According to Ella Mayhew Maxfield (b. 1866), she attended the ill fated Mr. Bluebeard matinee at the Iroquois Theater in Chicago with an unnamed friend, was badly injured and suffered from amnesia.  During her fourteen-month hospitalization, said Ella, her husband Herbert Maxfield (b. 1868), thinking her an Iroquois Theater fatality, mistakenly  buried the body of another woman, a stranger, as being Ella.  Upon recovering her memory, Ella saw that Herman had remarried and that her grown daughter, Luella (b. 1880), was making a new life.  Ella decided it would be best if she did the same.  She moved away without contacting them and adopted her maiden name, Mayhew.  The reborn Ella Mayhew became a Red Cross nurse, branch organizer and traveling lecturer in St. Paul, Minnesota, selling Christmas stamps to raise funds to fight tuberculosis.

Nine years later, upon learning of an inheritance from the estate of her parents, Thomas and Betsy Mayhew of Empire, Wisconsin, Ella decided to reveal her true identity so as to claim her one-third share of the estate. She telephoned her daughter Luella to request her help in proving her identity.
“Hi, there, this is Mom.  You know, the dead one?”

Ella and Luella were traumatized by all the attention and refused to give interviews. An enterprising reporter tracked down husband Herman to learn how he felt about his late wife coming back to life.

Not so good, it seemed.

Herman says reports of Ella's death were greatly exaggerated.

According to Herman (who worked as an oiler, presumably at the stock yards), Ella had abandoned him in 1902, a year before the Iroquois fire, after thirteen years of marriage.  In 1904 he obtained a divorce on grounds of desertion. He was happy to show the divorce decree to anyone who wanted to see it. The last time he saw Ella was the day she left him. He denied having buried anyone from the Iroquois fire.

Though Ella refused to be interviewed on the record, she protested that a sister in Fond du Lac, Mrs. A. F. Olmstead, could substantiate her story. Reporters went looking for information (as did yours truly) and the name Ella Maxfield was nowhere to be found among the Iroquois dead or injured.

Ella doesn’t look good in this Swiss cheese story. I found reference online to an Ella Mayhew and Herman Maxfield marrying in 1889 in Chicago, but a genealogy report gives Luella’s birth date as 1880 which would have her being born nine years before Ella and Herman married.  Not impossible but not likely in Edwardian times.  More likely that Herman was Ella’s second husband.