Category Archives: Ghastly!

Today’s Ever-More-Sophisticated Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

Professional grave robbers had begun supplying anatomists with corpses for dissection in the early 1700s. Concentrated mainly in London and Edinburgh, but also working in provincial English towns and later the American colonies, the body snatchers developed unique methods of unearthing their quarry with speed, stealth, and efficiency. Strongly despised and universally feared, the rival packs of ruthless men were nicknamed the “Resurrectionists,” after their ability to raise the dead from their graves, or the “Sack ‘Em Up Men,” after their method of transporting their wares. Initially, the perpetrators were grave diggers and sextons bribed by surgeons to exhume the corpses they had just buried. One grave digger who had been thus seduced was caught in 1736 lifting bodies from St. Dunstan’s churchyard in Stepney, located in east London, where he worked, and selling them to a surgeon for dissection. Sentenced to be publicly whipped, he received hundreds of lashes from the angry crowds that gathered in the churchyard to dole out his punishment.

So not only were the grave robbers willing to supply bodies to Scottish and English anatomist,; they could also prove to be convenient scapegoats for outraged public opinion. By the time Pritty and Thomas were caught stealing John Race’s corpse in 1747, the growing business in dead bodies was beginning to attract all manner of lawless desperadoes and petty crooks, who were greedy for rich pickings from the eager surgeons. Before long, with the Hunter brothers’ backing, body snatching would become a carefully orchestrated, highly managed, and increasingly lucrative industry. Rising public vigilance and widespread condemnation would only prompt the Resurrectionists to develop ever more sophisticated techniques.

Resurrectionists at work

Working on moonless nights throughout the winter, when the anatomy classes ran, the teams used wooden shovels to dig silently through the freshly turned soil of a new grave. By the discreet glow of covered lanterns, they dug a narrow shaft at the head of a grave down to the top end of a coffin, exposing about one-third of the lid. Using crowbars of grappling hooks, they pulled on the coffin lid, snapping the cheap thin wood under the weight of the remaining soil, to reveal their trophy. It was now but an easy matter to sling a rope around the arms and drag the body from its dank hole. Quickly, the gang stripped the corpse of its funeral shroud, working on the principle that while there was no law against stealing a body, since it had no owner, taking clothes, a coffin, or even a wedding ring could be punishable by hanging. In practice, the courts still found ways to punish miscreants—as Thomas and Pritty had found, to their misfortune. Next, the naked and usually limp body—rigor mortis would normally have passed within a day or two of death—was bundled into a sack or a hamper, ready for delivery before dawn to the basement steps of a waiting anatomist.

At the peak of their reign of terror, before the Anatomy Act ended the practice, professional gangs would unearth a body from a shallow grave in fifteen minutes flat. A single team could procure as many as ten bodies in a night’s work or three hundred in one year. Paupers’ graves were always the most popular, since the poor were conveniently buried in mass graves left uncovered until full or in shallow graves in public burial grounds. Richer folk took care to protect their dead in locked vaults or lead coffins.

Culled from: The Knife Man

Vintage Crime Scene Du Jour!

KILLS WIFE IN QUARREL
Gertrude Miller, 22, a negress of 204 West Fortieth street, was shot and killed by her husband Leslie yesterday afternoon after they had quarrelled over money. She died before an ambulance arrived.

The Sun,
May 21, 1915

Culled from: Murder in the City

Incidentally, the 4-story building where Gertrude was slain is long gone, replaced by this:

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 12th. Very chilly wind all day. Our two days’ rations did not come till late at night, because a number of the enlisted recruits could not be found, and the authorities feared that they had been murdered by our boys, who are very indignant at their action. A man near me, who was nearly naked, perished with the cold.

Culled from: Andersonville: Giving Up the Ghost

FYI: The Morbid Fact Du Jour newsletter will be on hiatus from Friday, February 23rd through Tuesday, March 19th while the Comtesse attends to family in Catatonia. While she’s away, you can always peruse the archives here!

Please, stay morbid in my absence!

Today’s Unextricated Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

An account of the death of Sergeant Christian Taifel, Company E, 107th Ohio Infantry, 2nd Brigade, 1st Division, 11th Corps at Gettysburg during the American Civil War.

This short biography illustrates some of the complications which often arise when the researcher attempts to track down the final disposition of a Civil War soldier. In the case of Sergeant Taifel, conflicting reports are found as to his death. One, the official source, records that he died on July 18, at Satterlee Military Hospital, Philadelphia, sixteen days after being wounded in the hand on the afternoon of July 1 at Gettysburg. However, the following letter points toward a totally different set of circumstances.

 

Navarre, Ohio
October 3, 1885

Colonel John Bachelder
Gettysburg, Pa.

Dear Sir….

A color bearer of the 107th O.V.I. was shot in the wrist, the ball passing up in his arm [and] stopping near the elbow. He walked around at the 11th Corps Hospital several days and wouldn’t let the Doctors cut out the ball. I plead with him one evening when he was frying potatoes and onions to have the ball extricated. He swore he wouldn’t and the next morning he was dead. We buried him. When I was at Gettysburg in August I went to the old Spangler Farm where the 11th Corps Hospital was and young Mr. Spangler who lives there told me that the book with the names of those who were buried in the cemetery on their farm had been given to some comrade last summer and that it is now in the war dept or Pension Bureau at Washington.

A.J. Rider

Alfred J. Rider was regimental postmaster of the 107th Ohio and was twenty-three during the Battle of Gettysburg. He was the soldier who physically buried Brigadier General Lewis Armistead at the George Spangler farm shortly after his death on July 3.

Taifel was twenty-two when he died, and made a fateful decision that day. However, many soldiers’ lives were saved by refusing to suffer amputation, and just as many perished by not allowing these serious operations to be performed.

Culled from: Killed In Action

Ghastly! Civil War Gangrene Edition!

Civil War Soldier with a Gangrenous Foot, June 21, 1865
Reed Brockway Bontecou, M.D., Washington, D.C.
Albumen print, 4 1/2 x 6 1/2 in.

Civil War Soldier on an Operating Table with His Amputated Foot, June 21, 1865
Reed Brockway Bontecou, M.D., Washington, D.C.
Albumen print (carte-de-visite), 2 1/2 x 4 in.

The most dramatic and poignant set of medical photographs of the Civil War — indeed, one of the most important in the first half-century of medical photography — are those taken of Private John D. Parmenter, Company G, 67th Pennsylvania Volunteers.

Parmenter was wounded by a “minnie ball” on April 3, 1865, during the Battle of Amelia Springs (Virginia), only three days before General Lee surrendered. “On April 16 Parmenter was admitted to Harewood US Army Hospital with a gangrenous ulcer of the wound, and despite debridement and supportive treatment he continued to lose weight and his general condition deteriorated,” noted Dr. Bontecou (1824-1907), the surgeon in charge, who decided to operate on June 21. Using a circular incision technique, he amputated the lower third of Parmenter’s leg, propping up the specimen next  to the anaesthetized youth for this remarkable picture. By July 30 the stump was healed, and Parmenter was discharged.

The first image depicts Parmenter’s gangrenous foot still attached to his body. The second is unique in that it was recorded after surgery but while the patient was still on the operating table; he is shown unconscious from the effects of general anaesthesia, his pathological specimen displayed with him and one of his physicians posed at his side.

The image is medically important because inclusion of the hospital operating table and its typical oiled cloth covering depicts the lack of sterile conditions, as the cloth usually remained unwashed between operations. (With the introduction of antisepsis by Lord Joseph Lister in 1867,  hospital gangrene, the condition from which Parmenter suffered, so quickly ceased to be a medical concern that it was never bacteriologically investigated.)

This image also clearly reveals the effects of general anaesthesia, under which Parmenter did not resemble his normal self as shown in the preoperative photograph. His youthful good looks became distorted from the paralysis induced by the miraculous painkilling agent (which would have been ether or chloroform, or perhaps a combination of the two). Another photograph in the series (not shown) depicts a close-up of the amputated leg.

Culled from: A Morning’s Work: Medical Photographs from the Burns Archive & Collection 1843-1939

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 11th. Clear and cold. A recruiting officer has been in camp enticing prisoners to enlist in the rebel army. Several went from our division.

Culled from: Andersonville: Giving Up the Ghost

FYI: The Morbid Fact Du Jour newsletter will be on hiatus from Friday, February 23rd through Tuesday, March 19th while the Comtesse attends to family in Catatonia. While she’s away, you can always peruse the archives here.

Please, stay morbid in my absence!

Today’s Penetrating Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

At exactly 8:15:17 a.m. on August 6, 1945, the ‘Little Boy’ atomic bomb was released from the bomb bay of the Enola Gay as it passed over Hiroshima. The following is a discussion of the aftermath of the blast.

Compared to the human suffering, the physical damage to the city seems almost irrelevant, but of course it represented an additional misery to the population. Of the 76,000 buildings in the city, 48,000 were completely destroyed, whilst most public utilities and services were wrecked. The direct result of the damage was that the people of Hiroshima were unable to help themselves, particularly as unseasonable bad weather brought a black rain of dust onto the town. The US Strategic Bombing Survey reported that:

Those who were able made a mass exodus from the city into the outlying hills. There was no organised activity. The people appeared stunned by the catastrophe and rushed about as jungle animals suddenly released from a cage.

The aftermath, Hiroshima

But even as outside relief began to arrive in the town in the days after the explosion, a further horror appeared to strike down those who thought that they had survived the bomb: radiation sickness. The British study observed that:

The gamma rays were very penetrating and passed through the skin without affecting it. As a result, those exposed to gamma rays, if they were protected from flashburn and from indirect injury, showed no immediate ill-effect. Even those severely irradiated probably did not show the characteristic symptoms, nausea, vomiting and fever, for 24 hours, and rarely died in less than one week. These symptoms were followed by bloody diarrhoea, occurring most frequently in the second week, at which time loss of appetite and general malaise also became marked. Patients begin to lose their hair after the first week.

Thereafter, in the severe cases, the clinical picture came to be dominated by signs of deficient blood formation. This effect on the blood is indirect, and therefore delayed: the gamma rays do not attack the cells in the bloodstream, but the primitive cells in the bone marrow, from which most of the different types of cells in the blood are formed. Therefore serious effects begin to appear only as the fully-formed cells already in the blood die off gradually and are not replaced as they would be normally by new cells formed in the bone marrow. In severe cases, it was apparent that the gamma rays had virtually killed the entire bone marrow. In such cases, all three types of cells formed in the marrow became deficient: red cells, platelets, and white cells. As red cell formation ceased, the patient began to suffer from progressive anaemia. As platelet formation ceased, the thin blood seeped in small and large haemorrhages into the skin and the retina of the eye, and sometimes into the intestines and the kidneys. The fall in the number of white cells, which was useful in diagnosing mild cases because it could be detected by taking blood counts, in severe cases lowered resistance, so that the patient inevitably fell prey to some infection, usually spreading from the mouth and accompanied by gangrene of the lips, the tongue and sometimes the throat. Death in these cases was the result of a combination of anaemia, internal bleeding, and infection. Deaths probably began in about a week after the explosion, reached a peak in about three weeks, and had for the most part ceased after six to eight weeks.

The distances at which these effects were felt are not easy to determine. It is thought that gamma rays ultimately caused the death of everyone who was fully exposed to them up to a distance of 1/2 mile from the center of damage. A figure can be obtained for the 50 per cent chance of survival, from the evidence of two groups of workers who had been brought into Hiroshima from an outlying village, and who were working in the open but screened by wooden buildings at 1,200 yards from the centre of damage. Of the total of 198 men, 6 were killed immediately by the debris and 95 subsequently died, it is believed all from the effects of gamma rays. Allowing for some small protection afforded by the wooden buildings, it is estimated that people in the open have a 50 percent chance of surviving the effects of gamma radiation at 3/4 mile from the centre of damage. As regards lesser effects, loss of hair was recorded up to 1 1/4 miles from the centre of damage, and some doctors felt that the milder forms of radiation sickness, more difficult to diagnose, may have extended to 2 miles.

This girl, Aiko (9), and her younger brother, Toru (7), were exposed to the bomb in a wooden building 1,000 m from the hypocenter. After that, they went outdoors and got caught in the black rain. Their hair began falling out four or five days later. Aiko lost her appetite and developed a fever, bleeding from the gums and other symptoms. Both recovered from the acute stage but fell ill in later years. Toru died 4 years after the bombing at the age of 11, and Aiko died 20 years after the bombing at the age of 29.

Culled from:  Eye-Witness: Hiroshima

Malady Du Jour!

GIRL WITH HYDROCEPHALUS
H. Glosser, Harrisburg, Illinois, c.1875
4 x 5 1/2″ Albumen Print

Few deformities of the head demand the attention that hydrocephalus does. In infancy, acquired or congenital brain disease results in the obstruction of fluid circulation in the brain. Thus, pressure builds up. Because the skull bones are not totally fused during early infancy, the pressure results in a ballooning enlargement of the brain and skull. Most of these children died in infancy, as vital areas were compressed.

In the second decade of the 20th century, the neurosurgeon Walter Dandy pioneered the use of X-rays using dye and air injection into the brain. He differentiated two types of hydrocephalus: an obstruction in the ventricular system; and obstruction in areas where there was a communication between the brain and the ventricles. In 1922, Dandy pointed out that treatment of obstructive hydrocephalus required drainage of cerebral spinal fluid. Various therapies were developed to successfully treat hydrocephalus.

Culled from: Harms Way

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 8th. Light rain. I had a comfortable night’s sleep. This is supposed to be presidential election day, and a great deal of excitement and sport was made in voting for the two candidates, Little Mac and Old Abe. My vote proved to have been case for the triumphant candidate in camp. Abraham received a majority of nine hundred and seventy-five in a total casting of over nine thousand.

Culled from: Andersonville: Giving Up the Ghost

Today’s Cost-Saving Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

Chicago history would repeat itself in 1993, when 20 residents of the Paxton Hotel died in a suspicious fire whose circumstances were strikingly similar to the Royal Beach fire 12 years earlier. Like previous cases, tragedy came during the pre-dawn hours when flames erupted inside the single-room occupancy (SRO) hotel that lacked adequate fire protection and featured open stairways and no fire doors. But even as deadly as the Paxton fire was, extraordinary heroics by Chicago firefighters prevented it from becoming an even greater disaster.

Like the Royal Beach, the Paxton was a four-story building of ordinary construction: the facade of the 60-year-old hotel was brick but its interior was made of wood, plaster, and other combustible materials. Unlike the Royal Beach, the Paxton was located not in a shabby part of town but at 1432 N. LaSalle Street in trendy Old Town, near Lincoln Park and the Gold Coast. Despite this desirable locale, the Paxton Hotel was home to residents on fixed incomes, mainly students, the elderly, and those trying to make a new start in life. Rents for each of its 140 rooms averaged $90 a week, enabling its occupants the convenience of month-to-month living. To keep costs affordable for such people, the city of Chicago did not require owners of SRO hotels to install expensive safety features such as sprinkler systems. As benevolent as this gesture seemed, the end result was a much heavier price paid in lives.

At 4 a.m. March 16, 1993, the Paxton’s estimated 160 residents were roused by screams, shouts, and the unmistakable smell of smoke. A fire that had originated in a rear stairwell was spreading rapidly throughout the hotel via the unenclosed stairway in the back of the building. Though it is not known who first noticed the fire, the first call reporting it to the fire department was logged at 4:05 a.m. In the next few minutes, five alarms plus numerous special calls for ambulances would be sounded, bringing much of Chicago’s on-duty firefighting force to the scene.

When the fire firefighters from Engine 8 and Tower Ladder 10 arrived at the yellow brick building, they saw dozens of residents hanging out windows as smoke billowed from behind. Some had already jumped and were lying on the sidewalk or in the alleyway next to the building. As residents opened their windows to escape, strong winds blew through the structure and fanned the flames. As the fire grew, occupants who opened their doors were forced back inside their rooms. With no other way out, they took to the window ledges and waited for ladders. The rapid spread of flames and smoke was aided by the removal of fire doors from stairway landings and hallways for remodeling and never replaced.  A second source of fresh oxygen came from a back door that was left open.

These factors, together with 20- to 30-m.p.h. winds and a cold drizzle that kept the smoke from lifting, made firefighting very difficult. Nevertheless, rescuers scaled ladders placed against the front of the building and plucked dozens of residents from upper floor windows, lowering them one by one to the sidewalks and alley. The physical strain on the rescuers was enormous, but they continued to revive unconscious victims on the sidewalk, picking up others and carrying them to ambulances. Quick work by the fire department during those precious early minutes resulted in an estimated 70 lives being saved.

Eventually the intensity of the fire drove the fire fighters from the building, and they were forced to set up ladder pipes and wage battle from the outside. After water was poured on the hotel for several hours, its wooden interior collapsed onto the basement and the fire eventually burned itself out. But because several people were unaccounted for, rescuers used heavy equipment to knock down the walls and spent the next seven days scouring the ruins for the missing. Some turned up in hospitals or telephoned officials to let them know they were alive. But the whereabouts of a few others were left unknown. After a week of sifting the debris bucket by bucket, two more bodies were recovered. Finally, the search was terminated and the death toll ended at 20.

Like many big fires, the Paxton blaze remains a mystery largely because the extent of the destruction was so great that it made pinning down an exact cause difficult. Officials speculated that a frayed cord on a space heater in a first-floor room might have sparked it. Another theory said an unattended hot plate was responsible. As for life safety, though the Paxton was equipped with smoke detectors, it lacked an internal local fire alarm as well as any automatic means to alert the fire department to a fire. But because the city had chosen to ease building codes so operators of SRO hotels could keep the rates low, the hotel wasn’t required to have such devices. It’s no surprise that in the wake of the Paxton disaster, the city upgraded its SRO laws.

Scene outside the fire-wrecked Paxton Hotel

Culled from: Great Chicago Fires

I found some fascinating rough video from the fire department rescue.  What an intense 38 minutes!

Vintage Crime Scene Du Jour!

No caption. The license plate is of 1918 issue. The story is almost certainly the following:

FIND BODY IN A BARREL
MURDERED MAN HAD THROAT CUT AND 24 STAB WOUNDS

Three small children playing in a vacant lot in 45th Street, between Eighth and Ninth Streets [sic], in Brooklyn, at dusk yesterday came across a wine barrel the head of which had been covered by burlap nailed to the sides. They tore this off and saw a pair of feet sticking out. They ran away frightened and told a man, who notified the police of the Fourth Avenue Station. Captain Arthur Carey, Chief of the Homicide Bureau, took fingerprints and ordered the body removed to the Fourth Avenue Station.

There it was found the man had been murdered.  [How surprising! – DeSpair] His throat was cut, his face and forehead gashed, and there were 24 stab wounds on the upper part of his body. Identity was established by means of a draft card found in a pocket of the coat. This showed he was Gaspare Candella, with a police record here, in Boston, and in Washington, D.C.

Candella lived at 1529 East 54th Street, Brooklyn. The police say the man was killed as a result of a feud.

[The New York Times, November 9, 1918]

The practice of stuffing bodies into barrels, usually with their tongues slit, is an old Mafia way of taking care of snitches. It was a habit associated with the New York City Mafia’s first great capo, Ignazio Lupo, and was probably not ignored by the Brooklyn Camorra, either. In 1918 Lupo was in jail and many other old leaders were in the process of being forcibly retired, while the young bloods of the Unione Siciliana were waging a citywide leadership war. Candella may well have been a victim of this fray. The only other conceivable explanation would be a particularly demented crime of passion.

Culled from: Evidence

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 5th. Drew two day’s rations, better in quantity and quality than at Andersonville, but suffer for want of shelter. Those who came in first have made comfortable winter-quarters of logs. Several hundred, in despair of exchange, have taken the oath, and gone into the rebel army.

Culled from: Andersonville: Giving Up the Ghost

Today’s Afflicted Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

Townhouses give a city architectural balance; they soften the heavy presence of commercial and institutional buildings. Among the fashionable of New York it is now considered chic to own one. The handsome facades have not been altered since the Gilded Age, but the interiors have, and for good reason. In their heyday these houses were stuffy, difficult to maintain and occasional injurious to health.

New York City townhouses

A basic problem was the polluted air that permeated almost all sections of the city. Brownstone residents were advised to keep their windows permanently shut against outside air, which was “redolent with a mixture of soot, factory vapors, and animal stenches.” Indoors, because of the lack of ventilation, the air was comparable in quality, if not worse. Sewer gas from primitive drainage systems posed a constant peril to health; dampness and odors plagued the homes of rich and poor alike.

The indoor air was befouled further by the standard coal stove, which gobbled oxygen in exchange for soot and dust. Central steam heat provided a costly ($2000-$4000) alternative in the 1880’s, but the early radiators were afflicted by a novel form of nuisance, water hammer and hissing. One wonders if the brownstone resident annoyed by these noises was consoled by the thought that the air was cleaner.

In one area of personal care, the Victorians appeared untroubled: they seldom bathed. Glorification of the bathroom is a modern fetish. In 1882 only 2 percent of New York’s homes had water connections, and these in all probability were leaky and, if attached to a stove, dangerous. Bathing was considered harmful by some doctors, and one, C. E. Sargent, described it as “a needless waste of time.” In an ornate or overstuffed townhouse regular chores, from bathing the baby (generally approved) to dusting and cleaning, were a grinding toil, but most wearisome of all was cooking. Preparation of a Victorian dinner was a monumental task in a kitchen of spartan design.

Washing the babe, 19th century-style

The servant problem was insoluble. In general, American girls were too proud to seek menial jobs, and immigrant girls were unsatisfactory as a result of the language barrier, their temperament, or their ignorance of domestic social customs. And capable girls refused to stay because of the enormous workload, the townhouse requiring “an unremitting war with its refusal to stay clean, orderly, warm, ventilated, nourishing and pleasant.”

Culled from: The Good Old Days, They Were Terrible!

Malady Du Jour!

The Dr. Ikkaku Ochi Collection is a fascinating cluster of medical photographs from the late 19th and early 20th century that had been collected by Dr. Ikkaku Ochi in Japan and were found in a box many years later.  There was no detailed information available for most of the photos, but the images are compelling because they show composed portraits of people suffering through intense pain caused by conditions that in most cases would be resolved through treatment today. There’s a sense of overwhelming sadness that comes through in these pictures, but also dignity and strength.

I’m thinking tumor.  Any other ideas?

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 4th. Clear, but very cold wind. Suffered for want of shelter and clothes. We were formed into detachments as before, and marched inside, where we drew rations of rice, meal, beef, beans, and salt. Camped by the side of the creek. Find this place nice, clean, and roomy, though about ten thousand of our old prisoners are here.

Culled from: Andersonville: Giving Up the Ghost

Today’s Playful Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

In June 1977, twenty-two-year-old Randy Hill, a seasonal employee from Mount Morris, Michigan, and twenty-year-old David Noel Barry, who came from Falls Church, Virginia, went swimming on a Thursday night in Wilbur Creek at the foot of a waterfall. “Two sisters who were with the victims, Tarisa and Mary Ann Guderian of Covington, La., told park rangers the four had been sliding over the waterfall into the creek when the two men were drawn back under the falls about 10 p.m. Thursday,” the Daily Inter Lake reported on June 26, 1977

Swept behind the falls and held underwater by the force of the cascade, the two young men could not fight their way to the surface. Divers found Randy’s body on Friday afternoon in the deep pool, and David’s about seventy feet away, still in the creek.

Wilbur Creek, Glacier National Park

Culled from: Death In Glacier National Park

Dissection Photo Du Jour!

Medical College of Virginia, Richmond, 1899-1900. Three of the students, to the left, have drawn a skull and crossbones on their dissecting gown, while all of their names are written on the cloth draping the table. Unlike the students, the porter or janitor, on the far left, is unnamed, although college records show he is Chris Baker.

Culled from: Dissection

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 3d. Packed as we were, it was impossible to change position, and I sat all night on the bottom of the car, with hardly a wink of sleep. Passing through Macon at daylight, we continued our journey on the Charleston Railroad, riding all day and until late at night, in the same cramped sitting posture; at last we arrived at Millen Station, two hundred miles from Andersonville, in a pitiable condition, and found great relief in getting out and stretching our aching limbs. One of my mess died in our car on the trip. Marching half a mile, we came to another stockade, and camped outside for the rest of the night.

Culled from: Andersonville: Giving Up the Ghost

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

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

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

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