Category: Culture
Widower Exhumed His Wife After Cockfights Took Over Kentucky Cemetery
For 42 years, the wife of Abraham Frye rested in a cemetery near St. Matthews, Kentucky. Then the cemetery became a gathering place for cockfights….
Arizona Miners Claimed They Found a Giant Mummy Buried With a Shotgun
On December 3, 1900, workmen at the United Verde Mines near Jerome, Arizona, reportedly entered a cave exposed by a collapse and discovered a remarkably…
Drunken Hog and Dog Battled Three Goats During Omaha Moonshine Raid
When deputy sheriffs raided a farm near Omaha, Nebraska, during the early days of Prohibition, they found six stills operating and approximately 600 gallons of…
San Francisco Traffic Cop Arrested Woman for Sticking Out Her Tongue
In San Francisco in January 1921, Loretta Lowe of Fresno was arrested for an offense that rarely appears on modern police blotters: sticking out her…
How Tea Helped Fuel Byrd’s Perilous Antarctic Expedition
The bulletin appeared while Commander Richard E. Byrd and his crew were undertaking their first Antarctic expedition. Byrd had already become famous for his 1926…
Bare-Legged Woman Startles London’s Financial District in 1919
In the summer of 1919, a young woman caused a minor sensation in London simply by walking through the financial district without stockings. At a…
Homemade Moonshine Still Turns Deadly After Flame Goes Out
A homemade moonshine operation apparently turned deadly in New York in 1920 when a man was found dead in his lodgings beside an improvised still….
Los Angeles Bootlegger Found Beaten and Shot During 1928 “Rum War”
By the summer of 1928, Prohibition had created a vast illegal market for alcohol, and in Los Angeles, competition over the liquor trade could turn…
Candy Sales Boomed as Men Turned to Sweets Instead of Drinking
In the summer of 1919, candy dealers noticed an unexpected change in their customers. Men who had once dismissed sweets as something meant primarily for…
Woman Charged 25 Cents to View Executed Murderer’s Body
The execution of Frank Small in Pittsburgh in March 1882 did not end public interest in his case. If anything, his death appears to have…
