Today’s Blazing Yet Truly Morbid Fact!
The torture that the Japanese inflicted upon the native population at Nanking, China in December, 1937 almost surpasses the limits of human comprehension. Here is one example:
The Japanese subjected large crowds of victims to mass incineration. In Hsiakan a Japanese soldier bound Chinese captives together, ten at a time, and pushed them into a pit, where they were sprayed with gasoline and ignited. On Taiping Road, the Japanese ordered a large number of shop clerks to extinguish a fire, then bound them together with rope and threw them into the blaze. Japanese soldiers even devised games with fire. One method of entertainment was to drive mobs of Chinese to the top stories or roofs of buildings, tear down the stairs, and set the bottom floors on fire. Many such victims committed suicide by jumping out windows or off rooftops. Another form of amusement involved dousing victims with fuel, shooting them, and watching them explode into flame. In one infamous incident, Japanese soldiers forced hundreds of men, women, and children into a square, soaked them with gasoline, and then fired on them with machine guns.
Chinese man burned to death by the Japanese
Culled from: The Rape of Nanking
Suicide Du Jour!
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 an entry that may have inspired a Hüsker Dü song!
Garretdom: Olde News!
Killed in an Elevator.
CHICAGO, Sept. 23.—As the employees in Mayer, Engles & Co.’s wholesale clothing house were leaving the store last evening, the elevator, containing Samuel Mayer, Samuel Herman and Louis Nochman, fell from the fourth floor to the basement. The accident was caused by the breaking of the cable. Herman’s chest was crushed in, producing internal injuries from which he died. Mayer had his skull seriously fractured and will probably die. Nochman, who was taken to the Michael Reese hospital, had an arm broken and a shoulder dislocated.
Culled from the collection of The Comtesse DeSpair
1886 Morbid Scrapbook
Here’s a follow-up from the Thursday, September 30, 1886 issue of the Chicago Tribune:
That Elevator Accident.
The inquest on Samuel Mayer and Samuel Harmon, the two men who lost their lives in the elevator accident at the corner of Fifth avenue and Adams street about ten days ago, was continued yesterday at the Michael Reese Hospital. Louis Nachman, the elevator-boy, who is suffering from a broken arm, testified that the two men, Mayer and Harmon, got on the elevator on the fifth floor, and that at noon as he closed the gate and started down Mayer and Harman began sparring. The elevator had only gone a few feet when he was struck and knocked down, the heel of his right shoe becoming wedged between the floor of the elevator and the wall of the elevator-chute. This brought the elevator to a stop, but for what length of time he could not say, as he lost consciousness at the moment his foot was caught and the elevator stopped, and did not regain it for over twenty-four hours. The verdict of the jury was that the heel of the shoe caught between the platform and the shaft, holding the elevator still although the throttle had been pulled for a down trip; that the cable unwound rapidly and that when the heel was torn from the shoe the elevator shot down to the basement, a distance of thirty feet.