Posts tagged
‘suicide’

Driven to Death by a Curse A New Hampshire schoolmistress killed herself believing herself cursed by her grandmother.

A Man Buries Himself Alive: A Story for Father’s Day A gruesome excerpt from The Victorian Book of the Dead for Father’s Day: A bereaved father follows his dead child to the tomb. Literally.

The Stiff of Dreams Dreams revealing the location of dead bodies–was that the only way the dead could communicate and make sure their corpses were found?

A Prolonged Wail of Horror: A Banshee in England As a rule, however, the Banshee is not seen, it is only heard, and it announces its advent in a variety of ways; sometimes by groaning, sometimes by wailing, and sometimes by uttering the most blood-curdling of screams, which I can only liken to the screams a woman might make if she were being done to death in a very cruel and violent manner….

In a previous post on auto-decapitation, I promised a fuller account of Mr. James A. Moon, who captured the imagination of the country with his ingenious suicide machine. Here are some of the gruesome details. Don’t try this at home.

The Club of Queer Trades In honor of Labor Day, we present some peculiar professions of the past. We can take prostitution, bodysnatching, and murder as read, but what about a professional Ray of Sunshine? A professional suicide? A professional Scandal-monger? A dog’s tailor? A parrot’s linguist? Or (you think you hate YOUR job) a woman who is paid to be fired?

Corpse Contracts: People who Sold Their Own Dead Bodies It is a sinister fact that, before the passage of the various Anatomy Acts, the doctors of the past paid for stolen corpses for their dissecting rooms. What is less well-known is that various individuals in what might be termed the “pre-corpse stage” might sell their own bodies to the anatomists.

Dreams of Death: Interesting People #5 The person who dreamed of his own death was as hoary a psychic chestnut as one could find in the press or in Spiritualist literature. Here are two ladies who fell short in the prophecy department.

Cutting Off One’s Head: Self-Decapitations of the Past: A post on ingenious self-decapitations inspired by the story of the Tulsa man found in his garage bound hand and foot, with his head cut off. Naturally the police suspect suicide. Here, ripped from the headlines of yesterday’s newspapers, are some cutting-edge examples of decapitation deaths and their infernal machines.