MFDJ 02/12/24: Excruciating Cholera

Today’s Livid Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

Cholera bacteria release a powerful toxin into the intestines that forces cells to pump water and salts from blood and tissues. The result is massive watery diarrhea that is dotted with mucus and skin cells, the so-called rice-water stool.

And as the bacteria draw fluids from the victim’s body, the vital signs start to plummet. Within an hour after the symptoms begin, a healthy person’s blood pressure can drop precipitously. The dehydration and loss of salts creates excruciating cramps. Death can follow two or three hours later, but more often occurs within eighteen hours to several days after the first attack of diarrhea.

One Edinburgh doctor, George Bell, who had witnessed cholera in India, wrote about the disease for his British colleagues: “The eyes surrounded by a dark circle are completely sunk in the sockets, for the whole countenance is collapsed, the skin is livid. The surface [of the skin] is now generally covered with cold sweat, the nails are blue, and the skin of the hands and feet are corrugated as if they had been long steeped in water… The voice is hollow and unnatural. If the case be accompanied by spasms, the suffering of the patient is much aggravated, and is sometimes excruciating.”


Cholera patient

As the 19th century cholera epidemics raged in Great Britain, the newspapers kept a running toll of the cases and deaths, which had “the depressing effect of the tolling of a funeral bell,” Morris writes.

Some small villages were nearly destroyed. Of Bilston, an iron-and coal-mining town in Staffordshire, observers wrote “To describe the consternation of the people is impossible. Many factories and workshops are closed; business is completely at a stand; women seen in a state of distraction running in all directions for medical help for dying husbands, husbands for their wives, and children for their parents; the hearses carrying the dead to the grave without intermission either by day or night. Those inhabitants who possessed the means of quitting their homes, flying to some purer atmosphere; those who remained seeing nothing before them but disaster and death.”


A young woman before and after cholera

Culled from: Flu

Wax Specimen Du Jour!

Wax specimens from the book Dermochromes – III (1910):


Eczema corneum plantae pedis


Eczema chronicum volae manus corneum

Andersonville Prisoner Diary Entry Du Jour!

This is the continuation of the 1864 diary of Andersonville prisoner Private George A. Hitchcock (see the archived version for all entries up until now).

Here’s today’s entry:

November 1st. The sheds are being cleared of all sick, who are either taken outside or returned to camp.

Culled from: Andersonville: Giving Up the Ghost

MFDJ 02/11/24: Icy Russian Prisons

Today’s Icy Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

Here’s a description of a Soviet prison camp in the Irkutsk Region circa 1980 from the book The First Guidebook to Prisons and Concentration Camps of the Soviet Union:

The inmates of Prison No. 410 in Vikhorevka languish under frightfully arbitrary and unbearably severe conditions. Here is an eyewitness report from a former political prisoner, who spent about a year in this facility:

“It was daytime when we arrived in Vikhorevka, a small settlement not far from the Bratsk hydro-electric power plant. When I saw the prison building from the outside, I was surprised to see how gloomy a place could be made to be. This squat, gray one-story concrete building, located on the perimeter of the settlement, was surrounded by an old, gray wooden fence and an off-limits zone with watchtowers. The walls, floors, and ceilings of the prison were cast with cement and iron bars into a cold block. This indestructible reinforced-concrete vault was built in the wintertime. Thus, in order to make the concrete harden as quickly as possible, salt had been added to it. The result, however, was that the floors, walls, and ceiling were constantly wet. With a creak of the door and a squeak of the hinges, I was locked into my cell of 15 square meters. I was ‘at home’. Directly opposite the door was a window under which stood a large plank bed for eight persons. It was made of thick wooden blocks held together by iron clamps that were spaced some 30 to 40 centimeters apart from one another. Ice glimmered in the indentations in the floor. The window was also covered with a thick layer of ice. Drops of water clinged to the ceiling; water trickled down the walls.

“A single oven, positioned between two cells, was used for heating. Yet, because it was placed behind iron bars, we could not even warm ourselves up on it. We received two billets of firewood a day — about a quarter of a log each for use in the oven. The oven was only moderately warm and naturally could not, as a result, heat the cells. Our bodies were the only source of heat in these reinforced-concrete cubicles. Light could hardly penetrate the ice layering on the ironbar windows. Over the door, there was a light bulb of not more than 25 watts. The yellow gleam could hardly illuminate the cell.”


Unidentified former Soviet Gulag Prison

Culled from: The First Guidebook to Prisons and Concentration Camps of the Soviet Union

 

Ghastly!

One of my favorite books is Death Scenes: A Homicide Detective’s Scrapbook.  It is exactly what it says it is: a bizarre and oft-disturbing scrapbook collected over the years by Los Angeles area police detective Jack Huddleston, whose career spanned from 1921 to the early 1950’s. Here’s a mysterious (and unexplained) suicide photo.

Andersonville Prisoner Diary Entry Du Jour!

This is the continuation of the 1864 diary of Andersonville prisoner Private George A. Hitchcock (see the archived version for all entries up until now).

Here’s today’s entry:

October 31st. Warm and lowering. First, second, and part of third detachment went away in the morning, but there is no enthusiasm, for we believe it to be only a change of prisons, the report of exchange being only a dodge of the rebels to keep us from any attempt to escape during transportation. The rebel sergeants have been taking our carpenters to work on their parole of honor. Rations of bread and rice cooked without a particle of salt.

Culled from: Andersonville: Giving Up the Ghost

MFDJ 02/10/24: Sinking of the Daniel J. Morrell

Today’s Untamed Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

Determined that this would be his last season on the lake, Dennis Hale boarded the 587-foot (176m) steel bulk freight steamer Daniel J. Morrell on Monday, November 28, 1966, at Detroit. The boat was heading to Taconite Harbor, Minnesota, on Lake Superior to load a cargo of iron ore.


Launch of the Daniel J. Morrell

The weather report for Lake Huron that day was severe, and as the Morrell and her sister ship, the Edward Y. Townsend, left the St. Clair River, they faced the full force of a mounting storm.  Winds reached 65 mph (104 kph) and waves topped 25 feet (7.5 m).

Hale came off watch at 8 p.m. and soon after lay in his bunk listening to the thuds and groans of the pitching Morrell. Suddenly he was jarred by a hard thump. The lights went out and the emergency bell began ringing. He ran on deck just as the boat began to crack in two. As the bow dove under the water, he and several shipmates managed to climb into one of two pontoon lifeboats on the forward section.

“The stern, still powered by its engines, was facing us and started to run into the bow section, ramming us in the side.” The force of the blow threw the crew into the water. Only four men, including Hale, made it back to the raft and they watched in amazement as the stern of the Morrell ran untamed across the lake.

When the men were finally spotted by a helicopter 36 hours later, the rescuers were astonished to see one of the men wave. Hale greeted them with “I love ya!” Twenty-nine men had been on board the Morrell. Three men in the raft had died of exposure. Hale was the only survivor.

Culled from: Disaster Great Lakes

 

Ghastly!


WOMAN SITTING ON A TOILET
circa 1945

Some crime scenes are surreal. At a quick glance, this woman dressed in her slip appears to be casually sitting on a toilet seat with her legs crossed. What is soon apparent is that she has no head, at least no head on her neck; it is on her lap. The scene may seem to be one of a crime of passion because it is so horrific and posed. However, this woman, who lived on Brooklyn’s Eastern Parkway, blew her own head off with a powerful rifle. The blood spatter on the walls and her crossed legs indicate she was sitting in this position when the gun went off.

Culled from: Deadly Intent Crime and Punishment: Photographs from the Burns Archive

Andersonville Prisoner Diary Entry Du Jour!

This is the continuation of the 1864 diary of Andersonville prisoner Private George A. Hitchcock (see the archived version for all entries up until now).

Here’s today’s entry:

October 30th. Had about an hour’s sleep last night. Shep. applied for admission to the hospital but was refused. The whole camp has received orders to be ready to march.

Culled from: Andersonville: Giving Up the Ghost

MFDJ 02/09/24: Racist Laws, 18th Century Style

Today’s Race-Dependent Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

England’s “bloody code” (as it was widely called by its detractors) had its eighteenth-century American counterpart in the swelling number of capital statutes applicable only to blacks. The first of these appears to have been enacted in New York, which in 1712, alarmed by a slave revolt, capitalized attempted murder and attempted rape committed by slaves. Most of these race-dependent capital crimes, unsurprisingly, were created in the southern colonies. Slaves made up more than half the population of South Carolina by 1720 and nearly half that of Virginia by 1750. To manage these captive workforces the southern colonies resorted to ever-increasing lists of capital statutes. In 1740 South Carolina imposed the death penalty on slaves  and free blacks for burning or destroying any grain, commodities, or manufactured goods; on slaves for enticing other slaves to run away; and on slaves maiming or bruising whites. Virginia, fearing attempts at poisoning, made it a capital offense for slaves to prepare or administer medicine. The Georgia legislature determined that crimes committed by slaves posed dangers “peculiar to the condition and circumstances of this province,” dangers which meant that such crimes “could not fall under the provision of the laws of England.” Georgia accordingly made it a capital offense for slaves or free blacks to strike whites twice, or once if a bruise resulted. “The Laws in Force, for the Punishment of Slaves” in Maryland, its legislature found, were “insufficient, to prevent their committing, very great Crimes and Disorders.” Slaves were accordingly subjected to the death penalty for conspiring to rebel, rape a white woman, or burn a house.


Slave sale advertisement from the July 30, 1737 issue of the South Carolina Gazette: “TO BE SOLD on Wednesday the 3d of August a choice Cargo of healthy Slaves, imported in the Ship Pearl Galley…”  Oh, America – so much to answer for!

Colonies with large numbers of slaves expedited the procedures for trying them. As early as 1692 Virginia began using local justices of the peace rather than juries and legally trained judges to try slaves for capital crimes. South Carolina adopted a similarly streamlined procedure in 1740. These systems remained intact as long as slavery existed. Execution rates for slaves far exceeded those for southern whites. In North Carolina, for instance, at least one hundred slaves were executed in the quarter-century between 1748 and 1772, well more than the number of whites executed during the colony’s entire history, a period spanning over a century.


Article from the April 12, 1739 issue of the South Carolina Gazette:

“On Thursday last two Negro-Men named Caesar and Allohoy belonging to Mr. Wm. Romsey and Company, were tried by Thomas Dale and Robert Austin Esq.; two of his Majesty’s Justices of the Peace and Mr. John Fraser, Capt. Isaac Holmes and Mr. Henry Perroneau jun. being three Freeholders associated with the said Magistrates persuant to an Act of Assembly, entitled an Act for the better ordering and governing of Negroes and other Slaves. They were charged by Mr. Attorney General with deserting from their Master’s Service, and attempting, with several other Slaves, to run-away off this Province either to Augustine or some other Place, which Charge being fully proved, the former was condemned to die, and the latter to be whipt. Accordingly on Saturday last the said Caesar was executed at the usual Place, and afterwards hung in Chains at Hang-man’s Point opposite to this Town, in sight of all Negroes passing and repassing by Water: Before he was turned off [Turned off? That’s kind of hi-tech!- DeSpair] he made a very sensible Speech to those of his own Colour, exhorting them to be just, honest and virtuous, and to take warning by his unhappy Example; after which he begged the Prayers of all Christian People, himself repeating the Lord’s Prayer and several others in a fervent and devout Manner.”

Culled from: The Death Penalty: An American History

Garretdom: Well-Dressed Targets Edition!

This town is infested by a considerable number of little boys who appear to have nothing else to do except to waylay in pairs any decently dressed, well-behaved boy. The better dressed the boy the more sure he is of being beaten and bruised by these good for nothing little ruffians. Yesterday afternoon a little boy was going up Wabasha street in a quiet manner, and was suddenly, and unexpectedly assaulted by three rough boys. He received two or three blows in the face, and considerable blood flowed from his nose in consequence thereof. As soon as the boys struck their victim all fled as fast as their legs could carry them around the corner into Third street. The attack was a piece of pure wantonness. It is a great pity that some of these little bruisers cannot be arrested and punished.

Culled from the January 11, 1874 issue of St. Paul Pioneer as quoted in Coffee Made Her Insane

 

Andersonville Prisoner Diary Entry Du Jour!

This is the continuation of the 1864 diary of Andersonville prisoner Private George A. Hitchcock (see the archived version for all entries up until now).

Here’s today’s entry:

October 29th. Very cold, and heavy frost last night. Toothache very severe. Fixed up our tent so that it is weather-proof. Six prisoners came in.

Culled from: Andersonville: Giving Up the Ghost

MFDJ 02/08/24: A Delicious Suicide

Today’s Expensive Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

A great deal of forethought and planning went into a double suicide in Paris in the 19th century. Two young men decided to dine out in grand style, no expense spared. The best food on the menu was accompanied by superior champagne and followed by cognac—and the bill. The youths had attracted attention throughout their meal by their loud and raucous laughter. The bill caused them to break into even louder guffaws. They called for the owner.

… the elder of the two informed him that the dinner was excellent, which was the more fortunate, as it was decidedly the last that either of them should ever eat; that for his bill he must of necessity excuse the payment as neither of them possessed a single sou; that upon no other occasion would they have thus violated the customary etiquette between guest and landlord; but that finding this world with its toils and its troubles unworthy of them, they had determined once more to enjoy a repast and then take their leave of existence! For the first part of this resolution, he declared that it had, thanks to the cook and his cellar, been achieved nobly; that for the last, it would soon follow, for the café noir, besides the little glass of his admirable cognac, had been medicated with that which would speedily settle all their accounts for them.

There was little the restaurateur could do except inform the police. Alas, by the time the gendarmes arrived at their lodging, the poison had taken effect.

Culled from: Death: A History of Man’s Obsessions and Fears

Sing Sing Death House Prisoner Du Jour!


NAME: Bernard Stein
NUMBER: 109-944
AGE: 34
OCCUPATION: Bartender
MARITAL: Separated, 1 child
PHYSICAL: 5’9-3/4″, 151 lbs.
RESIDENCE: Chicago
CRIME: Shot Sol Moss, Mayfair Grill, night, 7-10-46
ACCOMPLICES: John Reilly, Milton Shaket
CLAIMS: Claims innocence
JUDGE: Donnellan, New York Court of General Sessions
SENTENCED: 11-6-50
RECEIVED: 11-6-50
EXECUTED: 3-6-52

Dear Warden:

From the week of February 3—Bernard Stein will go to the chair as the newspaper mentioned. This man is 34 years old, I feel bad for any youth going to his death. Try to make his little time somehow to have a little value—be not hard with him. Somehow I know you are human. The reason I took time to write this is because I feel bad for broken people like Stein he is so young and must die so early. The prison priest understands this situation—so warden guess I was compelled to write the words down where human feelings are concerned. I know warden you are a man with a proud position so I don’t want to take up more of your precious time so I will come now to a polite close.

Devotedly,
Frederick

Culled from: Condemned: Inside the Sing Sing Death House

Here’s an article I found that provides a few more details:

2d Trial Jury Dooms Killer of Union Agent

Bernard Stein, 35, who won a jury disagreement at his first murder trial, didn’t at his second yesterday. The jury found him guilty of murder in the first degree, with no recommendation of clemency, in connection with the shooting of Sol Moss, 35, a union business agent, on July 10, 1946, during a stickup in the Mayfair Cafe, 169 W. 47th St.

General Sessions Judge George L. Donnellan will sentence him Monday to the same fate already imposed on two accomplices, Milton Shaket and John Reilly, both electrocuted in Sing Sing Sept. 16, 1948.

Stein’s conviction at his second trial resulted largely from the painstaking work of Detectives James Leach and John Kennedy of the W. 47th St. station, who, after following clues all over the country, rounded up three vital witnesses who had been absent at the first trial.

Moss, of 219 Miriam St., Bronx, was agent for Local 10 of the AFL International Ladies’ Garment Workers.

– Daily News, November 3, 1950

 

Andersonville Prisoner Diary Entry Du Jour!

This is the continuation of the 1864 diary of Andersonville prisoner Private George A. Hitchcock (see the archived version for all entries up until now).

Here’s today’s entry:

October 28th. Hard toothache and poor night’s rest. Washed in the creek and mended shirt. Traded off my ration of beans for an excellent ration of rice. A mud shanty fell in, breaking one man’s back and badly crippling two others.

Culled from: Andersonville: Giving Up the Ghost

MFDJ 02/07/24: The Live-Bait Squadron

Today’s Foolhardy Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

At dawn, on the morning of Tuesday, September 22, 1914, three large British cruisers, HMS Aboukir, Hogue, and Cressy, were patrolling a swath of the North Sea off Holland known as the “Broad Fourteens,” moving at eight knots, a leisurely and, as it happened, foolhardy pace. The ships were full of cadets.  Hereward Hook, one of them, was fifteen years old and assigned to the Hogue. The ships were old and slow, and so clearly at risk that within Britain’s Grand Fleet they bore the nickname “the live-bait squadron.” Hook—who in later life would indeed be promoted to Captain Hook—was in his bunk, asleep, when at 6:20 a.m. he was awakened by “a violent shaking” of his hammock. A midshipman was trying to wake him and other cadets, to alert them to the fact that one of the big cruisers, the Aboukir, had been torpedoed and was sinking.


H.M.S. Hogue, 1900


H.M.S. Aboukir, 1900


H.M.S. Cressy

Hook sprinted to the deck, and watched the Aboukir begin to list. Within minutes the ship heeled and disappeared. It was, he wrote, “my first sight of men struggling for their lives.”

His ship and the other intact cruiser, the Cressy, maneuvered to rescue the sailors in the water, each coming to a dead stop a few hundred yards away to launch boats. Hook and his fellow crewmen were ordered to throw overboard anything that could float to help the men in the water. Moments later, two torpedoes struck his own ship, the Hogue, and in six or seven minutes “she was quite out of sight,” he wrote. He was pulled into one of the Hogue’s previously launched lifeboats. After picking up more survivors, the lifeboat began making its way toward the third cruiser, the Cressy. But another torpedo was now tearing through the water. The torpedo struck the Cressy on its starboard side. Like the two other cruisers, the Cressy immediately began to list. Unlike the others, however, the list halted, and the ship seemed as if it might stay afloat. But then a second torpedo struck and hit the magazine that stored ammunition for the ship’s heavy guns.  The Cressy exploded and sank. Where just an hour earlier there had been three large cruisers, there were now only men, a few small boats, and wreckage. A single German submarine, Unterseeboot-9—U-9, for short—commanded by Kptlt. Otto Weddigen, had sunk all three ships, killing 1,459 British sailors, many of them young men in their teens.


Weddigen’s Triumph

Weddigen and his U-boat were of course to blame, but the design of the ships—their longitudinal coal bunkers—contributed greatly to the speed with which they sank and thus the number of lives lost. Once ruptured, the bunkers caused one side of each ship’s hull to fill quickly, creating a catastrophic imbalance.

The disaster had an important secondary effect: because two of the cruisers had stopped to help survivors of the initial attack and thus made themselves easy targets, the Admiralty issued orders forbidding large British warships from going to the aid of U-boat victims.

Culled from: Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania

Car Crash Du Jour!

One of my favorite books is Car Crashes and Other Sad Stories by Anaheim photographer Mell Kilpatrick. It’s a collection of car crash photos from the 40’s and 50’s, often with corpses still strewn across the enormous interior (or out of it, since there were no seat belts in those days). It combines my love of old cars with my love of morbidity and is the perfect ambulance chaser book!


Los Alamitos & Garden Grove—fatal.

Andersonville Prisoner Diary Entry Du Jour!

This is the continuation of the 1864 diary of Andersonville prisoner Private George A. Hitchcock (see the archived version for all entries up until now).

Here’s today’s entry:

October 27th. Stormy. Our tent was flooded. I am hoarse and used up generally for want of sleep. Rations of bread and rice, very small, barely enough to sustain life.

Culled from: Andersonville: Giving Up the Ghost

MFDJ 02/06/24: River Bodies of Hiroshima

Today’s Blackened Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

An account from a teacher of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945:

Just below Mrs. Ito, the chaos around the Tsurumi Bridge was growing. When Miyoko Matsubara, a twelve-year-old schoolgirl, reached the bridge from some nearby homes where she had been salvaging roof tiles with a wrecking crew of youngsters from her school, she found hundreds of people who could no longer flee across the bridge. They had to stop to deal with the pain of their burns. Some were standing skin-to-skin in the water of the little emergency fire tanks that families had built near their homes and that had become refuges for burn victims all over town. Most had jumped into the river, and even there they still kept holding their arms up in the air as if ready to surrender to an unseen enemy.

Most were schoolchildren. They cried, “Mother! Mother!” and “Help me!” and looked up beseechingly at Miyoko. One child called, “Aren’t you Matsubara?” The face in the water was so blackened that Miyoko could not recognize it. “I’m Hiroko!” said the face, but Miyoko barely heard. Her own burned arms and legs hurt so much that she too forgot about crossing the bridge and jumped fifteen feet into the river.


Tsurumi Bridge

When Fumiko Morishita reached the Tsurumi Bridge toward 10 a.m., trotting hand-in-hand with her brother-in-law, her niece, and one of their neighbors, they were the subjects of envious looks from crowds of people huddled at the roadside too exhausted, too injured to go on. Fumiko and her people seemed so strong. None had been burned. Fumiko’s sister could not walk and had to be carried piggyback by her husband; she had sustained a back injury when the second floor of their home 900 yards from the hypocenter collapsed. But remarkably, Fumiko and the others did not seem hurt at all.

The people at the bridge were no longer jumping into the river. It was full of floating corpses, a reminder that the soothing water could quickly become a grave to a weakened body. Fumiko had wanted to wade in the river to cool off, but she turned away nauseated and ran on with the others. “Look at us,” said several of the people by the road. “We are not so lucky.”

Fumiko, who was twenty-five and had been working as an inspector in an artillery-shell factory, did indeed feel lucky. She was alive and so was her sweetheart, who had left for the army three and a half years ago but was still writing her faithfully. She was determined to marry him and return to work in her brother-in-law’s fish restaurant with its Kabuki dancers.

Even now her luck was holding, for at the Tamonin Temple near the foot of Hijiyama Hill she encountered a policeman of her acquaintance who presented her with two plump tomatoes on which she feasted with her little band of fellow survivors. And around her waist she she carried a money belt with 5000 yen. Citizens had been urged to make such belts for themselves as a precaution against air raids. Not many wore them so early in the morning. Fumiko, the lucky one, was relatively rich. She could not guess that she would hover for months near death while her companions on the road up Hijiyama Hill would all be dead within seven weeks. Having been lucky enough to live through the bomb’s blast damage and its fires, they would become victims of its lingering radiation.

A few steel and concrete buildings and bridges are still intact in Hiroshima after the Japanese city was hit by an atomic bomb by the U.S., during World War II Sept. 5, 1945. (AP Photo/Max Desfor)

Culled from: Day One: Before Hiroshima and After

 

Plastination Specimen Du Jour!

Whole-body plastinate of a woman in the 5th month of pregnancy. At this stage of the pregnancy, the fetus is 17 centimeters (about 6.5 inches) long from head to tail and causes the abdomen to bulge.

The superficial muscles have been exposed on the front side of this body, while the back shows the deeper muscles. On the left side of the back, the thoracic cavity has been opened, revealing a smoker’s lung, as can be clearly seen by the black pigmentation. On the right side, the torso has been opened to show the right kidney.

Culled from: Bodyworlds: The Anatomical Exhibition of Real Human Bodies

Andersonville Prisoner Diary Entry Du Jour!

This is the continuation of the 1864 diary of Andersonville prisoner Private George A. Hitchcock (see the archived version for all entries up until now).

Here’s today’s entry:

October 26th. An order confiscating all salt offered for sale in camp has been issued by the Dutchman. Teeth ache very severely.

Culled from: Andersonville: Giving Up the Ghost

MFDJ 02/05/24: Chicago Blackhanders

Today’s Murderous Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

The Black Hand was essentially an extortion racket practiced by Sicilian and Italian gangsters (many of whom were members of the Mafia and Camorra) for approximately thirty years—1890 to 1920—against the unschooled, superstitious immigrants of the “Little Italy” settlements sequestered in major Eastern, Southern, and Midwestern cities.

Chicago’s history of the Black Hand, like New York’s, dated back to about 1890. The violence displayed by Chicago Blackhanders against their victims was devastating; it consisted mostly of bombings that destroyed whole buildings and several families in each attack. Little Italy—the area contained within Oak and Taylor Streets and Grand and Wentworth Avenues—was a Black Hand playground, more appropriately a slaughterhouse.

For years, it seemed that Blackhanders were more interested in annihilating their victims than in extorting money from them. Black Hand killings reached a peak around 1910-11 in Chicago. At one intersection, Oak and Milton Streets, which the Italians named “Death Corner,” thirty-eight Black Hand victims were shot to death between January 1, 1910 and March 26, 1911. At least fifteen of those killed were dispatched by a professional Black Hand assassin referred to by the residents as “Shotgun Man.” This killer, never apprehended, walked about openly in Little Italy and was well known. He had no loyalty to either victim or Blackhander. He hired out his gun and would murder without flinching, carrying out death sentences decreed by Blackhanders who could not collect. Blackhanders paid him handsomely for his services.


“Death Corner”

One criminal historian estimated that close to eighty Black Hand gangs terrorized Chicago’s Little Italy during the first two decades of the present century. Some of these gangs, wholly unrelated to each other, signed their notes as “The Mysterious Hand,” or “The Secret Hand,” but it meant the same thing: Pay or Die.

The notes Chicago Blackhanders sent their victims were couched in unbearably polite words, making them all the more sinister. The letter received by a wealthy Italian businessman typified the courteous but deadly Blackhander of this era:

“Most gentle Mr. Silvani: Hoping that the present will not impress you much, you will be so good as to send me $2,000 if your life is dear to you. So I beg you warmly to put them on your door within four days. But if not, I swear this weeks’ time not even the dust of your family will exist. With regards, believe me to be your friends.”

This letter was not signed but police still managed to trace it to one Joseph Genite (who was discharged for lack of evidence), in whose house they found a stockpile of dynamite, two dozen revolvers, several sawed-off shotguns, and other assorted weapons.

Other Black Hand notes were less formal:

You got some cash. I need $1,000. You place the $100 bills in an envelope and place it underneath a board in the northeast corner of Sixtyninth Street and Euclid Avenue at eleven o’clock tonight. If you place the money there, you will live. If you don’t, you die. If you report this to the police, I’ll kill you when I get out. They may save you the money, but they won’t save you your life.”

The police in most instances were helpless; the notes were all but impossible to trace. When witnesses did come forward they quickly retracted their statements after being contacted by Black Hand enforcers. In desperation, police raided Chicago’s Little Italy in January, 1910, and rounded up close to two hundred known Sicilian gangsters suspected of running Black Hand extortion rackets. All were released within twelve hours for lack of evidence.

For a five-year period—1907 to 1912—upstanding business leaders of the Italian community banded together to form the White Hand Society which actually supplied its own police force and money to prosecute Black Handers. Many extortionists were put in prison, but were shortly paroled through contacts with corrupt local and state officials. Dr. Joseph Dimiani, one of the White Hand leaders, explained why the Society threw in the sponge. “They [the White Handers] were so discouraged by the lax administrations of justice that they were refusing to advance further money to prosecute men arrested on their complaints.”

A rash of bombings came next. Experts used by the Black Hand were brutal enforcers such as Sam Cardinelli, his chief lieutenant, eighteen-year-old Nicholas Viana, known as “The Choir Boy,” and dim-witted Frank Campione. The three, all later hanged for murder, were responsible for at least twenty bombings in which dozens of Italians were killed. One police estimation reported that more than 800 bombs were directed against Black Hand victims in Chicago between 1900 and 1930, most of them during the period from 1915 to 1918.

A whole generation of professional bombers who had once worked for Black Hand gangs found heavy-duty work in the dawn-of-the-1920s bootleg wards between gangs in Chicago. Many of these were used in Chicago union wars, as well. The Italian and Sicilian Black Handers in earlier days preferred to use non-Italian bombers to prevent identification. When the Black Hand operations fell off in the early 1920s, these non-Italian bombers went to work for union gangsters. One of these, Andrew Kerr, was arrested in 1921 and boasted that he employed the best bombers in the business to enforce his edicts over the Steam and Operating Engineers union.

Kerr named Jim Sweeney as a boss bomber. Sweeney’s group of killers included “Soup” Bartlett and “Con” Shea, who had murdered whole families with bombs for decades. Shea, Kerr swore, had been a professional bomber since he was sixteen years old.

Boss of the barber’s union in Chicago, Joseph Sangerman took Sweeney’s position as king of the bombers after Sweeny was arrested and sent to prison. Sangerman’s top bomber was George Matrisciano (alias Martini) who manufactured his own “infernal machines” of black powder. This berserk bomber, who had terrorized Black Hand victims for twenty-five years, always walked about with two sticks of dynamite in his pockets. Before Sangerman had him killed, Matrisciano could be seen approaching total strangers in Little Italy and proudly showing them a newspaper clipping which described him as “a terrorist.”

A sharp decline of Black Hand operations followed Matrisciano’s death, and finally the racket cased to flourish. Police had failed to snuff out the Black Hand terror; it was the coming of Prohibition and its big-moneyed rackets which ended the terrible extortions. Like stock market investors, almost everybody happily plunged into bootlegging—even the courteous murderers of Little Italy, much to the gratitude of its hounded residents.

Culled from: Bloodletters and Badmen

Arcane Excerpts: Delusions and Stupor Edition

A Compendium of Insanity is a book written by John B. Chapin, M.D., LL.D. and published in 1898.  Chapin (1829-1918) was an American physician and mental hospital administrator. He was an advocate for the removal of mentally ill patients from the almshouses in New York State to a hospital setting and helped to pass a state law that provided hospital care for the patients.  Here is an excerpt from the book which answers the question that I often ponder:  am I suffering from Melancholia with Delusions and Stupor?  (It turns out, no – no, I am not!)

Melancholia with Delusions and Stupor

A patient may pass from the condition of simple melancholia into a more aggravated form of the same disease, characterized by an appearance of stupor. The stuporous condition is mainly due to the domination of delusions and to a partial or complete suspension of will-power, which may amount to a cataleptoid state. When a patient is presented for examination suffering from stuporous melancholia, there is usually a long history of invalidism or of progressive depression, with a comparatively sudden transition to a stuporous condition. It is not to be understood that a patient necessarily passes first through an attack of melancholia with agitation before entering upon the stage under consideration, as both forms of disease appear to continue along the lines of their respective development till the end is reached in recovery or in terminal dementia. When a patient is presented for observation suffering from stuporous melancholia, the appearance will be in striking contrast with the other forms of this disease. There will be offered a history of physical ill-health, insomnia, and worry, or possibly of some profound moral shock. The prodromal stage is not usually prolonged. The more aggravated mental symptoms may appear at an early stage. The patient is disposed to be absolutely silent, and the only response to questions may be monosyllabic. The eyes have a fixed and downcast appearance or are entirely closed.  The facial muscles are immobile. The countenance is pale or sallow, and has a smooth, oleaginous appearance. A fixed and rigid position is maintained, and whether sitting or standing there is a reluctance to any change, accompanied often by actual resistance. There is an unwillingness to rise from the bed, to dress, or to undress. Food is not desired, or absolutely refused, and only administered by placing liquids in the mouth, or often by overcoming the resistance of the patient by the use of force. The bodily functions are performed unconsciously or are in a state of apparent suspense. Saliva is retained in the mouth, giving rise to an offensive odor. The tongue when examined seems flabby, enlarged, and shows indentations produced by pressure of the teeth. The pulse is not accelerated, and the temperature is normal or subnormal. There is an apparent indifference to surroundings, to heat or cold or bodily comforts. Every effort to arouse the patient is without avail. There is an appearance of stupidity and stupor; but, as a matter of fact, the mind of the patient is intently engrossed with delusions which are of centric origin or wholly subjective. The intense will-power necessary to maintain fixed positions for long periods, the resistance offered to all changes proposed, the expression of the eyes, all indicate that the mind is intently absorbed in some controlling delusion. This condition might be confounded with the stupid state that characterizes mental enfeeblement or dementia, but the history of the case will usually furnish the right clue. It is important, however, to the proper treatment that a distinction be made. A person may pass rapidly into the stuporous stage of melancholia, but dementia, as will appear, is the usual terminal stage of several forms of mental disease of long standing. Patients have stated on recovery that while in this state they believed they were fragile, like glass, and would go to pieces if jarred or moved; that they were transformed into another state of existence, and could subsist without food; that the world had come to an end, and all human operations were suspended. The patient believes he is incapable of making any exertion to extricate himself from some terrible fate awaiting him—conditions showing the power exerted by dominating delusions. An experience with some dreadful dream furnishes the nearest approach to what may be conceived to be the mental state of these wretched persons. The nature of the delusions of a stuporous melancholiac are usually unknown, and their consequent actions so uncertain that it is never safe to act upon any presumption. Some outbreak of violence directed against the patient himself, his attendants or surrounding objects may occur at an unexpected time, so that it is not wholly safe to leave a patient unattended.


Melancholia with Stupor

Andersonville Prisoner Diary Entry Du Jour!

This is the continuation of the 1864 diary of Andersonville prisoner Private George A. Hitchcock (see the archived version for all entries up until now).

Here’s today’s entry:

October 25th. The wood detail has been stopped because some of the men have escaped. Salt is very scarce.

Culled from: Andersonville: Giving Up the Ghost

MFDJ 02/04/24: Ruthless Treatment of Russians

Today’s Ruthless Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

The prisoners of war at Bergen-Belsen concentration camp were guarded by soldiers who could not be deployed to the front because of their age or physical afflictions. These soldiers made up the territorial units (Landesschützen).

The camps’ headquarters were staffed with reserve officers, many of whom were over 60 years old and had already served in World War I.

The guidelines for the conduct towards Soviet POWs issued by the Wehrmacht High Command demanded a ruthless treatment of these prisoners without any respect for martial or international law. Many soldiers acted accordingly, others sometimes used the leeway they had to the prisoners’ advantage.


Bergen-Belsen, 1942
One guard squad of the territorial units relieving another at the entrance to the camp.
Photographer unknown, from the collection of Wehrmacht soldier Heinrich V.


Wietzendorf, autumn of 1942
A German soldier beating prisoners.
Photographer unknown, from the collection of Wehrmacht officer Heinz Dietrich Meyer.


Oerbke, 1941
Guards and prisoners outside the registration hut.
Photographer unknown, from the collection of Wehrmacht soldier Heinrich V.

“It all starts off pretty messy and jumbled here. For the most part, the Russians are just like animals, and, accordingly, are not treated very gently by us.”
Excerpt from a letter written by Wehrmacht officer Otto R., Oerbke, August 10, 1941

“[…] at the moment, our duties here are so cruel and affecting, I can’t even write about it to you. Believe me, the sacrifices we make are greater than you think. We’re always behind barbed wire and have the most terrible images before us. No, we’ll only be happy once we’re all back home. Here, in this isolation, we can’t even take our minds off things.”
Excerpt from a letter from Wehrmacht soldier Heinrich V. to his wife, Bergen-Belsen, October 14, 1941

“This morning, a gang of sick prisoners, around 50 of them, marched past me. […] They were hollow-eyed figures with pale cheeks and large, dark rings around their eyes. Death was already written all over their faces. […] It was a sad sight on this Sunday morning, this caravan of death.”
From notes taken by Wehrmacht officer Heinz Dietrich Meyer, Wietzendorf, entry for February 1, 1942

Culled from: Bergen-Belsen

Post-Mortem Portrait Du Jour!


Woman Mourns Lost Child
Circa 1852, sixth-plate daguerreotype, 3.75″ x 3.25″

In this poignant and dramatically arranged scene, a bereaved woman, her gloved hand placed against her forehead, gazes down at her lost child.

Culled from: Beyond the Dark Veil

Andersonville Prisoner Diary Entry Du Jour!

This is the continuation of the 1864 diary of Andersonville prisoner Private George A. Hitchcock (see the archived version for all entries up until now).

Here’s today’s entry:

October 24th. Had a comfortable night’s rest. We think we have our tent made very comfortable. The chief sutler was cleaned out by the Dutch captain for selling liquor, and his goods confiscated for the benefit of the sick around camp.

Culled from: Andersonville: Giving Up the Ghost

MFDJ 02/03/24: Distressful Wailing and Maggoty Bones

Today’s Distressful Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

Here’s the interesting story of a Nebraska settler who served in the American Civil War as recounted in The Children’s Blizzard:

Born in the rich rolling farmland of eastern Ohio in 1835, Ben Shattuck was twenty-six years old and single when he enlisted in the seventy-third Ohio Volunteer Infantry on November 16, 1861, seven months after the war began. He was assigned to Company B under the command of Second Lieutenant Thomas W. Higgins, and he drilled through the cold, wet winter months along with hundreds of other raw recruits at Camp Logan near Chillicothe. By the end of January 1862, the Seventy-third Ohio was considered battle ready and the men boarded trains bound for West Virginia. Their first taste of action was a forced march of eighty miles over mountain roads in a winter storm. Near Moorfield, on the South Branch of the Potomac, they were ambushed at night by Confederate snipers as they stood warming themselves at roadside campfires. The next day, the Seventy-third came under Rebel fire again while trying to ford the storm-swollen Potomac and take Moorfield. Eventually the Union soldiers prevailed and briefly held the town before retreating back up the river.

Disease ravaged the green regiment in the aftermath of this first battle. Many died in the mud and snow. Whether Ben Shattuck was among those who fell ill during those first bitter weeks of campaigning, we do not know. But he did survive. On March 20, 1862, he was promoted to the rank of corporal. It was sometime during this first year of his service in the Union Army that Ben “converted” to Christianity, as an awakening of religious fervor was termed, and joined the Methodist church—the Methodist Episcopal Church, as it was known then.

Ben served with the Seventy-third Ohio in some of the bloodiest battles of the war, including the disastrous Second Battle of Bull Run at the end of August 1862, in which 147 of the regiment’s 310 men were killed or wounded and 20 taken prisoner, and the humiliating Union defeat at Chancellorsville the following spring. Though Chancellorsville ended in confusion and retreat for the massive Union contingent under General Joseph Hooker, the Confederate Army paid dearly for its victory. Robert E. Lee sustained some thirteen thousand casualties during the campaign (about 22 percent of his army) and lost the charismatic General Stonewall Jackson, mortally wounded by accident by his own men while returning to the Confederate lines at night. By chance, the Seventy-third Ohio was positioned away from the worst of the fighting and they emerged from the engagement relatively unscathed. In all, Union casualties came to more than seventeen thousand men during these few days in April 1863.

At noon on July 1, 1863, the Ohio Seventy-third arrived at Cemetery Hill overlooking Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, and for the next three days they endured the almost ceaseless fire of Lee’s army. During the few hours at night that the guns and cannons were silent, the Ohio men lay shivering on the ground, listening to the cries of the wounded and dying on the field. “It was the most distressful wail we ever listened to,” wrote Samuel H. Hurst, the regiment’s commander.

The climax of the battle came on July 3. Early that day the Ohio men were driven back at the Emmetsburg Road, but eventually they advanced as the Union forces succeeded in breaching Lee’s line.

Sometime in the course of that day Ben Shattuck, now a sergeant, sustained a bullet wound in his right leg and was taken prisoner by the Confederate forces. For the next eighty-three days he was held at the Confederate prison camp on Belle Isle, a low-lying island surrounded by rapids of the James River near Richmond, Virginia. There were no permanent barracks for the prisoners, only tents, and food was so scarce that prisoners were reduced to gnawing on maggoty bones and stealing the boots of dying fellow soldiers and selling them for food. “All other thoughts and feelings had become concentrated in that of hunger,” wrote a Union prisoner. “Men became, under such surroundings, indifferent to almost everything, except their own miseries, and found an excuse in their sufferings for any violations of ordinary usages of humanity.” Every day, fifteen to twenty-five prisoners died. Their corpses were wrapped in canvas and tossed into holes in the ground just outside the prison. Many on Belle Isle were forced to sleep on the ground without shelter and died of exposure; many froze to death in the tents.


Belle Isle Prison Camp

“Can those be men?” the poet Walt Whitman wondered when he saw a group of Union soldiers returning from Belle Isle. “Those little livid brown ash streaked, monkey-looking dwarves? — are they not really mummified, dwindled corpses?”

After nearly three months, Ben was released from Belle Isle, possibly in an exchange for Confederate prisoners. The wound in his leg would bother him for the rest of his life. During his final fifteen months of military service, Ben fought with General Sherman’s forces in the siege of Atlanta. He watched the city burn in November of 1864 and he marched with Sherman to the sea. On New Year’s Eve of 1864, Sergeant Shattuck’s term of service expired and he was mustered out of his regiment.

Culled from: The Children’s Blizzard

 

Garretdom! – Empty Morphine Bottle Edition

An Empty Morphine Bottle Was Near.

CHICAGO, Sept. 27.—Attorney Lawrence J. J. Nissen was found lying dead in his office at 170 East Madison street yesterday morning. Upon a table near by stood an empty morphine bottle. At his late home, 107 Schiller street, whither the body was at once conveyed, the theory of suicide is discredited, and the confidence expressed that he died of paralysis. The deceased was for forty years a resident of Chicago, and was formerly a partner of Judge Barnum in the law business. He was fifty-nine years of age and leaves a wife and several grown children.

Culled from the collection of The Comtesse DeSpair
1886 Morbid Scrapbook

So I was going to put this in the “Suicide” category, but then I did additional research and found this article that made me change it to the “Accidental Death” category:

They Sought Relief from Insomnia.

An inquest was held yesterday at No. 432 West Twelfth street on the body of the lawyer, Lawrence J. J. Nissen, who was found dead in his office, No. 170 East Madison street, Sunday morning. A partly emptied bottle labeled morphine was found on a table by the side of the dead man. From the testimony of the daughter, Miss Emma Nissen, a teacher of elocution, it was learned that the lawyer had for years past suffered from insomnia, and that he was always in the habit of taking the drug to induce sleep. Some five years ago he had a narrow escape from death by taking an overdose. Judge Barnum, a former law partner of deceased, also stated that Mr. Nissen was long a sufferer from sleeplessness. The verdict was in accordance with the facts.

Culled from the September 28, 1886 issue of the Chicago Tribune.

Enjoy more morbid olde news at Garretdom!

 

Andersonville Prisoner Diary Entry Du Jour!

This is the continuation of the 1864 diary of Andersonville prisoner Private George A. Hitchcock (see the archived version for all entries up until now).

Here’s today’s entry:

October 23rd. Very cold and heavy frost last night, for which could not sleep much. Went out again for wood.

Culled from: Andersonville: Giving Up the Ghost