In my continuing collaboration with Juror2.Com, we introduce a new Serial Killer Quotes shirt: The Albert Fish!
“I like children – they are tasty.”
- Albert Hamilton Fish
(The Werewolf of Wisteria)
On the sleeve is the Morbid Fact Du Jour skull & crossbones logo. Available where all fine MFDJ shirts are sold: The Etsy Morbid Fact Du Jour shop. Get yours today!
Here’s something you can do with those disembodied baby doll parts you have lying around your pad.
Thanks to Faith for the link.
Today’s Yellow And Blue Yet Truly Morbid Fact!
In 1991, artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude put up an environmental installation art of thousands of giant yellow and blue umbrellas in California and Japan. The giant umbrellas, which measured about 20 foot (6 m) in height, 28 foot (8.7 m) in diameter and weighed about 500 lb, became a huge tourist attraction. Less than two months after the installation opened, Lori Rae Keevil-Mathews, a 33-year-old woman drove out to see the umbrellas in California. A wind gust uprooted one of the umbrellas and blew it straight at her, crushing her against a boulder and killing her. Christo immediately ordered all of the umbrellas taken down. The umbrellas, however, took another life – this time in Japan. Crane operator Masaaki Nakamura was electrocuted when the machine’s arm touched a 65,000-volt high-tension line when removing the umbrellas.
Culled from: Neatorama
Generously submitted by: Bex
“Travis Louie’s paintings come from the tiny little drawings and many writings in his journals. He’s created his own imaginary world that is grounded in Victorian and Edwardian times. It is inhabited by human oddities, mythical beings, and otherworldly characters who appear to have had their formal portraits taken to mark their existence and place in society.”
They are marvelous. I wish I had this talent! Have a look for yourself…
Thanks to Bruce for the suggestion.
Today’s Blood-Curdling Yet Truly Morbid Fact!
The body of a 16-year-old girl who police say was buried alive by relatives in an “honor” killing carried out as punishment for talking to boys has been discovered in Kahta, Turkey. Turkish police discovered the body after acting on an anonymous tip. The tipster told police that the girl was killed after a family council meeting, and had been buried under a chicken pen. Police say that the girl had complained two months earlier that her grandfather beat her for talking to boys. The girl, identified by police only by her initials M.M., was said to have a large amount of soil in her stomach and lungs, indicating she had been buried alive. “The autopsy result is blood-curdling. According to our findings, the girl – who had no bruises on her body and no sign of narcotics or poison in her blood – was alive and fully conscious when she was buried,” one anonymous expert said. The girl had been reported as missing by her family. Police have arrested her father, mother and grandfather. Her mother has been released but her father and grandfather are awaiting trial. The case is expected to bring further attention to the issue of “honor” killings in Turkey. Official figures indicate that more than 200 “honor” killings take place each year – almost half of all murders in Turkey.
Culled from: Huffington Post
At times like this I really wish I could rent a room in an Eastern European hostel and have this lovely family over for a “visit”.
Ah, the Japanese – even their blood donation mascots are absolutely adorable!
Thanks to Bruce for the link.
My friend The Mind Orbitor sent me this link to a photo gallery of executed prisoners along with their last words. It is truly sad how few people put any degree of creativity into their last words, isn’t it?
The Ghost Map
by Steven Johnson
I just finished reading the The Ghost Map (featured in the last two morbid facts) and it is a very interesting book. It centers around the 1854 London cholera epidemic, and the investigator who was able to track down the source of the scourge as a well that had been tainted by cholera-infested sewage. This was a landmark discovery because the theory of the time (called miasma) held that disease was caused by polluted air, rather than germs. The discovery also led to improvements in sewage systems that resulted in a marked decrease in epidemics.
Although the book drags a bit in the last third, the first two-thirds are excellent. My favorite part is actually the first chapter, quoted for today’s Morbid Fact, which discusses the scavenger culture of mid 19th-century England. The depiction of the physical ravages of cholera itself (which will star in a soon-to-come Malady of the Month/Year/Decade entry) are also spellbinding, as are the disgusting details of the filth that city dwellers had to contend with back in those days (when “flushing the toilet” meant throwing the contents of your chamber pot out onto the sidewalk or alley). Above all, this book made me feel grateful to not have been born until we’d figured out modern sanitation systems! A recommended read!
Today’s Ragged Yet Truly Morbid Fact!
It is August 1854, and London is a city of scavengers. Just the names alone read now like some kind of exotic zoological catalogue: bone-pickers, rag-gatherers, pure-finders, dredgermen, mud-larks, sewer-hunters, dustmen, night-soil men, bunters, toshers, shoremen. These were the London underclasses, at least 100,000 strong. So immense were their numbers that had the scavengers broken off and formed their own city, it would have been the fifth-largest in all of England. But the diversity and precision of their routines were more remarkable than their sheer numbers. Early risers strolling along the Thames would see the toshers wading through the muck of low tide, dressed almost comically in flowing velveteen coats, their oversized pockets filled with stray bits of copper recovered from the water’s edge. The toshers walked with a lantern strapped to their chest to help them see in the predawn gloom, and carried an eight-foot-long pole that they used to test the ground in front of them, and to pull themselves out when they stumbled into a quagmire. The pole and the eerie glow of the lantern through the robes gave them the look of ragged wizards, scouring the foul river’s edge for magic coins. Beside them fluttered the mud-larks, often children, dressed in tatters and content to scavenge all the waste that the toshers rejected as below their standards: lumps of coal, old wood, scraps of rope.
Above the river, in the streets of the city, the pure-finders eked out a living by collecting dog shit (colloquially called “pure”) while the bone-pickers foraged for carcasses of any stripe. Below ground, in the cramped but growing network of tunnels beneath London’s streets, the sewer-hunters slogged through the flowing waste of the metropolis. Every few months, an unusually dense pocket of methane gas would be ignited by one of their kerosene lamps and the hapless soul would be incinerated twenty feet below ground, in a river of raw sewage.
Culled from: The Ghost Map
Today’s Excrutiating Yet Truly Morbid Fact!
Where sheer physical brutality was concerned, there was little in Victorian society that rivaled the professional medical act of surgery. Lacking any form of anesthesia beyond opium or alcohol – both of which could only be applied in moderation, given their side effects – surgical procedures were functionality indistinguishable from the most grievous forms of torture. Surgeons prided themselves on their speed above all else, since extended procedures were unbearable for both doctor and patient. Procedures that would now take hours to complete were executed in three minutes or less, to minimize the agony. One surgeon boasted that he could “amputate a shoulder in the time it took to take a pinch of snuff.”
In 1811, the British author Fanny Burney underwent a mastectomy in Paris. She described the experience in a letter to her sister a year later. After drinking a wine cordial as her sole form of painkiller, she settled into the ominous closet that had been assembled by the team of seven doctors in her home, lined with compresses and bandages and gruesome surgical tools. She lay down on the makeshift bed, and the doctors covered her face with a light handkerchief. “When the dreadful steel was plunged into the breast, cutting through veins, arteries, flesh, nerves, I needed no injunction not to restrain my cries. I began a scream that lasted unintermittingly during the whole time of the incision, and I almost marvel that it rings not in my ears still! So excruciating was the agony… I then felt the knife tackling against the breastbone, scraping it! This performed, while I remained in utterly speechless torture.” Before passing out in near shock after the procedure, she caught a glimpse of her primary doctor – “pale nearly as myself, his face streaked with blood and its expression depicting grief, apprehension, and almost horror.”
Culled from: The Ghost Map
