Recent Posts
6 True Stories About Nurses in the Old Insane Asylums
I’ve covered abusive nurses in the old insane asylums, but I also wanted to cover the dangers nurses faced in unregulated insane asylums during the…
4 Cruel Facts About the Garrote as Capital Punishment
The garrote was used in Spain, Puerto Rico, Cuba and the Philippines during the 1800s and early 1900s. It was a slow, torturous way to…
7 Upsetting Stories of American Ghouls
A ghoul is traditionally a living person who steals from the dead, and it was quite an occupation back in the early 1900s when incidents…
7 Awful Ways to Literally Lose Your Head
People were constantly losing their heads in the previous two centuries. It was so bad that it was rather common news that bodiless heads were…
Traditional Guillotine Tattoos
A person’s tattoos usually have a strong, personal meaning, but in the early 1900s, tattoos often marked a person as a member of the criminal…
1909 First Hand Account of the Guillotine and Execution of Danvers
This original report, made by a reporter who witnessed the guillotine execution of Danvers, is the first mention I have found on the bloodiness and…
France’s Death Helmet – Terrifying Method of Capital Punishment
In 1898, a strange contraption called a death helmet was said to soon take the place of the guillotine. However, the death helmet was far…
Four Men Guillotined in Eight Minutes
There is no denying that the guillotine made fast work of executions and that Deibler and his assistants made the executions run smoothly, with little…
Guillotine Parties and Celebrations
Parties and celebrations often began before the execution of a criminal in France, but sometimes, especially when the criminal was a murderer, the parties went…
Anatole Deibler Tells Us If It Hurts To Be Beheaded
Anatole Deibler, France’s former high executioner who oversaw the use of the guillotine on hundreds of condemned criminals, was asked whether or not it hurt…
