Continuing with the project I began after seeing Jordan Peele's Nope. Content warning for death, child death, drug overdose, murder, fire, explosion, car crash.
On Today's Date
October 30, 2015: A fire inside the Colectiv night club in Bucharest, Romania kills 64 people, including four members of the band Goodbye to Gravity, whose pyrotechnics display had initiated the blaze. Guitarists Mihai Alexandru and Vlad Telea die at the scene; drummer Bogdan Enache and bassist Alex Pascu die in the hospital. Lead singer Andrei Gălu is badly burned but survives.
Many of those who die in the hospital do so from infections, possibly because of inadequate disinfectant measures used in Romanian hospitals.
On Halloween
October 31, 1926: Harry Houdini dies of peritonitis due to a ruptured appendix. Houdini had visited Canada’s McGill University on October 22, when a student asked to punch Houdini in the stomach (which Houdini was famously able to withstand, when properly prepared), but then did so before the magician was ready.
October 31, 1963: Spectators gather to watch a Holiday on Ice performance at the Indiana State Fairgrounds in Indianapolis, Indiana. A natural gas explosion starts in a storage area that food vendors use to store pre-popped popcorn. The explosion kills 81 people and injures an additional 400.
For additional detail by a firefighter who lived in Indiana, listen to this podcast episode.
October 31, 1974: Ronald Clark O’Bryan gives Pixy Stix candy straws laced with cyanide to his two children, two neighbor children, and a fifth child he knew from church. Only one of the children, O’Bryan’s 8-year-old son Timothy, eats the poisoned candy. After Timothy dies, police confiscate the other contaminated Pixy Stix, which O’Bryan claims to have gotten from a neighbor.
O’Bryan is convicted of the murder, which he appears to have planned to collect insurance money, and executed by the state of Texas in 1984.
October 31, 1990: Magician Joseph “Amazing Joe” Burrus, age 32, attempts a Halloween night stunt at Blackbeard’s Family Fun Center in Fresno, California. He’ll attempt to escape from a coffin made of plastic and glass and buried under mud and wet cement. The weight of the cement and mud crushes the coffin, burying Burrus alive. Although he is quickly dug out of the grave, he can’t be revived.
October 31, 1993: 23-year-old actor River Phoenix is pronounced dead at 1:51 a.m. at Cedars Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, California, after collapsing from an overdose of cocaine and morphine.
October 31, 2006: 18-year-old Nicole Catsouras dies immediately upon impact when the Porsche belonging to her parents, which the teenager is driving without permission, strikes a toll booth at over 100 miles per hour.
The accident is terrible enough, but Catsouras’ family suffers further when gruesome crash scene photos taken by the California Highway Patrol are leaked on the Internet, allegedly by people who worked in the 911 call center.
October 31, 2016: Natalie Babbitt, the author of Tuck Everlasting, dies of lung cancer.
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