The Silent Girl in the Lodging House
A young, unresponsive woman is abandoned at a Third and Mill Street lodging house by two unknown men.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
The case of the young girl who is lying at the lodging house on the corner of Third and Mill streets, and concerning whom there has been much talk lately, is a mysterious one. She was brought to the house a week ago by two unknown men, who left, paying a week's rent in advance, and stating that they would call again. They have not since been heard from, and the girl still remains in the room. She remains in bed almost continually and will speak to no one. The only things that she has yet told are that her name is Katie and that she formerly lived in Victoria. She will obey any commands given her without question. Although evidently insane, she has an intelligent face, and a look quite different from that of persons who are mentally deranged.
“She remains in bed almost continually and will speak to no one.”
This vignette serves as a chilling reminder of the precarity and lack of protections for women in the frontier city of the 1880s, where 'mysterious' cases often masked domestic abuse or human trafficking.
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