{"id":4970,"date":"2014-06-05T21:38:13","date_gmt":"2014-06-06T02:38:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.decidedlygrim.net\/?p=4970"},"modified":"2014-06-05T21:38:13","modified_gmt":"2014-06-06T02:38:13","slug":"morbid-fact-du-jour-for-june-5-2014","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.decidedlygrim.net\/?p=4970","title":{"rendered":"Morbid Fact Du Jour for June 5, 2014"},"content":{"rendered":"

Today’s\u00a0Stigmatized\u00a0Yet Truly Morbid Fact!<\/strong><\/p>\n

In a town in western Ireland, where castle ruins pepper green landscapes, there\u2019s a six-foot stone wall that once surrounded a place called the Home. Between 1925 and 1961, thousands of\u00a0\u201cfallen women\u201d\u00a0and their \u201cillegitimate\u201d children passed through the Home, run by the Bon Secours nuns in Tuam. \u00a0Many of the women, after paying a penance of indentured servitude for their out-of-wedlock pregnancy, left the Home for work and lives in other parts of Ireland and beyond. Some of their children were not so fortunate. \u00a0More than five decades after the Home was closed and destroyed\u00a0\u2014 where a housing development and children\u2019s playground now stands\u00a0\u2014 what happened to nearly 800 of those abandoned children has now emerged: Their bodies were piled into a massive\u00a0septic tank sitting in the back of the structure and forgotten, with neither gravestones nor coffins.<\/p>\n

\"Children's<\/a>

Children’s Home, circa 1950.<\/p><\/div>\n

\u201cThe bones are still there,\u201d local historian Catherine Corless, who uncovered the origins of the mass grave in a batch of never-before-released documents, told The Washington Post in a phone interview. \u201cThe children who died in the Home, this was them.\u201d \u00a0The grim findings, which are being reviewed by police, provide a glimpse into a particularly dark time for unmarried pregnant women in Ireland, where societal and religious mores stigmatized them. Without means to support themselves, women by the hundreds wound up at the Home. \u201cWhen daughters became pregnant, they were ostracized completely,\u201d Corless said. \u201cFamilies would be afraid of neighbors finding out, because to get pregnant out of marriage was the worst thing on Earth. It was the worst crime a woman could commit, even though a lot of the time it had been because of a rape.\u201d<\/p>\n

According to documents Corless\u00a0provided\u00a0the Irish Mail, malnutrition and neglect killed many of the children, while others died of measles, convulsions, TB, gastroenteritis and pneumonia. Infant mortality at the Home was staggeringly high. \u00a0\u201cIf you look at the records, babies were dying two a week, but I\u2019m still trying to figure out how they could [put the bodies in a septic tank],\u201d Corless said. \u201cCouldn\u2019t they have afforded baby coffins?\u201d Special kinds of neglect and abuse were reserved for the Home Babies, as locals call them. Many in surrounding communities\u00a0remember\u00a0them. They remember how they were segregated to the fringes of classrooms, and how the local nuns accentuated the differences between them and the others. They remember how, as one local\u00a0told\u00a0the Irish Central, they were \u201cusually gone by school age\u00a0\u2014 either adopted or dead.\u201d \u00a0According to\u00a0Irish Central, a 1944 local health board report described the children living at the Home as \u201cemaciated,\u201d \u201cpot-bellied,\u201d \u201cfragile\u201d and with \u201cflesh hanging loosely on limbs.\u201d<\/p>\n

Corless has a vivid recollection of the Home Babies. \u201cIf you acted up in class, some nuns would threaten to seat you next to the Home Babies,\u201d\u00a0she said.\u00a0She said she recalled one instance in which an older schoolgirl wrapped a tiny stone in a bright candy wrapper and gave it to a Home Baby as a gift. \u00a0\u201cWhen the child opened it, she saw she\u2019d been fooled,\u201d\u00a0Corless said. \u201cOf course, I copied her later and I tried to play the joke on another little Home girl. I thought it was funny at the time\u2026. Years after, I asked myself what did I do to that poor little girl that never saw a sweet? That has stuck with me all my life. A part of me wants to make up to them.\u201d<\/p>\n

She said she first started investigating the Home, which most locals wanted to \u201cforget,\u201d when she started working on a local annual historical journal. She heard there was a little graveyard near what had been the Home, and that piqued her curiosity. How many children were there? \u00a0So she requested the records through the local registration house to find out. The attendant \u201ccame back a couple of weeks later and said the number was staggering, just hundreds and hundreds, that it was nearly 800 dead children,\u201d Corless said. Once, Corless said in the phone interview, several boys had stumbled across the mass grave, which lay beneath a cracked piece of concrete: \u201cThe boys told me it had been filled to the brim with human skulls and bones. They said even to this day they still have nightmares of finding the bodies.\u201d \u00a0Locals suspect that the number of bodies in the mass grave, which will likely soon be excavated, may be even higher than 800. \u201cGod knows who else is in the grave,\u201d one anonymous source\u00a0told the Daily Mail. \u201cIt\u2019s been lying there for years, and no one knows the full extent of the total of bodies down there.\u201d<\/p>\n

Culled from: The Washington Post
\n<\/a>G<\/span>enerously submitted by: Vickie<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Today’s\u00a0Stigmatized\u00a0Yet Truly Morbid Fact! In a town in western Ireland, where castle ruins pepper green landscapes, there\u2019s a six-foot stone wall that once surrounded a place called the Home. Between 1925 and 1961, thousands of\u00a0\u201cfallen women\u201d\u00a0and their \u201cillegitimate\u201d children passed through the Home, run by the Bon Secours nuns in Tuam. \u00a0Many of the women, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4970","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\/4970","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\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.decidedlygrim.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4970"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.decidedlygrim.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4970\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4973,"href":"https:\/\/www.decidedlygrim.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4970\/revisions\/4973"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.decidedlygrim.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4970"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.decidedlygrim.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4970"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.decidedlygrim.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4970"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}