This is fun: Death Masks!!!
Death Mask of Frederick II, King Of Prussia.
Oh, and Life Masks too, but who cares about those.
The Laurence Hutton Collection
Thanks to Dov for the suggestion.
Today’s Self-Made Yet Truly Morbid Fact!
The April 1937 issue of Front Page Detective magazine featured an article entitled “I Help Them Die,” an as-told-to confession of George Philip Hanna, “Humanitarian Hangman” from Epworth, Illinois. Hanna was obsessed with nooses, gallows, hoods, and restraints as a teenager. He spent his days binding, masking, and hanging dummies and sandbags from the hayloft of the family’s barn, teaching himself the proper ratios of body weight to rope length: Too short a drop led to strangulation; too long, to decapitation. Hanna was “unexpectedly given the opportunity to show the world what [he] had learned” when, at age eighteen, he attended a hanging in a nearby county. Horrified by the sheriff’s bungling, he made his way through the crowd and walked to the foot of the gallows. “Could I lend you a hand, sir?” he asked. “You’re doing this the wrong way.” 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’d hanged – the only compensation Hanna asked.
Culled from: The Last Face You’ll Ever See: The Culture of Death Row
Today’s Severed Yet Truly Morbid Fact!
Police in southern Bangladesh say a woman cut off a man’s penis during an alleged attempt to rape her and took it to a police station as evidence. The incident took place in Mirzapur village, Jhalakathi, about 200km (124 miles) south of the capital, Dhaka. Monju Begum, 40, a married mother of three, told police that neighbour Mozammel Haq Mazi forced his way into her shanty and started assaulting her. Mr Mazi, who denies the accusation, has been admitted to a nearby hospital. ”We will arrest him once his condition gets better,” police spokesman Abul Khaer told the BBC. ”She said she fought back and cut off his penis and brought it to our police station in a polythene bag to prove that Mr Mazi tried to rape her,” police spokesman Abul Khaer told the BBC. ”She has registered a case accusing him of attempted rape,” he said. ”It is quite an unusual incident. As far as I am aware, this is the first time that a woman has brought a severed penis to the police station as evidence.” Monju Begum told police that Mr Mazi, a married father of five, had been harassing her for the past six months. But Mr Mazi denied the allegations. ”We were having an affair and recently she suggested that both of us can go and settle down in Dhaka,” Mr Mazi told the BBC from the hospital in nearby Barisal. ”I refused and told her that I cannot leave my wife and children, so she took revenge on me.” Prof AMSM Sharfuzzaman, a senior surgeon at the Sher-e-Bangla Medical College and Hospital in Barisal town, told the BBC it had not been possible to reattach the organ. ”Police brought his severed penis several hours after the incident,” he said. ”We are treating him so that he can urinate normally without the penis.”
Culled from: BBC News
Take a good look at this woman. Do NOT fuck with her!
Mike sent me a link to a particularly grim video of a fatally injured protester in Bahrain being carried to a hospital bed and pronounced dead. Warning: Not for the squeamish!
I am incredibly sad that I didn’t find out about this until now – long after the show has ended – but Ampersand, a gallery, bookshop, and retail archive in Portland ran a fantastic exhibition of 1930′s morgue photographs last year. Luckily, their website still has copies of the photos for our voyeuristic benefit (and you can purchase prints if you’re incredibly rich). Behold!
Thanks to Carson for the link.
Today’s Secretive Yet Truly Morbid Fact!
Florida takes the concept of keeping its executioner’s identity secret to a bizarre extreme. One of the last states to use a civilian executioner, the Sunshine State is also one of the last that hoods the man. Hired through classified ads, his name is known by only two people in the state, whose identities are also secret. At 5 a.m. on the morning of sentence, the executioner is picked up, hooded, at a designated spot by an administrative assistant of the Department of Corrections (DOC). The hood stays on for the drive to the prison farm at Starke, where the executioner is shown to a small room off the death chamber. He sits there until sunrise, when he’s summoned to another small room called the “executioner’s alcove,” which is visible to the execution participants but not the witnesses. After the condemned is strapped in, two electricians engage the circuits and a third man throws a switch activating the “executioner control panel”. When the moment comes, the warden nods to the hooded man, who hits a switch that begins an automated sequence of voltages or starts the administration of the lethal injection drugs. For reasons no one in the DOC can explain, this hooded man is the last to leave after sentence is carried out. Driven to the spot at which he was picked up, he’s paid $150 in cash.
Culled from: The Last Face You’ll Ever See: The Culture of Death Row
A few years ago I wrote up a travelogue about my visit to Memory Hill Cemetery in Milledgeville, Georgia. The main reason I went there was because I had read an article about the slave graves and how they had distinctive markers that consisted of 1-3 metal chain links. The article stated that a grave with one link indicates a slave was born into slavery but was freed as an adult and died free. Two links indicated the slave was born into slavery, lived most of their life in slavery, but died free. And three links indicated they died in slavery as well. I found this an absolutely heartbreaking and fascinating piece of southern history.
However, Adam Selzer has written me to advise me that this story may not be accurate. His version of the meaning behind the three links:
The three links of chains are often said to signify being born, living, and dying in bondage around town, but it’s not quite accurate. There are certainly slave graves in Memory Hill, but the three links of chain are actually symbols denoting that the buried person was a member of the Odd Fellows, the secret club that workers joined while their bosses joined the Freemasons or Shriners.
Are there any other Georgian historians out there who can corroborate Adam’s disappointing story?
Here’s the Memory Hill Cemetery travelogue in all its sullen southern glory:
Trudging Up Memory Hill
Today’s Impossible Yet Truly Morbid Fact!
First-hand account from the wife of a first responder firefighter at Chernobyl. It took him two weeks to die an agonizing death from radiation poisoning.
At the morgue they said, “Want to see what we’ll dress him in?” I do! They dressed him up in formal wear, with his service cap. They couldn’t get shoes on him because his feet had swelled up. They had to cut up the formal wear, too, because they couldn’t get it on him, there wasn’t a whole body to put it on. It was all – wounds. The last two days in the hospital – I’d lift his arm, and meanwhile the bone is shaking, just sort of dangling, the body has gone away from it. Pieces of his lungs, of his liver, were coming out of his mouth. He was choking on his internal organs. I’d wrap my hand in a bandage and put it in his mouth, take out all that stuff. It’s impossible to talk about. It’s impossible to write about. And even to live through. It was all mine. My love. They couldn’t get a single pair of shoes to fit him. They buried him barefoot.
Culled from: Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster
I can’t help but wonder if some of those workers in Japan are going through a similar experience right now and, much like Chernobyl, we won’t find out about it until long after the fact?
I was going through some old files tonight and I stumbled upon this fantastic old postcard. Isn’t it grand?
A Wretched Recommendation!
Radio Bikini (1988)
Interesting documentary about the despicable nuclear explosions at Bikini Atoll, which destroyed a beautiful tropical paradise and displaced its residents for the sole purpose of showing the rest of the world that the United States had the biggest balls on earth. I did feel like there was something lacking in this documentary though – maybe because I’d seen most of the footage already in my favorite nuclear documentary The Atomic Cafe
