As part of the training of Japanese soldiers leading up to World War II, one of the components of “Japanese spirit” valued most by the military was brutality. War is cold and by definition makes killers of those who practice it. But no army in history so systematically instilled hatred in its troops as this version of the Imperial Japanese Army. Brutality and cruelty were the rule rather than the exception in the Japanese army. It was the last primitive infantry army of modern times. The new army recruit entered a violent asylum where he was pummeled, slapped, kicked, and beaten daily. Shinji Ito remembered his first swimming lesson: “A rope was tied around my body, and… I was thrown into the river from a boat. When I lost consciousness from swallowing too much water, I was pulled up. Once I caught my breath, I would be thrown back into the water. My uniform froze.”
Ruggedly handsome, 6’4” Jeff Chandler was only 42 years old when he died. The square-jawed hunk, with prematurely gray, curly hair and chiseled features, was the picture of health until he suffered a slipped disk which making Merrill’s Marauders (1961), a World War II combat movie. Simple corrective surgery was performed at a Culver City, California, hospital. The strapping patient should have been up and about in no time. Due to medical misadventure, however, he died.
After a string of minor movie roles throughout the 1940’s, Chandler was cast in the first of several Native American roles (as Cochise) in Broken Arrow (1950) starring Jimmy Stewart. Chandler was Oscar-nominated for his three-dimensional performance. As a Universal contract player, he plowed through several action pictures. Along the way, he developed a real screen magnetism and played opposite several smoldering leading ladies: Jane Russell (Foxfire, 1955), Jeanne Crain (The Tattered Dress, 1958), and Susan Hayward (Thunder in the Sun, 1959). Jeff even broke into the recording industry and signed a contract in 1954 with Decca Records, completing several singles and an album.
Chandler continued to turn out movies and went on location to the Philippines for Merrill’s Marauders in early 1961. When he returned to Los Angeles, he underwent surgery on May 13 for a slipped disk. Following the relatively uncomplicated operation, he suffered internal hemorrhages and infection. During an emergency seven-hour follow-up operation to repair a ruptured artery, he was given 55 pints of blood. He survived that and further surgery, but another hemorrhage and subsequent additional infections weakened him. He took a turn for the worse on Friday, June 16, and died the next afternoon of a generalized blood infection further complicated by pneumonia. This needless tragedy was the talk of Hollywood.
In the American South in the early 20th century, photographs of lynchings and burnings of African-Americans were turned into popular picture postcards and trade cards made to commemorate the events. A Unitarian minister in New York, John H. Holmes, opened his mail one day to find a postcard depicting a crowd in Alabama posing for a photographer next to the body of a black man dangling by a rope. Responding to the minister’s recent condemnation of lynching, the person who sent the card wrote, “This is the way we do them down here. The last lynching has not been put on card yet. Will put you on our regular mailing list. Expect one a month on the average.”
A minor scald is painful enough, but the agony of being totally immersed in boiling liquid is unimaginable. Yet this method of execution was employed for centuries in countries ranging from Europe to the Far East. Mercifully short-lived in England, as were its victims, at least three people met their deaths in this manner, all for the crime of poisoning, and doubtless there would have been many more had that type of murder been detectable in those early centuries. So the causes must have been obvious when a maidservant was found guilty of killing her husband ‘by means of toxic substances’, and she was boiled to death at King’s Lynn, Norfolk, in 1531. Eleven years later Margaret Davey or Dawes perished in the cauldron at Smithfield in London for poisoning the family for whom she worked.
In November, 1937, as the Japanese army advanced towards Nanking, China, Japanese veterans remember raiding tiny farm communities, where they clubbed or bayoneted everyone in sight. But small villages were not the only casualties; entire cities were razed to the ground. Consider the example of Suchow (now called Suzhou), a city on the east bank of Tai Hu Lake. One of the oldest cities of China, it was prized for its delicate silk embroidery, palaces, and temples. Its canals and ancient bridges had earned the city its Western nickname as “the Venice of China”. On November 19, on a morning of pouring rain, a Japanese advance guard marched through the gates of Suchow, wearing hoods that prevented Chinese sentries from recognizing them. Once inside, the Japanese murdered and plundered the city for days, burning down ancient landmarks and abducting thousands of Chinese women for sexual slavery. The invasion, according to the China Weekly Review, caused the population of the city to drop from 350,000 to less than 500.
It’s been awhile, but here’s a new episode of My Brush With Morbidity. If you have a morbid tale to tell, please submit it to The Comtesse DeSpair for possible inclusion on the blog/website.
“My Brush With Morbidity” by Erika
My fiance’ and I, prior to moving back in with my beloved mother, lived in a local apartment complex near wear I work in beautiful Poway, CA; the so called “City in the Country”. We had been living here for quite some time when it came to my attention that our quiet patch of heaven was not so quiet indeed. We lived in an upstairs apartment directly above an elderly woman who was caring for her mentally ill son and allowing her grandson to stay there as well. Occasionally I would run into the grandson in our public laundryroom. He was always very quiet and never said more than a word or so to me. He seemed well and “normal” as some might say, albeit a bit shy.
One evening my fiance and I were enjoying the peace of the night, a very large BANG was heard and a spot above our stone fireplace erupted in shatters of stone flecks and dust. He screamed like a little girl and we both jumped in surprise. I stood to inspect the area and determine exactly what had happened, when the old woman downstairs began screaming in absolute blood curdling terror. I ran out the door onto our balcony to see her fleeing her apartment and yelling. I can hear her words clearly ringing in my mind to this day, “HE’S DEAD! Oh my god he’s dead! He’s DEAD!!”
I watched her over the balcony as she collapsed on the grass and continued her chilling lament. Someone must have called the cops because within a minute (the station is directly behind the complex) the police arrived. Lots of tenants were now outside trying to determine what was going on, and police were telling people to go inside and that there was nothing to see. I hid behind a potted plant and continued to listen (much to my fiance’s dismay). A police man and paramedic entered her home and the police man emerged shaking his head. It took almost an hour to get the woman coherent enough to speak and most of it was continued cries of “he’s dead, and oh my god, I can’t believe it!”. Eventually she began wailing out the ordeal very loudly. “I followed him and said, ‘what are you doing in my sons room?’. He turned around with the gun in his hand and said ‘BYE BYE GRANDMA!’ and then he KILLED HIMSELF!”.
I stumbled back into the house and sat numbly on the couch, pale. I covered my ears as the woman continued to scream and wail on and on and on, and it felt like it would never end the the sound, good god, the sound! A man in plain clothes who identified himself as an officer came to our door and my fiance’ showed the the spot in our fireplace where the large bullet hat ripped through our thin cheap flooring and embedded itself. They ended up removing a large chunk of our fireplace because the bullet fragments had shattered and could not be removed easily. The whole thing lasted the whole evening, and we answered a few questions regarding our neighbors, but nothing helpful or significant. The Grandmother and her son were taken into custody, but it was later cleared as a suicide. I watched the waste disposal team take out chunks of plaster and carry out dried blood and brain splattered bedding several days later.
We stayed there for a year afterward, and we even received new tenants in the downstairs apartment after the old tenants had left. I often wondered if they knew of what had happened…. I’d watch them laughing on the porch drinking and smoking and would get the greatest urge to walk up and spill the whole thing, just to get a reaction. I never did though.
This story powerfully epitomises the unbearable anguish of the suicide survivor. Thank you for sharing it, Erika.
More Brushes with Morbidity are available to peruse at the My Brush With Morbidity room of the Asylum.
On Saturday April 5, 1902 Scotland met England for a football international at Ibrox in Glasgow. That was the 27th such meeting and the first with only professional players. Ibrox football ground had been put in order by Rangers Football Club in 1899 at a cost of about £20,000. The total crowd at the 1902 international was said to be just in excess of 68,000. The match had not been in progress for long when, shortly before 4 pm, as fans shifted and swayed to follow a charge along the flanks, part of the western terracing gave way. The part that collapsed was near to the top of the terracing. In the ensuing panic, people at the lower edge of the terracing moved out onto the surrounding track and then the playing pitch and this led to a temporary stoppage of the game, lasting about 20 minutes. There were 25 deaths as a result of the accident. The number of people injured was in excess of 500, although the precise total is uncertain. Later in 1902 the contractor who built the western terracing two years before the accident was prosecuted and acquitted.
The strangest part of the story? Per John Marr’s “Murder Can Be Fun” zine (Issue #18), as soon as most of the dead and injured were removed, the action resumed, and the damaged section of the terrace even filled up again! As anthropologist Desmond Morris said in his discussion of this tragedy, “It takes more than death and disaster to put the Soccer Tribesman off his game.”
In Natal, South Africa, in March 1824, a hundred and fifty witch-finders ‘smelt out’ over three hundred tribesmen, declaring them all guilty of smearing the royal kraal, the palace, with blood. However, Shaka, the ruler, declared them all to be innocent, stating that he had smeared the kraal himself to test the powers of the diviners. He then sentenced all the witch-finders to be executed, and this was carried out, they being skewered or clubbed to death.
On December 6, 1917 in Halifax, Nova Scotia, a munitions ship (the Mont Blanc) collided with a vessel in the Narrows of the harbor, triggering a catastrophic fire and explosion that destroyed much of the city and killed over 1,600 people and injuring over 9,000. Many of the injured had been staring out the window at the burning vessel when it exploded, resulting in horrifying facial injuries from broken glass. Dr. George Cox, a local eye surgeon, operated for more than three straight days. Here is an excerpt about his efforts:
Friday night, Dr. Cox stood dazed, watching as his medical student carefully poured two or three droplets of chloroform onto ribbed cotton gauze. Cox was preparing to remove both of a man’s eyes. As the med student held the cone over the man’s face, Cox turned to his other patient, the man’s wife. He could save one of her eyes, Cox thought, if he took out the other, worrying about how a marriage could survive with one eye between them. ‘The double cases were particularly sad.’ He tried not to consider it; there were too many terrible cases, some so bad they could not be treated. ‘In one poor woman the whole frontal bone had been chopped off and she lay there with her brain exposed, moaning until she died some twelve hours after. It was said that she was found in her backyard holding her headless baby in her arms.’
I go urban exploring frequently. It’s my favorite hobby. And I admit, every time I enter an abandoned structure, I’m on the lookout for a body. Sometimes I come across imitation bodies, like these:
A Website dedicated to Odds and Ends picked up from Remote Corners and Cubbyholes of Garretdom throughout Civilization’s Wide Domain forming a Rare Museum of Strange and Fantastical Oddities, marvellous to witness and attractive to the Irrational Whimseys of Distinctly Morbid human beings.
