Crowds gathered, and within hours, a former fiancee of Mary’s identified the body as hers.Īccording to the coroner, her dress and hat were torn and her body looked as though it had taken a beating.
Rowing out in a small boat, they dragged what turned out to be the body of a young woman back to shore. On July 28, some men were out for a stroll near Sybil’s Cave, a bucolic Hudson riverside spot in Hoboken, New Jersey, when a bobbing figure caught their attention. The night Mary ventured out, a severe storm hit New York, and when Mary failed to return the next morning, her mother assumed she’d gotten caught in bad weather and delayed her trip home.īy Monday night, Mary still hadn’t come back, and her mother was concerned enough to place an advertisement in the following day’s Sun asking for anyone who might have seen Mary to have the girl contact her, as “it is supposed some accident has befallen her.” Foul play was not suspected. On Sunday, July 25, Mary announced plans to visit relatives in New Jersey and told Payne and her mother she’d be back the next day.
By 1841 she was engaged to Daniel Payne, a cork-cutter and boarder in her mother’s house. Still, the affair blew over, and Mary settled back into her role as an object of admiration for New York’s literary set. Her boss, John Anderson, was suspected of being in on the scheme, for after Mary returned his shop was busier than ever. The Sun, which three years earlier had been responsible for the Great Moon Hoax, was accused of manufacturing Mary’s disappearance to sell newspapers. She had been, it turned out, visiting a friend in Brooklyn. Her mother discovered what appeared to be a suicide note the New York Sun reported that the coroner had examined the letter and concluded the author had a “fixed and unalterable determination to destroy herself.” But a few days later Mary returned home, alive and well. In 1838, the cigar girl with ”the dainty figure and pretty face” went out and failed to return. A poem dedicated to her visage appeared in the New York Herald, and during her time clerking at John Anderson’s shop she bestowed her heavenly smile upon writers like James Fenimore Cooper and Washington Irving, who would visit to smoke and flirt during breaks from their offices nearby. Mary was the teenage daughter of a widowed boarding-house keeper, and her beauty was the stuff of legend. There only reason it was so crowded was Mary Rogers. John Anderson’s Liberty Street cigar shop was no different from the dozens of other tobacco emporiums frequented by the newspapermen of New York City.
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