In 1924, she married , an eccentric amateur archaeologist fifteen years her senior, who claimed to have found evidence of a lost Viking settlement in the Mojave Desert. The wedding lasted six months. The divorce lasted three years.
Cubbi — born Cordelia Beatrice Thompson in 1899 to a Pittsburgh steel fortune — earned her nickname as a toddler when she couldn’t say “Cuddly” and called herself “Cubbi” instead. The name stuck. By eighteen, she had rejected debutante balls, bought a Stutz Bearcat with her own inheritance, and announced she was moving to New York to “write novels and make enemies of boring people.”
She never checked into the hotel she’d reserved in Barstow. cubbi thompson van wylde
To this day, the journal sits in a climate-controlled box. Catalog number: MS.VW.1928.0001. Status:
By 1922, she had done both. Her one published story, The Parrot Who Knew Too Much , sold barely 300 copies but became a cult oddity for its unsettling blend of dark comedy and locked-room mystery. She was photographed at the Algonquin Round Table — not as a member, but as a “wild card guest who made Dorothy Parker laugh once and never returned.” In 1924, she married , an eccentric amateur
Since “Cubbi Thompson Van Wylde” doesn’t correspond to a widely known historical figure, I’ve written it as a fictional or mysterious “forgotten character” piece — fitting for a blog that explores oddities, unsolved mysteries, or obscure Americana. The Strange Disappearance of Cubbi Thompson Van Wylde: Heiress, Adventurer, or Ghost?
The lock on the journal was never picked. A 1932 attempt by a San Francisco locksmith failed; he reported “a mechanism unlike any I’ve seen, possibly European or custom-made.” In 1951, the journal was donated to the Huntington Library with a condition: it could not be opened without permission of the “Van Wylde literary estate” — which no one has successfully claimed since Julian died childless in 1944. Cubbi — born Cordelia Beatrice Thompson in 1899
— M. Forrester, Strange Histories