In the October issue of Discover magazine, LeeAundra Keany tells us that a bonfire is "basically a tree running in reverse," and other interesting facts.
1 Fire is an event, not a thing. Heating wood or other fuel releases volatile vapors that can rapidly combust with oxygen in the air; the resulting incandescent bloom of gas further heats the fuel, releasing more vapors and perpetuating the cycle.
2 Most of the fuels we use derive their energy from trapped solar rays. In photosynthesis, sunlight and heat make chemical energy (in the form of wood or fossil fuel); fire uses chemical energy to produce light and heat.
3 So a bonfire is basically a tree running in reverse.
4 Assuming stable fuel, heat, and oxygen levels, a typical house fire will double in size every minute.
For some reason, Great Britain has more than its share of mansions, estates, and old homes that are reported to be haunted.
Leeds Castle is said to be haunted by a dog. He pays no attention to the people who visit the castle, but he's said to bring bad luck to anyone who spots him. (Image credit: Flickr user Gauis Caecilius)
St. Donat's Castle is a 12th-century Welsh castle that's now a boarding school ...and they say a ghost panther stalks the corridors. In a parlor, a piano plays itself ...even when the lid is closed.
Woburn Abbey in Bedfordshire supposedly has a mischievous spirit that loves to fling open doors. Billionaire J. Paul Getty said it once terrified him by barging into the room.
Chatham House is haunted by the ghost of the "Hanging Judge" George Jeffreys, the former Chief Justice of England who liked to hand out death sentences. Jeffreys is said to walk around Chatham House in his black judicial robes, carrying a bloody bone.
(East Riddlesden Hall image credit: Flickr user floato)
East Riddlesden Hall in Yorkshire hosts the "Grey Lady." She reportedly paces up and down the stairs, looking for her lover, who was sealed in a room by her jealous husband and left there to die.
Dover Castle is said to be haunted by a boy murdered during the Napoleanic Wars. The headless ghost stalks the halls, drumming.
(Raby Castle image credit: Flickr user Mark Loveridge)
Raby Castle near Durham is the home to the "Old Hellcat" -a ghoulish old woman who sits in a chair, knitting. (If you get close enough, you can feel the heat coming off her glowing red knitting needles.)
Neatorama presents a guest post from actor, comedian, and voiceover artist Eddie Deezen. Visit Eddie at his website.
It was August 27, 1965. The greatest summit meeting in show business history was about to take place.
The Beatles had arrived in America in February of 1964. They had already met many singers, celebrities, and movie stars. Basically, all they had to do was request it, snap their fingers, and almost literally, anyone could be brought in for them to meet. But according to John Lennon, the leader of the band, there was only one person they had to meet. It was the King himself, Elvis Presley.
The meeting has been documented by several witnesses present, but as we all know, human memory can be fallible. But the following is, in general, what occurred that incredible evening. The first question, after the meeting was agreed to, was who would come to whom? It was quickly agreed upon that the Beatles -the "new kids on the block"- would go to Elvis' house in Bel Air and pay homage to the King.
After smoking a joint in their limo to calm their nerves, the Beatles pulled up to Perugia Way and were greeted at the door. It was Elvis Presley, their supreme idol, in the flesh! Elvis, dressed and acting super-casual, escorted the boys in. He was watching TV without the sound on (something the Beatles liked doing themselves). The Beatles were amazed -a color TV! And even more incredible, according to Paul, he had one of those weird contraptions, a remote control! They had never seen one before (remember, it was 1965).
The Fab Four sat staring, literally gaping, at their hero. After a few minutes, Elvis broke the quiet ice and said, "Hell, if you're just going to sit around staring at me, I'm going up to bed." Everyone laughed and the remark calmed the tense atmosphere.
Aspiring writers know how it is -those rejection slips just keep piling up. It can be discouraging. But that doesn't necessarily mean your book is bad. Some of the biggest selling books ever were published only after a string of rejections. Even Anne Frank's diary was rejected -sixteen times!
These days, Anne Frank has one of the best-known holocaust stories and the book has sold 30 million copies around the world. Surprisingly, the tale wasn’t too popular with publishers though, and was rejected sixteen times. One publisher even noted the story was barely worth reading because, “The girl doesn’t, it seems to me, have a special perception or feeling which would lift that book above the ‘curiosity’ level.”
Read about other bestselling books that overcame initial publisher's rejection at Flavorwire. Link
At this point, you have to be pretty young to not know what happens in the Star Wars saga. That said, this contains spoilers. Faris is four years old, and here he sees The Empire Strikes Back for the first time. The camera captures his surprise at the twist. -via Metafilter
We've posted art from more than one person who takes everyday paintings or iconic images and adds fantastic monsters to them. It's neat, but it's not new. Back in the 1970s, Yokopro in Japan published postcards that did the exact same thing. The monsters are called pachimon kaiju. See a collection of them at How To Be a Retronaut. http://www.howtobearetronaut.com/2011/09/pachimon-postcards-1970s/ -via Everlasting Blort
An artificial uterus sounds like a scene from Brave New World. In reality, scientists at the Port Stephens Fisheries Institute in New South Wales, Australia, have so far only nursed six embryos of a wobbegong shark through their last 18 days before birth successfully in a souped-up aquarium with delicately balanced chemicals, filters, and monitors that copy a shark's womb. The ultimate goal is to incubate embryos of the endangered grey nurse shark throughout their gestation. What's really strange is the reason they need to do it. The grey nurse shark is endangered in part because of its weird way of reproducing:
After mating, a female produces as many as 40 fertilized embryos, separated between two separate wombs. The embryos take nearly a year to fully develop, but they begin hunting long before that. After about two months, their own yolk sacs go dry. Hungry, they start eating their brothers and sisters. After the rampant in utero cannibalization, only one shark — the biggest and strongest — is left in each womb.
At birth they’re three feet long and experienced hunters, with a good chance of survival. But the tiny brood size, nearly year-long gestation period, and relatively restricted maternal capacity — after giving birth, mothers must wait a year to reproduce again — limit the number of young sharks.
Read more about this research in artificial shark gestation at Wired Science. Link
September 24th through October 1st is Banned Books Week. In honor of the occasion, here is a guest post from actor, comedian, and voiceover artist Eddie Deezen. Visit Eddie at his website.
Talk about an easy subject to research! It might have been easier to write up a "books that have never been banned anywhere" list. The banning of books seems so ridiculous, simplistic, and stupid to most of us. But man, in all his Jeckyll and Hyde glory, will all-too-often, when trying to solve a problem, come up with a solution much worse. This is "the 29th annual Banned Books Week." The week is used to condemn censorship and "thought police."
O.K., let's take a look at a brief (in the scheme of these things) list of books that have been (ironically) banned here in the U.S....
1. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray BradburyFahrenheit 451 has to head this list of "ironic books banned." Why? Fahrenheit 451 is an entire novel about the future and the banning (and burning) of books. It was banned, ironically, because one of the books that eventually gets banned and burned is the Bible. Drawn your own conclusions, my (hopefully) intelligent readers.
2. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain Mark Twain was a racist? A product of the times? Twain uses the bombshell "N" word so as to illustrate the awfulness of the word (and all its connotations). This vicious word is still, far and away, the most highly-charged and controversial word in the English language. So, the knee-jerk reaction is to ban the book. Or better still, as in more recent examples, issue the book with the "N" word cleverly edited out.
3. Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger There isn't enough time to edit out all the examples of the expression "f*** you" being used in this one. Also banned because it promotes youthful rebellion and disrespect of authority. Catcher in the Rye was the book that guy was reading when he shot and killed John Lennon. So maybe if it were still banned... hmmm, slippery slope, isn't it?
4. Where's Waldo? by Martin Handford Misprint, right? Uh, no. The very first Where's Waldo? book was, indeed, banned, because in one of the Where's Waldo? drawings a beach is shown featuring a woman lying on the sand with part of her breast showing. It was actually just a side view of her breast, with a penciled-in microscopic nipple shown. Do you realize the meticulous research and hours of time it must have taken whoever discovered this "offensive" character amidst all the thousands and thousands of characters featured in a Waldo book?
5. The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank This is the incredible story of an ever-hopeful and ever-wistful young girl who is eventually killed in the Holocaust. In some ways, it is the ultimate example of the ever-classic theme of "Good vs. Evil." Or one very good person in the face of perhaps the greatest evil of the past several centuries. Yet despite her incredibly horrible enemies and fate, this remarkable teenage girl still believes in "the basic goodness of mankind." Banned by the Alabama State Textbook Committee in 1983 for being "a real downer."
6. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee Like our pal Huck Finn, this book has been banned because of the free-flowing use of the "N" word. And like Twain's book, it is used to paint an accurate picture of the period (and all its ignorance). It has been banned across America for "racial slurs" and for "promoting white supremacy." Also because a parent thought the way "blacks are treated by members of [the] white community in a way that would upset black children." Only ironic because never, but never, in the entire history of literature, has good and evil been so clearly portrayed and delineated. Real (not ersatz) racism is shown under a clear magnifying glass, in all its vicious cruelty. (As a sidebar, to those of you who do not like reading -definitely see the movie. To Kill a Mockingbird is without question one of the greatest movies ever made. One of those rare times "the movie is equally as great as the book it is based upon.")
7. The Harry Potter Series by J.K. Rowling The Harry Potter books are far and away the most banned books of the past decade. Extremely ironic in that the Harry Potter series has probably inspired more young people to read than all the Hooked on Phonics and Pizza Hut books in the world. Also one other point for all those people who have worked so tirelessly to ban these highly-popular books: strip away the magic and the Dr. Seuss creatures and the wizards and sorcerers, and ultimately the series boils down to the message that love, understanding, and tolerance are the most important things in the world.
8. Little Red Riding Hood (You can't make this stuff up, folks!) Little Red Riding Hood has been banned for the use of alcohol (one of the items in Red Riding Hood's basket is a bottle of wine).
9. Sleeping Beauty The fairy tale was banned for promoting witchcraft and magic.
10. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck This classic was banned for "vulgar language."
11. Harriet the Spy by Louise Fitzhugh Why do I feel like I am writing a Monty Python sketch? Could there possibly be a more harmless, innocuous book than Harriet the Spy? O.K. this one was banned because it "teaches children to lie, spy, back-talk, and curse."
12. Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe This book was banned in the South during the Civil War because of its anti-slavery content. Well, heck, that was over 150 years ago. Fortunately, as we all know, man has come a long way since those days of ignorance.
Have you ever participated in a séance or tried to contact the "spirits" using a Ouija board? You probably don't realize it, but the modern conception of communicating with the dead only dates back to the late 1840s. Here's the story of the hoax that started spirit-mania.
BUMP IN THE NIGHT
In 1848 a devout Methodist farmer named John Fox and his family began to hear strange noises in their Hydesville, New York, farmhouse. The noises continued for weeks on end, until finally on one particularly noisy evening, Mrs. Fox ordered the two children, 13-year-old Margaret and 12-year-old Kate, to stay perfectly quiet in bed while Mr. Fox searched the house from top to bottom. His search shed no light on the mystery, but afterward, Margaret sat up in bed and snapped her fingers, exclaiming, "Here, Mr. Split-foot, do as I do!"
"The reply was immediate," Earl Fornell writes in The Unhappy Medium: Spiritualism and the Life of Margaret Fox. "The invisible rapper responded by imitating the number of the girl's staccato responses."
Mrs. Fox began to make sense of what she was hearing. "Count ten," she told the spirit. It responded with ten raps. So she asked several questions; each time the spirit answered correctly. Next, Mrs. Fox asked the spirit if it would rap if a neighbor was present; the spirit said yes. So Mr. Fox ran and got a neighbor, the first of more than 500 neighbors and townspeople who visited over the next few weeks to watch Margaret and Kate interact with the spirit. As long as either Margaret or Kate was present, the spirit was willing to communicate.
MURDER MYSTERY
Using an alphabetic code that Margaret and Kate devised, "Mr. Split-foot" explained that in his Earthly life he'd been a peddler, murdered by the person who lived in the farmhouse. The spirit identified the killer as "C. R." Some citizens tracked down a man named Charles Rosana, who'd lived in the house years earlier, but with no body and no evidence other than the testimony of a ghost, he was never charged.
The original Frankenstein's monster wasn't Boris Karloff -it was (believe it or not) a character created by a 19-year-old author named Mary Shelley ...more than 190 years ago.
BACKGROUND
In the summer of 1816, 19-year-old Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley and her 24-year-old husband, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, visited Switzerland "It proved a wet, uncongenial summer," she wrote some 15 years later, "and incessant rain often confined us for days to the house."
To pass the time, the Shelleys and their neighbors -28-year-old Lord Byron, his 23-year-old personal physician, and his 18-year-old lover- read German ghost stories aloud. They enjoyed it so much that one day, Byron announced, "We will each write a ghost story." Everyone agreed, but apparently the poets, unaccustomed to prose writing, couldn't come up with anything very scary.
Mary was determined to do better. "I busied myself to think of a story," she recalled, "One which would speak to the mysterious fears of our nature and awaken thrilling horror." Yet she couldn't come up with anything. Every morning, her companions asked: "Have you thought of a story?" "And each morning," she wrote later, "I was forced to reply with a mortifying negative."
A FLASH OF INSPIRATION
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
One evening, Mary sat by the fireplace, listening to her husband and Byron discuss the possibility of reanimating a corpse with electricity, giving it what they called "vital warmth."
The discussion finally ended well after midnight, and Shelley retired. But Mary, "transfixed in speculation," couldn't sleep.
"When I placed my head on the pillow," she recalled, "I did not sleep, nor could I be said to think. My imagination, unbidden, possessed and guided me, gifting the successive images that arouse in my mind with a vividness far beyond the usual bounds of reverie. I saw -with shut eyes but acute mental vision- I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together ...I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life and stir with an uneasy half-vital motion.
"Frightful must it be; for supremely frightful would be the effect of any human endeavor to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world. His success would terrify the artist; he would rush away from his odious handiwork, horror-stricken. He would hope that, left to itself, the slight spark of light which he had communicated would fade; that this thing would subside into dead matter; and he might sleep in the belief that the silence of the grave would quench forever the transient existence of the hideous corpse which he had looked upon as the cradle of life. He sleeps; but he is awakened; the horrid thing stands at his bedside, opening his curtains, and looking on him with yellow, watery eyes..."
THE PERFECT HORROR STORY
At this point, Mary opened her eyes in terror -so frightened that she needed reassurance it had all just been her imagination. She gazed around the room, but just couldn't shake the image of "my hideous phantom." Finally, to take her mind off the creature, she went back to the ghost story she'd been trying to compose all week. "If only I could contrive one," she thought, "that would frighten people as I myself had been frightened that night!" Then she realized that her vision was, in fact, the story she'd been reaching for.
As she recounted: "Swift as light and as cheering was the idea that broke in upon me. 'I have found it! What terrified me will terrify others; and I need only describe the spectre which had haunted my midnight pillow.' On the morrow I announced that I had thought of a story. I began the day with the words, 'It was on a dreary night in November,' making only a transcript of the grim terrors of my waking dream."
THE NOVEL
The first version of Frankenstein was a short story. But Mary's husband encouraged her to develop it further, and she eventually turned it into a novel. It was published anonymously in three parts in 1818. "Mary," notes one critic, "did not think it important enough to sign her name to the book... And since her husband wrote the book's preface, people assumed he had written the rest of the book as well... It was not until a later edition of Frankenstein that the book was revealed as the work of a young girl."
Since 1988, the Bathroom Reader Institute had published a series of popular books containing irresistible bits of trivia and obscure yet fascinating facts.
Neatorama presents a guest post from actor, comedian, and voiceover artist Eddie Deezen. Visit Eddie at his website.
Technically, it is hard to pinpoint the exact moment when the Beatles ended as a group. John Lennon had officially walked out of a meeting at Apple headquarters, with the other three Beatles present, on September 20, 1969. His immortal words, just before he haughtily exited, were, "I want a divorce. Just like the one I got from Cynthia (his first wife)."
Other things were said, but suffice it to say, with these words, the die was cast. Interestingly, Ringo had already quit the band, back in August of 1968, during the recording session for The White Album. In January of 1969, during the filming of The Beatles' last movie Let It Be, George Harrison too got fed up with the quarreling and the sniping -and Yoko Ono- and he, too, made for the nearest exit. "See you around the clubs, George said as he bolted.
Both George and Ringo were eventually talked into returning, although John never did. Paul was the first to publicly announce an end to the Fab Four, on April 10, 1970, with a formal newspaper interview, declaring, in so many words, the fact that "I'm quitting the Beatles." Although the four had split up in the real world, there was still a lot of legal red tape to be cut before the "official" split could actually take place.
Finally, after four long years of court battles, lawsuits, subpoenas, public and private acrimony, and millions of dollars, the official dissolution of the Beatles was about to take place. With just a few kinks left to iron out, the dissolution meeting was set to take place at the Plaza Hotel in New York City -ironically (and sadly) the first place the Beatles stayed in America when they first arrived there in 1964.
The meeting was scheduled for December 19, 1974. Both George and Paul made special arrangements and flew in to be present for the joint signing of the required papers. Ringo was the only Beatle not present for the historic occasion. He had already signed the necessary documents back in England.
At the Plaza, George arrived with his lawyer and his business manager. Paul came accompanied by his own lawyers. And Ringo's lawyer and business manager were present on his behalf. Two teams of lawyers for Apple (one for the U.S. and one for the U.K.) gathered around a very large table to get all the signatures on the paperwork dissolving the partnership. Ringo was on the phone, to confirm that he "was alive." Paul and his wife Linda had a camera set up to document the historic occasion.
Finally, after a long wait, George said what everyone was thinking, "Where's John?"
"Good question," replied his lawyer. Incredibly, John had played hookey and ducked the meeting. To add to the growing anger of all present, John lived within walking distance (or at least a short cab ride) of the Plaza, right in New York City.
George's lawyer put in a call to John. (At the time, John was living with his secretary, a pretty girl named May Pang. He was going through a separation with his wife, Yoko Ono.) John refused to come to the phone. May took the call and told the lawyer that John had decided not to come to the meeting at the Plaza. His official reason: "The stars aren't right."
It was one thing to put up with John's fads and passions and idiosyncrasies, but to not attend this important meeting because of the misalignment of his astrological charts was pushing the envelope a bit too far.
George was already in a dour mood. He was in the middle of a tout, he was getting lousy reviews, and his voice was strained and nearly shot. First, he blamed his lawyer for John not coming. Soon, all the other lawyers erupted at George's lawyer. Then furiously, George picked up the phone. "Take off your G*****n shades and get the f*** over here!" he barked at his former bandmate. (George, although he did have a strong temper, nonetheless always idolized and worshiped John, no matter what Lennon had put him through over the years. George saying such a violent thing to John was completely out of character. It was very clear that the stress of his own unsuccessful tour, plus the weight of the moment, had overtaken the normally level-headed ex-Beatle.)
May asked innocently if George wanted to talk to John. "No! Just tell him whatever his problem is, I started this tour on my own and I'll end it on my own!" George barked and slammed the phone down.
John was listening over May's shoulder. Paul and his wife Linda came by the visit John the next day, realizing how upset John was over the agreement. Paul reassured John, "We'll work it all out."
George's rage didn't last long. A message arrived at John's home: "All is forgiven. George loves you and he wants you to come to his party tonight."
John and May did go to the party at the Hippopotamus Club, where George, John, and Paul all hugged. John and May left New York the following day to spend Christmas at West Palm Beach, Florida.
On December 29, 1974, the voluminous documents were brought down to John in Florida by one of Apple's lawyers.
"Take out your camera," John instructed May, wanting her to capture the moment for posterity. Then he called George's lawyer to go over some final points. When John hung up the phone, he looked out the window wistfully. According to May, she "could almost see him replaying the entire Beatles experience in his mind."
John finally picked up his pen and, in the unlikely backdrop of Disney World, at the Polynesian Village Hotel, officially ended the greatest rock'n'roll band in history by simply scrawling "John Lennon" at the bottom of a page.
It would have never occurred to me to take a ride in an aqueduct, but now I want to! Before railroads, before highways, Britain built many elevated waterways to transport cargo from place to place. Many are still there, and they are fascinating. Shown is the Pontcysyllte Aqueduct in Wales, which is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and is open for tourist traffic. See ten such UK aqueducts at WebUrbanist. Link
Neatorama presents a guest post from actor, comedian, and voiceover artist Eddie Deezen. Visit Eddie at his website.
The "evil twin" is a very old plot device in many forms of entertainment.
Edgar Allan Poe used the device in the short story William Wilson. The story (almost a perfect pattern to the much later "evil twins" of television) deals with two twin, one moral, one amoral. The evil twin keeps doing his bad deeds and the good twin is good and ethical -and, of course, the evil twin gets the good twin into lots of trouble. In a bizarre Poe twist, the evil twin happens to have the same name as the good twin (William Wilson) and he was born on the same day (January 19th -Poe's birthday).
Evil twins were portrayed in the movies such as 1939's The Man in the Iron Mask (based on the Alexander Dumas novel) and Charlie Chaplin's The Great Dictator (1940) in which Charlie plays a nice Jewish barber, who has history's ultimate "evil twin" Adenoid Hynkel (an obvious satire of Adolph Hitler).
Comic books have probably had more different and varied evil twins than any other entertainment genre, with Superman, Batman, Robin, The Flash, Wonder Woman, and almost every other classic superhero (or superheroine) worth their salt being plagued by their own "evil twin."
OK, in doing research regarding TV's evil twin characters, I really didn't find that much material out there, so, I not only looked over the limited data available, but I racked my own memory of all the many "evil twins" on all the countless TV shows I have seen over the past 40 or so years.
As far as I know, I believe the very first ever "evil twin" in TV series history was seen on The Adventures of Superman, a series I never missed as a kid, starring George Reeves, my first ever hero. In 1953, Reeves played a dual role (he actually played three different roles, if you count Superman and Clark Kent as two) of a criminal named "Boulder," who dressed up as Superman (complete with a bullet-proof vest) and extorts money from local merchants (I mean, who is going to turn down Superman?). Reeves, a brilliant and talented actor, never relished playing the role of Superman, and supposedly this was one of his favorite episodes.
"Evil twins" weren't all that prevalent in the 1950s, but in the '60s they were to skyrocket and achieve their greatest fame. In a 1960 episode of the popular Western Bonanza, called "The Outlaws," the "evil twin that is portrayed in an episode that is a stretch" first comes to light. The odds against anyone having an actual "evil twin" who is not related to them in any way are, of course, pretty steep. But in this episode, two outlaw brothers who look exactly like both Hoss and Little Joe (Dan Blocker and Michael Landon) and use the old "switch identities" routine on the Cartwright brothers.
A dark tale from our "Dustbin of Gruesome History" files.
THE DISCOVERY
One the night of April 28, 1908, Joe Maxson, a hired hand on a farm outside of La Porte, Indiana, awoke in his upstairs bedroom to the smell of smoke. The house was on fire. He called out to the farm's owner, Belle Gunness, and her three children. Getting no answer, he jumped from a second-story window, narrowly escaping the flames, and ran for help. But it was too late; the house was destroyed. A search through the wreckage resulted in a grisly discovery: four dead bodies in the basement. Three were Gunness's children, aged 5, 9, and 11. The fourth was a woman, assumed to be Gunness herself, but identification was difficult- the body's head was missing. An investigation ensued, and Ray Lamphere, a recently fired employee, was arrested for arson and murder. Before Lamphere's trial was over, he would be little more than a sidebar in what is still one of the most horrible crime stories in American history ...and an unsolved mystery.
BACKGROUND
Belle Gunness was born Brynhild Paulsdatter Storseth in Selbu, Norway in 1859. At the age of 22 she emigrated to America and moved in with her older sister in Chicago, where she changed her name to "Belle." In 1884 the 25-year-old married another Norwegian immigrant, Mads Sorenson, and the couple opened a candy shop. A year later the store burned down, the first of what would be several suspicious fires in Belle's life. The couple collected an insurance payout and used the money to buy a house in the Chicago suburbs. Fifteen years later, in 1898, that house burned down, and another insurance payout allowed the couple to buy another house. On July 30, 1900, yet another insurance policy was brought into play, but this time it was life insurance: Mads Sorenson had died. A doctor's autopsy said he was murdered, probably by strychnine poisoning, so an inquest was ordered. The coroner's investigation eventually deemed the death to be "of natural causes," and Belle collected $8,000, becoming, for 1900, a wealthy woman. (The average yearly income in 1900 was less than $500.) She used part of the money to buy a farm in La Porte. But there was a lot more death -and insurance money- to come.
MORE SUSPICIONS
In April 1902, Belle married a local butcher named Peter Gunness and became Belle Gunness. One week later, Peter Gunness's infant daughter died while left alone with Belle... and yet another insurance policy was collected on. Just eight months after that, Peter Gunness was dead: He was found in his shed with his skull crushed. Belle, who was 5'8", weighed well over 200 pounds, and was known to be very strong, told police that a meat grinder had fallen from a high shelf and landed on her husband's head. The coroner said otherwise, ruling the cause of death to be murder. On top of that, a witness claimed to have overheard Belle's 14-year-old daughter, Jennie, saying to a classmate, "My mama killed my papa. She hit him with a meat cleaver and he died."
Belle and Jennie were brought before a coroner's jury and questioned. Jennie denied making the statement; Belle denied killing her husband. The jury found Belle innocent -and she collected another $3,000 in life insurance money. And she was just getting started.
