Hair collector only takes samples from dead celebs after living star threatened to sue

What do Abraham Lincoln, Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley have in common?

Samples of their hair are all part of the world’s largest collection of hair from historical figures.

The archive is owned by John Reznikoff of Connecticut, USA, a leading expert and authenticator who runs his own business, University Archives.

John was awarded the record back in 2001 when his collection stood at 115 different samples.

With hair from the heads of John F. Kennedy, Albert Einstein, Napoleon, King Charles I and Charles Dickens, the collection was valued at $1 million (£690,000) at the time. That's more like $1.8 million (£1.3 million) in today's money.

Monroe’s hair alone was valued at $50,000 at the time.

But it’s likely John’s collection has grown much larger in the last 25 years, and that it’s worth a lot more money too.

In a video shared to his YouTube channel, John is heard chatting about his collection and his work in an interview with NPR.

When asked what the appeal is in collecting human hair, he said: “It kind of is centred in Victorian tradition, and 100 years ago, if someone famous came to town, let’s say Robert E. Lee, you didn’t ask for his autograph like you would today, you’d ask for a little snippet of his hair.

“Usually, he might be with someone who had a knife or some scissors and he might cut a little strand, and that’s how a lot of hair in my collection is preserved. Not all of it, some of it has a little bit more macabre origins.”

Asked to explain how he had come to own some of the rare hair samples he has, John said the hair of former US President Lincoln was one he was particularly proud of.

He said: “That is the actual lock, and again this is a little macabre, it is the lock that cleared the wound the night of the assassination on 14 April 1865, and it was obtained and passed down through the surgeon’s hands and his son eventually, and it was held in the family for about 80-90 years then ended up with me.”

One of the most controversial hair samples he has is from Eva Braun, the wife of Adolf Hitler.

John explained during his radio interview: “For a long time, I didn’t want to collect any bad people’s hair, I wanted only people who positively affected history, and I think I was a little bit sour grapes because I was trying to buy a John Wilkes Booth [the man who assassinated Lincoln] lock of hair and we couldn’t get together on a price and I decided at that point, and I guess it was self-serving, that I wasn’t going to collect bad people.

“That very lock of hair made its way to me about six or seven years later and then I said, ‘Well, you know, maybe I will collect some people who didn’t exactly make the best impressions on history as well, just a few.”

Read about more record-breaking collections in our dedicated section.

When asked what he’d say to people who think collecting hair is “weird”, John said we are a “society of hero worshippers”.

“We always want to be close to someone who we admired or who we think about or who is important historically,” he said.

“We’re trophy collectors, is what we are, and when you frame it that way it’s not that strange.”

His collection began, he once told The Week, when he bought a collection owned by Margaretta Pierrepont, the wife of Ulysses S. Grant’s attorney general, for $100,000.

He said it was “the world’s greatest collection of hair” but that no one knew about it.

When it comes to displaying the hair, John explained that he usually mounts the locks in a frame, along with a photograph of the person it belonged to.

“Nobody likes just a clump of hair,” he told the publication.

He also said that he only collects hair from dead celebrities after an attempt to pay astronaut Neil Armstrong’s barber $3,000 for a cutting of his hair almost landed him in hot water.

Armstrong, who has since passed away, was so upset about it that he threatened to sue.

“I don’t do living celebrities anymore,” John said at the time. “That has the connotations of a stalker running around with scissors, and that’s not me.”

John lent his expertise to another record too - the most expensive hair sold at online auction, with his University Archives providing a letter of authenticity for the cuttings of Elvis Presley’s hair that sold for $115,120 (£72,791, buyer's premium included) to an anonymous buyer in 2002.

Header image: A sample of Marilyn Monroe’s hair. Credit: Douglas Healey/AP Photo/Alamy