RECENT RESEARCH — When the Emperor Norton Memorial Association had a new headstone made for the Emperor in 1934, the Association inscribed the wrong birth date: 1819. For years, The Emperor Norton Trust has traced this error to a falsified claim made by Robert Ernest Cowan (1862–1942) — a longtime friend and "history associate" of members of the Association — in a 1923 essay for the California Historical Society (CHS). Comes new evidence that Cowan revived and even RAMPED UP his decade-old birth date fakery in early 1934, and did so while he was president of the CHS board — a board that included 2 of the 4 officers of the new Emperor Norton Memorial Association — one of whom was the Association’s president. Seems that — more than we knew: In 1934, the fix was in for a falsified 1819 birth date on the Emperor's headstone.

The Emperor Norton Trust

TO HONOR THE LIFE + ADVANCE THE LEGACY OF JOSHUA ABRAHAM NORTON

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The Time Emperor Norton Was a "Pepper" Too

On Christmas Eve 1862, at the Royal Polytechnic Institute, in London, the Institute’s director, John Henry Pepper, debuted his theatrical refinement of a reflection illusion that came to be known as “Pepper’s ghost.”

The sensation had made it to the United States by the early 1870s — probably initially being performed as a sideshow attraction.

But, on the evening of 26 December 1879, the resident company of the Metropolitan Theater in Sacramento, Calif., used what they called “the Pepper Mystery” to dramatize the Emperor Norton.

It was a commonplace in the 1860s and ‘70s for theater troupes in San Francisco and elsewhere in California to burlesque the Emperor for laughs. But, it seems as though this performance might have been a little different.

Did members of the audience at the Metropolitan all slap their knees at the sight of an ethereal Emperor Norton on the stage? Or did some shed a quiet tear for the passing of an era that too quickly was slipping through their fingers?

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