Submitted by Riddle on
Some truths are stranger than fiction, and there is still debate about whether this New York legend IS actually true. However, some paranormal historians have confirmed its authenticity as recently as the year 2000, citing police records and witness accounts passed down. The story highlights a bizarre haunting which resulted in a revenge phantom slaying.
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The story goes back to the mid-nineteenth century, when a gang of international jewel thieves was operating on ships sailing between New York and the European mainland. The most accomplished thief in the bunch was literally a little person: a woman in her thirties who was no taller or more developed than a six year old and looked no older than one either. Born Estelle Ridley, she used the name Fanchon Moncare in her criminal enterprises. She traveled frequently by ship, escorted by her “governess,” an older woman named Ada Danforth. Fanchon would charm wealthy passengers aboard the vessels into revealing where they kept their jewelry; Ada would sneak into unattended staterooms and steal the baubles, and Fanchon would hide them in the doll she always carried. This doll had a removable china head and a hollow body cavity, in which the stolen jewels would brazenly be carried through customs—now what customs agent was going to upset such a sweet little girl by asking to search her dolly? I ask you!–and thence to Manhattan’s Chinatown to be fenced.
Once in Chinatown, safe from the prying eyes of the authorities, Fanchon Moncare dropped the sweet little girl act. She drank, cursed like a sailor, smoked cigars, and drove such hard bargains that the Chinese fences who resold the jewels and took a very small percentage of the proceeds gave her the nickname “midget of the devil.”
Fanchon and Ada made a fortune in the jewelry theft business, in their most audacious score taking a quarter million dollars’ worth of gold, silver and precious stones through customs stored in “Dolly’s” belly. Things began to go sour, however, when they took on an accomplice, a young woman named Magda Hamilton.
Some versions of the story say that Magda actually replaced the aging Ada Danforth as Fanchon’s “governess”; others, that she and Ada had a falling out over a man and Magda turned police informant for spite. The Ripley’s version, which omitted Ada from the gang altogether, maintains that Magda was angry because Fanchon, after initially promising to cut her into the enterprise fifty-fifty in a theft involving a Chicago businessman, gave her only a third of the profits they made, arguing, quite sensibly, that since Fanchon herself did all the work save the actual thefts, she should get the bulk of the profits.
Whatever the cause, Magda Hamilton turned state’s evidence. Her testimony netted her a short sentence; Fanchon Moncare was sentenced to life. The last time Magda saw Fanchon alive, Fanchon vowed that she would have her revenge.
Magda served her time, got out, and married a wealthy man named Dartway Crawley. They bought a mansion on New York’s Staten Island, and then Dartway Crawley left his wife and went to California.
Magda lived alone in the house.
In 1870, word came that Fanchon Moncare had died in prison, possibly a suicide.
Shortly afterward, Magda Hamilton Crawley was found dead in her bed. It appeared that she had died of suffocation. The legend goes that Fanchon Moncare returned from the grave, appeared in Magda’s bedroom, and killed her by shoving the china head of her beloved “Dolly” down Magda’s throat.
The Crawley house, according to Hauck, is haunted to this day—not by the hapless Magda, but by the ghost of tiny Fanchon Moncare, the Devil’s Midget. She has been seen both inside the old mansion and on the widow’s walk on the roof. - https://fairweatherlewis.wordpress.com/2010/04/25/the-devils-midget/