Bummer March

This is a repost of some previous Pagan Spirits book blog content. It combines the original Bummer March post with the update.

March 2, 1978: Two thieves steal the coffin containing the body of actor Charlie Chaplin, which was interred in Corsier-sur-Vevey, Switzerland. They hope to gain $600,000 in ransom, but Chaplin’s widow Oona (the daughter of American playwright Eugene O’Neill) refused to pay. The two men, auto mechanisms from Poland and Bulgaria, were instead forced to show police the corn field in which they’d reburied the coffin. Chaplin’s family took the precaution of burying the coffin in concrete when it was returned to the cemetery. The English actor had died at age 88 on December 25, 1977.

March 2, 1982: Science fiction author Philip K. Dick is taken off life support. He has suffered two strokes, with brain death following the second stroke. 

Before My Ken, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

March 5, 1963: Musicians Patsy Cline, Cowboy Copas, and Hawkshaw Hawkins perish when their Piper PA-24 Comanche aircraft crashes in a forest in Tennessee during stormy weather. The pilot is also killed. Cline’s epitaph reads, “Death Cannot Kill What Never Dies: Love.”

March 5, 1977: In an unfortunate accident at the South African Grand Prix, English driver Tom Pryce struck and killed 19-year-old race marshall Frederik "Frikkie" Jansen van Vuuren, whom he couldn’t have seen in time. Jansen van Vuuren had run across the track with a fire extinguisher to rescue Italian driver Renzo Zorzi. Zorzi was trapped in his burning car while trying to remove the oxygen pipe from his helmet. 

The 40-pound fire extinguisher struck Pryce’s car and came through his windshield, striking Pryce in the head, forcing his helmet upward at a sharp angle, causing severe head and neck injuries that killed him instantly. Pryce’s car struck Jacques-Henri Laffite’s car and both vehicles struck the barrier and came to a stop.

Zorzi was not injured. The eventual winner of the 1977 South African Grand Prix was Austrian driver Niki Lauda, who had almost burned to death in the 1976 German Grand Prix. 

March 5, 1982: Albanian-American comedian John Belushi dies of a drug overdose.

March 8, 1941: American author Sherwood Anderson dies of peritonitis in Colón, Panama. He and his wife Eleanor, who were frequent travelers, had been taking a cruise to South America when Anderson began having abdominal discomfort. An autopsy revealed internal injuries caused by swallowing a toothpick.

March 8, 1989: Iran breaks diplomatic ties with the U.K. since the U.K. will not denounce Salman Rushdie for writing The Satanic Verses.

Portrait of Sherwood Anderson by Carl Van Vechten, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

March 10, 1948: Zelda Fitzgerald, by then the widow of novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald, has checked herself into Highland Hospital in what is now Montford Area Historic District in Asheville, North Carolina for treatment of her severe depression. She is awaiting an electroconvulsive therapy treatment in a locked room when a fire breaks out in the hospital kitchen. With no way to escape the locked room, she is killed by the fire.

March 11, 1918: Private Albert Gitchell, stationed in the U.S. Army at Fort Riley, Kansas, is discovered to have the first-recorded case of influenza in what becomes the influenza pandemic of 1918. An estimated 50 million to 100 million people die of influenza during the pandemic worldwide.

In the Disaster Area Podcast episode on the Bazar de la Charite fire of May 4, 1897 in Paris, Jennifer Matarese loosely outlines how that tragic fire that killed 126 people indirectly related to the events that started World War I and the 1918-1920 influenza pandemic. To wit:

- The fire kills Sophie Charlotte of Bavaria, Duchess of Alençon.

- Sophie's sister, Empress Elisabeth of Austria, is inconsolable at the death of her favorite sister. Empress Elisabeth was already having a pretty rough time.

- Elisabeth's only son (of her four children), Crown Prince Rudolph, had died in an apparent murder-suicide, killing his mistress Baroness Mary Vetsera and himself, in 1889. Crown Prince Rudolph, who was to inherit the throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, dies without leaving a legitimate male heir.

- In 1898, Empress Elisabeth is assassinated in Geneva by an Italian anarchist, who stabs her with a thin needle-file as she walks between her hotel and a steamship.

- When Empress Elisabeth is assassinated with no son or male grandson to inherit the throne, rule of the Austro-Hungarian Empire passes to Elisabeth's husband's brother, Archduke Karl Ludwig.

- Archduke Karl Ludwig of Austria dies of natural causes (typhoid) in 1896, passing the throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire to his heir, Archduke Franz Ferdinand.

- Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie are assassinated by a Serbian anarchist on June 28, 1914, leading directly to the Great War when Austria-Hungary declares war on Serbia.

- Fort Riley is one of the major training grounds for the American Expeditionary Forces who will fight in the Western Front of the Great War. As American troops are moved into Europe, they are among those who spread the H1N1 influenza A virus. 

- The virus kills an estimated 25 million to 50 million people worldwide between 1918 and 1920, with some estimates going as high as 100 million people.

March 12, 2015: Author Terry Pratchett dies of Alzheimer’s disease. 

March 15, 1937: H.P. Lovecraft dies of cancer of the small intestine at age 46.

H.P. Lovecraft. Amateur Publishing Association, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

March 16, 2009: Nicholas Hughes, the 46-year-old son of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, dies by suicide. According to his sister Frieda, Hughes struggled with depression. Frieda was two years old and Nicholas one year old when their mother died by suicide. 

March 20, 1964: Poet, novelist, and folk hero Brendan Behan, considered one of the all-time greatest Irish literary talents, dies at the age of 41 after collapsing into a diabetic coma in the street.

Brendan Behan drinking. Eeipmde, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

March 22, 1950: Convicted child sexual predator Frank La Salle is arrested for the kidnapping of Florence Sally Horner, whom he has abducted from her home in New Jersey 21 months earlier. Horner is ten years old at the time of the kidnapping. La Salle is sentenced to 30 to 35 years in prison.

Although he denied it during his lifetime, Vladimir Nabokov almost certainly based some of his narrative in his book Lolita on Horner’s story. In her 2018 book The Real Lolita, Sarah Weinman describes how literary scholars know this.

March 23, 1969: Assia Wevill, an advertising copywriter and poetry translator who escaped the Nazis as a young woman, drinks a glass of water laced with sleeping pills, drinks a glass of whisky, and turns on the gas in her apartment. She lies down on a mattress with her 4-year-old daughter Alexandria (nicknamed Shura) and they both die of asphyxiation. Shura’s father was English poet Ted Hughes, the widower of Sylvia Plath. Hughes and Wevill (married to a Canadian poet) allegedly began their affair before Plath’s suicide. 

March 26, 1664: Samuel Pepys celebrates his Stone Feast, commemorating the day he had a kidney stone removed by the horrific, pre-anesthesia 17th century surgical method. He writes in his famous diary:

“This being my solemn feast for my cutting of the stone, it being now, blessed be God! this day six years since the time; and I bless God I do in all respects find myself free from that disease or any signs of it, more than that upon the least cold I continue to have pain in making water, by gathering of wind and growing costive, till which be removed I am at no ease, but without that I am very well.”

March 27, 2004: Richard Lancelyn Green, a noted scholar of Sherlock Holmes and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, is found dead in his home at the age of 50. His sister, who worries when he doesn’t answer his phone, finds him face-down on this bed, garotted with a shoelace tightened with a wooden spoon. In his last days, Green has been observed acting erratically and complaining that an unnamed American was following him and that his apartment was bugged. Green’s paranoia seemed to stem from his actions in trying to stop an auction of Doyle’s papers, which Green believed were part of a collection Doyle’s daughter had intended to be donated to the British Museum rather than auctioned to the public. It remains unclear whether Green was murdered or staged his suicide to seem like a murder, as a character had done in the Sherlock Holmes story “The Problem of Thor Bridge.”

March 28, 1941: Virginia Woolf, knowing that another bout of severe mental illness is coming on, fills her pockets with stones and drowns herself in the River Ouse. She is 59 years old. Most likely, her illness was bipolar disorder. 

March 29, 1911: The New York State Library, located inside the State Capitol building in Albany at the time, is badly damaged in a fire at the Capitol building. The fire destroys an estimated 450,000 books and 270,000 manuscripts, including many historical documents relating to early Dutch settlers in New York state.

March 31, 1855: Charlotte Brontë and her unborn child die, most likely due to hyperemesis gravidarum. In modern times, their lives could have been saved by something as simple as an IV injection of fluids and electrolytes.

March 31, 1931: While flying to participate in a movie called The Spirit of Notre Dame, University of Notre Dame head football coach Knute Rockne is killed when his Transcontinental & Western Air airliner crashes near Bazaar, Kansas. Seven other people are killed in the crash. Rockne is 43 years old.

March 31, 1995: Singer/fashion designer Selena (in full, Selena Quintanilla Pérez) is murdered by her hanger-on Yolanda Saldívar when it appears Selena is about to confront Saldívar about financial misdeeds. At a Days Inn motel in Corpus Christi, Texas, Saldívar shoots Pérez once in the right shoulder as Pérez walks away. Pérez is rushed into emergency surgery but is pronounced dead on the operating table.

March 31, 2019: Roman Catholic priests in Gdansk, Poland, perform a “spring cleaning” that includes burning books and other objects they consider “harmful to our faithful.” These include Harry Potter books, books from the Twilight series, an African-style face mask, and a Hello Kitty umbrella. Exactly how Hello Kitty was thought to be attacking the Catholic faith is unclear.