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Archive for September, 2011

Morbid Fact Du Jour For September 12, 2011

September 12th, 2011

Today’s Infested Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

The scene was shocking enough when police answered a call at the small brick bungalow in Berwyn (a suburb of Chicago, Illinois). A 14-year-old boy, severely mentally disabled, wearing only a T-shirt, lying in the backyard and not breathing. As he was rushed to a hospital, where he was pronounced dead, police said they made a gruesome discovery inside. Four children — ages 12 to 18 — who had never been to school, living with more than 200 animals in a home covered by feces and infested with spiders and hundreds of hissing cockroaches that measured four to five inches. One of the children, a 12-year-old, was found to have severe autism. All four of the children inside the home in the 2800 block of Lombard Avenue were “shoeless and dirty,” prosecutor Joseph Hodal said as the 14-year-old’s mother appeared in court on abuse charges. “Their feet (were) caked with feces and dirt,” police noted in their report. “The children have never been to school, nor did they receive any medical treatment,” Hodal said in court. They were living in a home without working toilets, or a washer and dryer or a refrigerator. The children slept on the floor because the bedrooms were used to house 109 cats, three dogs, 39 cockatiels, two kinkajous, a large raccoon and other exotic animals. Many of the animals were so diseased and malnourished, they had to be euthanized, including all the cats. The children’s mother, Lydia Price, 49, was charged with criminal abuse and neglect of a disabled child resulting in death, endangerment of a child, animal hoarding and cruel treatment. Price was also charged with criminal abuse and neglect of the girl with autism. Price is being held on $100,000 bail. Berwyn paramedics received a call Thursday that the boy was lying unresponsive on the lawn at the family home. The boy was taken to MacNeal Hospital in Berwyn, where he later was pronounced dead. An autopsy determined he died of natural causes related to bronchopneumonia. Three of the other children are now in the custody of the Department of Children of Family Services after being treated for flulike symptoms. A fourth child, 18, was being treated at the hospital, said Kendall Marlowe. Marlowe said the children had been kept isolated at the home, which has been declared unfit for habitation by the Berwyn Fire Department.

Culled from: Chicago Tribune
Generously submitted by: David Kulczyk

Can you f*cking imagine???? Can you f*cking IMAGINE????????? How could no one have noticed this situation before? People…

Facts

Morbid Fact Du Jour For September 11, 2011

September 11th, 2011

I refuse to do anything so predictable as a 9/11 retrospective. Instead, let’s talk about unheralded ghastly things currently happening in other parts of the world with…

Today’s Decomposing Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

Corpses Lying In A Tripoli Hospital

Corpses lay in a hospital in the Abu Salim district in Tripoli, Libya, which had been a stronghold of Moammar Gadhafi. Doctors and nurses fled amid fight between Gadhafi loyalists and rebels that have sezed the capital. Some of the more than 200 bodies appeared to be those of mercenaries Gadhafi recruited from sub-Saharan Africa.

More than 200 decomposing bodies have been found at a Tripoli hospital that doctors and nurses abandoned because of fierce fighting between Libyan rebels and loyalists of Moammar Gadhafi. A BBC correspondent found corpses of men, women and children on beds, in gurneys in the corridors and outside of the Abu Salim hospital, in a district of the capital mostly loyal to Gadhafi. His forces had occupied the facility last Saturday and snipers held rebels and medical staff at bay until Thursday, August 25, 2011. Some of the dead were civilians and some were fighters, including some that appeared to be African mercenaries. According to residents, some were already dead when brought to the hospital and others were badly wounded. AFP reports that 17 patients were found alive, including a child, and that the Red Cross evacuated them. AFP earlier estimated the number of corpses at 80. Some residents alleged that Gadhafi’s forces murdered some of the patients, but that has not been confirmed. A correspondent for Britain’s Channel 4 provides graphic descriptions and video footage of “the horror,” writing, “There is no language for the stench. You fear even to breathe in here.” Rebel forces are encountering strong resistance as they advance on Sirte, Gadhafi’s birthplace and the town regarded as his last stronghold.

Culled from: USA Today
Generously submitted by: Michael Marano

Can you imagine being badly wounded in a hospital, surrounded by the dead and dying, and suddenly all the doctors and nurses disappear???? For days???? As you lie there in your own filth suffering from pain and hunger, surrounded by the stench of decomposition and the buzzing of flies? Talk about “Hell on Earth”.

Facts

Morbid Fact Du Jour For September 10, 2011

September 10th, 2011

Today’s Devastating Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

Tribune HeadlineThe fire began about 4 a.m. in the basement of Warehouse 7 of the Nelson Morris and Co. plant, run by one of the prominent meatpacking companies in Chicago’s infamous Union Stockyards. Black smoke was spotted by a night watchman who rang the alarm at 43rd and Loomis streets. All the firemen in the Stockyards rushed to the alarm with horse-drawn steam engines and trucks in tow. Fire Marshal James Horan, known as “Big Jim” for his large stature, was called out of bed and driven to the scene in the department’s only motorized vehicle. On that frigid morning of Dec. 22, 1910, the men arrived at the windowless “hog house” and were met with an overwhelming firefighting challenge. The only way to attack the fire was to hop on a 4-foot-tall loading dock covered by a rickety wooden canopy, leaving them little space to maneuver, said Bill Cosgrove, a retired Chicago firefighter who recently wrote a book about the fire titled “Chicago’s Forgotten Tragedy.” “They had the railroad track (with standing boxcars) at their back, a canopy overhead, the fire in front of them, (and they are) confined to this small space with all this heat and smoke,” he said. The pressure of the heat and smoke climbed, and without warning, an exterior wall collapsed. Six stories of molten brick came falling down on top of the firefighters, killing 21 instantly, including Horan. Three civilians were also crushed. The furious fire ravaged the infamous Union Stockyards, devastated families and upended the Chicago Fire Department. It stood as the single greatest loss of professional big-city firefighters in U.S. history until Sept. 11, 2001.

Many of the firefighters who fought that day were from the neighborhood, leaving a whole community in grief, said Tim Samuelson, the city’s cultural historian. The fire also made national news, as the Stockyards were one of Chicago’s most well-known landmarks at the time, he said. Local news accounts at the time described the macabre scene in detail, including how the bodies of many of the dead were found buried in the rubble amid hog meat that had been stored in the building. It took 17 hours to pull all the bodies from the ruins. Though this blaze became infamous, fires at the Stockyards were not uncommon, Cosgrove said. Highly flammable chemicals used for meat production and spilled on Stockyard floors made conditions ripe for fires. “Every fireman knows what a stockyard fire means,” the Tribune reported at the time. “The men knew of the treachery of the ancient shells of grease soaked wood and shaky brick walls. Chicago firemen cherish no illusions when they go in to strangle a big fire at the yards with their hands.” The fire, started by a faulty electrical socket, left behind 19 widows and 35 orphaned children just before Christmas Day.

Culled from: Chicago Tribune

Facts

Grim Curiosities

September 10th, 2011

Thanks to Michael Marano for sending me a link to a most exceptional Tumblr page entitled wunderkammer: a curiosity cabinet of (un)natural wonders. Well worth a browse!

Wunderkammer

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Morbid Fact Du Jour For September 8, 2011

September 8th, 2011

Today’s Resistant Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

Mildred Harnack was born in Milwaukee in 1902. Through a chance encounter while attending the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Mildred met a German exchange student named Arvid Harnack who was studying economics on a Rockefeller Fellowship. The two fell in love and were married at Mildred’s brother’s farm near Brooklyn, Wisconsin, in the summer of 1926. Arvid returned to Germany in 1928 in search of work and Mildred followed in 1929. By 1930 the couple was settled in Berlin, where Mildred worked as a lecturer and studied for her doctorate at the University of Berlin while Arvid took a government job.

The Harnacks were well known for hosting literary and cultural discussion circles with other Berlin intellectuals and students, many of which had socialist affiliations. As the Nazi Party’s dominance grew, these discussions turned toward ways in which to foment a more structured resistance, giving rise to a group the Gestapo would later nickname the Red Orchestra. In the early 1940s, Arvid began to pass sensitive government information to the Soviet, British, and American embassies. Mildred served as a recruiter and communicator for the group, and may have passed information to the United States as well. In the fall of 1942, German counterintelligence decoded the Red Orchestra’s radio communications and the Harnacks were implicated.

Arvid was tried and condemned to death by hanging; he was executed at Berlin’s Plotzensee Prison on December 22, 1942. The executioner used a short rope to ensure slow strangulation. Mildred was forced to watch. At her own trial she was sentenced to six years in prison. Hitler himself ordered a retrial. This time the sentence was death. On February 16, 1943, at 6:00 p.m., she was executed by guillotine. Her last words: “And I have loved Germany so.”

Culled from: Wisconsin Academy and In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin

I just finished reading “In the Garden of Beasts” by Erik Larson and though it wasn’t a particularly morbid book, it was a very absorbing read. I’ll write up a full review soon.

Facts

Ghost Mall

September 8th, 2011

I went on another urban exploring adventure a few weeks ago – a much less interesting one than the abandoned church, but you might still enjoy the pictures. This was to the most famous dead shopping mall in America: the Dixie Square Shopping Center. It is famous as the site of the police chase through the mall in the Blues Brothers. There really isn’t much left of the place after over 30 years of abandonment though.

Dixie Square Mall

Sundry

Abandoned Church

September 7th, 2011

I went urban exploring again last Friday in an abandoned church in Chicago and came away with some nice (and sometimes creepy) pics. I thought you might enjoy them? (Click on the picture to access the album on Flickr.)

Abandoned Church In Chicago

Sundry

Morbid Fact Du Jour For September 3, 2011

September 3rd, 2011

Today’s Most Vivid Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

Sada Abe (born in 1905) was a Japanese woman who was thrown out of her home as a teenager after losing her virginity to a rapist. She became a low-ranking geisha whose main duties were to provide sex and worked in the prostitution industry for several years. In February 1936, at the urging of her lover Goro Omiya, she began an apprenticeship at a restaurant owned by Kichizo Ishida, 42. When Abe joined his restaurant, Ishida was known as a womanizer who did little in the way of running the restaurant, which was managed mostly by his wife. Not long after she began work at the restaurant, Ishida began making advances towards Abe. Omiya had never satisfied Abe sexually, and she gave in to Ishida. In mid-April, Ishida and Abe initiated their sexual relationship in the restaurant, to the accompaniment of a romantic ballad sung by one of the restaurant’s geishas. On April 23, 1936 Abe and Ishida met for a pre-arranged sexual encounter at a teahouse — the contemporary equivalent of a love hotel. Planning only a short “fling”, the couple stayed in bed continuously for four days. On the night of April 27, 1936, they moved to another teahouse in the distant neighborhood of Futako Tamagawa. Here they continued to drink and have sex. Ishida did not return to the restaurant until the morning of May 8, 1936. Of Ishida, Abe later said, “It is hard to say exactly what was so good about Ishida. But it was impossible to say anything bad about his looks, his attitude, his skill as a lover, the way he expressed his feelings. I had never met such a sexy man.”

After they separated, Abe became agitated and began drinking excessively. She claimed that with Ishida she knew love for the first time in her life, and the thought that Ishida was back with his wife made her jealous. On May 9, 1936 she attended a play in which a geisha attacks her lover with a large knife. After seeing this, Abe decided to threaten Ishida with a knife at their next meeting. She pulled the knife out of her bag and threatened him as in the play. Ichida was startled, but seemed delighted with the prop. Ishida and Abe began another marathon lovemaking session. During their lovemaking this time, Abe put the knife to the base of Ishida’s penis, and said she would make sure he would never play around with another woman. Ishida laughed at this. Two nights into this bout of sex, Abe began choking Ishida, and he told her to continue, saying that this increased his pleasure. She had him do it to her as well. On the evening of the May 16, 1936, Abe used her obi sash to cut off Ishida’s breathing during orgasm, and they both enjoyed it. They repeated this for two more hours. Once Abe stopped the strangulation, Ishida’s face became distorted, and would not return to its normal appearance. Ishida took 30 tablets of a sedative called Calmotin to try to soothe his pain. According to Abe, as Ishida started to doze, he told her, “You’ll put the cord around my neck and squeeze it again while I’m sleeping, won’t you… If you start to strangle me, don’t stop, because it is so painful afterward.” Abe commented that she wondered if he had wanted her to kill him, but on reflection decided he must have been joking.

About 2 a.m. on the morning of May 18, 1936, as Ishida was asleep, Abe wrapped her sash twice around his neck and strangled him to death. She later told police, “After I had killed Ishida I felt totally at ease, as though a heavy burden had been lifted from my shoulders, and I felt a sense of clarity.” After laying with Ishida’s body for a few hours, she next severed his genitalia with the kitchen knife, wrapped them in a magazine cover, and kept them until her arrest three days later. With the blood, she wrote, Sada, Kichi Futari-kiri (“Sada, Kichi together”) on Ishida’s left thigh, and on a bed sheet. She then carved (“Sada”, the character for her name) into his left arm. After putting on Ishida’s underwear, she left the inn at about 8 a.m., telling the staff not to disturb Ishida. When asked why she had severed Ishida’s genitalia, Abe replied, “Because I couldn’t take his head or body with me. I wanted to take the part of him that brought back to me the most vivid memories.”

After leaving the inn, Abe met Goro Omiya. She repeatedly apologized to him, but Omiya, unaware of the murder, assumed that she was apologizing for having taken another lover. Abe’s apologies were for the damage to his political career that she knew his association with her was bound to cause. On May 19, 1936, the newspapers picked up the story. Omiya’s career was ruined, and Abe’s life was under intense public scrutiny from that point onwards. Abe was arrested and interrogated over eight sessions. The interrogating officer was struck by Abe’s demeanor when asked why she had killed Ishida. “Immediately she became excited and her eyes sparkled in a strange way.” Her answer was: “I loved him so much, I wanted him all to myself. But since we were not husband and wife, as long as he lived he could be embraced by other women. I knew that if I killed him no other woman could ever touch him again, so I killed him…..” When the details of the crime were made public, rumors began to circulate that Ishida’s penis was of an extraordinary size. However, the police officer who interrogated Abe after her arrest denied this, saying, “Ishida’s was just average. [Abe] told me, ‘Size doesn’t make a man in bed. Technique and his desire to please me were what I liked about Ishida.’” After her arrest, Ishida’s penis and testicles were moved to Tokyo University Medical School’s pathology museum. The were put on public display not long after the end of World War II, but they have since disappeared. On December 21, 1936 Abe was convicted of murder in the second degree and mutilation of a corpse. Though the prosecution demanded ten years, and she was hoping for the death penalty, Abe was sentenced to six years in prison. She was released, exactly five years after the murder, on May 17, 1941.

Culled from: Wikipedia
Generously suggested by: Elizabeth

Elizabeth also recommends the Japanese film about Abe, “In The Realm Of The Senses”
In the Realm of the Senses (1977)

Amazon synopsis:
“Nagisa Oshima’s sensational, 1976 film concerns a woman (Eiko Matsuda) whose obsessive sexual relationship with her husband (Tatsuya Fuji) crosses the line from passion into the territory of life and death. One of the most sexually explicit films ever to play in mainstream theaters (though it did run into legal trouble both in the U.S. and Japan), it has an air of palpable doom, suggesting that sex can be a doorway to suicide. Lest this sound like grunge-era noodling over dreams of self-destruction, be assured that the Kyoto-born Oshima (Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence) takes a somewhat formal, middle-aged perspective on the conjunction of various mysteries of existence.”

Facts

The Incredible String Dolls

September 3rd, 2011

Morbid Trinket Du Jour!

September is here which means our greatest holiday is just around the corner! Which reminds me: String Dolls are awesome Halloween decorations. (I have a devil that hangs in my living room year round, actually.) Thanks to NYC Rocker for reminding me how splendid they are!

My Devil

The Comtesse's Friend

Available from Kamibashi.

Trinkets

Russian Mafia Tombs

September 3rd, 2011

And how about those Russian mafia tombstones? Class, all the way.

Mobsters Last Shots From Dnepropetrovsk

Thanks again to Steve O’ for the link.

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