Today’s Spit-Roasted Yet Truly Morbid Fact!
Execution historian Watt Espy has chronicled the details of more than 18,000 American executions – by hanging, shooting, electrocution, gassing, lethal injection, burning, beheading, entombment, gibbeting, breaking on the wheel, boiling in oil, roasting, drowning, etc. – more than 10,000 of which were unknown to posterity before he tracked them down. “Virginia leads by far,” he says. “2,049 thus far.” Why Virginia? “Because they executed so many slaves. The closer you get to the Mason-Dixon Line, the more perilous it’s been, historically, to be of colour.” Truly grotesque executions tended toward the north of the Mason-Dixon Line, Espy emphasizes, though he has collected a fair share of Death Belt horror stories. He waxes particularly eloquent on Louisiana, where slaves and mutineers were nailed into boxes and then sawed in half, roasted on cannon barrels, or sewn into a leather sack with a dog, viper, monkey, and cock and thrown into the river. “But the worst was of a slave in colonial New York who poisoned her master. Spit-roasted on a slow fire for hours and hours with a horn full of cool water held inches from her lips, to accentuate her agony. In the modern era, we’ve lost sight of the fact that executions were meant to inflict not only death but pain.”
Culled from: The Last Face You’ll Ever See: The Culture of Death Row