Welcome to Aaron Menke's Cabinet of Curiosity's, a production of IHeart Radio and grim and mild.

Our world is full of the unexplainable.

And if history is an open book, all of these amazing tales are right there on display, just waiting for us to

explore. Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosities. Prolific authors leave behind a great deal when they die.

Not just their completed works, but every piece of paper that ever touched their pen

suddenly becomes valuable.

For their next-of-kin, going through the notes and assembling a legacy for the deceased

writer, can be a lifelong duty.

In 1912, an Irish woman named Florence fell into this very situation.

She became a widow at the age of 54, her husband succumbing to disease.

Almost immediately, she had work to do, not just in arranging his funeral or comforting his

bereaved friends, but she also had to manage his literary estate.

For work, her husband Abe had been a theater manager for most of his life, and the assistant to a famous stage actor. And while the

short stories and books were well received, they'd never sold quite as well as he had hoped.

Florence hoped, in her own way, that she could provide literary success for her husband in death that he had not

achieved in life. So throughout the 1910s, she edited together collections of his short stories

and negotiated with publishers to keep his novels in print. They provided the same modest income that

they always had, never quite enough. And then in 1922, 10 years after her husband's death, she received a strange

letter in the mail. The envelope contained a handbill advertising an upcoming motion picture,

screening in Berlin. It wasn't an invitation. She lived in London, after all, but looking at the

handbill, there was no denying that it was meant for her. Emblazoned underneath the film's title was her husband's name.

They had changed the title and many plot elements, but the film was undeniably based on the

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