{"id":2161,"date":"2011-05-31T13:10:52","date_gmt":"2011-05-31T19:10:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/asylumeclectica.com\/grim\/?p=2161"},"modified":"2011-05-31T13:10:52","modified_gmt":"2011-05-31T19:10:52","slug":"morbid-fact-du-jour-for-may-31-2011","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.decidedlygrim.net\/?p=2161","title":{"rendered":"Morbid Fact Du Jour For May 31, 2011"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>Today&#8217;s Self-Made Yet Truly Morbid Fact!<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>The April 1937 issue of <em>Front Page Detective <\/em>magazine featured an article entitled &#8220;I Help Them Die,&#8221;\u00a0an\u00a0as-told-to confession of George Philip Hanna, &#8220;Humanitarian Hangman&#8221; from Epworth, Illinois.\u00a0 Hanna was obsessed with nooses, gallows, hoods, and restraints as a teenager.\u00a0 He spent his days binding, masking, and hanging dummies and sandbags from the hayloft of the family&#8217;s barn, teaching himself the proper ratios of body weight to rope length: Too short a drop led to strangulation; too long, to decapitation.\u00a0 Hanna was &#8220;unexpectedly given the opportunity to show the world what [he] had learned&#8221; when, at age eighteen, he attended a hanging in a\u00a0nearby county.  Horrified by the sheriff&#8217;s bungling, he made his way through the crowd and walked to the foot of the gallows.  &#8220;Could I lend you a hand, sir?&#8221; he asked.  &#8220;You&#8217;re doing this the wrong way.&#8221;  His perfect hanging that day became legend among sheriffs and wardens across the nation, and he carried on as a traveling hangman and execution adviser for forty years, touring the country with his ropes, handcuffs, and hoods, as well as a collection of weapons used by murderers he&#8217;d hanged &#8211; the only compensation Hanna asked. <\/p>\n<p>Culled from: <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/gp\/product\/0060931035\/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=theasylumeclecti&amp;link_code=as3&amp;camp=211189&amp;creative=373489&amp;creativeASIN=0060931035\">The Last Face You&#8217;ll Ever See: The Culture of Death Row<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Today&#8217;s Self-Made Yet Truly Morbid Fact! The April 1937 issue of Front Page Detective magazine featured an article entitled &#8220;I Help Them Die,&#8221;\u00a0an\u00a0as-told-to confession of George Philip Hanna, &#8220;Humanitarian Hangman&#8221; from Epworth, Illinois.\u00a0 Hanna was obsessed with nooses, gallows, hoods, and restraints as a teenager.\u00a0 He spent his days binding, masking, and hanging dummies and [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2161","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-facts"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.decidedlygrim.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2161","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.decidedlygrim.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.decidedlygrim.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.decidedlygrim.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.decidedlygrim.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2161"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.decidedlygrim.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2161\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.decidedlygrim.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2161"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.decidedlygrim.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2161"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.decidedlygrim.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2161"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}