Decidedly Grim

Today’s Shocking Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

A Bellaire, Ohio man had to be removed from his home on Washington Street Sunday, March 27, 2011. The 43-year-old man’s skin had become attached to the fabric of the chair after he sat in it for two years Authorities said he was sitting in his own feces and urine and maggots were visible. Police were called in to help transfer the man to the hospital. Authorities said they had to cut a hole in the wall to get the man out of his home. Shockingly, two other able-bodied people lived there—another man, who had a separate bedroom, and the girlfriend of the man who was stuck in the chair. Officials say the girlfriend served food to him, since he never got up. Bellaire Code Enforcer Jim Chase says now the tenants have been given orders to clean it or leave it. One officer said it was the worst thing he ever responded to. And most said the worst part of all was the smell. Ironically the landlord says the man in the chair rented from her before and used to be a vital active person. She says she checked on them periodically but lately he always sat with a blanket over him. She says she had no idea it had come to this. Sunday morning his housemates called officials when he was unresponsive. He later died at the hospital.

Culled from: WTRF.Com
Generously submitted by: Katchaya

So, what do you think? Should the housemates be held liable for enabling this situation?

Facts

Today’s Rooting-Tooting Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

Artemus Acord was an authentic cowboy and rodeo champ when cast in Cecil B. DeMille’s Squaw Man.  Soon after, Acord shipped off to fight in World War I, where his real life rooting-tooting acts of bravery earned him medals.  He returned to Hollywood and became one of the most popular actors in silent westerns, displaying a natural genius for capturing the bravado of the American cowboy era.  He performed his own stunts, and reportedly could withstand any number of bottles crashed over his head without flinching.  He didn’t need to act too much for his barroom brawls, or for belting back a shot of rotgut, since he always insisted the colored water normally used to fill whiskey bottles contain the real thing. When his drinking became a burden, he was canned, primarily because of an arrest for bootlegging. Acord went down to Mexico, in hope of finding a part in low-budget cowboy films, but he got quickly into trouble and more barroom fights, nearly being stabbed to death in one. In the end, Acord was employed as a miner below the border when he had the brilliant idea to stage his own kidnapping – he was certain the publicity would facilitate a triumphant return to the Silver Screen. When Acord brought the local police in on the scheme, he managed to get into more hot water by screwing around with one officer’s wife. Eventually, Mexican authorities stated Acord died of suicide by ingesting cyanide, even if autopsy reports show the size of his enlarged liver may have caused his death (at age forty in 1931) from complications of chronic alcoholism. Others believe he was murdered by Mexican police. All but a few of Acord’s more than 100 films have been lost.

Culled from: Genius and Heroin: The Illustrated Catalogue of Creativity, Obsession, and Reckless Abandon Through the Ages

Facts

I should probably shorten this one but I found it all so interesting I figured I’d share it in full…

Today’s Ash-Covered Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

On March 9, 1945, as the war in the Pacific entered its climactic phase, American General Curtis LeMay ordered a daring new type of raid on Tokyo.  The B-29 bombers would strike at night, flying at 5000 to 8000 feet instead of the usual daylight 30,000-foot altitude.  This time the raiders would carry M47 incendiary bombs.

At 5:36 p.m. the first of 333 B-29s took off from Guam’s North Field and headed north, followed at 50-second intervals by eleven more. These were pathfinders. They would demarcate the target area and light it up with a gigantic “X” by dropping canisters of magnesium and phosphorous as well as jellied gasoline (the dreaded napalm).

Undiscovered on their low sweep over southeast Tokyo, the pathfinders began to discharge their fiery markings at 12:08 a.m. The main force of three wings started to arrive at 12:30 a.m. and dropped two-foot-long napalm sticks at altitudes ranging from 4900 to 9200 feet. Under a stiffening wind, flames fanned out rapidly. Within minutes huge balls of fire torched structure after structure and fueled an incandescent tidal wave carrying temperatures exceeding 1800 degrees Fahrenheit.

The turbulence of the firestorm tossed the bombers hundreds of feet into the air, then pulled them downward. Many fliers vomited, first from airsickness, again when the sickly-sweet stench of burning bodies hit them from the ground. Some crews put on oxygen masks. The last of the B-29s escaped to the south at 3:30 a.m. – only 14 planes were lost.

On the ground Koyo Ishikawa, a cameraman for the police department, was photographing LeMay’s handiwork. “The very streets were rivers of fire,” he said later. “Everywhere one could see flaming pieces of furniture exploding in the heat, while the people themselves plazed like matchsticks.” Many were incinerated in their wooden shelters. Masao Nomura, a reporter for the newspaper Asahi, described the scene after the raid: “Long lines of ragged, ash-covered people straggled along, dazed and silent, like columns of ants. They had no idea where they were going.”

Mrs. Yohie Sekimura, trying to make her way back to her home with her baby on her back, found the bridge across the Sumida River clogged with bodies, the river choked with swollen corpses. Mechanically she walked past bodies of neighbors and could shed no tears. The pool of emergency water at her neighborhood hospital was filled with layers of sprawling bodies. Survivors were scrawling charcoal messages for their missing loved ones on the sidewalk. Her home was in ashes, along with 267,170 others; 15.8 square miles were burned out; 72,489 people died, 130,000 were injured.

Culled from: Day One: Before Hiroshima and After

Now, that’s terrorism for you! The military’s reason for targeting civilians? Factories, which were considered military targets, had been disbanded and workers had been moved into individual houses so productivity was not impacted by the conventional raids. LeMay grew impatient and decided to take out the civilian workplaces in one fiery fell swoop.  Unsurprisingly, many of the pilots who took part in the raids were tortured with guilt afterwards.  If ever a people had to pay a severe price for the misguided arrogance of its leaders, it was the civilians of Japan.

Facts

The Sexual Criminal: A Psychoanalytical Study
by J. Paul De River

A 1949 vintage criminology textbook written by infamous Los Angeles County criminal psychiatrist J. Paul De River that is jam-packed with all the sexism and homophobia common to its era. Among many fascinations, I learned that a women who enjoys being orally pleasured is a masochist, a man who likes to orally pleasure women is a pervert, and homosexuals are psychopaths who need to be given shock therapy. Apart from those revelations, there are a number of case studies from a variety of sex crimes – from the truly shocking (a man who strangled three children because he wanted to have sex with them but couldn’t do it when they were alive because he “didn’t want to hurt them”) to the merely amusing (the sadist who had a violent orgy with himself in the muddy field at night). Some of the case studies have rather graphic photographs (including the most violent murderer, who cut his victims into pieces after killing them), so the book is definitely not for the squeamish, but it is a fascinating historical document.  (4/5)

Library

Today, in honor of the 100th anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York City, I thought I would repost a summary of the event originally posted in two Morbid Facts on April 2/3, 2000. Er, enjoy!

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

Near closing time on Saturday afternoon, March 25, 1911, a fire broke out on the top floors of the Asch Building in the Triangle Shirtwaist Company. Within minutes, the quiet spring afternoon erupted into madness, a terrifying moment in time, disrupting forever the lives of young workers. By the time the fire was over, 146 of the 500 employees had died.

William G. Shepherd was an eyewitness to the atrocity:

As I reached the scene of the fire, a cloud of smoke hung over the building. . . . I looked up to the seventh floor. There was a living picture in each window–four screaming heads of girls waving their arms. ‘Call the firemen,’ they screamed… One girl climbed onto the window sash. Those behind her tried to hold her back. Then she dropped into space. Then came that first thud. I looked up, another girl was climbing onto the window sill; others were crowding behind her. She dropped. I watched her fall, and again the dreadful sound. Two windows away two girls were climbing onto the sill; they were fighting each other and crowding for air. Behind them I saw many screaming heads. They fell almost together, but I heard two distinct thuds. Then the flames burst out through the windows on the floor below them, and curled up into their faces. The firemen… took out a life net and, while they were rushing to the sidewalk with it, two more girls shot down. The firemen held it under them; the bodies broke it; the grotesque simile of a dog jumping through a hoop struck me. Before they could move the net another girl’s body flashed through it.

As I looked up I saw a love affair in the midst of all the horror. A young man helped a girl to the window sill. Then he held her out, deliberately away from the building and let her drop. He held out a second girl the same way and let her drop. Then he held out a third girl who did not resist. I noticed that. They were as unresisting as if her were helping them onto a streetcar instead of into eternity. Undoubtedly he saw that a terrible death awaited them in the flames, and his was only a terrible chivalry. He brought another girl to the window. Those of us who were looking saw her put her arms about him and kiss him. Then he held her out into space and dropped her. But quick as a flash he was on the window sill himself. His coat fluttered upward–the air filled his trouser legs. I could see that he wore tan shoes and hose. His hat remained on his head. Thud–dead, thud–dead–together they went into eternity.

A police officer stands with bodies of victims who leaped to their death. Click on the photo to access a great gallery of fire photos at the Cornell University website.

The firemen raised the longest ladder. It reached only to the sixth floor. I saw the last girl jump at it and miss it. And then the faces disappeared from the window. I heard screams around the corner and hurried there. What I had seen before was not so terrible as what had followed. Up in the [ninth] floor girls were burning to death before our very eyes. They were jammed in the windows. No one was lucky enough to be able to jump, it seemed. But, one by one, the jams broke. Down came the bodies in a shower, burning, smoking–flaming bodies, with disheveled hair trailing upward. They had fought each other to die by jumping instead of by fire. The whole, sound, unharmed girls who had jumped on the other side of the building had tried to fall feet down. But these fire torches, suffering ones, fell inertly, only intent that death should come to them on the sidewalk instead of in the furnace behind them.

On the sidewalk lay heaps of broken bodies. A policeman later went about with tags, which he fastened with wires to the wrists of the dead girls, numbering each with a lead pencil, and I saw him fasten tag no. 54 to the wrist of a girl who wore an engagement ring. A fireman who came downstairs from the building told me that there were at least fifty bodies in the big room on the seventh floor. Another fireman told me that more girls had jumped down an air shaft in the rear of the building. I went back there, into the narrow court, and saw a heap of dead girls… The floods of water from the firemen’s hose that ran into the gutter were actually stained red with blood. I looked upon the heap of dead bodies and I remembered these girls were the shirtwaist makers. I remembered their great strike of last year in which these same girls had demanded more sanitary conditions and more safety precautions in the shops. These dead bodies were the answer.

Culled from: The Triangle Factory Fire
Generously submitted by: Fearless Freya

Here is my original review of a book chronicling the tragedy.  I should re-read it because I might find the second half more interesting these days:

The Triangle Fire
By Leon Stein
Cornell University Press
The 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire killed 146 young women, mostly immigrant girls, in one of the worst factory fire disasters in American history. (Of course, as the book points out, this sort of thing still occurs all the time, it just happens in Thailand, China, Korea, Hong Kong, etc. and we don’t care about it.) Anyway, this book was okay… The first part, about the actual fire itself and how the design of the building (with exit doors that pushed inward, locked exits, one inferior fire escape, and narrow stairways) created a firetrap that resulted in numerous women (and some men too) plunging to their deaths onto the New York sidewalk below, is a compelling read. However, I just couldn’t get in to the second section of the book at all, which deals with the prosecution of the company owner’s for contributing to the deaths through their negligence, the protests and unions that formed in the aftermath, and the new laws that were enacted to protect others. That part had me yawning nearly non-stop. But that’s just me… Perhaps you might find all that very interesting as well.

*** – Half-Baked

Facts, Library

Today’s Unrotted Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

Ever think you’re going to pieces? Saint Catherine of Siena feels your pain. After the holy woman died in 1380, her body became an object of veneration. Pilgrims believed touching her miraculously unrotted flesh could heal illnesses and bring them closer to God, so they flocked to visit the body from all over Europe. Eventually, the Catholic Church laid Catherine to rest – part of her, at least. Before she was buried, one of her followers removed a finger (along with a few teeth and other various and sundry body parts). Meanwhile Pope Urban VI got a similar idea and took her head. Today, both finger and head are on display at San Domenico Church in Siena, Italy. The rest of her is beneath the main altar at Santa Maria Sopra Minerva Church in Rome.

Culled from: Neatorama
Generously submitted by: Reno Dave

Facts

Today’s Disobedient Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

On the morning of Monday, July 26, 1830, the Parisian newspaper Moniteur announced that the French king, Charles X, had made some major changes in the country’s government. Contrary to the constitution, he had suspended the liberty of the press, dissolved a newly elected government chamber, and restructured the French election system, giving greatest power to his own ministers. It took awhile for the news to spread through the city, but soon anxious groups of people began to collect on Paris streets. Some began to throw stones through the windows of government offices. By afternoon, the editors of newspapers and journals issued a public statement: “Legal government is interrupted, and that of force has commenced. In the situation in which we are placed, obedience ceases to be a duty…”

The next day, police began to seize and smash the journalists’ presses. Violence broke out, and the streets of Paris were quickly filled with angry and unruly mobs. Some 30,000 printing workers and factory laborers who had been dismissed from work swelled the unmanageable crowds. French soldiers took to the streets and tried to keep order, but were enormously outnumbered by the defiant French citizens. By July 29 the soldiers had fled from Paris, and the city was left entirely in the control of its triumphant citizens. Some 2,000 people were wounded in the insurrection and another 1,000 lost their lives. King Charles was forced to flee the country, and when he abdicated, Louis Philippe was proclaimed the new king of France.

Culled from: The Pessimist’s Guide To History

Facts

Today’s Commemorative Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

Vladimir Komarov, a cosmonaut, knew he was going to die when he left Earth for space on the Soyuz 1. His friend Yuri Gagarin, the first human to reach outer space, knew Komarov would too. But Leonid Brezhnev, leader of the Soviet Union, wanted to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Communist Revolution with a spectacle. So Komarov boarded the Soyuz 1, and just like he predicted, ended up dying. The picture above is Komarov’s remains. The book Starman by Jamie Doran and Piers Bizony examines the story of Gagarin and Komarov and how they couldn’t stop the USSR from going forward with the mission. Gagarin and some senior technicians had inspected the Soyuz 1 and had found 203 structural problems – serious problems that would make the machine dangerous to navigate in space. The mission, Gagarin suggested, should be postponed. Gagarin wrote a 10-page memo and gave it to his best friend in the KGB, Venyamin Russayev, but nobody dared send it up the chain of command. Everyone who saw that memo, including Russayev, was demoted, fired or sent to diplomatic Siberia. Komarov couldn’t refuse the mission because the backup cosmonaut would have been Gagarin, his friend. So he went along with it and when things predictably failed—antennas didn’t open, power was compromised, navigation was difficult—US intelligence picked up Komarov’s cries of rage “cursing the people who had put him inside a botched spaceship.”

Culled from: Gizmodo

The full story is available to peruse at NPR , along with a recording of Komarov’s last angry shouts as his spacecraft began to burn up on re-entry.  (I think the empty electronic beeps that end the transmission are the creepiest part of the recording.)  I’m definitely picking up this book when it’s released!

Facts

Today’s Arresting Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

The earliest known reference to forensic entomology is in a 13th century Chinese manuscript entitled The Washing Away of Wrongs. It is a general treatise on forensic science, and it discusses a case in which a peasant was cut down and killed with a scythe. The investigating officer asked the local peasants to stand in a row and place their scythes on the ground before them. It was a hot day, and flies came and settled on one particular scythe, which had traces of blood and other body fluids on it. The officer arrested the owner of the scythe and charged him with murder.

Culled from: Forensic Medicine: Clinical and Pathological Aspects
Generously submitted by: Z. Constantine

Why don’t they give textbooks such colorful titles anymore? Instead of “The Washing Away Of Wrongs” we now have “Forensic Medicine: Clinical and Pathological Aspects”. I think that’s another sign of the general deterioration of everything interesting in this world.

Facts

Today’s Deeply Religious Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

Police have arrested an Upper Darby, PA man who they say confessed to stoning to death 70-year-old Murray Seidman because he was making “homosexual advances.” In his interview with police this week, John Thomas, 28, cited the Old Testament in explaining the murder. Seidman was found dead in his Lansdown apartment in January. “I stoned Murrary with a rock in a sock,” Thomas told police.

The complaint states: “John Thomas stated that he read in the Old Testament that homosexuals should be stoned in certain situations. The answer John Thomas received from his prayers was to put an end to the victim’s life. John Thomas stated that he struck the victim approximately 10 times in the head. After the final blow, John Thomas made sure the victim was dead.”

“He is a deeply religious man. Or so he says,” said Lansdowne Police Chief Dan Kortan.

Several days later, Thomas, who is the executor and sole beneficiary of Seidman’s will, returned to the apartment and pretended that he had just discovered Seidman’s body. He said he ditched his bloody clothes and the bloody sock in a Dumpster. Delaware County Medical Examiner Fredric Hellman ruled that Seidman had been dead for five to 10 days before Thomas started banging on doors in the apartment hallway Jan. 12. Thomas, who police found sitting in the hallway crying, said, “I’m not going down there again, there is too much blood,” court documents state. Seidman was face down on the living room floor.

Thomas, who lives on Sunshine Road in Upper Darby, had no comment as he was led out of the Media courthouse today. Seidman, who previously lived at Elwyn Institute, was a longtime worker in the laundry department at Mercy Fitzgerald Hospital, where he was “very popular,” Kortan said.

“As far as we are concerned, he was a model citizen,” Kortan said.

Culled from: Philly.Com.

“He was a model citizen.” Yes, a model of citizen for Ancient Mesopotamia, perhaps. 2011 America? Not so much…

Facts