Today’s Playful Yet Truly Morbid Fact!
In August 1923, 18-year-old Taylor Hubbard and 16-year-old Dick Forman tied Hubbard’s brother William, 16, and 11-year-old Charles Spindler to a tree on a vacant lot in Belmar, New Jersey. They told the younger boys they were going to have some fun with them, and piled excelsior (wood shavings then used for packing) at their feet before lighting it on fire. The material caught fire quickly, and then the ground around the tree, saturated with oil from the neighboring gas plant, burst into flames as well.
Forman and the older Hubbard realized the fun had gone too far and ran to a brook for water, but had nothing to carry it in. The two younger boys screamed for help as their clothing was burned off their bodies and they were burned all over, except their heads, protected by their caps. As they lost consciousness, the ropes holding them to the tree burned through and they fell onto the still-flaming grass.
Charles Goff, who lived nearby, heard the screams and saw the flames. He transported the injured boys to a nearby hospital.
William Hubbard and Charles Spindler refused to tell exactly what led to their being burned “at the stake” and Taylor Hubbard and Dick Forman likewise weren’t talking. Forman did suggest that Hubbard “had it in” for the victims. There was talk the group had been “playing Indiana’ or that they were playing “Ku Klux Klan”; the town of Belmar was a KKK stronghold and there had been a Klan rally just the day before.
The two victims died of their injuries later that night, and Hubbard and Forman were under arrest.
Culled from: GenDisasters
Submitted by: Aimee
Unfortunately, I can’t find any info on what charges the two older boys faced or whether those charges stuck. – Aimee
Arcane Excerpts: Kinda-Normal-Sounding-To-Me Edition
The following case study of a deviant with Anaesthesia Sexualis (i.e., absence of sexual feelings) is culled from Psychopathia Sexualis (1931). As I read it, I thought to myself, he sounds perfectly sane to me; and, also, he would be a great topic for an early Belle & Sebastian song; and, also, he sounds like Morrissey in a previous life. Let’s get to know F. J.
Case 9. F. J., aged nineteen, student; mother was nervous, sister epileptic. At the age of four, acute brain affection, lasting two weeks. As a child he was not affectionate, and was cold towards his parents; as a student, he was peculiar, retiring, preoccupied with self, and given to much reading. Well endowed mentally. Masturbation from fifteenth year. Eccentric after puberty, with continual vacillation between religious enthusiasm and materialism – now studying theology, now natural sciences. At the university his fellow-students took him for a fool. He read Jean Paul almost exclusively, and wasted his time. Absolute absence of sexual feeling toward the opposite sex. Once he indulged in intercourse, experienced no sexual feeling in the act, found coitus absurd, and did not repeat it. Without any emotional cause whatever, he often had a thought of suicide. He made it the subject of a philosophical dissertation, in which he contended that it was, like masturbation, a justifiable act. After repeated experiments which he made on himself with various poisons, he attempted suicide with fifty-seven grains of opium, but he was saved and sent to an asylum.
Patient was destitute of moral and social feelings. His writings disclosed incredible frivolity and vulgarity. His knowledge was of a wide range, but his logic peculiarly distorted. There was no trace of emotionality. He treated everything (even the sublime) with incomparable cynicism and irony. He pleaded for the justification of suicide with false philosophical premises and conclusions, and, as one would speak of the most indifferent affair, he declared that he intended to accomplish it. He regretted that his pen-knife had been taken from him. If he had it, he would open his veins as Seneca did – in the bath. At one time a friend had given him instead of a poison as he supposed, a cathartic. Instead of sending him to the other world, it sent him to the water-closet. Only the Great Operator could eradicate his foolish and fatal idea with the scythe of death, etc.
The patient had a large, rhombic, distorted skull, the left half of the forehead being flatter than the right. The occiput was very straight. Ears far back, widely projecting, and the external meatus formed a narrow slit. Genitals very lax; testicles unusually soft and small.
Now and then the patient suffered with onomatomania. He was compelled to think of the most useless problems and give himself up to interminable, distressing and worrying thoughts, and became so fatigued that he was no longer capable of any rational thinking. After some months the patient was sent home unimproved. There he spent his time in reading and frivolities, and busied himself with the thought of founding a new system of Christianity because Christ had been subject to grand delusions and had deceived the world with miracles (!). After remaining at home some years the sudden occurrence of a maniacal outbreak brought him back to the asylum. He presented a mixture of primordial delirium of persecution (devil, antichrist, persecution, poisoning, persecuting voices) and delusions of grandeur (Christ, redemption of the world), with impulsive, incoherent actions. After five months there was a remission of this intercurrent acute mental disease, and the patient returned to the level of his original intellectual peculiarity and moral defect.