Charles Francis Coghlan was one of the great actors of the Victorian Era. Born in Paris to Anglo-Irish parents, he graduated from Irish provincial theaters to the London stage, performing both classical works by Shakespeare and Sheridan and contemporary playwrights like Oscar Wilde, when not penning his own plays, partnering with Lillie Langtry or feuding with Sir Henry Irving. One reviewer commented that Coghlan earned a rapport with audiences “from the dignity and pathos with which he invested [his] character.” One American critic waxed rhapsodically that Coghlan “never descends to the cheap creating of effects. He plays his part for all it is worth; he does not play Charles Coghlan, with the kind assistance of somebody’s text, for the amusement of his friends and admirers.

He wasn’t universally acclaimed, though; Coghlan often seemed to stumble over classical roles. The he New York Times criticized his 1889 performance of Macbeth as “intelligent but over-deliberate.” Even worse was a performance of The Merchant of Venice, where he squared off against his rival Sir Henry Irving, performing in Leopold David Lewis’s The Bells. While Irving’s performance was acclaimed as that brilliant actor’s greatest achievement, Coghlan disastrously flopped. Actress Dame Ellen Terry spoke for many, commenting that “Coghlan’s Shylock was not even bad. It was nothing.”

Coghlan might have been disappointed but such brickbats, but his popularity was undeniable. In the last decades of his life he performed extensively in the United States, garnering acclaim at a time when British actors were more likely to inspire riots than applause in American audiences. He built a farm on Prince Edward Island, Canada where he lived with his common law wife Louise and daughter Gertrude, who inherited her father’s talent and enjoyed a four decade career as an actress, both on stage and screen. Coghlan died in November 1899 in Galveston, Texas after suffering a severe illness while performing his play The Royal Box, an adaptation of Dumas’s Kean.

As Coghlan’s career receded into memory, he became associated with a bizarre legend that grew embellished with each telling. According to the tale, Coghlan was a superstitious man who regularly visited spiritualists and fortune tellers. Shortly before his final tour, the story goes, a soothsayer told the actor that “you will never live to see the twentieth century. You will be interred in a city in the South, but a great storm will beset that city, and your remains will be cast upon the sea.” This bizarrely specific premonition was fulfilled when Coghlan’s burial place, Galveston, was hit by the worst hurricane in American history in September 1900, killing 6,000 people, destroying much of the city and sending dozens of coffins from local graveyards into the Gulf of Mexico.

Eight years later, the story goes, a group of fishermen on Prince Edward Island caught a box covered with barnacles in their nets. Pulling it aboard, they discovered that the box was in fact a coffin. After scraping off some of the barnacles, they found the occupant’s name engraved on a silver plate: “Charles Francis Coghlan, born 1841 Prince Edward Island, Canada. Died 1899, Galveston, Texas.” Coghlan had exceeded the fortune teller by not only being swept to sea, but according to this tale, returning to the place of his birth…even though Coghlan was born in Paris, not Canada.

A careful perusal of the record finds that the story was first recorded in Johnston Forbes-Robertson’s memoir A Player Under Three Reigns (1925); Forbes-Robertson, a brilliant Shakespearean performer himself, uses the story to give a tragic flair to Coghlan’s untimely demise. Lillie Langtry, in her own memoirs, added the embellishment of the soothsayer predicting his death several years later. These two stories were combined by Robert Ripley, who after hearing the story from Coghlan’s manager, George Tyler, published the tale of the “wandering coffin” in his Believe it or Not! column in 1929.

Coghlan’s sister Rose, also an actress, was disgusted by Ripley’s story and demanded a retraction. Gertrude would confirm that her father’s remains hadn’t been reinterred on Prince Edward Island – which, as an attentive reader, might have noted, was not Coghlan’s birthplace. Ripley, who recognized a good story when he saw one, instead printed spurious supporting details (mostly Tyler’s testimony) when recycling the column in a compilation book published in 1941. From Ripley, the story percolated to the usual suspects, paranormal writers like Vincent Gaddis who repeated the tale without bothering to check its veracity, until Coghlan became better-known for his supposed post-mortem adventure than his storied acting career.

In fact, Coghlan’s coffin was swept out to sea by the Galveston hurricane…but that’s about all that Ripley got right. After several false reports, in 1907 Coghlan’s coffin were recovered in a swamp eight miles from Galveston by several hunters. It’s unclear what happened to the actor’s remains afterwards; some reports claim he was reburied in Texas, others that he was cremated per the family’s wishes. There’s no evidence that he made his way back to Prince Edward Island, but Charles Coghlan did become immortal through his literally unbelievable journey.