Let's all give a toast to this week's links!
Why the hell did it take so damn long to publish Jane Austen's "Northanger Abbey?"
What the hell really happened to Elizabeth Canning?
Roget, the man behind the thesaurus.
A light-fingered clerk.
An alleged case of reincarnation.
A vision of the afterlife.
The link between Nazis, trolls, and the Grateful Dead.
You can go ahead and put that 19th century corset back on.
An 18th century impostor.
Mystery skeletons in Pennsylvania.
Execution of an infanticide.
An obituary for a world-traveling goat.
The gruesome mystery of the "Rack Man."
What sort of rope did 18th and 19th century hangmen use?
The good old days of lethal children's toys.
A haunted mountain.
The medical officers of Victorian workhouses.
Scientists may have found a previously unknown extinct human species.
The flying saucer of Sligo.
That time America faced a penny shortage.
A turning point in human history: we are more old than young.
This week in Russia Weird: Tunguska redux!
The Diana Files.
The dark origins of Snow White.
The history of curry.
18th century political parties.
Reminiscences of a Civil War soldier.
18th century bathing machines.
The unfinished manuscript.
The death of patience.
The club of thinkers and drinkers.
Let's talk medieval parasites.
Vintage diets for invalids.
The dandy's perambulations, 1819.
The case of the Brides in the Bath.
Why it was so hard to assassinate Hitler.
Witches and hallucinogens.
A feline civil servant.
The woman with the backward organs.
The man who lived with two bullets in his brain.
The last woman to be executed in Canada.
Queen Victoria and a famous literary mystery.
How a part of Cardiff became known as "Tiger Bay."
From bad feet to blasphemy.
Fortean religion.
There you have it for this week. See you on Monday, when we'll look at a California author who managed to terrorize the entire city of Santa Barbara. And that was just for starters. In the meantime, here's a bit of French Baroque:
The 'Brides in the Bath' article was interesting, but it is at odds with the account I read years ago. It was written by Arthur Neil, the detective in charge of the case. He wrote that there was an absence of spilled water, which was why there was doubt for so long about homicide. He experimented, using a tub much like those in which the women drowned, and had, I think, one of the first female police officers in the Metropolitan Police dress in a bathing suit. He then tried to 'drown' her in numerous ways. They all resulted in much splashed water. Then, on the spur of the moment, without really thinking, he grabbed her feet and jerked her under. To Neil's horror, the woman immediately went unconscious. It was a frightful fight to revive her, though she did come 'round. Neil had just discovered that water rushing suddenly up the nose causes shock, knocking the person out - without a drop of water being spilled. Smith was hanged.
ReplyDeleteYes, I've read an account of Smith's murders by Edmund Pearson (who noted that Smith "invested the commonplace bath-tub with a new element of romance,") which said much the same thing. Pearson added that Smith likely wouldn't have been caught if he didn't just repeat his same methods over and over.
DeleteThe story of the women with the backwards organs reminds me of French athlete Joseph Guillemot, who won the 5,000 metres track event at the 1920 Antwerp Olympic games. Guillemot had isolated dextrocardia - his heart was located on the right side of his chest, rather than on the left side.
ReplyDeleteThe Rack Man can join the Somerton Man as two of Australia's most mysterious unsolved murders.