This is a repost of some previous Pagan Spirits book blog content. It combines the original Bummer February post with the update.
February 1, 1891: Newspaper publisher Ignacio Martínez is assassinated by two men in Laredo, Texas, because they disagree with his newspaper’s criticism of Mexican president Porfirio Díaz.
February 2, 2014: Actor Philip Seymour Hoffman, who played Truman Capote in Capote, dies of an apparently accidental overdose of prescription medicine and heroin.
February 2, 2022: A pastor in Nashville, Tennessee, holds a burning of books he deems “demonic.” According to his loosely-organized, conspiratorial beliefs, a book counted as “demonic” if it was “anything tied to the Masonic Lodge.” It’s unclear whether these actions were influenced more by religious fanaticism or by mental illness.
February 3, 1959: “The Day the Music Died,” when early rock and roll musicians Buddy Holly, Richie Valens, and J.P. “The Big Bopper” Richardson were all killed in a plane crash outside Clear Lake, Iowa. The musicians had performed at Clear Lake’s Surf Ballroom and were on their way to their next show in Minnesota. This accident is remembered in poetic form through the Don McLean song “American Pie,” recorded on May 26, 1971.
February 6, 1998: Austrian “Rock Me Amadeus” rocker Falco (Johann Hölzel) dies in a traffic accident while on vacation in the Dominican Republic. He is 40 years old.
February 7, 1497: On Shrove Tuesday in Florence, followers of the monk Girolamo Savonarola burn art, books, their cosmetics, fancy clothes, playing cards, and other cultural objects they associate with sin in the so-called Bonfire of the Vanities. Sadly, irreplaceable ancient art and manuscripts were lost to this religiously-fueled war on anything that represented luxury.
Ironically, Savonarola will later be excommunicated and convicted of heresy by the Roman Catholic Church. As punishment, he is hanged and his body burned in the same plaza where the Bonfire of the Vanities occurred. It will be forbidden for any Christian to possess copies of Savonarola’s writings.
February 9, 1963: In a racially-charged incident captured in song by Bob Dylan, 51-year-old Hattie Carroll is working as a bar server at the Emerson Hotel in Baltimore. The hotel is hosting an event called the Spinster’s Ball. One of the guests, Billy Zantzinger, who is white, is excessively drunk and physically and verbally abusing both his wife Jane and the African-American wait staff at the event.
Zantziger hurls racial slurs and other verbal abuse at Carroll, then strikes her in the neck/upper shoulder region with his cane. Carroll immediate begins feeling numbness in her arm, and her co-workers notice her speech is slurred. She’s taken to the hospital, where Carroll dies of a brain hemorrhage. Zantziger is convicted of manslaughter for Carroll’s death, but his sentence is a paltry six months in prison and a $500 fine, plus a fine of $125 for assaulting the other wait staff.
February 10, 2005: Playwright Arthur Miller dies of bladder cancer.
February 11, 1963: Poet Sylvia Plath, who struggles with clinical depression, dies by suicide, inhaling gas by placing her head inside an unlit gas stove. She is 30 years old.
February 11, 2012: 48-year-old singer/actress Whitney Houston is found unresponsive in the bathtub of her room at the Beverly Hilton hotel. Paramedics attempted CPR but are unable to revive her. The Los Angeles County Coroner’s Office attributes her death to atherosclerotic heart disease, cocaine use, and drowning.
February 12, 1980: Two days after 34-year-old Patricia Frazier of Texas saw a CBS network TV broadcast of the movie The Exorcist, Frazier kills her 4-year-old daughter Khunji and cuts out her heart. According to Dr. Leon Morris, a psychologist who spoke with Frazier after the crime, Frazier believed Khunji was possessed by demons and trying to harm her (Patricia). A jury of her peers finds Patricia Frazier not guilty by reason of insanity.
February 13, 1945: U.S. and U.K. forces drop incendiary bombs on Dresden, Germany, causing fires with the intention of destroying munitions factories in that city. A second round of bombs are dropped in the early hours of February 14th, calculated to hamper the efforts of rescuers on the scene of the first round of bombings and fires. It’s estimated that between 22,000 and 25,000 Germans are killed, almost all of them civilians.
Author Kurt Vonnegut Jr. is there as an American prisoner of war being held by the German army. The experience forms the basis of his science fiction novel Slaughterhouse-Five.
February 14, 1929: In what becomes known as the Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre, Al Capone’s gangsters line up seven members of Bugs Moran’s rival gang and machine gun them to death. Police arrive in time to find one survivor, Frank Gusenberg, suffering from 14 bullet wounds. They ask Gusenberg to name his killer, but Gusenberg refuses before he succumbs to his injuries.
February 14, 1989: Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, issues a pronouncement urging faithful Muslims to assassinate Salman Rushdie. Rushdie’s magical realist novel The Satanic Verses depicts a fictional version of the Prophet Mohammad as a character, which the Ayatollah considers blasphemous.
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February 15, 1998: 89-year-old war correspondent Martha Gellhorn, struggling with ovarian and liver cancer and failing eyesight, chooses to end her own life by swallowing cyanide.
February 17, 1673: French playwright Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, who wrote under the pen name Molière, suffers a tuberculosis-induced pulmonary embolism while performing in his own play The Invalid. He finished out the show, but was carried immediately home afterward, where he died.
February 18, 1718: French-born English writer Peter Anthony Motteux dies of apparent autoerotic asphyxiation inside a brothel, although the circumstances of his death were considered suspicious at the time. This may be the oldest recorded case of autoerotic asphyxiation.
February 19, 2013: The body of Canadian student and tourist Elisa Lam is discovered in the water tower atop the Stay on Main hotel in Los Angeles, California. Lam is believed to have entered the tank of her own volition and accidentally drowned, possibly while experiencing the effects of withdrawal from her psychiatric medications.
February 24, 1809: London’s Drury Lane Theatre burns down. No one is injured, but the loss of the building is a financial disaster for its owner, Richard Brinsley Sheridan.
February 25, 1983: Playwright Tennessee Williams dies of an apparently accidental overdose of the barbiturate medication Seconal.
February 26, 2015: Australian author Jessica Ainscough, age 29, dies of a rare cancer, epithelioid sarcoma. In 2008, her doctors suggested amputating her affected left arm at the shoulder, which would have given her a greater than 50% chance of surviving for ten years or more. Ainscough chose to treat her cancer with alternative therapies rather than having the amputation. She used the alternative treatments for six years, only returning to conventional medical treatments near the end of her life when she developed a tumor that bled continuously for ten months.
February 28, 1909: Actor Irene Muza (a stage name) dies when her hairdresser accidentally sets her on fire. According to a Perth, Australia, newspaper account published March 30, 1909, “Before taking part in a charitable performance on Tuesday she sent for her hairdresser to come and dress her hair. The hairdresser had applied a petrol lotion, when a few drops of it fell upon the kitchen stove. The stuff, ignited in an instant, and the flames caught the actress's hair and her dressing-gown and the clothing of the hairdresser. [...] In a moment she was a mass of flame. A friend who was in an adjoining room tried to save her by tearing away the burning gown, but before this could be accomplished she had sustained terrible injuries. She was conveyed to the hospital, where she expired. Her hairdresser, who was also badly injured, lies in a precarious condition.”
February 28, 1916: The Turn of the Screw author Henry James dies of pneumonia.
February 29, 1960: Melvin Purvis II, the FBI agent who shot and killed John Dillinger (and who was played by Christian Bale in Public Enemies), dies by suicide.
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