Erin O'Riordan writes smart, whimsical erotica. Her erotic romance novel trilogy, Pagan Spirits, is now available. With her husband, she also writes crime novels. Visit her home page at ko-fi.com.
Happy Star Wars Day; May the 4th be with you. I come to you today to talk about something remarkably much less pleasant than Star Wars. Namely, a historical fire. But really, I just wanted an excuse to highlight an episode from a podcast that I particularly enjoy.
May 4, 1897: On the second day of a charity bazaar set up by Catholic charitable organizations in Paris, aristocratic women shop in a wooden warehouse set up to look like a Medieval market. Decorations of cardboard, cloth, papier-mache, and wood help achieve this effect. As an extra attraction, an early movie projector called a cinematograph is set up with ether lamps as a light source.
The projection equipment catches fire. With flammable materials all around and little to no signage marking the exits, the largely female crowd is trapped inside. 126 people die; 200 more are injured. Many of the dead were so badly burned that they could only be identified by their clothing, jewelry, or expensive dental work.
Listen to the episode of Jennifer Matarese's Disaster Area podcast:
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If you don't have money--this is quite understandable--the best free way to support Jennifer and her research, writing, and podcasting is to give Disaster Area a 5-star review on any podcast platform that allows reviews. Especially Apple. Giving a podcaster a 5-star review on Apple increases their podcast's visibility to new potential listeners.
Fire at the Bazar de la Charité (Le Petit Journal). Artist: Osvaldo Tofani. This work is in the public domain in its country of origin and other countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 100 years or fewer.
Here in Indianapolis, we have a saying: This is May. By this we mean, it's May, so it's time to obsess over the Indianapolis 500-Mile Race, held every Memorial Day weekend. So I'm going to include some info about the Indy 500. It's not literary. I'm simply an author who lives in Indianapolis.
Trigger warnings: Death, cancer, murder, car accidents, plane crashes, corporal punishment, body horror, mention of Nazi Germany.
ICYMI, this post is the latest in a series highlighting one of my two current books in process, The Almanac of Bad Days (tentative title). Past installments:
May 2, 1981: Antiques dealer Jim Williams shoots 21-year-old Danny Hansford at Williams’s historical home, Mercer House (formerly owned by composer Johnny Mercer), in Savannah, Georgia. The lovers had been in an argument; Williams argued the killing was self-defense. After four trials, Williams was acquitted. The homicide is the basis of John Berendt’s book Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.
May 5, 1994: American Michael Fay, age 18, receives four lashes with a bamboo cane after being convicted of vandalism in Singapore. Fay attended the Singapore American School and lived with his American mother and Singaporean stepfather. This is believed to be the first time an American was sentenced to corporal punishment in another country.
May 7, 1896: Serial killer H.H. Holmes (real name: Herman Webster Mudgett) is executed by hanging at Moyamensing Prison in Philadelphia after his conviction for 27 murders and attempted murder of six other people. His neck does not break when his body is dropped, and it takes over 15 minutes for Holmes to strangle to death.
Erik Larson wrote the nonfiction book Devil in the White City about Holmes. A fictionalized version of Holmes was played by Evan Peters on American Horror Story: Hotel.
May 8, 2012: Children’s book illustrator and author Maurice Sendak dies in the hospital of complications from a stroke.
May 9, 1977: American novelist James Jones dies at age 55 from congestive heart failure.
May 10, 1933: Led by Joseph Goebbels, a crowd of 40,000 Germans gathers at the State Opera building in Berlin to watch the German Student Union burn approximately 25,000 books that they’ve decided are “un-German.”
May 10, 1943: Fire destroys the grounds of the National Library of Peru in Lima, taking it with numerous irreplaceable historical artifacts.
May 12, 2010: Afriqiyah Airways Flight 771 leaves Johannesburg, South Africa, bound for Libya. A series of errors by the flight crew causes the aircraft to crash into low terrain, killing 103 of the aircraft’s 104 occupants. Among the dead is novelist Bree O’Mara, an Irish and South African dual citizen.
The sole survivor is a 9-year-old boy from the Netherlands. Both of his legs are broken, but he sustains no life-threatening injuries. His parents were killed in the crash, so he is adopted by his aunt and uncle.
May 13, 1988: American jazz musician Chet Baker dies of an apparently accidental fall from a window in Amsterdam, Netherlands. If you're like me, you recently heard this story on the "Sunflowers" episode of Ted Lasso.
May 14, 1998: Frank Sinatra dies of a heart attack. He's 82 years old.
May 15, 1886: Poet Emily Dickinson dies of kidney disease at her home in Amherst, Massachusetts. She’s 55 years old. Dickinson has not left the home since 1865.
May 15, 1953: Chester “Chet” Miller dies in a car crash during practice for the 1953 Indianapolis 500. He is 50 years old.
May 16, 1940: During World War II, the library of the Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium, rebuilt after German troops burned it down in the First World War, is shelled by the Nazis. The rebuilt library catches fire again, and approximately one million books and other materials are lost.
May 17, 2012: Singer Donna Summer dies of lung cancer. She's 63 years old.
President (1981-1989 : Reagan). White House Photographic Office. 1981-1989 (Most Recent), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
May 19, 1935: Thomas Edward Lawrence, a.k.a. “Lawrence of Arabia,” dies of his wounds six days after a motorcycle crash. He is 46 years old.
May 21, 1703: Under the reign of Queen Anne, novelist and political pamphleteer Daniel Defoe is sent to prison for seditious libel on the basis of his satirical writings. He’ll spend six months in prison before the Earl of Oxford helps get him released in exchange for Defoe supplying the Earl with intelligence about his political rivals.
May 21, 1956: Léo Valentin attempts a dive using a wing suit at an air show in Liverpool. Among the 100,000-person crowd that day are George Harrison, Paul McCartney, and 3-year-old Clive Barker. Valentin’s wing suit malfunctions after it makes contact with the plane as he jumps. He attempts to land using a backup parachute, but it fails, and he falls to the ground to his death.
May 25, 1895: Oscar Wilde is convicted of "committing acts of gross indecency with other male persons" and taken to Newgate Prison for processing. He is later transferred to Pentonville Prison, where he is sentenced to hard labor, is malnourished, and is only allowed to read either the Bible or The Pilgrim’s Progress.
May 25, 1979: American Airlines Flight 19, bound from Chicago to Los Angeles, loses an engine shortly after takeoff due to improper maintenance. It crashes less than a mile from the end of the runway. All 271 people on board are killed, as are two people on the ground.
Author’s note: My mother’s first cousin, James Zielinski, was one of the passengers killed in this incident.
May 26, 1991: Lauda Air Flight 004, flying from Bangkok to Vienna, breaks apart mid-flight and crashes into a national park in Thailand. All 223 people on board are killed. The bodies of victims who could be recovered were taken to a hospital in Bangkok, where they were stored without refrigeration; as a result of decomposition, 27 victims were never able to be identified.
Lauda Air belonged to Austrian Formula One driver Andreas “Niki” Lauda, who himself had suffered severe burn injuries and almost died in a racing accident on August 1, 1976, at the German Grand Prix.
May 30, 1955: William John Vukovich Sr., who won the 1953 and 1954 Indianapolis 500s, dies in a car crash during the 1955 Indy 500. Vukovich’s car went over a wall, sailed through the air, flipped several times, and struck a low bridge. Vukovich is partially decapitated and dies instantly when his car struck the bridge. His grandson, William Vukovich III, will die during racing practice in 1990. Metal roll bars installed in vehicles and safety-certified driver helmets were mandated starting with the 1956 Indy 500.
May 30, 1958: Pat O’Connor is killed during the last lap of the Indy 500 amidst a 15-car pile-up. O’Connor’s car strikes Jimmy Reece’s car, sails through the air, lands upside-down, and catches fire. His death is due to head trauma from the car’s upside-down landing.
The eve of Beltane is traditionally known in Germany is Walpurgisnacht, the time for the pilgrimage to the tomb of Saint Walpurgis (or Walpurga) in Eichstätt. Walpurgis was born in England, but came to Germany as a missionary. According to legend, the 8th-century Germans were still largely practicing their indigenous Norse religion, but I don’t know how historically accurate this is. Her tomb is said to exude a holy oil that cures sickness, the original reason for pilgrimages to her burial place.
The 8th-century abbess was canonized as a saint by the Catholic Church on the date of the first of May. Her feast day is an excuse for a Halloween-like spring festival that often includes bonfires and/or fireworks and leaving out gift of bread spread with honey and butter for phantom hounds. The bonfires are said to ward off witches, the plague, whooping cough, and rabies. The 30th of April is considered to be a Hexennacht, or witches’ sabbath night.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe wrote about Walpurgisnacht in Faust:
“Now to the Brocken the witches ride;
The stubble is gold and the corn is green;
There is the carnival crew to be seen,
And Squire Urianus will come to preside.” Brocken is the highest peak in the Harz mountain range.
In Bram Stoker’s short story “Dracula’s Guest,” the Englishman visiting Transylvania (not given a name in the short story, but Jonathan Harker in the novel) arrives on Walpurgisnacht. The villagers warn him not to be outside of his hotel after dark.
Other European countries that observe some version of Walpurgisnacht tradition are Czechia, Estonia, Finland, Latvia, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Slovakia, Slovenia, and Sweden. In Europe, the first of May is typically the Labor Day holiday; the U.S. is the oddball for having its Labor Day at the end of the summer.
This is the latest preview of a work in progress tentatively titled Almanac of Bad Days. For the origin of the project, see this post. Past installments:
If you'd rather read something cheerful and literary rather than historical bummers, please visit my Ko-Fi feed.
April 8, 1994, South Bend: On my last real day of spring break, I woke up rather late in the morning, then had some leftover Taco Bell for breakfast. I took Maggie the dog for a walk without incident, which was a shame because I was hoping there would be incident. When I got back I turned on MTV and involuntarily learned that Kurt Cobain had been found dead at his home in Seattle. Very sad, not only that he left behind a wife and a very young daughter but also that Nirvana only had time to record four albums.
April 8, 1997: 49-year-old singer/songwriter Laura Nyro dies of ovarian cancer. Nyro’s mother Gilda Mirsky Nigro had also died of ovarian cancer at the age of 49.
April 10, 1931: Lebanese-American novelist Kahlil Gibran dies at age 48 of cirrhosis and tuberculosis.
April 10, 1962: Stu Sutcliffe, the 21-year-old Scottish musician and original Beatles bass player, dies of a cerebral hemorrhage. This internal injury, a ruptured aneurysm, may have been related to a head injury Sutcliffe suffered in 1961 as a result of a street fight in which John Lennon also suffered minor injuries.
April 10, 2003: When the United States invades the Iraqi capital of Baghdad to depose Saddam Hussein, officials at the Iraqi National Library and Archives fear that its archives of papers related to Hussein and his Ba’athist Party will incriminate them. They hire local people, many of them poor and likely motivated by the money, to loot and set fire to the library. These acts destroy about 60% of the archives and 25% of the library materials, including one of the oldest known copies of the Koran.
April 12, 1204: Christian Crusaders turn on the Christian capital of the Byzantine Empire, Constantinople, in three days of looting and burning. The rampage destroys the Library of Constantinople and other priceless works of art and ancient artifacts.
April 14, 1922: Shortly after she hears a radio program on which Sir Arthur Conan Doyle describes his Spiritualist beliefs, a New Jersey woman named Maude Fancher decides she wants to live in the spirit world with her 2-year-old son Cecil. She kills Cecil, then attempts to kill herself by drinking a bottle of Lysol cleaning solution. Maude Fancher survives.
April 14, 1965: Perry Edward Smith and Dick Hickok are executed by hanging by the state of Kansas for the murders of the Clutter family on November 15, 1959.
April 15, 1888: English poet Matthew Arnold dies. He has suffered a heart attack while chasing after a streetcar.
April 16, 1689: Playwright Aphra Behn dies. She is 48 years old.
April 17, 1998: Linda McCartney dies of breast cancer that has spread to her liver. She’s 56 years old.
April 18, 1906: The Great San Francisco Earthquake strikes Northern California. About 80% of the city is destroyed. The collapse of so many buildings and subsequent fires are responsible for around 3,000 deaths. Fire chief Dennis T. Sullivan was among the victims of the earthquake, so the interim fire chief requested help from the U.S. military. Both psychologist Henry James and writer H.G. Wells (on his first visit to the United States) remarked on the positive attitude and general helpfulness of the survivors in the rebuilding effort.
April 18, 1966: A fire at the Jewish Theological Seminary library in Manhattan destroys 70,000 books. Fortunately, most of these were additional copies of books housed on the ground floor of the library, which was not damaged in the fire. The library’s collection of rare manuscripts is also unharmed.
April 19, 1824: George Gordon, Sixth Lord Byron, dies of malaria while fighting in Greece for Greek independence from the Ottoman Empire. He is 36 years old.
April 21, 1910: Mark Twain dies in Redding, Connecticut, as Jill Badonsky writes in The Awe-manac, “just one day after Halley’s Comet’s perihelion.” The author born Samuel Langhorne Clemens is quoted as having said, “I came in with Halley’s Comet in 1835. It is coming again next year and I expect to go out with it.”
April 21, 1978: English folk-rock singer Sandy (Alexandria) Denny dies at age 31 from head injuries sustained from a fall down some stairs at her home. Denny, who had bipolar disorder, was known to use falls as a form of self-harm and had sustained a previous head injury from another fall down the stairs. Denny was being treated for headaches with a medication known to mix poorly with alcohol, so it’s unclear if Denny’s ultimate fall was an act of self-harm or an accident precipitated by mixing her medication with alcohol.
April 21, 2016: The musician who performs as Prince (Prince Rogers Nelson) is found dead in an elevator inside his home. He has apparently passed away from taking pills of the opioid medication hydrocodone, to which he was addicted, which were counterfeit and laced with fentanyl. He is 57 years old.
April 27, 1932: Poet Hart Crane, age 32, dies by suicide by drowning in the Gulf of Mexico. He jumps off the steam ship on which he’s traveling from Mexico to New York. Crane is believed to be heavily intoxicated when he jumps and had recently been badly beaten when he made advances on a male crew member. His body is never recovered.
April 27, 2000: Broadway actress and dance music singer Vicki Sue Robinson dies of cancer at the age of 45.
April 29, 1986: A fire at the Los Angeles Public Library’s Central Library destroys 400,000 books and other circulating materials.
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.
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.”
arianravan from Arnold, MD, USA, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
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.
Daniel Brühl, Niki Lauda and Peter Morgan at the premiere of Rush in Vienna, Austria. 30.09.2013. Elena Ringo http://www.elena-ringo.com, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
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.
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 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.
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 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.
Lesekreis, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons
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 Gdańsk, 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.
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February 16, 1957: Actor and reading enthusiast LeVar Burton is born in Landstuhl, West Germany. His father Levardis Robert Martyn Burton Sr. was serving as a U.S. Army Signal Corps photographer at the time. Burton’s mother Erma Gene was a teacher and social worker.
These are some of my favorite episodes of the podcast LeVar Burton Reads.
Previous Installment in the "Bummer" Series: Bummer New Year
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 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 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 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. (Ok, this one's not really "literary." I'll allow it.)
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.
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 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, 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.
Now, after all that bad news, if you want to take a little Public Enemies sidebar and learn about the song "Blue Moon," read here.
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