Today’s Self-Proclaimed Yet Truly Morbid Fact!
The nearest approach to the torture of witches in England came in the years 1645 to 1646, when Matthew Hopkins, the self-proclaimed ‘Witch Finder General,’ carried out his inquiries in East Anglia. Hopkins’s favorite method of extorting confessions was the ‘swimming’ of witches. He took his justification from the Demonology (1597) of James VI of Scotland (subsequently James I of England):
So it appears that God hath appointed, for a supernatural sign of the monstrous impiety of the witches, that the water shall refuse to receive them in her bosom, that have shaken off them the sacred water of baptism and willfully refused benefit thereof.
The procedure involved tying the right thumb to the left big toe, and immersing the witches in water. If they floated, they were guilty. If they sank, they were innocent — but they very likely drowned.
The Swimming of Witches
In the summer of 1645, an English parliamentary commission condemned the practice and Hopkins was forced to find other methods. He resorted to forcing his prisoners to sit cross-legged on a stool for many hours, or making them continue to walk about their cell for four or five days without sleep. One of his victims was a 70-year-old parson, Rev John Lowes. A succession of Hopkins’s assistants:
… kept him awake several nights together, and ran him backwards and forwards about the room until he was out of breath. Then they rested him a little and then ran him again. And thus they did for several days and nights together, till he was weary of his life and was scarce sensible of what he said or did.
In this state, it is not surprising that Lowes confessed to making a covenant with the Devil, bewitching cattle, and sinking a ship off Harwich.
Hopkins was particularly taken with the idea of the Devil’s mark, and ‘discovered’ many witches by pricking them with a bodkin on a mole, birthmark, or scar to see whether they bled or cried out in pain. During Hopkin’s 18 months as professional witch-finder, demand for his pricking services was so great that he and his partner, John Stearns, hired four assistants to go from village to village and seek out likely victims,. It seems probable that they made use of a fake bodkin with a spring-loaded handle, into which the blade slid as it was apparently forced into the alleged witch’s flesh. Hopkins was compelled to retire in the summer of 1646, and died of tuberculosis within the year.
Matthew Hopkins, What a Prick!
Culled from: The History of Torture
Vintage Crime Scene Du Jour!
Anthony Krzesinksi lies dead in the hallway of a building where he ran after being attacked by Salvador Agron, Antonio Hernandez, and other gang members. A patrolman points to a stab wound in the body.
West Side Story was on Broadway. On the evening of August 29, 1959, one day after his sixteenth birthday, Salvador Agron traveled from the Upper West Side to West Forty-sixth Street with his friend Antonio Luis Hernandez and fellow Vampires gang members. They were on their way to act out their own version of a “rumble,” in a park not far from where the musical was playing. Belts and knives, sticks and pipes were the chosen weapons. When the other gang, the Norsemen, didn’t show, some of Agron’s cronies stayed in the park. Three youths, Robert Young and Anthony Krzesinski, both sixteen, and Edward Riemer, eighteen, who were not part of any gang, started making fun of the black cape Agron was wearing. With the help of Hernandez, known as “The Umbrella Man,” and various gang members, Agron attacked the three other youths, killing Young and Krzesinski and injuring Riemer. Agron was the only one to admit to the murders.
Agron is hustled up the steps of the West Forty-seventh-Street police station for booking after the murder in Hell’s Kitchen.
The case of “The Capeman and the Umbrella Man” became a sensation. Agron’s words to the press both confounded and confirmed people’s worst fears. Asked why he committed the murders, he said, “Because I felt like it.”
Reporters crowd around Hernandez (in hat) and Agron as detectives lead the pair from police headquarters.
He was charged with two counts of first-degree murder and one count of attempted first-degree murder. At the age of sixteen, he was sentenced to death, and was the youngest prisoner at Sing Sing on death row. Eleanor Roosevelt campaigned to have the sentence commuted to life, an action supported by the father of one of the victims. On February 7, 1962, six days before Salvador Agron’s scheduled execution, Governor Nelson Rockefeller commuted his sentence. Agron was released from jail in 1979. Seven years later he died, of natural causes, at the age of forty-three.
Culled from: Shots in the Dark
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 27th. Having spent the night in bivouac by the side of the railroad, in the morning our names are taken and we are sent inside another stockade, which we find crowded with old prisoners from Andersonville. Laird and I spread our blankets together, and at night drew a ration of meal and flour, which, by the aid of a few chips, we made a supper of, and though our hopes had been checked by this termination of “the exchange,” still the change of air and scene has stimulated us somewhat, and we do not feel ready to say die yet.
Culled from: Andersonville: Giving Up the Ghost