Today’s Horrible, Seething Yet Truly Morbid Fact!
In 1871, the first recorded severe thermal injury occurred at Yellowstone National Park when Macon Josey and photographer H.B. Calfee entered the hot springs area. In attempting to help a deer out of a similar predicament, Josey fell almost completely into a “horrible seething pool” in Upper Geyser Basin near Old Faithful. His partner Calfee noted: “I assisted my companion as quickly as possible but in one half minute he was badly scalded from his waist down. He was so badly scalded that when I pulled his boots and socks off the fleshed rolled off with them.”
Calfee pulled Josey out and constructed a travois to carry him on, dabbing their remaining flour onto “his raw and bleeding burns.” The travois proved unsatisfactory for “this pathless country,” so Calfee rigged an arrangement in which Josey could sit with his legs crossed over the horse’s neck to prevent pain to his burns. They traveled west in that manner to an old settler’s place on the Madison River and then north to the Gallatin Valley and Bozeman, Montana. Unfortunately, Josey’s fate went unrecorded and remains a mystery but it is likely that he died from his wounds. If so, he would represent the first recorded human death from hot spring misadventure in Yellowstone.
Culled from: Death In Yellowstone
Facts
Today’s Motionless Yet Truly Morbid Fact!
Authorities at Lake Tahoe on Monday solved the mystery of a scuba diver who disappeared 17 years ago in the mountain lake’s deep, frigid waters. The well-preserved body of Donald Christopher Windecker was discovered July 23 on an underwater shelf, 265 feet below the surface. A remote-controlled mini-submarine with a robotic claw raised the remains July 27. The recovery occurred on the lake’s west side, near Rubicon Point. Officials delayed releasing Windecker’s name until dental records confirmed his identity. Four more divers remain missing in the same area, which is infamous for swallowing up victims. Windecker’s body was clad in a wetsuit and buckled into a weight belt and air tank. The scuba gear bore a certification from 1994, officials with the El Dorado County Sheriff’s Department said. Just beyond the ledge where Windecker’s body was found, the lake plunges to a depth of 1,645 feet. News reports at the time of Windecker’s disappearance described him as a 44-year-old former city planner from Reno who set out for a dive on July 10, 1994. Accompanied by a friend, Windecker planned to swim to a depth of about 100 feet. But trouble occurred toward the end of the dive as the pair began to ascend. Windecker reportedly experienced difficulty with his equipment and began to sink. His companion tried to help but began running out of air and was forced to surface. “His remains are in amazing physical condition,” said Sheriff’s Sgt. Jim Byers. “We’ll be able to do a thorough autopsy. He may have had a heart attack or a stroke or maybe just ran out of air. Hopefully we’ll determine what happened.” Windecker’s body was discovered by a group of “mixed gas” divers exploring cliff walls. Mixed gas divers can safely descend to about 350 feet without suffering nitrogen narcosis, or “rapture of the depths,” among other problems. Conventional scuba divers have to stop at about 100 feet. Byers said those in the diving group were startled to see Windecker’s motionless form. “It was pretty scary for them. They were wondering, ‘What’s this person doing down here?’” he said. He did not identify members of the group. The surprising condition of the body is attributable to the 35-degree water and the increased pressure at the 265-foot depth. He dismissed speculation that Windecker had gone undiscovered for so long because his body had been caught in underwater tunnels that legend says connects Lake Tahoe with Pyramid Lake northeast of Reno. Some Tahoe locals insist that bodies of boaters and swimmers who drowned in Lake Tahoe have turned up Pyramid Lake and vice versa. They insist the tunnels are the result of volcanic activity. “Lava tube connections between Lake Tahoe and other lakes are an urban myth,” Byers said.
Culled from: LA Times
Generously submitted by: Mike
Too bad the body was only from 1994. Wouldn’t it be cooler if it was from 1944 or something? I always think how weird it would be to see the frozen well-preserved remains of someone who died decades (or centuries) before. Unfortunately, with all the ice melting in this world, that’s something that we’re quickly losing any possibility of seeing…
Facts
Today’s Confused Yet Truly Morbid Fact!
In the world of early high altitude flight, balloons offered one great advantage over airplanes: they could climb to the very roof of the sky, where there is too little air to provide lift for wings or to support air-breathing engines. As a result, they became essential research tools, enabling scientists to study conditions in the upper atmosphere and to develop and test equipment and techniques that would protect aviators at high altitudes. During the 1930s, teams from the United States and Europe made repeated attempts to capture and hold the world’s absolute altitude record — an unofficial race to the stratosphere for national prestige and new scientific knowledge. U.S. Army Air Corps balloonist Capt. Hawthorne Gray launched from Scott Field, Illinois, on November 4, 1927, on his third attempt to explore conditions and test equipment that would enable air crews to survive and function at altitudes of over 12,192 meters (40,000 feet). The balloon was found in a tree near Sparta, Tennessee, the next day, with Gray’s lifeless body still in the basket. He had apparently become confused, parachuting a full bottle of oxygen to earth in an effort to climb even higher. He died from lack of oxygen. “His courage,” suggested the citation of his posthumous Distinguished Flying Cross, “was greater than his supply of oxygen.”
Culled from: Smithsonian National Air & Space Museum
Facts
Today’s Happy Yet Truly Morbid Fact!
L’Inconnue de la Seine (French for “the unknown woman of the Seine”) was an unidentified young woman whose death mask became a popular fixture on the walls of artists’ homes after 1900. Her visage was the inspiration for numerous literary works. According to an often-repeated story, the body of the young woman was pulled out of the Seine River at the Quai du Louvre in Paris around the late 1880s. The body showed no signs of violence, and suicide was suspected. A pathologist at the Paris morgue was so taken by her beauty that he had a moulder make a plaster cast death mask of her face. According to other accounts, the mask was taken from the daughter of a mask manufacturer in Germany. The identity of the girl was never discovered. The moulder who took the cast of the face was believed to be based at the Lorenzi family model-making firm. Claire Forestier, a member of the Lorenzi family, believes that the model was not dead when the cast was taken. She works in the family modelling workshop, and says that a dead body from a river would not have such clear features. She estimated the age of the model at no more than 16, given the firmness of the skin. In the following years, numerous copies were produced. The copies quickly became a fashionable morbid fixture in Parisian Bohemian society. Albert Camus and others compared her enigmatic smile to that of the Mona Lisa, inviting numerous speculations as to what clues the eerily happy expression in her face could offer about her life, her death, and her place in society. The popularity of the figure is also of interest to the history of artistic media, relating to its widespread reproduction. The original cast had been photographed, and new casts were created back from the film negatives. These new casts displayed details that are usually lost in bodies taken from the water, but the apparent preservation of these details in the visage of the cast seemed to only reinforce its authenticity. Critic A. Alvarez wrote in his book on suicide, The Savage God: “I am told that a whole generation of German girls modeled their looks on her.” According to Hans Hesse of the University of Sussex, Alvarez reports, “the Inconnue became the erotic ideal of the period, as Bardot was for the 1950s. He thinks that German actresses like Elisabeth Bergner modeled themselves on her. She was finally displaced as a paradigm by Greta Garbo.”
Culled from: Wikipedia
Facts
So you’ll never believe this, but last Sunday I ran and completed (albeit extremely slowly) the Warrior Dash – a muddy obstacle course run. It was a strange experience to get the Comtesse’s creaking old bones moving again, but one that I found mildly exhilarating. However, Run For Your Lives has something the Warrior Dash doesn’t have: Zombies!!! I not only want to run from the Zombies, I also want to BE a Zombie. This year it’s only occurring in Baltimore but the virus is spreading next year. Perhaps you might want to take part as well?
Run For Your Lives
Sundry
Today’s Shady Yet Truly Morbid Fact!
Although today we think of coroners as esteemed medical professionals, there was a time when they were untrained elected officials. In New York City, political party bosses regularly fixed elections to reward loyal supporters with the lucrative position. A 1915 report estimated that the city spent $172,000 annually on “unqualified coroners, their mediocre physicians and their personal clerks, who spend most of their time on private affairs,” or lining their pockets. In addition to drawing their salaries, coroners worked on commission. They could – and usually did – bill the city for every body they examined; one assistant coroner “investigated” the same drowning victim more than a dozen times, claiming each time that it had bobbed up at a different location on the Hudson River. Coroners had been known to allow families to claim bodies only if they agreed to let a certain funeral home, which paid a kickback, handle the arrangements. Coroners had other sources of income as well. They sold fake death certificates and thereby covered up murders, criminal abortions, and suicides. One example involved a man who had been found dead in his bed, with a bullet wound in his mouth and a revolver in his right hand. The gun contains three loaded cartridges and one exploded one. The coroner gave the cause of death as “rupture of thoracic aneurism”.
Culled from: The Poisoner’s Handbook
Facts