In the early months of 1917, the United States Radium Corporation in Orange, New Jersey was one of the most desirable employers for teenage girls in the country. The pay was roughly triple that of a standard factory job, and young women worked alongside their friends and siblings in what was described as the elite job for poor working girls. Grace Fryer, born on March 14, 1899, was among them. With two brothers sent off to fight in the First World War, she took work as a dial painter just four days after the United States entered the conflict.
The company mass-produced a glow-in-the-dark paint called Undark, invented in 1902 and widely used on military dials and wristwatches so soldiers could read them at night. The work demanded precision, and the women were taught a technique called lip-pointing: after a few strokes, a brush would lose its shape, so the painters were encouraged to use their lips to keep the tips sharp and clean. Every time they did, they swallowed a tiny, flavorless amount of the glowing paint. Managers assured them it was not dangerous.
The only side effect, they claimed, would be rosy cheeks. Some of the young women even painted their dresses, fingernails, and teeth with the luminous substance so they could shine at night. Eventually, many of them began to glow in the dark. It was a terrible sign, but they had no idea.
They would later be remembered as the ghost girls. In 1922, one of Grace Fryer’s colleagues, Mollie Maggia, fell ill. She developed a toothache, then her teeth began to fall out, and soon she was in agonizing pain, unable to walk. Her entire jawbone was later lifted out of her mouth by a dentist.
By September 1922, just eight months after her first toothache, Mollie was dead. She was the first of the dial painters to pass away, and she was not the last. Mysterious illnesses and deaths followed in quick succession. Frightened by the downturn in business, the company launched a disinformation campaign and concealed the cause of these illnesses.
They cooperated with doctors so that the cause of death would be blamed on syphilis, undermining the women’s reputations and allowing the company to deny responsibility. In 1924, US Radium commissioned Harvard physiology professor Cecil Drinker to study working conditions in the factory. His findings were the opposite of what they expected: he confirmed the rumored link between radium and the women’s mysterious deaths. The company president was outraged and buried the report, then financed new studies that found no such link.
By 1925, Grace Fryer’s health was deteriorating. Her jaw was weakening, her spine was crushing, and she was forced to wear a steel back brace. Her doctor believed her former employment might be responsible. Grace consulted a specialist named Frederick Flynn, who told her her condition had nothing to do with her previous job.
Flynn was not a doctor at all. He was a toxicologist working for US Radium. In 1925, US Radium’s first male employee died of unknown causes, just like many of the women. Finally, a doctor named Harrison Martland proved once and for all that the illnesses and deaths were caused by radium poisoning.
He discovered that ingested radium constantly emitted radiation, creating holes inside the bones and destroying the body from within. The poisoning was fatal. The ghost girls, who had once glowed at night, now knew their death was certain. Grace Fryer became the driving force behind a lawsuit against US Radium.
Despite the growing awareness of the risks, dial painters were still being employed, and Grace believed she had little time left. She said she was not fighting for herself but for the hundreds of girls to whom her case might serve as an example. The radium industry was powerful and tried to discredit Martland’s discovery. For two years, lawyers turned the case down.
Then a young attorney named Raymond Berry agreed to take it. He filed suit on behalf of Grace and four other dial painters, demanding $250,000 each in damages. The case made national headlines and became an international courtroom scandal. By January 1928, when the women made their first court appearance, Grace had lost all her teeth, could not walk, and needed a back brace to sit up.
Two of the other women were bedbound. The following hearing was scheduled for April, but all the women were too sick to attend. The judge adjourned the case until September, citing witnesses being on vacation in Europe. The decision drew huge backlash; one newspaper editor called it a damnable travesty of justice.
The hearing was rescheduled for early June. US Radium played a waiting game, dragging out the proceedings while some of the women were given just four months to live. Days before the hearing, Berry secured an out-of-court settlement. Desperate, the Radium girls reluctantly accepted.
Each woman received $10,000, with medical and legal expenses paid. It was far less than they had hoped, but Grace had accomplished her main objective: she had brought attention to radium poisoning and the exploitation within the industry. She died on October 27, 1933, at her home in New Jersey, at the age of 34. The legal fight continued to have consequences beyond the settlement.
One dial painter who read their story in the papers was Catherine Wolf Donahue of Illinois. She began her own legal battle in the mid-1930s against the Radium Dial Company, which denied responsibility, lied, and interfered with autopsies to hide the truth. In 1938, her case finally went to court, and she gave evidence from her deathbed. She won.
Catherine died soon after, on July 27, 1938, at the age of 35. These cases led to life-saving regulations, forcing companies to take responsibility for the safety of their employees. Industrial safety standards in the United States were significantly tightened, saving countless others from a similar fate. The ghost girls, it is said, still glow in their coffins due to the radium embedded in their bones.
Almost two decades earlier, another tragedy had unfolded quietly in England. Lady Jacqueline Mary Alva Montagu and Lady Alice Eleanor Louisa Montagu were born on November 27, 1879, the second and third children of George Montagu, Viscount Mandeville, and his wife, Consuelo, a Cuban-American heiress. Their family called them May and Nel. They were born into one of the most senior aristocratic families in Victorian Britain, and their mother was one of the earliest of the so-called dollar princesses: daughters of wealthy American businessmen married off to the sons of leading British noble families.
The marriage was a social and financial transaction, and it would affect the girls as they grew up. Their lives were uprooted when they were just four years old, when their grandfather, the seventh Duke of Manchester, exiled his son and his family to Ireland after the father’s drinking, gambling, and reckless lifestyle squandered the vast majority of the $6 million dowry Consuelo had brought to the marriage. In 1890, the grandfather’s death brought the family back to England, with the parents becoming Duke and Duchess of Manchester. The girls were increasingly minded by nurses and tutors, and it was during this time that Nel became ill with consumption, the name for tuberculosis.
By the time Nel fell ill, nearly a quarter of premature deaths in Britain were caused by the disease. It was widely believed that May was suffering from it as well, though she was never officially diagnosed. The twins celebrated their fifteenth birthday in November 1894, described by a contemporary as the two most beautiful and delicate girls imaginable. They would not celebrate their sixteenth together.
On March 15, 1895, May died. The cause was assumed to be tuberculosis, though some accounts suggest malaria, as the family had been holidaying in Italy. The circumstances of her death caused a rift between her mother and one of her oldest friends, Alva Smith Vanderbilt, who suspected her husband and Consuelo were having an affair after he arranged to bring May’s body home on his yacht. After May’s death, Nel continued to live a relatively normal life for a time, making her society debut in London and the United States in the winter of 1898.
Newspapers called her the most admired of the belles of the past London season and exquisitely pretty. But her health was deteriorating sharply. She and her mother headed for St. Moritz in Switzerland, famous for its healing waters, and Nel spent much of the remainder of her life there.
By the start of 1900, it was clear she was dying. Nel died on January 10, 1900, at the age of twenty. Her death was widely reported, with publications as far away as New Zealand noting the sorrow of her passing, coming so soon after her twin sister’s. One newspaper wrote that many who had never seen her felt a check of regret and sadness at the news, for her beautiful face was so familiar from photographs that she always seemed a personal friend.
Nel’s funeral was held at St. James’s Palace on January 15, attended by leading nobles of late Victorian Britain. She was laid to rest at Kimbolton Castle, next to her twin sister. In the aftermath, their mother commissioned Louis Comfort Tiffany to create a memorial: a stained glass window showing the two girls, based on an image from shortly before May’s death.
The ethereal image still adorns one of the main windows of St. Andrew’s Church on the grounds of Kimbolton Castle, a testament to two girls who died so young. Half a century earlier, on a small island off the coast of southern Sweden, a different kind of mystery was unfolding. Karolina Olsson was born on October 29, 1861, on the island of Oknö, a remote fishing community.
She was the second eldest of five children; her father was a fisherman, and the family barely subsisted. The world would never have heard of her had it not been for the events of February 18, 1876. That day, fourteen-year-old Karolina hit her head while out on the ice of a late winter freeze. She developed a toothache immediately afterward.
When it did not subside, her family began to believe a local witch had placed a hex on her. Four days after the fall, Karolina went to bed and, by all accounts, did not wake up for thirty-two years. Her family were too poor to bring a physician from the mainland, so they fell back on local folk medicine and the advice of the island’s midwife. Her mother force-fed her glasses of sweetened milk and water every day.
The community eventually banded together to hire a doctor. He determined Karolina was in a coma; smelling salts and needles could not wake her. He left a bottle of tonic and continued to visit weekly. Occasionally, Karolina was said to sit up and mumble prayers in a half-stupor, or sleepwalk, but she never reached full consciousness.
The doctor wrote letters to newspapers and medical journals across Sweden, hoping someone with greater training might have an answer. More doctors arrived, but none could solve the case. Theories abounded: peculiar hibernation, a psychological disorder, a profound state of shock, or an elaborate hoax perpetrated by Karolina and her family. Unusual features of her case were noted: her hair and nails never seemed to grow.
In 1892, after she had been asleep for sixteen years, she was taken to a hospital on the mainland and treated with electroconvulsive shock therapy. It failed, and doctors effectively gave up. In 1904, twenty-eight years into her slumber, Karolina’s mother dropped dead, no doubt exhausted from years of caring for her daughter. Some accounts say Karolina woke enough to weep at her mother’s death, though this may be embellishment.
On April 3, 1908, at the age of forty-seven, just over thirty-two years after she first went to sleep, Karolina Olsson suddenly awoke. She was informed that her mother was dead, as were two of her brothers, who had drowned at sea. Looking in the mirror at a face she barely recognized, she began to weep. Her case generated massive attention in Sweden and internationally.
Karolina agreed to undergo psychiatric evaluation and medical testing in Stockholm. Her mental faculties were determined to be entirely intact, and she was effectively waking as though she was still a fourteen-year-old girl rather than a woman of forty-seven. Physicians noted she looked no older than twenty-five. No consensus was ever reached on the cause of her thirty-two-year sleep.
One possible explanation is a very severe case of Kleine-Levin syndrome, a rare disorder characterized by bouts of excessive sleep, often brought on by a severe incident like banging one’s head, and associated with an alleviated appearance of aging. Another possibility is that the entire episode was an elaborate hoax, though it seems difficult to believe she could have deceived the doctors who administered electroshock therapy in 1892. Karolina attempted to return to Oknö and live with her father and two remaining brothers, but the cottage was inundated with visitors and newspapermen, and the family settled elsewhere for a time before eventually returning. Karolina lived out a long life, dying on April 5, 1950, at the age of eighty-eight, occasionally visited by people interested in seeing the famed sleeper of Oknö in the flesh.
Her case remains unsolved to this day. Centuries earlier, another short life was unfolding in the Tuscan countryside. Bia de’ Medici was born sometime in 1536, near Florence. Her father was Cosimo I de’ Medici, but the identity of her mother is unknown.
Only Cosimo’s mother, Maria Salviati, knew, and she took the secret to her grave. When Cosimo seized power as Duke of Florence in 1537, just months after the assassination of his predecessor, Bia was nearing her first birthday. Far from hiding her, Cosimo claimed her as his own and brought her into the Medici household. In 1539, Cosimo married Eleonora of Toledo, the daughter of the Spanish viceroy of Naples, a union of pure strategy.
Eleonora, barely eighteen, stepped into her role as Duchess with confidence. Court whispers suggested she resented Bia, who had already captivated her husband’s heart, but most historians believe Eleonora treated the girl with kindness and affection. Bia was sent to live at the Villa di Castello, the family estate in the hills beyond Florence, under the care of her grandmother Maria Salviati. She shared both her home and bedroom with Giulia de’ Medici, the illegitimate daughter of the slain Duke Alessandro.
The two girls became inseparable, more like sisters than distant cousins. Bia earned a reputation as a radiant and spirited child, charming, lively, and mischievous enough to keep her nurses on edge. Her father, burdened by the weight of ruling a city, would slip away from court just to visit her. In 1540 and 1541, Eleonora gave birth to Maria, and then to a healthy son and heir, Francesco, the future Grand Duke of Tuscany.
When they were old enough, they too were sent to Villa di Castello, where Cosimo’s children were raised together in a world of order, education, and affection. Bia’s formal education began by the age of four, with religious instruction, lessons in manners, embroidery, and music, all overseen by nurses and tutors who planned to mold her into a refined Florentine girl. One day in the late winter of 1542, Cosimo planned a trip to the Tuscan town of Arezzo and brought his beloved Bia along. As they made their way home in February, fate turned cruel.
Soon after returning to Villa di Castello, both Bia and Giulia were struck by a sudden high fever. Cosimo sent the best doctors, but the medicine of the time was no match for the illness. Giulia slowly recovered; Bia’s condition only worsened. From February 25 to February 28, her decline was swift.
A court official wrote grimly, “Tomorrow will be a much sadder day. ” On March 1, 1542, Bia passed away, likely from malaria. She was just six years old. Her death was deeply mourned, especially by her father.
Six months later, a new light entered Cosimo’s life: his daughter Isabella was born. Historian Paolo Giovio wrote to Cosimo, congratulating him on the beautiful baby girl God had conceded to him in recompense for the one he had taken to paradise. Isabella would soon become Cosimo’s new favorite. After Bia’s death, Cosimo, stricken with grief, commissioned a posthumous portrait from the court painter Agnolo Bronzino.
The result is a hauntingly tender image: a young girl adorned in white and pearls, radiant and serene, captured not in life but in memory. For centuries, the painting was mistakenly thought to depict Bia’s legitimate younger sister Maria. The truth was not discovered until 1893, when art historian Cosimo Conti uncovered archival evidence confirming the existence of a separate daughter, Bia, born to Cosimo before his marriage. The portrait’s true subject was finally restored to her rightful name.
Today, it hangs in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, where her luminous presence continues to captivate those who stand before her. Each year, millions of visitors pass by her portrait without ever learning her story.
