MFDJ 12/28/24: Decorated Skulls

Today’s Decorated Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

More often than not, when trophy skulls from the Pacific War and Vietnam are found in America today, they are decorated with writing, pictures and paint, often courtesy of the soldiers who took them in the first place, but sometimes thanks to a subsequent owner. One skull, brought home from the Second World War by a Navy medic, was found later by his grandson, who spray-painted it gold, tied a bandana around it and put it in his bedroom, until he became frightened of it and threw it in a lake. [Some people should not be allowed to have nice things! – DeSpair]  Another,  brought back from Okinawa and painted entirely in red and silver, was handed over to a forensic team in the United States in the early 1980s. One skull taken from the skeletonized pilot of a crashed plane and brought back to Morgan County, Tennessee, had been enlarged to hold a light bulb at Halloween. Others have been found covered in graffiti and pictures, coloured with crayon, felt pen or paint, and stained with soot and wax from the candles they have held. These processes of domesticating the dead, and turning them from a person into a prop, began on the battlefield.

While on duty, decorating bones was, at one level, simply something to do, in a world where bones were everywhere. The time invested in this kind of artistry may tell of tedious days spent at base camp, but it also suggests a sense of pride and the desire to layer personal identity onto enemy bones. Perhaps these artefacts were an attempt to take control, to make death more familiar and manageable: to convert the confusing and violent death of another into the reassurance of caring for oneself. There was a catharsis to the craft. Decorated skulls and bones were simultaneously attractive playthings, memento mori and an assertion of power over the enemy. The act of appropriation could even be an expression both of supremacy and, perhaps, of solidarity or even affection.


Marine Recruiting Sergeant John Shough of Springfield holds the skull of a Japanese sniper who was killed on Guadalcanal 20 years ago during World War II.  Before the Japanese sniper was spotted tied high in a tree, he killed a young Marine who had gained quite a name for himself during the fighting. To avenge his death, other Marines in his group beheaded the sniper and upon his skull painted the emblem of the First Marine Division and the American Flag.

Culled from: Severed: A History of Heads Lost and Heads Found

 

Ghastly!

Yosuke Yamahata photographed the aftermath of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki on August 10, 1945.  Here’s one of his haunting images from the book Nagasaki Journey: The Photographs of Yosuke Yamahata, August 10, 1945.

 

Garretdom!

MURDERED AT HIS MEAL.

James Keevan’s Wife Breaks His Head With a Sugar Bowl at the Tea-table.

PRINCETON, N. J., Sept. 23.—News was received here yesterday that a terrible murder was committed Tuesday evening at Kingston, between here and New Brunswick. The victim was James Keevan, who lived alone with his wife on the north side of the village. Both were over sixty-five years of age. It is supposed that Keevan was murdered by his wife after he had sat down to supper, the crime being the result of a quarrel. His dead body was found in a chair at the table on which he was leaning. A knife and fork were still in his hands. There was a frightful gash in his head and the fragments of a heavy sugar-bowl were scattered over the floor near the chair in which the murdered man sat. Keevan was a laborer and had had two or three wives. The murder caused the greatest excitement at Kingston and the surrounding country. The authorities at Somerville have been notified and they will take charge of the body, and probably arrest the woman.

Culled from the Friday, September 24, 1886 issue of the Louisville Courier-Journal

Follow-Up Article from the Evening Gazette (Pittston, PA), Thursday, December 30, 1886.

A Woman Guilty of Murder.

SOMERVILLE, N. J., Dec. 30.—Seldom has this community been in such a state of excitement as it has been since Monday, when the trial of the old woman Catharine Keevan for the murder of her husband, James Keevan, at Kingston, Sept. 21, begun before Judge Magie in the Somerset county court. The strange features of the horrible crime made it one of the most noteworthy in the criminal annals of the county. She killed her husband by smashing his head with a sugar bowl. She was found guilty of murder in the second degree and thus saved from the gallows.

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