Death
Charles Francis Coghlan died in Galveston, Texas, on November 27, 1899 after a month’s illness. He had originally come to the city with his company to perform "The Royal Box", but his illness prevented him from ever taking the stage. His body was temporarily placed in a metal casket and stored in a vault at a local cemetery to await further family instructions. At first it was decided his remains would be interred on his farm in Fortune Bridge near the eastern tip of Prince Edward Island. Coghlan had sometime earlier purchased the property as a summer home and for his eventual retirement. Several days after his death, it was announced through the press that his remains would be returned to New York for cremation. Nearly a year later the disposition of the body had yet to be decided and as a result his casket was swept away from its resting place by a storm surge generated from the deadly Galveston Hurricane of 1900. The New York Actors Club had, for several years, a standing reward for anyone who recovered Coghlan’s coffin. The coffin was eventually found seven years later by a group of hunters who found it partially submerged in a marsh some nine miles from Galveston along the east coast of mainland Texas.
Years after his death, a story arose that Coghlan’s metal casket had been recovered in 1907, not far from his Prince Edward Island proper, by a group of Canadian fishermen in the Gulf of Saint Lawrence, after drifting some two thousand miles along the East Coast of North America. Over the years some clever skeptic of this story referred to Coghlan’s casket as the “homing coffin” The genesis of the Canadian fishermen tale appears to have come from a 1929 Ripley's Believe It Or Not! column.
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