A little less than seven years before he found himself standing in front of a burning barn in Virginia, fatally shooting John Wilkes Booth in the neck, Boston Corbett cut his own balls off with a pair of scissors in Boston, Massachusetts.
Corbett's real name was Thomas, and he moved from New York to Boston after his wife died in childbirth. After finding Jesus in Boston, he changed his first name in honor of his newfound fundamentalist hysteria.
On the 16th of July, 1858, in order to resist the daily temptations of Boston's ladies of the night, Corbett sliced the bottom of his scrotum open, pulled his testicles down, and snipped them off. He got this very logical idea after reading chapters 18 and 19 of Matthew ("And if your hand or your foot causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away; it is better for you to enter life maimed or lame than with two hands or two feet to be thrown into the eternal fire"). Apparently none the worse for wear, Boston Corbett then attended a prayer meeting, ate a big dinner, and went to see a doctor, in that order.
Corbett floated around after the war, living in Boston, Connecticut, and New Jersey. Striving to emulate Jesus Christ, he grew his hair long and moved to Concordia, KS In 1878. Or rather, he moved outside of Concordia; in a field near town, he dug a hole in the ground (euphemistically referred to as a "dugout" by Corbett's supporters) and lived therein, occasionally brandishing a gun when anyone got too close.
Not content to merely live off the land, Corbett secured employment as Assistant Doorkeeper in the Kansas House of Representatives. He lost the job in 1887 after threatening members of a mock-legislature at gunpoint who made fun of the chamber's opening prayer.
On May 26, 1888, Boston Corbett escaped from the Topeka Asylum for the Insane, and vanished into the mists of time and history. it's possible he died in the Great Hinckley Fire of 1894, but nothing ever surfaced to prove it; no body was never recovered, and no sign of his existence ever surfaced. Just rumors and shadows about the last years of the man who killed Lincoln's assassin.
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Boy Scout Troop 31 of Concordia erected a plaque in 1958, marking the spot where Corbett lived in a hole.
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