Recent Posts - page 2
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Halloween Horror Post #3: The strange ways people avoided premature burial
Taphophobia, or the fear of premature burial, reached a fever pitch at the end of the 19th century and early 20th century. One of the reasons for this was people realized that the methods doctors used to confirm death were… Read More ›
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Halloween Horror Post #2: The woman who survived premature burial
Frightening stories of people who were accidentally buried alive, also known as premature burial, have been repeated around fireplaces and reported in newspapers since the 18th century. True or not, these tales really scared a lot of people so families went to… Read More ›
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Halloween Horror Post #1: The corpse queen of Portugal
According to legend, in the mid-14th century a heart-broken King Peter (Pedro) I of Portugal exhumed the corpse of his lover to have her posthumously crowned queen. The romantic scandals of European royalty could fill a library so it can… Read More ›
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Civil War Forensics: The death Stonewall Jackson and the fate of his left arm
General Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia fought the Union’s Army of the Potomac, which was commanded by Major General Joseph Hooker, at the Battle of Chancellorsville in Virginia between April 30 and May 6, 1863. The Battle of… Read More ›
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The mystery of a medieval anatomical specimen
In 2003, a medical antiquities dealer sold an unusual item, a partial mummified body, to a private Canadian collector. This specimen only consisted of a partial skull, neck, and top of the torso, and measured 17.3 inches by 18.9 inches… Read More ›
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The occultist rocketeer of the real-life Suicide Squad
Although the Suicide Squad is best known today as a movie about a fictional group of supervillains drafted by the government to undertake dangerous missions in exchange for commuted sentences, there was a real-life Suicide Squad at Caltech in the… Read More ›
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Rediscovering Betsy Ross’ bones
Betsy Ross was a talented seamstress and upholsterer who was widely believed to have made the first American flag. She was also an 18th century entrepreneur who made supplies for the American soldiers during the Revolution and lost two of her… Read More ›
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How to develop a picture from a corpse’s eye
The morning of November 16, 1880, Wilhelm Friedrich Kühne (1837–1900), a professor of physiology at the University of Heidelberg, dissected the head of an executed murderer in his dark room within minutes of the man’s death. Kühne worked around the… Read More ›
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Was this hymn printed on mummy paper?
The people of Norwich, CT celebrated the bi-centennial anniversary of their city’s settlement September 7th and 8th in 1859. To mark the occasion, the publishers of the local newspapers printed a hymn on brown paper to be sung during the… Read More ›
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Scientists resolve myth about the identity of the Dark Countess
The Countess and the Princess In 1807 an enigmatic couple arrived in the village of Hildburghausen in Central Germany and lived in the castle of Eishausen for the next 30 years. The villagers referred to the solitary duo as the… Read More ›
