EDITOR’S NOTE: Everyone has a story — some more well-known than others. Across Western North Carolina, so much history is buried below the surface. Six feet under. With this series, we introduce you to some of the people who have left marks big and small on this special place we call home.

The body of Sydney Lascelles or Charles H. Asquith (1857-1904), a bogus nobleman, notorious swindler and bigamist, remained at a local undertaking establishment for several years before being identified and removed.

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In the early 1900s, a charming stranger arrived in Asheville, presenting himself to a local hotelier as Charles H. Asquith, a wealthy Englishman who needed a physician.

News reports said local doctors and nurses tended to the man until Oct. 28, 1904, when he died at a boarding house on Montford Avenue just a few days after he arrived.

However, his death certificate was not completed until May 18, 1910, after his body was claimed, news reports said. A local health official said in 1910 that he believed the cause of death to be tuberculosis.

Asquith’s supposed family members were notified of his death, but years passed with no replies, all the while Asheville residents reveled in the mystery of the embalmed stranger.

When no one claimed the man’s body or could prove his identity, local funeral home Brown, Noland & Co. decided to use the corpse to advertise its embalming skills.

The undertakers built a glass cover for Asquith’s coffin, put him on a pedestal and invited locals to view the body. According to the Funeral Industry News website, the body “became almost petrified, losing little of its lifelike appearance, and was exhibited in many side shows.”

New in town

When Asquith arrived in town, he presented himself as a wealthy cotton broker and cousin of former English Home Secretary Herbert Henry Asquith, according to multiple news reports.

But, when Asheville authorities notified Herbert of his cousin’s death, the only response was that the man was not known.

Photographs of the embalmed body were said to have been sent to London for publication in the hopes someone might recognize Asquith.

Several months later, a Texas banker from Texas, visited the funeral home, claiming he recognized him as a man “who had spent some time in Waco selling a powder to put in gasoline to prevent explosions.” But the man could not provide a name for the powder salesman, news reports said.

Louisiana Hobbs Douglas, of Lambert’s Point, Virginia, sent a letter in July 1905 claiming the description of Asquith matched her husband, Lord Alfred Percival Sholto Reginald Scott Douglas, who left for a business trip and had not been seen since, according to the Asheville Museum of History. She told a local newspaper she did not care if he “never gets buried.”

The next month, authorities received a letter from Beatrice E. Anderson Douglas, of Fort Worth, Texas. She sent a photo of a man who claimed to be Lord Douglas, “but who, I understand, went by the name of C.H. Asquith and also Dudley Sanford Douglas, an English nobleman, and died in your town recently,” according to the Asheville Musem of History. She said she had received letters from California, Denver and Lambert’s Point from women he married and deserted.

She was not interested in burying him.

It seemed no one wanted to claim the body.

Another name for the embalmed man

The next summer, Lord Douglas, the estranged husband of Louisiana and Beatrice, resurfaced as John C. Cavendish.

With the discovery that Lord Douglas was alive and could not be Asheville’s embalmed corpse, the search for the dead man’s identity continued.

In May 1907, a lawyer from Rome, Georgia, stopped in Asheville on his way home from New York. According to a local newspaper, “(The lawyer) had occasion to stop at an undertaker’s establishment. While conversing with the proprietor he glanced around and saw standing on a pedestal the real Lord Beresford perfectly embalmed and looking just as he did in life. The gentleman had no doubt of his identity, as he knew him well, having represented him as one of his leading counsel during his various trials in Rome, and saw him every day for many months.”

Apparently, Beresford was one of many aliases used by a man who had been marrying and abandoning women for decades. The exploits of Sidney Lascelles, the name that appeared on his death certificate several years later, had been front-page stories since at least 1891 when he eloped with a New York City tobacco heiress using the alias Walter Eaton, according to reports.

While imprisoned in Georgia in the early 1890s, Lascelles penned a book, “Lord Beresford’s Book: From Wealth and Happiness to Misery and the Penitentiary,” about his pre-prison activities.

Noland-Brown now had a name for its mummy, but still, no one had claimed his body.

Final disposition

In May 1910, Mrs. T.J. Summerfield, of New Jersey, said she was the “sister-in-law of the first of Lascelle’s reputed sixteen wives” paid the $110 fee and took possession of his body.

In May 1910, with his true identity still somewhat in question, the fake lord took a train from Asheville to Washington, D.C., where he was cremated and his ashes eventually thrown into the waters of the Potomac River.

CLICK HERE to learn more about his life and disposal of his body.

CLICK HERE to read more about his exploits.