Category Archives: Art

Today’s Alien Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

While lounging around one afternoon in the spring of 1908, a middle-aged German woman felt an unseen hand grip her throat. She thrashed and gasped as it crushed her windpipe, and only after a great struggle did she manage to pry it loose with her right hand. At which point the offending hand – her own left hand – fell limply to her side. A few months prior, on New Year’s Eve, she’d suffered a stroke, and ever since then her left hand had been lashing out like a rotten child – spilling her drinks, picking her nose, throwing off her bedcovers, all without her conscious consent. Now the hand had choked and bruised her. “There must be an evil spirit in it,” she confessed to her doctor.

Two similar cases popped up in the United States during World War II. Both victims, one woman, one man, suffered from epilepsy and had had their corpus callosums surgically severed to head off seizures. (The corpus callosum, a bundle of neuron fibers, connects the left and right hemispheres.) The seizures did quiet down, but a distressing side effect emerged: one hand took on a life of its own. For weeks afterward the woman would open a drawer with the right hand and the left hand would snap it shut. Or she’d start buttoning up a blouse with her right and the left would follow along and unbutton it. The man found himself handing bread to his grocer with one hand, yanking it back with the other. Back at home, he’d drop a slice into the toaster and his other hand would fling it out – Dr. Strangelove meets The Three Stooges.

As more and more cases emerged, neurologists started calling this syndrome “capricious hand” [my personal favorite – DeSpair] and “anarchic hand,” but most now refer to it as alien hand – the unwilled, uncontrolled movements of one’s own hand. Alien hand can strike people after strokes, tumors, surgery, or Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, and while cases usually disappear within a year, sometimes the hand anarchy persists for a decade.

Through autopsy work,neuroscientists have determined what sort of brain damage causes alien hand. First, victims probably suffer damage to sensory areas. Those areas provide feedback whenever we move our arms voluntarily, and without that feedback, people simply don’t feel as if they’ve initiated a movement themselves. In other words, victims lose a “sense of agency” – a sense of being in control of their actions.

Hand-to-hand combat – with one hand undoing the other’s work (pants up/pants down) – usually arises after damage to the corpus callosum, damage that disrupts communication between the left and right hemispheres. The left brain moves the right side of the body, and vice versa. But proper movement involves more than just issuing motor commands; it also involves inhibitory signals. When your left brain tells your right hand to grab an apple, for instance, the left brain also issues a signal through the corpus callosum that tells your right brain (and thus, left hand) to cool it. The message is, “I’m on it. Take five.” If the corpus callosum suffers damage, though, the inhibition signal never arrives. As a result the right hemisphere notices that something’s going on and – lacking orders not to – lurches with the left hand to get in on the action. It’s really an excess of enthusiasm. And because most people perform most tasks with their right hands, it’s usually the left hand that jumps in late and causes this type of alien anarchy. Overall, left hand-right hand combat usually involves the weaker half rebelling and trying to win equal status for itself.

A woman in the hospital with an attacking alien hand.

Culled from: The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons: The History of the Human Brain as Revealed by True Stories of Trauma, Madness, and Recovery

Morbid Art Du Jour!

Sarah Sitkin.

Her art ain’t for wimps!

(Thanks to Anna for the link.)

Sarah Sitkin is a Los Angeles based artist. Her sculptural works are made in wide variety of media including but not limited to silicone, clay, plaster, resin,and latex.

Check out more of her gruesome goodness at her official site.

Today’s Ridiculous Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

At Nazi concentration camps, the striped uniforms were deliberately handed out in the wrong sizes to make the prisoners look ridiculous.

Culled from: Sachsenhausen Concetration Camp 1936-1945

All Hail The Pumpkin King!

Look at this adorable, if ever-so-slightly creepy, drawing of veggies.

Then feel somewhat uneasy when you learn that the image is from the wall of the cellar of the kitchen at the Sachsenhausen Prison Camp – from the time after World War II when it was a Soviet prison camp (Soviet Special Camp, 1945-1950).

Today’s Fork-Tailed Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

Human settlement helped disease to settle in, attracting disease-spreading insects, while worms took up residence within the human body. Parasitologists and palaeopathologists have shown how the parasitic roundworm Ascaris, a nematode growing to over a foot long, evolved in humans, probably from pig ascarids, producing diarrhoea and malnutrition. Other helminths or wormlike fellow-travellers became common in the human gut, including the Enterobius (pinworm or threadworm), the yards-long hookworm, and the filarial worms which cause elephantiasis and African river blindness. Diseases also established themselves where agriculture depended upon irrigation – in Mesopotamia, Egypt, India and around the Yellow (Huang) River in China. Paddyfields harbor parasites able to penetrate the skin and enter the bloodstream of barefoot workers, including the forked-tailed flood fluke Schistosomawhich utilizes aquatic snails as a host and cause bilharzia or schistosomiasis (graphically known as “big belly”), provoking mental and physical deterioration through the chronic irritation caused by the worm. Investigation of Egyptian mummies has revealed calcified eggs in liver and kidney tissues, proving the presence of schistosomiasis in ancient Egypt. (Mummies tell us much more about the diseases form which Egyptians suffered; these included gallstones, bladder and kidney stones, mastoiditis and numerous eye diseases, and many skeletons show evidence of rheumatoid arthritis.) In short, permanent settlement afforded golden opportunities for insects, vermin and parasites, while food stored in granaries became infested with insects, bacteria, fungoid toxins and rodent excrement. The scales of health tipped unfavorably, with infections worsening and human vitality declining.

Culled from: The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity

And the worst part of that paragraph?  They had no medications to get rid of any of those things!!!  As someone who once had the misfortune to suffer from one of the milder disorders – pinworms – I cannot even imagine!  Of course, unfortunate people in under-developed nations still suffer needlessly with many of these diseases.

Morbid Art Du Jour!

These L.A. gang member “rugs” are just amazing!  Bullet holes, anus – no detail is forgotten.  And those heads!  My only criticism is… do you think L.A. gang members would really have speedo tans?

See more images at Dangerous Minds.   (Thanks to Rob for the link.)

Today we continue the tragic story of the Iroquois Theater fire of December 30, 1903.  As you may recall, the fire had just been started by a light above the stage and despite the frantic attempts to snuff it out, it had started to grow.  Now we pick up the tragic action with…

Today’s Incinerating Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

Eddy Foy was in his dressing room busily applying the final touches of makeup when the drama of the fire in the loft began to overshadow the production on stage. Dressed in his “Sister Anne” costume, he was due to appear in a few minutes opposite a comic elephant. When he heard the commotion, he opened his dressing room door, ran to the stage, and saw the fire. Acting on instinct, he burst onto center stage and raised his hands, imploring the audience to remain seated and calm. “Ladies and gentlemen,” Foy exclaimed. There is no danger. This theater is fireproof. Don’t get excited.” He signaled conductor Herbert Gillea to direct the remaining six musicians to “play, play, play and keep playing.” They struck up the waltz from Tchaikovsky’s Sleeping Beauty ballet, which had a temporary, soothing effect on the crowd. After more flaming sets came crashing down onto the stage, Foy signaled a stagehand to lower the asbestos curtain to protect the audience. But the curtain snagged half-way down, possibly on a cable wire used to hoist a ballerina, or on an electric light reflector, leaving a 20-foot gap between the curtain’s suspended bottom and the wooden stage floor.

The audience’s escape down the aisles turned from orderly to panic-stricken. Foy’s one last try to calm them went unheeded, and he fled to a rear stage exit. With hundreds of children in tow, the audience of mothers, fathers, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and schoolteachers scrambled for the exits. Almost immediately the aisles leading from the auditorium gallery and upper balconies became clogged and impassable. When the lights went out the crowd bunched up in blind terror and died at the exits and hallway doors that either opened inward or were locked shut to keep out freeloaders. With the auditorium filling with heat, smoke, and poisonous gases that made breathing impossible, children and mothers screamed for one another in the darkness and families became separated in the crushing stampede. Many children fell and were stomped to death.

Backstage, theater employees and cast members opened a rear set of huge double doors which sucked a powerful wind tunnel inside, fanning the flames and sending huge sheets of fire underneath the open asbestos curtain and into galleries and balconies filled with people. A second gust of wind created a fireball that shot into the auditorium, incinerating patrons in their seats or in the aisles. All of the stage drops were now on fire, which spread to the entire auditorium destroyed the 75,000 feet of oiled manila rope suspended above the loft, and burned the supposedly noncombustible asbestos curtain.

To Be Continued…

Culled from: Great Chicago Fires: Historic Blazes That Shaped a City

Morbid Art Du Jour!

While searching for images to use with this fact, I stumbled across the artwork of Eric Edward Esper, who has documented some of Chicago’s greatest disasters in brilliantly vivid paintings.  Check out his work!  A kindred soul, methinks.  I’d love to have one of his pieces – and my birthday IS coming up, people!

Here’s his brilliant painting of the start of the Iroquois Theater Fire:

Here are a few more of his masterpieces of Chicago Tragedy.The Green Hornet Streetcar Inferno:

The Eastland Disaster:

Our Lady of Angels Fire:

He has some non-Chicago masterpieces too.  Check them out!

Eric Edward Esper

Today’s Mercurial Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

In the early 20th century, mercury compounds were sold as bedbug killers. They came mixed into laxatives, antiseptics, and diuretics. In extreme cases, doctors prescribed them for chronic bacterial infections such as syphilis. In the 1920’s, both the benefits and the murderous potential of mercury bichloride were well known. The poison’s risky attributes had been impressed on film fans everywhere, thanks to a Hollywood-fueled tabloid scandal of 1920.

Actress Olive Thomas had the look of a charming child, with a shining bob of curly dark hair, big violet-blue eyes, and a pale, heart-shaped face. The look launched her career, starting in 1914 when she’d won a “Most Beautiful Girl in New York City” contest. She went on to become a featured Ziegfeld dancer at the New Amsterdam Theatre, a graceful waif, drifting in a zephyr of scarves.  Within a few years she was making films for the Selznick studios.

In the way of people whose lives seem charmed, Thomas soon married a member of the Hollywood’s elite, Jack Pickford, younger brother of screen star Mary Pickford. The couple rapidly developed a reputation for wild behavior, intense partying, and intense quarreling, usually over his numerous affairs – he’d developed syphilis as a result of one of them. They separated, reunited, separated, and tried again, delighting the gossip magazines. “She and Jack were madly in love with one another but I always thought of them as a couple of children playing together,” Mary Pickford observed sadly in her autobiography many years later.

In early September 1920 the couple sailed to Paris, reportedly on a reconciliation holiday. They checked into the Hotel Ritz and whirled off to enjoy the Prohibition-free city, drinking and dancing at Left Bank bistros until the early morning. At the end of one particularly drunken spree, Pickford and Thomas staggered into their hotel room at nearly three in the morning. Jack, barely standing, fell into the bed. His wife, still energized by the adventure, puttered around the room, wrote a letter, and, finally tiring, went into the bathroom to get ready for sleep.

As Pickford told the police, he was floating in a whiskeyed haze when Olive began screaming, over and over, “Oh my god, my god.” He stumbled into the dimly lit bathroom, where she was leaning against the counter. Mistaking it for her sleeping medicine, she had picked up a bottle of the bichloride of mercury potion that he rubbed on his painful syphilis sores, poured a dose, and chugged it down. As the corrosive sublimate burned down her throat, she had a moment to realize her mistake. He caught her up and carried her back to the bed, grabbing the phone and calling for an ambulance. “Oh my god,” she repeated, “I’m poisoned.”

As the story broke, as Thomas lingered in the hospital for three more days, the newspapers repeated every rumor smoking around them: Pickford’s infidelities had driven her to suicide; he had wished to get rid of her and tricked her into taking the poison. As the days passed, he became more evil, she more saintly. So many people flocked to Thomas’s funeral in Paris that women fainted in the crush and the streets became carpeted with countless hats, knocked off and trampled.

The police launched an investigation, including an autopsy, and concluded that it was, as Pickford had said, just a terrible accident. In an interview with the Los Angeles Examiner after his return to California, Pickford dwelled on how much his wife had wanted to life: “The physicians held out hope for her until the last moment, until they found her kidneys paralyzed. Then they lost hope. But the doctors told me she had fought harder than any patient they ever had.”

Olive Thomas’s demise, for all the feverish attention it received, was actually a rather standard death from bichloride of mercury. In New York City the medical examiner’s office calculated that the compound caused about twenty deaths a year, mostly suicides and similarly unfortunate accidents.

Culled from: The Poisoner’s Handbook

Coronal Section of the Head Du Jour!

Here’s another lovely artistic image culled from the book Mütter Museum of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia by Gretchen Worden.

Sliced Head (2000) by Richard Ross

One of a series of coronal sections of the head, prepared for the Mütter Museum by Dr. Joseph P. Tunis (1866-1936), 1910.

Today’s Venomous Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

In the last few years, during dry summers, public health officials in Tokyo have warned citizens that the world’s largest and most painful hornet may be in their midst. The so-called Asian giant hornet, known locally as yak-killer, delivers a venomous sting that contains high levels of the pain-inducing compounds normally found in bee or wasp stings, along with a deadly neurotoxin called mandaratoxin that can be fatal. The world’s leading expert in the giant hornet, Masato Ono, described the sting as feeling like “a hot nail through my leg.” Worst of all, the sting attracts other hornets to the victim through the pheromones it leaves behind, increasing the likelihood of being stung several times.

In Japan these hornets are called suzumebachi, which translates to “sparrow wasp.” They are so large, measuring five centimeters from head to tail, that when they fly they actually resemble small birds. During hot summers they can be seen in Japanese cities foraging in garbage cans for bits of discarded fish to carry back to their young. Because they are so willing to venture into urban areas in search of food, about forty people die every year after being stung by the massive hornets.

Culled from: Wicked Bugs: The Louse That Conquered Napoleon’s Army & Other Diabolical Insects

And here’s what the stings look like.  Yikes!

Today’s Artistic Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

Jean-Michel Basquiat started on the road to becoming an internationally known artist by spray-painting the sides of buildings in Manhattan in 1977, when he was seventeen years old. What made his drawing stand out from the standard graffiti were cryptic messages he included that left many curious as to their meaning. An article in the Village Voice ultimately revealed his identity. His talent was encouraged and before long, Basquiat was heralded as a leading painter of the neo-expressionist movement. Even though he rose from poverty to acquire accolades and wealth, Basquiat still preferred the old heroin haunts that he had frequented during his years as a street artist. He died in his loft studio in Soho, New York, from a speedball (mixing heroin and cocaine), at the age of twenty-seven, in 1988. In 2007, his wall-size piece of art “Profit I’ sold for more than fourteen million dollars.

Stomach scar courtesy splenectomy after getting hit by a car at age 8.

Culled from: Genius and Heroin: The Illustrated Catalogue of Creativity, Obsession, and Reckless Abandon Through the Ages

Incidentally, the scars on Basquiat’s abdomen resulted from him being hit by a car when he was 8 years old – an injury which resulted in a splenectomy.

And I ask you – would you pay fourteen million dollars for this painting?

Morbid Art Du Jour!

Dan LuVisi is warped.  He likes to re-imagine cartoon characters as criminals and even comes up with entire storylines for his disturbing images.  It takes all kinds, as we know.  (Thanks to Anna for the link.)

Your Favorite Cartoon Characters Reimagined As Psycho Killers Will Ruin Your Childhood

Today’s Mummified Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

Mummification is a fascinating way to preserve a person’s remains, whether to be worshipped or because they’re planning on using that body at a later date. But some people have gone to incredible lengths to prepare their own bodies for mummification while they were still alive.

The most famous practitioners of self-mummification are the sokushinbutsu—the Buddhas in the flesh—whose bodies have been found in Japan, primarily in Yamagata Prefecture. Some 24 individuals, mainly practitioners of Shingon Buddhism, have been found successfully self-mummified, their deaths dating between the 12th and early 20th centuries AD.

Mummifying yourself is not a thing you do on the spur of the moment, especially in Japan’s humid climates. In fact, there is a 3,000-day “training” process for turning an ordinary ascetic’s body into a mummy’s. The key element of the process is dietary; Japanese ascetics would commonly abstain from cereals, removing wheat, rice, foxtail millet, pros so millet, and soybeans. Instead, they would eat things like nuts, berries, pine needles, tree bark, and resin (which is why the diet of the sokushinbutsu was called mokujikyo, or “tree-eating.” Over time, the diet would become more restrictive, starving the body of nutrients and eliminating the fat and moisture that can encourage bodily decay after death; X-rays of sokushinbutsu have even shown river stones in the guts of mummies. Jeremiah suggests that, beyond the weight loss, some aspects of the diet may have helped with the preservation of the body after death. For example, certain herbs and toxic cycad nuts may have inhibited bacterial growth. And at least some sokushinbutsu are said to have drunk a tea made from urushi, the sap of Toxicodendron vernicifluum, which is typically used to make lacquer. In addition to facilitating vomiting, the urushi may have functioned as a sort of embalming fluid, rendering the body toxic to potential flesh-eating invaders.

Once the ascetic was prepared to attempt to become a sokushinbutsu, it’s said he would step into a tiny burial chamber and has himself buried alive, with a small opening to allow air inside the chamber. There he would sit, chanting sutra and ringing a bell to signal that he was still alive. Once the bell stopped ringing, the chamber would be completely sealed, and after three years it would be opened again to see if the attempt at self-mummification proved successful.

Hundreds of people are thought to have attempted this form of self-mummification, and it’s not known how many were successful. However, you can visit some of the successful sokushinbutsu at their shrines. Famously, Daijuku Bosatsu Shinnyokai-Shonin, who mummified himself at the age of 96 in 1783, sits in the Ryusui-ji Dainichibou Temple in Tsuruoka City, Yamagata Prefecture. If, when your burial chamber was opened, your body was found preserved, then you could be worshipped as a sokushinbutsu. You could be dressed in robes and placed in a shrine where humanity could await your reawakening. Here, there is actually a small cheat in the self-mummification process; if the body was not decayed but not totally preserved, the skin would actually be treated with incense smoke to ensure it would last.

However, changing mores and laws meant that not all successful sokushinbutsu were enshrined. When the priest and ascetic Bukkai Shonin died in 1903, he was interred and was supposed to be exhumed after three years, but exhumation was illegal in Japan at that point in time. When Bukkai was eventually exhumed, it was in 1961 by a team of researchers, who found the ascetic quite well preserved.

And if your body was found rotting when the tomb was opened? Well, then no worship for your remains. An exorcism would be performed and the remains would be reburied. All those years of self-starvation those final days spent alone in a dark chamber, and your remains become an object of caution rather than worship.

Culled from: io9
Generously submitted by: Mike Marano

I can’t decide if that’s the ultimate form of self-destruction or vanity?

Morbid Crochet!

One of the greatest trends of recent years is the deviant crochet, in which a tedious activity popular with grandmothers with Christmas presents to create is turned into a tool of dark art.  And few have done this better than Croshame.  Check out the gallery!  I’m especially fond of Sid & Nancy.

Croshame

Today’s Narrow Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

The narrow, brick chimney of a Louisiana bank became his tomb for 27 years and now Joseph Schexnider will be laid to rest Sunday, August 14, 2011 in a proper grave with a proper farewell by his family. Still, his brother Robert wonders, how did he wind up in that chimney? Didn’t anyone hear any cries for help? Was it a robbery attempt gone awry, an accident or something more sinister?

“At least we know where he is now,” Schexnider, 48, said, tears welling in his eyes ahead of his brother’s weekend funeral and burial. “At least he’s home.”

Nearly three decades after he disappeared, much mystery lingers about the case of Joseph Schexnider and involving a small town bank in the southern Louisiana city of Abbeville. Police say Schexnider became trapped and apparently died in the bank’s chimney in 1984. But beyond that, they know little more.

“Everybody has an opinion,” said Lt. David Hardy, chief of investigations for the Abbeville Police Department. “But no one has evidence to say one way or another.”

If Joseph Schexnider did cry out for help, no one heard his pleas. The stench of death was never detected.

The decades rolled on until last May (2011) when a construction worker helping turn the bank’s vacant second floor into offices tugged some fabric out of the chimney and was showered with old clothes and human bones.

Described as sweet-natured and relaxed by the few who remember him, Joseph Schexnider was 22 when his family last saw him in January 1984. He had no criminal record, but was wanted for possessing a stolen car.

A lanky, rambling man, Schexnider was prone to wandering at an early age.

In the years after they last saw them, his family, his mother, and two brothers and a sister, had not reported him missing — and no one searched for him.

“My mother worried about him, but I just said, ‘Mom, that’s just Joseph being Joseph,”‘ Robert Schexnider said. “He was always taking off for somewhere.”

Joseph first ran off around the age of 9 or 10, Robert recalled, adding his brother had dropped out of high school in the ninth grade.

He worked now and then at this and that, quitting jobs when he became tired and moving on. He was briefly in the Louisiana National Guard, leaving with a medical discharge. One of the few pictures of him shows him in uniform, his dark eyes looking off into the distance.

“He was always going off somewhere,” Robert Schexnider said. “He told me he’d seen every state in the country.”

Schexnider followed carnivals and once traveled with a circus. He told his brother he hawked cotton candy and peanuts with the shows, traveling with the circus to New York where he was stranded when it left to go overseas.

“He didn’t have enough money to get home, so the church helped him out,” recalled Francis Plaisance, a city councilman and the pastor of the church the Schexniders attended. “I remember him as being a nice kid.”

Plaisance also remembers Joseph as a somewhat simple person. When the church sent a plane ticket to New York for him to come home, Schexnider was unable to navigate the airport.

“We ended up having a pastor up there walking him through it and put him on the plane,” Plaisance said.

Jason Hebert, now a detective with Abbeville Police, went to elementary school with Joseph Schexnider. He described him as quiet kid, on the fringe of a group of young boys that made mischief in the town.

“He was just another kid,” Hebert said. “Nothing really stood out about him.”

With the remains found in the chimney were a yellow long-sleeve shirt, a pair of jeans, blue tennis shoes, and jockey shorts with Schexnider’s name printed in the waistband. There also was a magazine and gloves.

He had a wallet with a copy of his birth certificate, a Social Security card and a few pictures.

“There was no sign of foul play,” Hardy said. But, he said, there is no way to determine the cause of death.

From the way the skeleton was recovered, Hardy said it appeared Schexnider went into the 14-inch-by-14-inch chimney feet first. Because the chimney narrowed sharply at the bottom, he then was apparently unable to maneuver his way back out.

There was no way out at the bottom of the chute, which ended in a 3-inch opening to a narrow fireplace on the second floor of the bank building.

“He was stuck with nowhere to go,” Hardy said. If he had called for help — Hardy points out — he would have been 20 feet above the street, and encased in bricks.

“His voice would have been carried up and away from the street,” Hardy added.

None of the people working on the floor below reported any strange sounds. No one ever went into the seldom-used second floor and reported any strange smells.

His brother won’t guess why Joseph went into the chimney, but acknowledged in his final days in town that Joseph had gotten in “with a bad crowd.” He was carrying no burglary tools when found or anything to carry away money if he had planned to rob the bank.

Plaisance said he could see it as a misconceived burglary plan on Schexnider’s part, however.

“He was the kind of guy who would do things without really thinking them through,” Plaisance said.  After so many decades and so few clues, Abbeville Police have declared the case closed.

Culled from: CBS News
Generously submitted by: Mike Marano

I don’t have claustrophobia, but I get incredibly claustrophobic just thinking about going down a chimney. Does anybody actually survive these attempts?

Atrocious Art: Road-Kill Edition!

Kimberly Witham collects roadkill and makes incredibly beautiful still life (er, death?) out of the deceased creatures.  I think the images are a wonderful tribute to the animals.  (Thanks to Michael for the link.)

Kimberly Witham