The Mummy of John Wilkes Booth

The cover story of the Memphis Flyer this week is a macabre history article on the alleged mummy of Lincoln's assassin, John Wilkes Booth, and how it ended up, for a time, in a garage in Memphis.

Sweating furiously, the old man pried open the wooden crate and peered inside. Memphis attorney Finis Bates breathed a sigh of relief when he saw that the fragile contents were undamaged.

"John, my old friend," he said. "You're home at last!"

Lying inside was the mummified body of an elderly man Bates believed was John Wilkes Booth. How the corpse of Abraham Lincoln's assassin came to rest in a Central Gardens garage remains one of the strangest episodes of our city's past.