Murder Mansion

Early in the morning of December 6, 1959. cardiologist Harold Perelson attacked his wife, Lillian, with a ball peen hammer as she slept. She fell unconscious and drowned in her own blood. Harold then attacked his teenage daughter, but although he struck her with the hammer, he missed and hit her only with the handle, waking her to a state of extreme panic. She couldn’t understand when her father calmly said, Lay still and keep quiet.”She did not. She ran pleading with her father not to kill her to her mother and finding her dead, ran to a neighbor’s house for help. They had been awakened by her screams and were already on their way to help. One of them had already called the police.

Harold’s two younger children woke up, and e told them, “Go back to bed. This is a nightmare.” He did not attempt to attack them with the hammer. Instead, he took 33 tranquilizers went to sleep, and was dead before the police arrived. The house was vacant after that, which is rare almost unheard of in the better neighborhoods of Los Angeles. It was sold to new owners in 1960, but the owners never moved in. it was sold again in 2019. It remains to be seen if the Perelson’s will allow anyone living to occupy the house. Nonetheless, it will never be empty.

You Obstinate Cow

John Prombo lived in Morris Illinois. In Morris, Illinois there are a lot of cows. Morris is a farm town so every cow is valued at a premium.

One morning, while tending his herd, John Prombo heard a train whistle off in the distance. Much closer, he saw one of his cows casually standing on the tracks. He knew that even with a cowcatcher ( a pyramid shaped device that pushes cows, logs and other heavy objects off of train tracks) on the front of the train to push cows off the tracks, the cow would probably be seriously injured and have to be put down.

He ran to the cow and tried to coax her off the tracks by pulling on her halter. She wouldn’t budge.
He tried pushing her off the tracks, but cows are heavy, stubborn beasts and she wouldn’t move.
He ran around to her tail and tried smacking her to shock her off the track and pushed with all his might.

At the very last second, the cow calmly and casually walked off the tracks leaving John Prombo to be killed by the train, which did not have a cowcatcher… nor a people catcher.

Clumsy Roy McGiven

One afternoon on a busy day in Chicago, Roy McGiven , a successful businessman, headed out to meet some associates for lunch. He was really enjoying the sunshine coming in from the cavern of buildings and wasn’t paying attention to where he was going. He tripped on some accumulated garbage, fell off the crowded sidewalk and injured his leg against the curb.

As he stood up, he felt some pain, but perhaps due to adrenaline or the amount of activity around him, he didn’t realize that his leg was broken. He tried to stand on it, failed and fell into the path of a passing car. Luckily, the car wasn’t moving too fast and he survived the impact.
Unluckily, he stumbled away from the car and was hit and killed by a passing train.

A Deadly Bed

Murphy beds that fold up against a wall have been popular since 1911 when they were invented. Unfortunately, safety measures were not instituted in the bed’s design until the late 1990s. They save space and make an apartment more useful, especially in small areas. In Denver, Colorado, the newly burgeoning apartment scene was loaded with Murphy beds and young couples.

Warren E. Mclean and his wife enjoyed their Murphy bed in their tiny studio apartment, they would use the ample space the bed provided to dance to music on the radio, then lie awake into the night listening to the comedy radio shows that were also all the rage of the time.

One night, a particularly funny show made Warren double over with laughter, shifting the balance of the bed and causing it also to double over with his weight and close with the young couple inside.

After hours of struggling with trying to open the bed from inside, Warren McLean slowly suffocated to death. His wife, who’s face was close enough to the edge of the bed so that she could get some air, survived and was found by family friends two days later.

A Bad Day For Doziers

Mr. Frank Miller of Dozier, Alabama, adored his family. He had been married for more than twenty years. He was crazy about his wife and she loved him deeply.
They had one son. Not ironically, they named him Love.

On a stormy Autumn morning, Mr. Frank Miller died on the way to the hospital of an unexpected paralytic stroke. His son Love was charged with taking his unconscious father to the hospital in his small car. They had no phone, so no one was able to tell Mrs. Miller what had happened.

After Frank was pronounced dead, Love took care of the details of his father’s burial which at the time were often done at the hospital in which one died. On his way home, Love stepped out of his car to put gas in his car and was struck by lightening. It killed him instantly.

Mrs. Frank Miller had lost her entire family in one bad day but no one was able to tell her until late that night. When she heard the news of both her beloved husband and her cherished son’s instant deaths, she collapsed and died as well.

Death at the Graveyard

Graveyards are a place to put the dead, not a place for perfectly healthy people to go to die. But in Augsberg Germany on November 28^th, 1930 Annie Rossmeier and her friend Fanny Schlegel proved that it is possible.

The girls, Annie (16) and Fanny (17) were there to visit Annie’s recently deceased mother at her grave. They read the tombstones along the way noting that most of the dead were old people who had been gone for in some cases, centuries. The idea of mortality should have been more prominent in their minds but it probably only occurred to them in passing (no pun intended.) They marveled at the beautiful flowers that others had placed on the graves and Annie carried a bouquet of her own.

Cemeteries are expansive places often occupying hundreds of acres. Such is the case in Augsberg.

The girls spent a little time sitting at the grave of Annie’s mother telling her spirit how they missed her and the news that she had missed since her passing. Just before they moved to leave, Annie reached out to hug her mother’s gravestone in proxy for her mother. As the woman had only been gone for a few weeks, the 300 pound stone had not been fastened to its base. It fell, immediately killing Annie and injuring Fannie so that she could not run for help.

Annie was found with one flower in her hand. Fanny never forgot the horrible experience, and although her best friend was buried next to the mother that she loved, Fanny went home to her own mother and never visited the graveyard again.

The Sleeping Cannibal

Everyone has heard of sleepwalking, but sleep biting? Is that a thing?

Mrs. May Burn of Manhattan had first hand experience (quite literally) when one night she slept peacefully beside her husband. Her fingers fell too close to his mouth and, erhaps out of self-protective instinct, (After all nature doesn’t want snakes to climb into our mouths as we sleep…but I do.) or perhaps because he was dreaming of eating a box of lady-fingers, May’s husband bit her wayward finger, breaking the skin, but not deeply enough to cause a concerning loss of blood.

May Burn woke for a moment, but then fell back to sleep and woke again later with a swollen finger.

Human saliva is full of the nastiest bacteria available and when bitten, the smart thing to do is wash the bite and disinfect it. It was 1930, just two years after penicillin was invented and was not yet widely available so little was known about the benefits of cleanliness. Even if she had known to wash her finger after she woke, in the hours in which she slept, the deadly microorganisms had a chance to multiply.

Within days Mrs. May Burn succumbed to the infected wound and died, having been bitten to death by her sleeping husband.

And On That Tasty Note…

It’s not easy to hit the low notes in any opera song. Once must relax their throat and position it just right and breathe perfectly, especially while performing.

Singer Kate Gaston of Griffith, GA knew that. She had done it so many times that she didn’t even have to think about it anymore.

What she did need to think about was her image. She needed her hair to be perfect, her make-up done just right, her costumes to fit just so and her teeth to be attractive and clean.

Unfortunately. Kate Gaston, had a sweet tooth. This was not a problem for her costumes, they could be altered, but her teeth were beginning to rot and it effected her performance. She decided to get false teeth and they looked amazing.

One night not long after Kate had gotten her new teeth, she was doing her usual show and doing it well. The seats were full and the applause was as ample as her waistline. He dazzling new smile was captivating her audience and her voice had never been better. Then came the dynamic moment when I low note shot to a high one and Kate went from head down relaxing her throat to head held high and constricting it. Unfortunately, somewhere in between, Kate Gaston’s new teeth fell into her throat. The audience watched in helpless horror as the teeth very publicly strangled her to death.

A Tacky Way to Die

Drawing pin on chair, close-up.

Angelina Ceronit had a dirty butt. She probably washed. She may have simply sat on something dirty. She may not have even been aware of the fact that she had a dirty butt.

She may never have known her behind was tainted if not for a cruel prank perpetrated by someone who thought it would be funny to hear her squeal.

Behind her back, literally, someone put a tack on Angelina’s chair. As she sat on the tack she jumped and squealed much to the amusement of the prankster and those in the immediate vicinity. (If she had not, I may not have known this story.)

Even Angelina laughed as she rubbed her new injury.

That was her second mistake. It is likely that bacteria from her skin, her undergarments, or her skirt got into the tiny tack hole and began to multiply.

Angelina likely started to get progressively more sore as the bacteria grew and the pin prick grew to the size of a bite, then a wound and eventually a fiery cyst.

If you ever wonder what kind of weapon is required to kill a person, (and I know you do) it can be as small as a thumbtack…if the person has a dirty butt.

Snail

Obsession over the little things can lead to deadly consequences.

Thomas Waddington, a tenured science professor lived alone in London. His days were spent researching and teaching, his nights were spent reading and preparing lessons for the next day.

Teaching science was his life.

Although he could tell you about the nutritional requirements, breeding rituals, and gestation periods of most of the animals of England, he seldom got a chance to interact with them. The pigeons of Trafalgar square and the rats in the streets were the only living animals he usually encountered.

On the last afternoon of his life, while waiting for a train, he noticed a large snail crawling across a track and without even thinking about why, he jumped down to get a better look at it.

Snails are beautiful creatures on a macro level. Their signature lubricating slime is iridescent and when the sun light hits it, it shimmers with all the colors of the spectrum. A snails texture is not smooth, it lays like feathers over the surface of it’s body and the snail uses the layered bumps for traction as it undulates on its way about its business. It was a new experience for Thomas Waddington and he made a note to memorize the experience for sketches for a future class. As the hypnotic motion of the undulations propelled the snail forward Thomas followed on his knees in rapt fascination. The sun felt perfect on his skin, a light breeze tousled his hair and his mind was utterly occupied with the increasing speedy movement of the snail as it hurried to the other side of the train rail. It was a perfect moment of discovery. Everything else had completely disappeared for him.
Unfortunately, the snail, try as he might, was not fast enough to avoid an oncoming train and neither was Thomas Waddington.

Science was his life. It was also indirectly, the cause of his untimely death.