She Was Severely Burned After Ending Up In A Furnace, But Could She Have Done This To Herself?
Barney Rosenhagen, the police chief of Lake Bluff, Illinois, showed up at the village hall at about 7:30 a.m. on October 30, 1928. The property served as the police station, firehouse, and town hall, given Lake Bluff’s small population, but that morning, Barney realized the building was quite cold.
So, he instructed a municipal worker named Chris Louis to head to the basement and check on the furnace. What Chris ultimately discovered has remained a haunting mystery for nearly a century.
Upon unlocking the furnace room, he walked inside and thought he’d seen a ghost, causing him to run upstairs and alert the chief. Barney traveled down to the basement to investigate the so-called supernatural phenomena and instead found a severely burned woman waving at him.
According to Barney, she was unclothed and leaning up against a pipe. She also said, “I’m cold,” and he quickly wrapped a blanket around her before calling for an ambulance.
“Her forearms were burned black. The hair was burned from her head and her face, and her forehead was black with charred flesh, the skull being laid bare at the forehead. Her fingers and toes had burned to cinders. Yet, she was standing,” he told the press.
The woman was soon identified as Elfrieda Knaak, a 30-year-old resident of Deerfield, Illinois. She’d suffered third-degree burns on 30% of her body from the furnace, leaving her heel bones exposed and a burn mark on the back of her neck. Due to this, it’s suspected that Elfrieda was face-up when her head entered the opening of the small furnace, which was around four feet tall.
The scene inside the furnace room was puzzling, as the room had been locked. Additionally, authorities found Elfrieda’s handbag, purse, and watch on the floor, yet her coat and the rest of her clothing were missing.
She spent three days in the hospital, fighting for her life, while investigators tried to determine who had done this to her. However, her story was inconclusive.
At one point, Elfrieda actually claimed, “I did it myself.” But, while in a semi-conscious state, she also allegedly muttered about a man named Hitch, saying, “Oh Hitch,” and, “I wonder why they did it.”
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It turned out that Elfrieda worked as a door-to-door encyclopedia salesperson, and on October 29, she’d traveled to Chicago from Deerfield for a sales conference. Then, she called home and spoke to a sibling to let them know that she would be home around 7:30 p.m.
But Elfrieda wound up buying a train ticket to Lake Bluff instead and departed at 6:01 p.m. She exited the train at the village hall stop, and exactly what she did after that is unknown.
As for “Hitch,” investigators learned that Elfrieda knew 45-year-old Charles “Hitch” Hitchcock, a Lake Bluff resident who was an actor-turned-police officer and also served as the town’s night watchman. He lived just two blocks away from the town hall and knew Elfrieda because she’d previously taken a speech class with him.
Even stranger, Charles had been scheduled to work as the night watchman on October 30, 1928, but since he had broken his ankle, he had taken the evening off.
The police began to suspect that perhaps Elfrieda and Charles, who was a married man with four kids, had been having an affair. Nonetheless, he denied being involved with her, and a doctor confirmed that Charles’ ankle was broken and, had he walked the two blocks to the village hall, his ankle would’ve shown signs of swelling, which it didn’t.
Elfrieda ultimately died on November 2, 1928, and she maintained that “no one ” had been responsible for her burns. Charles’ wife was unable to vouch for his whereabouts, given she’d been at work, but she claimed that Charles was asleep when she returned home.
This pushed authorities to look into other suspects and, eventually, consider the possibility that Elfrieda really had been responsible for her own death. Upon searching her home, they found a book entitled “Christ in You,” in which Elfrieda had underlined a passage reading, “As you unfold in the consciousness of God, many inexplicable things become clear. One is the purifying power of pain. This is the process called The Refiner’s Fire.”
Nonetheless, the physician who oversaw Elfrieda’s care at the hospital, Dr. Arthur Rissenger, found it hard to believe that she’d committed suicide and instead suspected foul play.
“To believe her story, you would have to believe these facts: that she placed her right foot in the furnace and kept it there for several minutes. Then, she stood on the burned foot and put the other one in the fire, after which, standing on the two injured feet, she thrust her head and arms into the fire upside down. The pain would have been excruciating,” Dr. Rissenger told the Knaak family’s private investigator.
Nonetheless, the private investigator was unable to find any evidence suggesting that someone else had been responsible for Elfrieda’s burns. Plus, in November 1928, a shocking anonymous letter was sent to State’s Attorney A. V. Smith.
The unidentified author of the letter referred to Elfrieda as “Bub” and confessed to having hypnotized her, forcing Elfrieda to “sacrifice herself in the furnace” in order to help her overcome her unrequited love for Charles Hitchcock.
“The letter-writer, who claimed he was a friend of the young woman, said he had prevailed upon her through hypnotism to burn herself in hopes of ridding her of her secret love for Charles Hitchcock, Lake Bluff actor, teacher, and policeman. The state’s attorney is attempting to trace the origin of the letter, mailed in Chicago,” reported The Daily Illini on November 8, 1928.
Still, to this day, what truly happened to Elfrieda remains a puzzling mystery, particularly because 14 years after she died, her good friend, Marie, married Charles.
And once Charles passed away in 1964, Marie’s niece alleged that Marie had confessed to being romantically involved with both Elfrieda and Charles.
Her claims have not been verified, and more than 96 years later, the exact circumstances surrounding Elfrieda’s death are unknown.
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