Her Memory Still Gone
No One Claims the Pretty Crazy Girl at Bellevue.
Justice Duffy believes that there is a romance in her story, but Warden O'Rouke doubts it.
The well-dressed girl who wandered into the Home for Women on Second Avenue on Friday, and who said she was Nellie Marina, and again that she was Nellie Brown, is still at Bellevue Hospital. The doctors are not certain that she is insane. She says continually that men are going to kill her, and that she would kill herself if she only knew the name of the poison she wants to take. She has lucid intervals, when she talks sensibly enough about what is going on around her, but she appears to remember nothing of the past. Dr. Braisted, the physician at the insane pavilion, takes no stock in the theory that the girl is suffering from the effects of drugs. His opinion is that she is suffering from hysterical mania, but he is not certain that she is not romancing. He admits that her case is a puzzle that will take several days to solve.
The girl is probably a Cuban, and, as far as can be inferred from what she said on Saturday, it is believed that she lived in New Orleans. She walked into the nurses' room in the pavilion, with a heavy shawl wrapped around her neck and shoulders, to see a Sun reporter yesterday afternoon, and complained of the cold. She said nothing, but stood staring until the reporter spoke.
“Where are your relations?” she was asked.
“They are dead,” she answered, sadly.
As the nurse took her back to her apartment the girl said: “I never saw such a lot of crazy men as there are around this place.”'
“They are not crazy men,” said the nurse. “They are reporters.”
“They must be crazy to question me,” she answered.
Justice Duffy said last night that he was deeply interested in the girl. She was a Cuban, he thought, and had been waited upon by slaves. She called them in Spanish peons. She probably journeyed here by water, for she expressed a desire to leave by the ocean.
“There is certainly a romance,” said the little Judge, “behind her fragmentary story.”
Warden O'Rourke of Bellevue said that he considered the girl a humbug.
—New York Sun
Monday, September 26, 1887