8 Gruesome Accounts of Severed Fingers

In 2018, I wrote a series of articles for Listverse about old cases of children kept in chains, bodies found in sacks, and gruesome ways bodies ended up in wells.

Recently I’ve been itching to getting back to my gory roots.

And so…

Hi everyone. This is Elizabeth from StrangeAgo and today we are going to take a look at some old accounts about severed fingers.

1. Buzzsaw

The first thing I noticed when I began reading about severed fingers in the newspaper archives was just how resilient men were in the early 20th century.

For instance, an Allentown, Pennsylvania man, Alfred Stephen, accidentally cut off his pinky finger while using a buzzsaw back in 1912. Instead of panicking like I would have done, the man tied up his hand, picked up his finger, and stuffed it in his pocket. He then walked two miles to the doctor’s office and had it sewn back on. [1]

2. Step Ladder

If we dig a little further back, we find a Minnesota man who, in 1901, fell while on a step ladder. The ladder also toppled over and landed on the man’s hand, severing one of his fingers. Oddly enough, the man, one Elmer Barch, did not realize his finger was severed until some time later when he saw a bit of the bony end of his finger poking through the hole in his glove. He was immediately sent to the hospital for treatment. [2]

3. Parrot

Men were not the only ones losing their fingers. A 1922 article tells us that a Redfield, South Dakota woman, Mrs. Christian, was bit so hard by her parrot that her finger was left hanging on by a flap of skin.

Unbelievably, this woman calmly sterilized a needle and some silk thread. She then proceeded to sew her finger back on.

Newspapers boasted that she had cheated the local surgeons out of a job. [3]

4. Bicycle Chain

Not all fingers were immediately saved after being severed. Sometimes fingers and fingertips got passed around.

In 1896 there was the odd case of a Nebraska man whose fingertip was cut off while he was repairing his bicycle chain.

The man immediately made his way to a physician to have the wound cared for.

Meanwhile, a bystander picked up the fingertip and it was passed around as a curious memento. Thirty-six hours later, the fingertip was finally passed to a man who brought it to a physician as a medical curiosity. Strangely enough, the physician was the same person who had tended the man who lost the fingertip. [4]

5. Picket Fence

Picket fences and iron gateways claimed an alarming amount of fingers in the past.

In San Francisco, 1894, a young man was goofing around and climbed to the top of a picket fence. All was well until he went to jump off the fence and the sharp point of the picket caught under the ring on his little finger. The man landed well, but his ring and finger remained attached to the fence. [5]

6. Impaled

Meanwhile, in London, 1909, a policeman discovered a man’s finger impaled on a spike that was on top of a gateway. The finger was taken to Scotland Yard, fingerprinted, and matched to a notorious thief by the name of William Mitchel.

The police went looking for the man and eventually found a man hanging out with a gang of pickpockets in South London. The man’s hand was bandaged, but when asked who he was, he told the police that his name was Harry May and that there was no way he could be a pickpocket. “Look at my hand,” he told them.

The finger was matched to the thief and it was determined that the finger was torn off when the thief was climbing the gate to get inside the building. Mitchel was sentenced to twelve months of hard labor. [6]

 7. Store Safe

A similar occurrence happened in Berne, Washington in 1912. Frederick Hoppe managed to open and steal from a store safe. When he was done, he closed the door on his little finger. He was unable to get the safe reopened and, to prevent getting caught, he wrenched his hand away from the safe’s door and left his finger behind.

Frederick’s finger was matched to him when he received treatment in a nearby hospital and was arrested for burglary. [7]

8. Axe

Finally, we have a strange case from 1912 when a Fernley, Nevada man decided to end his existence.

While working as a night fireman at a pumping station, the man took an ax and chopped off one of his fingers. Whether this was deliberate or accidental is unknown.

The next day, workmen arrived at the site and discovered the bloody ax and finger. After a brief search, the man was discovered in the firebox of the boiler. His legs were sticking out of the firebox, but the upper portion of his body had been burned to a crisp.

Because workers said he had been behaving strangely the day before, his death was considered a suicide.