The Man Who Claims He Stays Young by Being Buried Alive
Alexander J. McIvor Tyndall, a traveling mystic, shares his peculiar method for achieving eternal youth and his request that doctors not perform an autopsy if he stops breathing.
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Alexander J. McIvor Tyndall, the mind reader and clairvoyant, now at the Northern Hotel, claims he has discovered a way to maintain youth through cataleptic trances. 'I have been buried alive twenty-one days since I was last in Seattle and am stronger and younger for the experience,' he told a reporter. Fearing that his trances might lead local doctors to declare him dead and perform an autopsy, he carries a written warning on his person: 'Beware lest ye hold an autopsy or cause me to be buried while I still live. I am prone to that dreadful nervous affection, catalepsy, and if it had not been for those interested in me, my mission—that is, of placing the higher powers of man more prominently before the world—I verily would have been murdered by doctors’ scalpels.' He plans to spend thirty days buried at the Chicago Exposition later that summer.
“I lead a sort of Jekyll-Hyde existence, though in this case the part I take on is a pleasant one.”
Tyndall represents the 19th-century obsession with 'New Thought' and psychic phenomena, which flourished alongside rapid technological change. His flamboyant self-promotion and public stunts mirror the modern influencer culture, though his specific fears about medical science are a dark reminder of pre-modern medical standards.
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