Today’s Gruesome Yet Truly Morbid Fact!
The scene was so gruesome investigators could barely speak: A 3 1/2-week-old boy lay dismembered in the bedroom of a single-story house, three of his tiny toes chewed off, his face torn away, his head severed and his brains ripped out. “At this particular scene you could have heard a pin drop,” San Antonio Police Chief William McManus said Monday. “No one was speaking. It was about as somber as it could have been.” Officers called to the home early Sunday found the boy’s mother, Otty Sanchez, sitting on the couch with a self-inflicted wound to her chest and her throat partially slashed, screaming “I killed my baby! I killed my baby!”. She told officers the devil made her do it. Sanchez, 33, apparently ate the child’s brain and some other body parts before stabbing herself. “It’s too heinous for me to describe it any further,” McManus told reporters. Sanchez is charged with capital murder in the death of her son, Scott Wesley Buccholtz-Sanchez. She was being treated Monday, July 27, 2009 at a hospital, and was being held on $1 million bail. The slaying occurred a week after the child’s father moved out. Otty Sanchez’s sister and her sister’s two children, ages 5 and 7, were in the house, but none were harmed. Sanchez’s aunt, Gloria Sanchez, said her niece had been “in and out” of a psychiatric ward but did not say where she was treated or why. “Otty didn’t mean to do that. She was not in her right mind,” a sobbing Gloria Sanchez said. She said her family was devastated.
Investigators are looking into Sanchez’s mental health history to see if there was anything “significant,” and whether postpartum difficulties could have factored into the attack. Postpartum depression and psychosis have been cited as contributing factors in several other cases in Texas in recent years in which mothers killed their children. Andrea Yates drowned her five children in her Houston-area home 2001, saying she believed Satan was inside her and trying to save them from hell. Her attorneys said she had been suffering from severe postpartum psychosis, and a jury found Yates not guilty by reason of insanity in 2006. In 2004, Dena Schlosser killed her 10-month-old in her Plano home by slicing off the baby’s arms. She was found not guilty of reason by insanity, after testifying that she killed the baby because she wanted to give her to God.
Culled from: The Associated Press
Generously submitted by: Sandy
Yet more proof that there is nothing more dangerous to a child than a religious Texas mother… (shudder)
Facts
Today’s Restricted Yet Truly Morbid Fact!
The “standing bunker” was a cruel specialty at Auschwitz concentration camp. The Political Department ran the main camp’s block 11. No inmates lived in the block, which was always locked. Its basement served as a prison. In addition to 28 cells, the basement held the standing bunker, the collective name for four cells, each smaller than a square meter. A prisoner ordered to the standing bunker had to crawl through a small opening near the floor. The cell was dark with only one air hole. The condemned was locked into the standing bunker, where he could not lie down, for a number of nights, while having to march to work during the day. When several inmates were imprisoned in one of the standing bunkers, the already restricted space became even tighter. A prisoner could be sentenced to several nights in the standing bunker if he had relieved himself behind a building or had picked fruit from a tree near his workplace.
Culled from: Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp
I’m not even particularly claustrophobic and this one made me start to have a panic attack!
Facts
Stella sends a wonderful link to the classic 1959 driver safety film “Signal 30″. Watch in shock and horror as mangled bodies of inattentive drivers are pulled from their massive hunks of twisted metal!! It’s a splendid way to spend a half-hour! (There are two parts – it should automatically start part 2 once you’ve finished part 1.)
Signal 30
Incidentally, I thought I’d post an old review of one of my favorite ghastly books: Car
Crashes and Other Sad Stories.
Car Crashes and Other Sad Stories
Text by Jennifer Dumas
Photos by Mell Kilpatrick
This is the perfect book for the ambulance chaser in all of us: a collection of car crash photos from the 40’s and 50’s. There’s something deeply tragic about these stark black and white images of destruction. It’s fascinating to try and piece together these shattered lives from the scant clues available – the letters strewn beside a well-dressed corpse, the cans of beer strewn from an overturned and demolished car – or, if you’re morbid like moi, you might try and figure out exactly how the bodies came to lie in those odd positions. Of course, in these days prior to seat belts, bodies flew every which way, so the variations are really quite amazing.
More ghastly books available from The Library Eclectica’s Ghastly Gore aisle.
Ghastly!
Today’s Jerky Yet Truly Morbid Fact!
Executions by elephant were often held in public in India as a warning to any who might transgress. To that end, many of the elephants were especially large, often weighing in excess of nine tons. The executions were intended to be gruesome and, by all accounts, they often were. They were sometimes preceded by torture publicly inflicted by the same elephant used for the execution. An account of one such torture-and-execution at Baroda in 1814 has been preserved in The Percy Anecdotes:
“The man was a slave, and two days before had murdered his master, brother to a native chieftain, called Ameer Sahib. About eleven o’clock the elephant was brought out, with only the driver on his back, surrounded by natives with bamboos in their hands. The criminal was placed three yards behind on the ground, his legs tied by three ropes, which were fastened to a ring on the right hind leg of the animal. At every step the elephant took, it jerked him forward, and every eight or ten steps must have dislocated another limb, for they were loose and broken when the elephant had proceeded five hundred yards. The man, though covered in mud, showed every sign of life, and seemed to be in the most excruciating torments. After having been tortured in this manner for about an hour, he was taken to the outside of the town, when the elephant, which is instructed for such purposes, was backed, and put his foot on the head of the criminal.”
Culled from: Wikipedia
Generously submitted by: Ben Z.
Facts
Morbid Anatomy is my new favorite blog: a magnificent assortment of images of anatomical models and specimens from museums and collections across the globe. Pure morbid fascination!
Morbid Anatomy
Thanks to Steve O’ for the link.
Web
Today’s Poetic Yet Truly Morbid Fact!
Sergei Alexandrovich Yesenin (sometimes spelled as Esenin) was a Russian lyrical poet. Through his collections of poignant poetry about love and the simple life, he became one of the most popular poets of the day. In the fall of 1921, while visiting the studio of painter Alexei Yakovlev, he met the Paris-based American dancer Isadora Duncan, a woman 18 years his senior who knew only a dozen words in Russian, while he spoke no foreign languages. They married (Sergei’s third marriage) on May 2, 1922. Yesenin accompanied his new celebrity wife on a tour of Europe and the United States but at this point in his life, an addiction to alcohol had gotten out of control. Often drunk, his violent rages resulted in him destroying hotel rooms and causing disturbances in restaurants. This behavior received a great deal of publicity in the international press. His marriage to Duncan was brief and in May 1923 he returned to Moscow. The last two years of Yesenin’s life were filled with constant erratic and drunken behavior, but he also created some of his most famous poems. In 1925 Yesenin met and married his fifth wife, Sophia Andreyevna Tolstaya, a granddaughter of Leo Tolstoy. She attempted to get him help but he suffered a complete mental breakdown and was hospitalized for a month. Two days after his release for Christmas, he cut his wrist and wrote a farewell poem in his own blood, then the following day hanged himself from the heating pipes on the ceiling of his room in the Hotel Angleterre. He was 30 years old.
Sergei’s farewell poem:
Goodbye, my friend, goodbye. My dear one, you are in my breast. A predestined parting Promises a reunion ahead.
Goodbye, my friend, without a touch of hand, without a word, Don’t be sad and do not frown, Dying is nothing new in this life, And living, of course, isn’t any newer.
Culled from: Wikipedia
Confession: When I was 16, I wrote a poem in my own blood too… but it wasn’t even as good as Sergei’s. Such a waste of hemoglobin…
Facts
I received an e-mail from John C. Von Hohenstein who was delighted to see his great-great grandparents’ grave displayed on my Bonaventure Cemetery blog:
“I am very pleased that you posted the picture of my ancester’s tomb; Charles and Mary Hohenstein. They are my Great Great Grandparents. Charles and his Brother came from Germany at the end of the Civil War. They were shipping merchants who came to capitalize on the rebuilding of Savannah, Atlanta, and New Orleans. The Hohenstein Shipping Yard is still in operation at the Port of Savannah.”
If you’re interested in cemeteries, Savannah, or Savannah cemeteries, please have a look at my Bonaventure Cemetery travelogue. Other travelogues and suggested morbid sites are available at The Morbid Sightseer.
Sightseer
“I was a sophomore at college, and had been suffering from severe depression, bipolar, anorexia and self mutilation for years; they all seemed to be treatment resistant. I was at a good friend’s dorm when we started to snort crushed Adderall, and qualudes. The effects started immediately. I became extremely talkative and hyperactive. I confessed to him that when I had attempted suicide that spring the night before I was drugged and raped by a friend who lived on my floor and his friend from home. I began confessing numerous travesties that had occurred to me. While sitting in his dorm, I started to feel really funny. My heart was beating so fast I thought it would explode, my skin became cold and clammy and I began slipping in and out of consciousness. My breathing was rapid and shallow, I began to panic. He knew what was going on and took me to the bathroom, forcing me to vomit, but nothing came up. I began telling him, ‘It’s alright; I know I’m going to die and I’m not afraid.’ I kissed his cheek and simply asked that he hold me until the end. As shaky and cold as I was, I felt warm inside and peaceful. Sounds faded from my ears, everything was becoming really quiet, despite a slight vibrating in my ears. His roommate, who happened to be an EMT came home and saw me. I blacked out, and he performed CPR on me and got my heart beating again. They took me to the hospital, where it was confirmed I had overdosed and they were surprised I was still alive. I survived and no one but the three of us ever spoke of it again. I know it isn’t as morbid as the rest but that day I almost became someone else’s morbid story.”
Do you have a morbid story to share? Send it to The Comtesse DeSpair.
“My Brush With Morbidity” Archives
Brush
Karen told me she “saw this site and thought of you,” which is so unbearably sweet, I simply cannot find the words to express my shock. What I can do is tell you that Serial Killer Central is home to a nice, comprehensive serial killer community. Which doesn’t mean you have to be a serial killer to post here… though it doesn’t hurt.
Serial Killer Central
Incidentally, some of you… er, maybe one of you?… were complaining about my having taken down my Dark & Gruesome Links page, so just for you I have tidied it up by removing all the dead links and I’ve reinstated it. I’ve also put a new splash page on The Asylum Eclectica featuring a photograph I took last September in the abandoned Michael Reese Hospital in Chicago. Comments/Concerns/Dismay are all appreciated.
Oh, and I added a Donations link to the splash page too. Not that I ever expect donations, but in these troubling economic times, they certainly do lessen the load of running the site. Thank you for anything you can offer from your coffers.
Web
skat has a book recommendation for us:
“It’s not really ‘morbid’ but sort of sad and interesting if you’re a ‘voyeur’ into people’s lives like I am.”
Oh, and you KNOW that I am a voyeur into people’s lives too… so this is a must-have!
The Lives They Left Behind: Suitcases from a State Hospital Attic
by Darby Penney
Here’s the fascinating synopsis: “When New York’s 120-plus-year-old mental institution Willard State Hospital was closed down in 1995, New York Museum curator Craig Williams found a forgotten attic filled with suitcases belonging to former inmates. He informed Penney, co-editor of The Snail’s Pace Review and a leading advocate of patients rights, who recognized the opportunity to salvage the memory of these institutionalized lives. She invited Stastny, a psychiatrist and documentary filmmaker, to help her curate an exhibit on the find and write this book, which they dedicate to ‘the Willard suitcase owners, and to all others who have lived and died in mental institutions.’ What follows are profiles of 10 individual patients whose suitcase contents proved intriguing (there were 427 bags total), referencing their institutional record-including histories and session notes-as well as some on-the-ground research. A typical example is Ethel Smalls, who likely suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder as a result of her husband’s abuse; misdiagnosed and institutionalized against her will, she lived at Willard until her death in 1973. While the individual stories are necessarily sketchy, the cumulative effect is a powerful indictment of healthcare for the mentally ill. 25 color and 63 b&w photographs.”
Available from The Library Eclectica astore and currently the paperback is only $10.17 too! I am snatching one for myself. More books about mental illness can be found at the Insanity! aisle of The Library Eclectica. (All proceeds from sales go towards keeping The Asylum Eclectica and the Morbid Fact Du Jour running.)
Library
