weighted with man's and scales were [00:38:00] used as tests, I fear that man would have to know that woman's wits the best." Do you know who said that quote?

Cameron: Man, that is a great quote. I'm gonna guess that that was Ida though.

Cory: Yeah, she uh, she quotes herself on the very first page of the book.

Okay. So. The book starts with Lorraine. Remember? That's Ida. She goes on a carriage ride in the forest. While she's in the woods she hears this child crying for help. She sees that there's a man carrying a child on the forest path. Lorraine takes out a pistol. The man rushes Lorraine and she shoots the man dead.

She rescues the child and adopts it and names it Grace. So already we can see like the parallel is she had an abusive spouse, right? And she rescued her child from that spouse.

Cameron: Yeah. She never shot him, but maybe she thought about doing it.

Cory: Right. So that's just like an early example of how everything else that happens in the book, you're like, I don't, 'cause some things are dead on to what the newspaper said, but a lot of things are like you're reading a Grimms fairy tale.

Mm-hmm. A really, really [00:39:00] grim Grimms fairy tale with a guy getting shot on like page four. So years later, it's Grace's fifth birthday. All that Grace wants is to visit the king of Stockland. Um, Lorraine obliges, they meet King Roscoe, who just instantly loves the child. He's so charmed by this five-year-old girl.

Lorraine walks into the room is introduced, and then there's like this instant mysterious connection between Lorraine and King Roscoe. So here's a quote from that scene:

"but a keener observer would've seen that two souls, two infinite minds, had met and that affinity of souls, like a tumultuous sea gushed into their lives from eternity.

What was the infinite saying to these souls who had never met before, say for acknowledge that their spirits were in harmony."

Cameron: She was really into King Oscar.

Cory: Well, and I think she's trying to paint that Oscar and her had this connection and that she had to go to Sweden because there's just something that was forged in that moment that was greater than their [00:40:00] two lives.

Cameron: Right.

Cory: The king invites her to come to Stockland. And the girl Grace before they leave, she's like, Hey, can I sing you, um, the first song that I remember that my nurse used to sing to me when I was a baby? And the king is like, yeah, go ahead. And the Baby Grace says, sings, the national anthem of the king's country.

And he becomes all shocked and emotional. And I wanna read this quote:

"In the sweetest, clearest baby voice, the child hummed the national heir of his country. And as she finished, his majesty clasped her to his bosom, petted, and kissed her."

Cameron: Wow, that is touching.

Cory: The king proclaims himself godfather to the child and gives the child his name and again says you should come see me in Stockland.

And then they say that they're going to do that. Um, there's like a really weird chapter after that that lasts a really long time where Lorraine goes to a witch and then the witch orders her to strip naked and [00:41:00] then reads her a prophecy about how great her life is going to be and how she's destined for great things.

But the prophecy is like written as one paragraph, and it's like a stream of consciousness thing, and it, it's like 10 pages long. It's, it's, it's crazy. So she finally goes to Stockland to see the king and fulfill her promise that they would see each other again. But as we know, they won't be able to meet because she goes to see the Minister of Fredonia.

Right. Mr. Graves the ambassador to the United States. He's not gonna let her in. He's named Monsieur le Mort, like death, I guess in French. Yeah. Here's a quote from the book where he's introduced.

"Remaining discourteously seated before a desk is a man with silver, white hair and a weak, pathetic face like that of a sick schoolboy with a smirk upon his countenance, a shallow mind and a full pocket to explain his presence."

There's a, uh, a flag of Fredonia behind Monsieur le Mort, and she says, uh, "the red, blue and white flag flaps helplessly in hands like these". So she spends a lot of [00:42:00] time just really hating on this guy. She spends a long time talking about how much she hates Mrs. Graves. I'm sorry, Mrs. le Mort. And I don't know, man, like she gets wrapped up in this huge conspiracy about this movement that's being championed by rogue agents in the King's Circle and her own government.

They're, they're trying to overthrow the king. She heavily implies throughout the book that the Mr. Graves character, the ambassador from the United States, is actively working in his own self-interest to overthrow the king. Her purpose for the last two thirds of the book is to become like a spy or an agent to undercut these efforts to overthrow the king.

She like meets up with knights and spy, remember, it's very fantasy based so she's like, tries to like, get evidence that they're trying to overthrow the king. And, um, it, it, it's a lot of stuff. It's like, I won't pretend that I didn't skim through a lot of it.

Cameron: Oh yeah, I'm sure.

Cory: She eventually gets all the evidence she needs, but then a spy takes the evidence and burns it.

So she doesn't, she's not able to [00:43:00] prove anything. Um, but in the end, she like succeeds in her mission that she was able to bring awareness to the fact that this was going to happen. And it's like a happy ending. So I don't know what to make of it. Like, do I believe most of the stuff in there? No, because it's, it's, it's fiction and I don't know, like what has been twisted to just-

Cameron: Yeah.

She's trying to make it a more interesting story maybe, or just, I mean, something that will sell. I don't know, because I guess that's the purpose of publishing this book, right?

Cory: No, I think it's like telling her side of it, but not wanting to say things explicitly for like, you know, there's like libel to worry about.

So if she makes everything a little bit more fictionalized, changes detail, she can just say, well, that's not, I mean, no, it's, it's a book. Very often in this book, she talks about how she's doing this not for herself, but for like the flag of Fredonia to uphold. Its, its Honor. A Patriot. Like there's, there's like a bunch of stands, it's like a, it's like the Lord of the Rings.

There's like a bunch of poems and like songs that she puts in there. And there's one where she's just like looking at the flag, [00:44:00] like a Mr. Smith Goes to Washington moment and just thinking about how beautiful it is and everything that it represents and how like if she doesn't do anything, the flag is all for nothing.

Cameron: Well, if any of our listeners want to read it, we will put a link to it on our website, lostthreads.org.

Cory: Good luck. It's a tough read.

Cameron: A little personal news for Ida. Her father, Adolph Claussen, passed away August 12th, 1911. He died suddenly on the boardwalk at Brighton Beach Wall, just paying a visit to Ida. 74 years old.

A few months later, she reports that his final words to her were: "Ida, there's a plot to put you in the insane asylum and you can't get out once they get you in." To which she replied, "if I am committed, I'll take good care of myself."

Cory: That's a cool thing to say.

Cameron: So earlier I made mention of a very small incident where Ida is in court trying to re-divorce her ex-husband, Dr. [00:45:00] Honan from South Dakota 'cause she said it wasn't legal. So she's back in court over this situation and she didn't wanna start until her lawyer arrived, but the judge moved ahead anyway. It really pissed her off. She got unruly, she was removed from the court. So a couple months later, October 9th, Ida shows up in Justice Greenbaum's court in New York for the case against her ex-husband.

The judge starts the morning in the court by asking his auditors in the courtroom about an unsigned telegram he received the night prior at his home demanding justice and liberty as well as some threats. Ida stands up in court and just takes credit for this telegram and the judge is super confused.

He doesn't know who she is, what case she's with, and the full text of the telegram: "justice and Liberty are all I want. If foul play marks your decision, God help you."

Cory: That sounds like a threat to me.

Cameron: Yeah, it would be a little scary. Like it, yeah, you get this at home, you're not like, it's very personal.

So the very [00:46:00] next day after she's taken credit for this, the police court has been asked by the state Supreme Court to order an examination in the sanity of Mrs. Ida Von Claussen. And it's all because of this telegram that she sent to the judge. And she is committed to the Bellevue Hospital to just until they determine her sanity.

She says if they do commit her, she'll appeal to the German emperor. She says, "you'll find yourself handling fire if you handle me. If you do such a thing, do you know what you are doing? You are taking my reputation."

Cory: Oh my goodness. But she gets committed?

Cameron: Yes. And she's diagnosed as suffering from progressive paranoia and an exaggerated ego.

I'm not sure about the paranoia, but I definitely exaggerated ego I can see.

Cory: We haven't really talked about her in terms of like our evaluation, and I don't think we are qualified at all to say anything.

Cameron: No, not at all.

Cory: I, I am taking this from a rich trust fund child who got everything handed to them, [00:47:00] and anytime that there was a bump in the road, it was immediately society's fault that that happened.

You know? And, and not a lot of personal accountability,

Cameron: but an ego, like a big ego isn't an excuse to lock somebody up in an asylum.

Cory: Absolutely not. And it's not a diagnosis. Like that's not, that's nothing medical. No. Like, oh, you have an ego.

Cameron: One note, she does tell the doctors at this time that she has occult powers and has been in communication with her dead father.

Cory: And I will say to that, what celebrity at this time didn't have a belief that they were able to lead a seance and talk to dead people?

Cameron: Right. I was gonna say that like, that's also not grounds for insanity 'cause this is something a lot of people believed in back then. But also, like you drive around town, you'll see like signs for people who, uh, do tarot or read hands or tell the future and like you aren't going and locking those people up.

Cory: Nope.

Cameron: Um, so she's still locked up in Bellevue and about a month in, she [00:48:00] tries to escape by jumping from her window and ends up breaking her ankle. So a couple months later, thankfully, Ida is released into the custody of her brother where he's given control of her finances. So she's out of there, at least ,she's with her brother.

He's gonna take care of her finances. You know, like it, it's not a perfect situation, but it's better than being in a hospital, I think. And, uh, you know, this all took place in 1911 and surprisingly, we don't hear anything in the papers about Ida for another two years. And in 1913 it's announced in the New York Times that she's engaged to a Fred L. Davis in England, and he happens to be a millionaire mine owner.

So this is great news, but uh, the marriage is called off just a few days later. It turns out that the reason it was called off is because she still doesn't have that proper [00:49:00] divorce from her ex-husband in South Dakota. This is, this is obviously pissing Ida off. She was about to marry a multimillionaire and it was called off because of this.

So she sends a letter to her ex-husband's lawyer. Here's the full text of it.

"To say that I am angry, furious, is putting it mildly. My marriage with a man worth $50 million is broken off because his lawyers say, I am not legally divorced. This is all up to your door. You sent me by force, duress, and every devilish means out to South Dakota when I could have obtained a legal divorce in New York.

Now I warn you, Mr. Strauss, to take some steps to replace the damage you have done. I tell you with malice and premeditation that unless you do retrace the way you have swindled me, I will come to New York and disgrace you publicly first, then shoot you like the dog you are. Shoot to kill. Do you understand that English? But just let this situation last another month and the [00:50:00] man I love slip outta my life forever through your fault, then I'll kill you as sure as there is a God in heaven."

So I think that's a pretty clear cut threat.

Cory: Okay. But devil's advocate, if I could marry somebody worth $50 million and I was getting stopped by some stupid legal mumbo jumbo, I would be pretty pissed off too.

Cameron: Yeah. But it's, I think you could say something threatening without like saying, with malice and premeditation, I'm going to shoot you.

Cory: Yeah. I don't think that that's gonna hold up in court very well. I mean, her first threat of disgracing you publicly, she could absolutely do that. You know, I'm, I'm assuming that she could just call up a bunch of newspapers and, and just say things and people will wanna read about Ida.

Like, I imagine at this point people either hated her or they loved her, you know, like when they saw her in the papers. It's, oh, there's Ida again. I'm sure she had like, a lot of fans, probably a lot of people that were like, heck yeah, she's fighting the system. Go her. Or, oh, there she is [00:51:00] again. She's always trying to, you know, get on the front page.

But I bet that people,

Cameron: yeah, love her or hate her. You're gonna be reading. What she has to say. Now. She is arrested when she comes back to the States for writing this letter, as you might have guessed. Her response:

"I have no recollection of writing the letter I'm accused of sending Strauss. Though I may have done so. At the time the letter is said to have been sent I was in Rome, dying of a broken heart. The real milk of the coconut is that my former husband wants me in jail. He tried to keep me in an insane asylum. Dead women tell no tales and he's trying to have me put away. I do not live for myself, but for my adopted child."

Cory: The real milk of the coconut?

Cameron: Yeah. That's the first time I've heard that.

Cory: I'm gonna start using that.

Cameron: So she's later found guilty for, uh, sending this threat and sentenced to six months in Sing Sing Prison. But they keep kind of bouncing her around through the system. One, you know, one month she's in a mental [00:52:00] asylum. The next month she's back in prison.

You know, she has these sheriff's juries say that she's sane. Then a judge says she isn't. It just kind of goes back and forth. One thing during one of these jury tests where she was actually found sane, she read a poem to District Attorney Whitman and the full poem isn't available, but the paper did print some excerpts when she read this in court and it says:

"you've locked me in grief and in shame

in a prison without a name

and you've helped disgrace.

You can never have face

on one that was born to fame."

And then they kind of skipped some lines and they, I guess the writer thought this was funny, but one of her lines was

"the crimes of the prison are sizzlin' and sizzlin'"

Cory: she was brazen enough to rhyme prison with sizzlin'. She's a very talented person, like, she is a really fantastic speaker and she's a, a writer. Like she is, she is a bit of a renaissance woman. But she also just has like such a [00:53:00] terrible, terrible temper. If I'm gonna say anything about her, it's, it's that her, her incredible mind was just used for petty vengeance.

Cameron: Yeah. She could not let go of a grudge.

So, like I said, she's bouncing around, you know, between the prison system to the mental asylum. And this is really kind of starting to anger and frustrate the Commissioner of Corrections, uh, for the women in prison, Catherine B. Davis. So November 6th, 1914, there are reports of an automobile traveling 45 miles per hour down fifth Avenue in New York around midnight. Three men on the street hear a woman yelling for help from the back of the car, and she throws them a note. And this is what the note said.

"For God's sake, phone my attorney Wallace LJ Collins to search for me. I'm kidnapped at midnight by Commissioner Davis without law pending stay and appellate division.

Signed Ida Von Claussen."

The next day, people are still trying to figure out what's going on. [00:54:00] Like was this really Ida Von Claussen in the back of this car? Was she really being kidnapped? And they're asking, you know, Catherine Davis, like, what's going on? And she's refusing to say where Ida is, just that she's in her care.

And it turns out that they've orchestrated this whole plot against Ida to keep her in an asylum because her lawyers keep interjecting and getting her free, you know, they are able to get her out of this system and they've designed something with these sealed orders. She is locked up for another year before they're able to get her out.

Cory: I mean, it's like there's no due process here. There are parts in her book where she talks about just the, this subterfuge going on at these high levels of government and that she's the only one that knows about them and has evidence for it. I tend to not believe a lot of that stuff, but like. This isn't how you treat-

Cameron: You hear something like this and it's like, well, there is like some truth to it. Like people [00:55:00] are working against her. They are able to get her out a year later. Like I said, her brother is once again put in her custody or she's put in his custody, excuse me, and a few days after she leaves the asylum, she announces that she is getting married.

That's kind of interesting. Her brother thought she was just kind of kidding or wasn't really sure she was serious, but she was. She takes her nurse along who has to stay by her side and when she's not looking, just hops in a car with a man and takes off. And she gets married in New Jersey to a man named Francis Albert Gilbert Donna who the press label as somewhat mysterious. He says he's a Philadelphia architect, but gave a fake address on the marriage certificate. And when the papers called out this, you know, discrepancy, he says he'll reveal his identity when he's ready. They're also saying that they almost have no money for their honeymoon in Atlantic City because you know, Ida's brother [00:56:00] is in charge of her funds and not giving her money for this.

So around the same time, people start to realize that this Francis Donna looks exactly like a Frank Donogan who was an attendant at the asylum where Ida was locked up.

Cory: Okay, lemme complain about this really quick. Francis Donna is Frank Donogan. If I am going to use a fake name, I'm not going to pick anything close to my real name.

Like my name's Cory Munson. I'm not gonna do like Cody Mogason. You know I am, I am Peter Hinderbilt as far as the press is concerned.

Cameron: Yes. Uh, it's not that clever. So apparently they had been seen dancing together in the asylum. They really hit it off. He got fired and started working as a hotel clerk, and the press asked Ida about this, like "Hey, isn't this Mr. Donogan?" She says, "of course the matter is annoying, but really it is quite immaterial to me. I want to reiterate that Mr. Donna is not Mr. Donogan. He has assured me he is [00:57:00] not. Even if he were Donogan and a hotel clerk, I should have married him just the same for, he rescued me from an insane asylum and I love him for that."

I still just think it's so funny that she asks her husband, Mr. Donna, if he is the person in the asylum.

Cory: No dear, that's not me.

Cameron: Yeah. Claims oh, it's not me. Well, he says he's not that person,

Cory: so get off our backs, but keep writing stories about us, please.

Cameron: So three years after this marriage, Ida is recommitted to another hospital and a year after that, in 1918, Ida's back in court trying to gain control of her own funds and is actually successful in doing so, which is great.

So she's free from the hospital, she's got her own money, she can manage her own finances. And she can go about her life. Uh, also, while she's getting her finances back, she's also trying to sue some theatrical managers [00:58:00] for stealing an idea from her book for the play A Tailor Made Man.

Cory: As far as I know, it's not from Forget It, but it could have been hidden in that witch chapter that I skipped.

Cameron: So on September 11th, 1920, Ida gets married in Reno to Captain Raymond H. Mayberry.

Cory: Wait, hold on. Wait, hold on. Wait. Stop, stop, stop, stop. A different dude?

Cameron: Yes. So I don't know how many husbands she's had at this point. I think, as far as I can tell, this would be her third 'cause it's Dr. Honan, Francis Donna or Frank Donogan.

Anyway, she does get married to this actor and, uh, six days after their marriage, Ida sues to have the marriage anulled, claiming he was only after her money. She says, so the, again, these are her words to the press. She says he bothered her for two years, begging her to be his wife and threatened to kill himself.

But the press at this point, they, they [00:59:00] talked to Mayberry and get his side of the story. He claims that Ida was never properly divorced from her husband, Francis Donna AKA Frank Donogan. And he's quoted in the paper as saying,

"who is this man Donna? There's no such man. His name is Donogan. Ida thought Donna sounded better than Donogan, so she changed it. I know positively that she was not divorced from Donogan, who is now in New York."

I mean, she had so many problems just getting divorced, it seems. And she was in Reno, the divorce capital. She could have done it there.

Cory: She was in Reno?

Cameron: Yeah. This was her last marriage here was in Reno. So, Ida is again, back in the news in 1929, 22 years after this event, and she's still being written about.

She's being referred to as the woman without a country. She was stuck in Europe for a long time. Apparently, [01:00:00] she got stuck in Monaco, was barred from practically every European country, denied a passport by the US State Department. So what happened is she had to escape Monaco into Belgium by hiding under a rug in her car, driven by her chauffeur, and with a German ID card visaed by the American console in Cologne, she sailed for Montreal.

Then she arrived in Boston through what she called a quote "back gate".

Cory: I mean that whole experience sounds like it could have been a show on its own. That is a crazy escape.

Cameron: Again, this is her quote, I think. I don't know if they were able to back this up with anything. Um, and that's pretty much the end of the press coverage that Ida gets, and that is still so impressive to me that she was able to stay newsworthy from 1907 to 1929.[01:01:00]

And you don't hear about her at all today. You can find almost nothing on her.

Cory: What about like the end of her life?

Cameron: Well, by 1940, Ida is living in Miami, Florida, where she spends the rest of her life. She will end up passing away at the age of 86 on September 23rd, 1960, and I would like to read her gravestone. It says

My valedictory. Beautiful Ida Von Claussen. Patriot, psychic, author, poet. Quote, "the parting". "When death doth cease my hours of toil, let others hear my cry. Take up the banner of God's truths and liberty for which I'll gladly die."

Cory: I mean, that's very nice and I have to assume that she wrote that.

Cameron: It seems very much Ida-like in the writing.

That is all we have on Mrs. Ida von Claussen today. If you want to see some photos, if you want a link to her [01:02:00] book, some photos of her ex-husbands, we have those on our website lostthreads.org, and thank you for listening.