Decidedly Grim

Today’s Almost Unbearable Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

In November 1941, Charles Minot Dole, the head of the National Ski Patrol System, was encouraged to recruit the country’s best skiers and mountaineers to begin training as U.S. mountain troops. The mountain troops trained in Camp Hale, Colorado for three full years, waiting for the call to fight. The conditions were severe and the training brutal. The men were constantly sick from the unprecedented physical duress and exposure to cold and altitude. In a memoir of his experiences in the 10th Mountain Division, Robert Ellis reprinted a letter he wrote home in April 1943 describing the legendary “D-Series” training maneuvers, which an official army report called “the most grueling training test ever given to any U.S. Army Division.” During a storm that would dump eight feet of new snow in the high mountains and drop temperatures to 30 below zero, some 12,000 troops left their barracks on skis and snowshoes for six weeks of training maneuvers. Soldiers carried some 90 pounds of gear on their backs, and practiced war games at 13,000 feet. One day, more than 100 cases of frostbite had to be evacuated.

Easter weekend 1943 was the worst. Saturday night, Ellis and his regiment started on snowshoes and skis through snow up to their waists. They hiked until 1:30 a.m., then laid out their sleeping bags and fell asleep in the snow. They were awakened two and a half hours later, packed up their gear in a snowstorm, and began climbing again to outflank another regiment. With no sleep, empty stomachs, and suffering from extreme cold, they hiked through a blizzard for four hours, when Ellis and another soldier fell out to rescue a companion who had fainted in the snow. After building a shelter and snatching some rest, Ellis and his mate, by now without food or water other than handfuls of snow for thirty-six hours, had to hike 15 miles to the next nontactical “problem area,” where they stayed for a day and two nights. “My feet were covered with blood from where the snowshoe laces and shoepacs had cut my feet and toes. The medics bandaged me up, and when Wednesday rolled around I was ready again. Everything went all right until Friday when I got dysentery somehow, and was up all Thursday night as well as Friday morning. Feeling terribly weak and nauseated I again left the forced march and was given medical attention at the battalion aid station. I rested for a couple of hours, and then set off to find the company.

“I caught up with them about noon, and we hiked on in regimental offensive until 10:00 p.m. We slept until 4:30 a.m. and continued the attack until around noon when the problem ended. They decided the men could no longer stand two more weeks of maneuvers, so the ordeal ended after three weeks. We made the 20-mile trip back to camp and arrived really tired. Along with other discomforts my back and shoulders broke out with sores, my fingers cracked at the ends, my ears were frozen once, etc. I’ve been tired many times but never so completely washed out in every way. The never-ending snow and standing for hours in an icy fox hole was almost unbearable.”

By the time the “D-Series” was over, the army reported the “proud record” of no fatalities and only 195 cases of frostbite, 340 injuries, and nearly 1,400 cases of sickness, including more than a total 1,100 evacuations.

Culled from: The White Death

Facts

Today’s Speeding Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

The mother of all celebrity car crashes took place at 5:59 p.m. on September 30, 1955, at the intersection of routes 41 and 466 near Pasa Robles, California. A week after completing shooting on Giant, James Dean, the enfant terrible of car crash culture, was, as everybody who cares knows, on his way to a sports car rally in Salinas in his silver Porsche Spyder, the “Little Bastard.” A few hours earlier, in Bakersfield, Dean had been issued a speeding ticket and warned to slow down, but when his car crashed head-on into an oncoming vehicle, he was reportedly driving at a speed of at least 86 mph. His last words – to passenger Rolf Weutherich – were apparently “he’s got to see us.” Dean’s head was nearly severed from his body by the crash; Weutherich suffered a broken leg and head injuries, and the driver of the other vehicle, Donald Turnupseed, was only slightly injured.

Culled from: Car Crash Culture

“Donald Turnupseed”. If ever a name was destined for infamy from birth…

Facts

Today’s Virulent Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

In 1918, the final year of the savage trench fighting of World War I, something else began felling the soldiers. No one knows for sure when or where the Spanish flu emerged, though it certainly wasn’t in Spain. As a neutral country, Spain had no wartime censorship, and the flu apparently got its false pedigree from news reports about outbreaks there in May 1918. In fact the disease was already spreading on both sides of the European front, laying low entire divisions through the spring and early summer. Then it seemed to subside.

In late summer, though, the Spanish flu returned, and this time its virulence was unmistakable. The sick took to their beds with fever, piercing headache, and joint pain. Many were young adults, exactly the group that normally shrugs off the flu. About 5% of the victims died, some in just two or three days, their faces turning a ghastly purple as they essentially suffocated to death. Doctors who opened the chests of the dead were horrified: The lungs, normally light and elastic, were as heavy as waterlogged sponges, clogged with bloody fluid.

After flashing through crowded military camps and troopships in Europe and the United States, the flu leaped out of uniform to ports and industrial cities. In Philadelphia, historian Alfred Crosby found, 12,000 people died of flu and pneumonia in October – 759 in a single day. Schools and businesses were shut down and church services cancelled. Morgues overflowed.

By then the sickness had spread to the far corners of the planet, from the South Pacific to the Arctic. “Everybody on Earth breathed in the virus, and half of them got sick,” says Jeffery Taubenberger of the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology in Maryland. More than 50 million people died – at least three times as many as in the war.

Culled from: National Geographic, October 2005

Facts

Today’s Cold Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

Cold water saps body heat. A human can survive barely 30 minutes in a 40°F sea.

Culled from: National Geographic (October 2009)

Facts

My urbex/rurex friends and I have started a blog entitled Shooting With Abandon. I contributed an article to it recently and thought I would share it with you. Keep you eye on the blog – I have some vastly talented friends!

Shooting With Abandon

Art

Charles Krafft is an amazing artist who uses traditional ceramic techniques to create plates and sculptures that are truly of our time. His work commemorates such grim things as Hitler, Sal Mineo’s death, mob killings, and disasters. Obviously, I dream of having one of his pieces in the Castle DeSpair one day!

This is my favorite:

Here’s a sample of his brilliant work:

Delft Artist Charles Krafft

Thanks to Layna for the recommendation!

Art

Alex CF creates amazingly realistic taxidermy “specimens” of mythical creatures. I’m sure you’ll love his work as much as I do. Have a gander! (Thanks to William Thirteen for the link.)

The Specimens of Alex CF

Here’s his Facebook page, for those so inclined:

The Art Of Alex CF

Art

Today’s Macabre Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

At the end of the 19th century, Paris’s morgue sat perched just behind Notre Dame cathedral, on the edge of the island in the Seine, l’Ile de la Cité. Two-thirds of the corpses dealt with by the morgue would have been fished out of the Seine – suicides, accidental drownings or murders. The morgue attendants would carefully study the dead person’s clothes, scars and wounds – often caused after they had hit the water, by a boat or by the hooks used to fish them out. Then the bodies would be displayed on 12 black marble slabs propped up in the morgue window for the public to view and decide whether they recognised any of them. This macabre showcase became one of the most popular pieces of entertainment in Paris. Locals and tourists peered in at the forsaken departed souls. People of all ages, including children, would visit the famous window of the dead – Émile Zola, in his 1867 novel Thérèse Raquin, described gangs of boys, aged from 12 to 15, “who ran the length of the window, only stopping in front of the female corpses.”

Earlier, in the 18th century, families would traditionally float a plank of wood on the river, bearing blessed bread and a candle for the dead. But nothing disturbed and captured the imagination like suicide – especially that of a beautiful young woman who might have taken her life because of a broken heart. When the British director Peter Greenaway made an eerie documentary, Les Morts de la Seine, retelling the tales of 23 drownings between 1795 and 1801, he learned that young women made up the biggest proportion of apparent suicides, appearing to favour drowning, while men opted for hanging. The true stories he recreated included bizarre findings, such as a naked woman in her 70s, dredged from the Seine clasping two leeks in her left hand.

Culled from: The Guardian

Facts

Fascinating – but it would have sucked to have been this pilot!

British WWII fighter found in Egyptian desert

News

Today’s Smoky Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

During prohibition, legal and safe alcohol was replaced by cheaply made, unsafe, and often quite foul-tasting alcohol. At the underground clubs, inventive bartenders enjoyed new respect for disguising the taste of the day’s alcohol. They created a new generation of cocktails heavy on fruit juices and liqueurs to mix with the bathtub gin, bright and spicy additions to cover the raw sting of the spirits. There was the Bennett Cocktail (gin, lime juice, bitters), the Bee’s Knees (gin, honey, lemon juice), the Gin Fizz (gin, lemon juice, sugar, seltzer water), and the Southside (lemon juice, sugar syrup, mint leaves, gin, seltzer water).

At least, those were the kind of drinks served at New York City’s classier joints – say Jack and Charlie’s 21 on 52nd Street. Or Belle Guinan’s El Fay Club on West 45th, where the hostess gleamed like a candelabrum and the house band played “The Prisoner’s Song” when dry agents were spotted in the crowd. Down in the Bowery, as the police could tell you, the drink of choice was a cloudy cocktail called Smoke, made by mixing water and fuel alcohol. Smoke joints were tucked into the back of paint stores, drugstores, and markets, among the dry goods and the stacked cans. The drink was blessedly cheap – fifteen cents a glass – and just about pure methyl alcohol.

In a bad season, Smoke deaths in the Bowery averaged one a day. Government agents trying to hunt down suppliers of the poor man’s cocktail swore that it was served right from cans stenciled with the word POISON – and that people didn’t care. They just gambled that it wouldn’t kill them and drank it anyway.

Culled from: The Poisoner’s Handbook

Facts