Monthly Archives: February 2014

Today’s Forgiven Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

Mary Blandy, born in 1720, was the only child of Francis Blandy, attorney-at-law and town clerk of Henley-on-Thames in Oxfordshire, England.  Although it was known that she would bring a dowry of £10,000, she was still unwed at 26.  Then she met lieutenant William Henry Cranstoun who charmed her and with whom she fell hopelessly in love.  When the Blandy’s were told that he already had a wife and child in Scotland he replied that the woman was lying and that she had no claim on him, and that this would be confirmed by a court case he was bringing against her.  Indeed he even persuaded his wife to write a letter under the maiden name of Murray to the effect that they were not married.  She did this thinking to help her husband who had told her that his being married was a bar to his promotion in the army, and that for the time being he wished to appear to be single.  He showed this letter to Mary and her parents who took it at face value and even allowed Cranstoun to live with them.  Unfortunately for Cranstoun, the Scottish courts in March 1748 upheld the woman’s claim to be married to him although he managed to keep this from the Blandys for two more years, during which time Mrs. Blandy died.

Eventually Francis Blandy decided he wanted nothing more to do with Cranstoun, who returned to Scotland, from where he sent Mary packets of arsenic trioxide, which he labelled ‘powders to clean Scotch pebbles’ and telling her to put some in her father’s food because he said it would change her father’s opposition to their relationship.  She may well have first done this in November 1750, putting some in his tea, but it only made her father ill; in June the following year, on receipt of more powder from Scotland, she tried again, making her father very ill but he again recovered.  In August she added a larger dose of the powder to his gruel (oatmeal and milk) and again he was taken ill, this time fatally so; a servant who also ate some of the food was also made very ill.  Francis now realized that his daughter had poisoned him and that he was dying; he expired on the 14th of that month but not before he tried to save his daughter by saying that he forgave her.

When the townspeople of Henley learned what Mary had done a mob appeared menacingly outside the Blandy residence and she had to flee to the safety of the Angel pub where the landlady gave her shelter.  Mary was arrested on August 17 and imprisoned in Oxford Castle.  She was put on trial on Tuesday, March 3, 1752, and this lasted almost 12 hours.  At the end of that day the jury did not feel the need to retire to reach a verdict but delivered it then and there: guilty.  Mary was duly convicted and hanged but not before pleading for extra time in order to write her own version of events: Miss Mary Blandy’s Own Account of the Affair Between Her and Mr. Cranstoun.  Clearly she was an odd young woman and maybe she was always a little naive.  She seemed unnaturally cool and calm even as she approached the gibbet, asking the hangman not to hang her too high ‘for the sake of decency’ and indeed a large crowd had turned out to witness her execution.  But hang her high he died on April 6, 1752.

As for Cranstoun, he fled to France, but he had not long to live: in November 1752 he went down with a fever and he died on the 30th of that month.

Culled from: The Elements of Murder

Today’s Brightly Clothed Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

Russian police say they have discovered 29 mummies at the home of a well-known local historian who dug the bodies up from cemeteries and dressed them in clothes scavenged from graves (November, 2011).  A police video of the man’s apartment in the Volga river city of Nizhny Novgorod shows a gruesome tableau of what looks like dolls dressed in bright dresses and headscarves, some with their hands and faces appearing to be wrapped in cloth. Police said they were mummified remains.  Police refused to name the suspect arrested last week, but released photographs of him, gave his age as 45 and described him as a well-known specialist in the history of the city about 250 miles (400km) east of Moscow.  Russian media reports identified the man as Anatoly Moskvin, a 45-year-old historian who was considered the ultimate expert on cemeteries in Nizhny Novgorod, and who had spoken openly about rummaging through cemeteries and studying gravestones to uncover the life stories behind them.

Russian newspaper reports quoted police as saying the man had selected only the remains of young women for his grisly collection.  The arrest followed a long-running investigation into the desecration of graves at several cemeteries in Nizhny Novgorod, a police spokeswoman, Svetlana Kovylina, said. She did not explain how they tracked down the suspect.  The national daily Moskovsky Komsomolets said Moskvin was detained at a cemetery while carrying a bag of bones. But Kriminalnaya Khronika, an online publication specialising in crime news from the Nizhny Novgorod region, said police investigators had discovered the bodies when they visited Moskvin to consult him about the desecration.

Moskvin, who had long been known in the region for his interest in the dead, wrote several articles about cemeteries in the region. A linguistic expert by training, he specialised in Celtic culture and studied 13 foreign languages.  In a 2007 interview with the newspaper Nizhegorodsky Rabochy, or Nizhny Novgorod Worker, Moskvin said he had inspected 752 cemeteries, often travelling 20 miles a day by foot.  He said he drank from puddles, spent nights in haystacks or at abandoned farms and once even slept in a coffin readied for a funeral. He said he was repeatedly questioned by police, who then always let him go.  Last month he wrote a piece for a publication on necrology to explain his interest in the dead. He said that when he was 12, he came across a funeral procession whose participants forced him to kiss the face of a dead 11-year-old girl. He said he later grew interested in the occult.

Culled from: The Guardian
Generously suggested by: Mike Marano

Here’s a video of Moskvin’s collection.  Pretty creepy, to say the least!

[tube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z5jxpZ8A8kE[/tube]

Today’s Concussed Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

Excerpt from the Report of the Mine Inspector of Houghton County, Michigan, for the Year Ending September 30, 1891:

Accident 32. — Two Finnish miners while at work in the 16th level, No. 4 shaft, Atlantic mine, September 17, charged a hole with three pounds of dynamite and undertook to ram it down the hole with an iron bar.  The concussion caused explosion.  The result was Oscar Mattson lost his right arm above the elbow and thumb and first finger on his left hand. Emil Krangquist lost his right foot at the instep.  These men had been warned against using iron bars in tamping holes charged with dynamite.  Mattson died on the 20th.

Culled from: Some fatal accidents in the Atlantic, Baltic, Champion, Trimountain, and Winona copper mines (A local history series)

NEVER use iron bars to tamp your dynamite!  Duh!