On December 30, 1903 Herman Fellman hosted a theater party for his family, perhaps to celebrate his daughter's thirteenth birthday.  The party:

• Herman (or Hermann) Fellman (or Fellmann) (b.1866) – audience fatality

• Sidonie (or Sedonie or Sidonia) Anger Ruhlman (or Ruhleman or Ruehlman) Fellman
  (1869-1923) – survivor

• Gertrude Fellman (1890-1964) – thirteen-year-old survivor

• Bertha Voekel Fellman (c.1833)  – seventy-year-old fatality, her body never located
  She lived in Detroit with another of her sons, Adolph Fellman (1870-1922) and his wife, Emma Jerendt Fellman (1877-1904).

• Clara Anger Ruhlman (or Ruhleman or Ruehlman) (b.1840) – audience fatality, from Detroit

The location was Chicago's newest playhouse, the Iroquois Theater, and the presentation was a pantomime of an old fairytale, Mr. Bluebeard.  Producers Klaw & Erlanger had imported costumes and scenery from the Drury Lane Theater in London, then added songs and features for their American audiences.  The audience was filled with teachers, children and families enjoying spectacular lighting and special effects, including aerial ballet dancers. 

When a fire broke out on stage, Herman quickly got his wife and daughter to safety, then went back after his mother and mother-in-law.  By then the doorways and complicated stairways were jammed with terrified theater goers.  Herman, Bertha and Clara did not make it out of the inferno.

In 1903 Herman sent $10 each to his mother and mother-in-law who lived in Detroit, Clara Ruhleman, with invitations for the women to come to visit he and his wife in Chicago over the Christmas holidays.  They set out for Chicago by train on Dec 24, 1903, arriving that evening in time to spend Christmas Eve.  It would later be reported that Bertha Fellman, his mother, had a sense of foreboding about the trip.  There were dozens of such reports after the fire.  As a mother and worrier, if I labeled as foreboding all the times a horrible possibility has run through my mind about my loved ones, my clairvoyance accuracy, fortunately, is zero.  For Bertha Fellman in 1903 her anxiety about their trip to Chicago turned out to be accurate.  More about Bertha below.

Sixty-three-year-old Clara Anger Ruhleman's body was found at Rolston's mortuary and identified by her son, Arthur Anger, who came from Lansing, Michigan to make the identification.†

After the fire

Sidonie testified about their experiences at the Iroquois Theater before the grand jury February 15, 1904.  Two years later in Detroit, she married Alois Hastreiter and two years after that married Otto Herman Jarrendt in Chicago.

Daughter Gertrude grew up, married Fred Michael Stucker and they had a daughter named Doris.  Gertrude's family lived with her mother and stepfather in Chicago in 1920 and by 1930 had relocated to California.

Adolph Fellman lost his wife in 1904 and their five year old daughter in 1905.  He remarried a woman named Ottilie Werner (1871-1946) and they had a son named Walter Fellman (1906-1989).

Puzzle of Bertha Fellman's body

Nothing was reported to suggest that body parts from the scene had to be matched up to complete assembled corpses or that officials suspect entire body(s) had been consumed.  With the exception of a report of one severed hand found in the ice in Couch Place alley the day after the fire, and the head of one boy on the first floor, next to his body, references to body parts were in conjunction with removing bodies from the balconies.  Some had been burned badly enough that when first responders attempted to separate bodies from piles on the stairway landing and in front of the exits in the balconies, limbs sometimes separated from the body but there were no references to headless torsos or a quantity of disconnected parts assembled to make bodies as would be the case in the Eastern disaster a dozen years later. 

There is a chance that the answer to the puzzle about Bertha Fellman's body lies in an event ten years later.  In 1913 a career criminal called Spencer confessed to having stolen a body and buried it under a bogus name, Nellie Skarupa.  It was the body of a woman fifty or so years younger than Bertha Fellman's but badly damaged by the fire.  Did Bertha go in the ground as Nellie?

Possibly connected to Spencer and the Fellmans was a curious incident that took place in the few days in the first week in January between when Adolph and his wife located Herman's and Clare's body and their return to Detroit.

A man appeared at the Fellman home in Detroit, claiming to represent a Chicago undertaker.  He claimed to be there to retrieve the caskets soon to arrive with the bodies of Herman and Clara.  A relative became suspicious and took him to an undertaker the family was familiar with to discuss the arrival of the caskets.  The undertaker found the man's behavior odd and treated him coldly.  The man disappeared and did not return.  He was described as short and with a mustache.  By 1913 con man Spencer did not have a mustache but he might have had one in 1903.  If him, whatever might he have had in mind when approaching the Fellmans?  His cons were sometimes long on arrangements and short on gain, not helped by an opium addiction.

Discrepancies and addendum

* Several online sites repeat what I believe must be an error: that Herman Fellman changed his name from Sidonic Fellman to Herman Fellman. Inaccurate data entry or a character recognition error seems more probable than that a man named Sidonic married a woman named Sidonie.

†  The Everette disaster book stated inaccurately that Clara lived in Chicago.  She lived in Detroit.

Story 2685