As I’d feared, I ended up being unable to send the facts during my long vacation, so that’s the reason for the lull. I’m back at The Castle DeSpair now and ready to get back to making your lives intolerable on a daily basis!
Today’s Fiendish Yet Truly Morbid Fact!
Apprehended for allegedly killing his white employer, Luther Holbert and his wife found themselves subjected to mob justice in Doddsville, Mississippi, in 1904. Some one thousand people stood and watched as the self-appointed executioners went about their business, engaging in the increasingly familiar ritual of torture, mutilation, and murder. A reporter for the Vicksburg Evening Post described the execution of the Holberts.
When the two Negroes were captured, they were tied to trees and while the funeral pyres were being prepared they were forced to suffer the most fiendish tortures. The blacks were forced to hold out their hands while one finger at a time was chopped off. The fingers were distributed as souvenirs. The ears of the murderers were cut off. Holbert was beaten severely, his skull was fractured and one of his eyes, knocked out with a stick, hung by a shred from the socket… The most excruciating form of punishment consisted in the use of a large corkscrew in the hands of some of the mob. This instrument was bored into the flesh of the man and woman, in the arms, legs and body, and then pulled out, the spirals tearing out big pieces of raw, quivering flesh every time it was withdrawn.
Holbert and his employer had quarreled before the murder, but there was no evidence to implicate Holbert’s wife. Two blacks, mistaken for Luther Holbert, had already been slain by a posse.
Culled from: Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America
The Perils of Self-Pollution
Here’s an illuminating excerpt from What A Young Boy Ought To Know (1897) by Sylvanus Stall. The chapter is entitled, “God’s Purpose in Giving Us Hands”. I think you know where this is going…
MY DEAR FRIEND HARRY: When God gave man hands, He also gave him intelligence, a moral sense, and a conscience that he might use them aright. With his hands God meant that man should lift himself up infinitely above the animals, but some men, and we are sorry to say boys, too, use their hands so as to debase themselves below the level of the most degraded brute. Instead of using their hands as intelligent and moral beings should do, they use their hands so as to pollute their bodies, by handling and toying with their sexual member in such a way as to produce a sensation, or feeling, which may give a momentary pleasure, but which results in the most serious of injuries to the moral, intellectual, and physical powers. God did not give us a sexual member or organ to be used in this way, and such a use of it is called self-pollution or masturbation.
Man is the only animal except one whose sexual organ is exposed on the outside of his body, and the only animal to whom self-pollution is mechanically or physically possible. [I have known some pets who would disagree with this. – DeSpair] The rare instances which are in conflict with this statement are accidental and altogether exceptional. In the care and use of the sexual member God has reposed the greatest trust in man’s intelligence and moral sense. Upon no other animal has God placed such confidence and responsibilities as upon man. But because of the wickedness of the human heart, the temptations of Satan, and sometimes also because of ignorance upon this important subject, even young boys begin to go wrong, and with no one to instruct and warn them, they pursue evil habits which result in great injury, and if the practice is not stopped the individual is plunged into greater vice and degradation.
I wish that I might say to you, Harry, that but very few boys have ever known anything of this vice, but I do not believe that such a statement would be true. I can say, however, that many pure-minded and innocent boys have learned the habit in very innocent ways, and in the beginning to even mistrusting that the habit was either wicked or injurious. Many boys at a very early age have discovered the sensation by sliding down the banisters, or at a little later period in life by climbing and descending trees, by riding on horse-back, and some because of uncleanness of the sexual member have experienced an itching of these parts, and when relief has been sought by chafing or rubbing, the child has been introduced to the habit of self-pollution. Sometimes by constipation of the bowels, or in simply language, a failure to go regularly each morning and pass from the lower portion of the body the worn out and waste matter which has accumulated in the intestines, and this neglect, when often repeated or long continued, results in producing what is called constipation, which often proves very injurious, and, for causes that I need not now stop to explain, produces a tendency to local sensitiveness and leads to self-pollution.
A similar, or even greater sensitiveness of the sexual member is sometimes produced by pin-worms in the rectum, or lowest part of the intestines. But I am sorry also to say that masturbation is sometimes even taught by one boy to another, and during the infancy of children, even nurses, sometimes, in ignorance of the terrible evil and sad consequences of their act, practice this destructive habit upon very young children for the purpose of diverting their thoughts, so that they will not cry, or in order that they may be quieted and fall asleep. It is terrible to think that intelligent people could do such things but on account of the prevalence of these practices it is necessary that we should understand the danger to which children are exposed so that we may be properly upon our guard against the temptations from without and, by the aid or our intelligence, be saved from the terrible consequences which are visited upon many because of the evil practices which they begin in their ignorance.
I trust, my dear boy, that you may be saved form and all other forms of vice.
I’m glad you’re back!