Today’s Crushing Yet Truly Morbid Fact!
Hundreds of children crowded into the Laurier Palace movie theatre in Montreal on January 9, 1927, eagerly anticipating the matinee performance of a comedy titled Get ‘Em Young. Shortly after the movie began, a small fire broke out in the projection room, but was quickly brought under control. The incident would have ended there had not children seated in the gallery panicked. Rushing to get out, a few youngsters apparently fell as they rushed down a stairway from the gallery. What followed was a deadly chain reaction. Other children toppled onto them, while the frightened crowd continued pushing forward. Within seconds, the stairwell became a mass of tightly packed, screaming children hopelessly trapped—just five steps away from the exit. When help arrived, the children were so tightly wedged in that twenty men working together could not separate the pile of bodies. Firemen finally resorted to chopping holes from underneath the stairs and through an outer wall. By then, the most of the youngsters they freed had died in the crush. Only one of the 78 victims was over sixteen years old.
Culled from: The Pessimist’s Guide To History
Generously submitted by: Bendy
Get ’em young, indeed!
Talk about yelling fire in a crowded theater.
That reminds me of that book, I think I actually heard about it from here, The Circus Fire.
I’m not entirely sure why, but there is something so much darker and more chilling about a tale of children stampeding and crushing each other to death compared to the reports one sometimes hears about adults in similar situations.
My Great-Grandmother was the piano player in the theatre at the time. She recounted the horror of forcibly pulling children out of the theatre after they had been wedged tightly into the confined spaces
The details of this kind of event are confusing to me. Not like being run over by a steam roller or stepped on by an elephant. How does this work? Does one asphyxiate because the lungs can no longer take in air and how flat are the first to fall? How tightly wedged must they have been if 20 men could not separate the stack? I guess there was no keystone affect going on there (pop the center one out and the rest loosen and fall).