Because these “bad news” collections are so popular, I spent the day collecting a few gruesome reports from the newspaper archives just for you.
Lakeshore Accident
First, I would like to touch on yet another incident involving a train. This one happened in 1901 and reads:
“This morning a horrible accident happened on the Lake Shore train… A heavy fog prevailed when a crowd of men were walking along the track to work. They did not hear the Lake Shore express as it came dashing along, and it ground three of the men into mincemeat, two others being seriously hurt.” [Source: https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn84024827/1901-12-17/ed-1/seq-1/]
This was an all too common occurrence in the past and often ended in people being shredded and the loss of quite a few limbs.
Unfortunately, people are still getting run over by trains so please, please, please, never walk on train tracks or be tempted to take a selfie while standing on the tracks.
Smooshed by Elevator
And now, elevators. Most people know that I have a slight fear of getting into elevators, and reading these elevator accident articles never seems to help me overcome that fear.
On the last day of 1919, a 70-year-old woman and her daughter walked to their apartment’s elevator when all of a sudden the daughter stumbled and fell. The elevator operator quickly sprang forward and caught the daughter, but at the same time, the elevator malfunctioned and shot upwards, crushing the elderly mother in the process.
As one report tells us:
“Before the elevator could be stopped Mrs. Dodge was crushed between the floor of the car and the glass shaft partition. Her head struck the iron supporting frame of the shaft and her neck was broken. The upper part of the body crashed through the heavy glass partition above the door.”
Her body was taken to the DC morgue, where Morguemaster William Schoneberger worked. And if you haven’t already, check out my article on DC’s Morguemaster. I’ll link it below. [Source: https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83045462/1920-01-01/ed-1/seq-12/]
Falls from Bridge
Next is a 1910 report that is both horrible and sad.
It reads:
“The fate that sooner or later comes to most of the human spiders who work on lofty bridges came to Julius Hansen, a broad-chested, blue-eyed young Swede, when he shot like a falling rivet to his death from the new Manhattan bridge almost at the same instant that his wife and two children, whom he had not seen for two years, were coming up the bay on the steamship that had brought them from Europe…
“To get to his work, Hansen had to get into a sort of shallow wicker basket… which was suspended from the lower stroke of the bridge by two slender steel cables attached to either end.
“The man reached up from his saucer of a basket to haul himself along the structure to a particularly difficult bit of wiring, when the contraption slipped and Hansen slid over its edge. He managed to grip the edge and hung there, the sweat pouring down his face and the fear of the end that was to come in his eyes…
“The blood squeezed out of his fingertips. With a loud shout of terror his left hand, with which he had still maintained a grip of his swinging perch, loosened, and he shot through through the loop down to the river. The man’s body did not reappear.” [Source: https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn94059373/1910-01-14/ed-1/seq-7/]
