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.
September 13, 1848: 25-year-old railroad worker Phineas Gage has a bad day at work when the 3-foot-long tamping iron his crew is using strikes a rock, sparking an explosion that drives the rod through his left eye and into his skull. Gage not only survives the accident but lives 12 more years, although with his personality drastically altered, due to the loss of part of the left frontal lobe of his brain.
September 13, 1931: Stout Institute (Menomonie, Wisconsin) first-year student Lloyd Aune dies of spinal cord injuries after wrestling with two second-year students.
September 13, 1982: Princess Grace of Monaco drives her car off a steep, mountainous road after suffering a cerebral hemorrhage while driving. She is taken to the hospital, where she is placed on life support.
September 13, 1996: Rapper and actor Tupac Shakur dies from gunshot wounds in Las Vegas.
September 12, 1912: University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill student William Rand dies during a class hazing ritual. Forced to sing and dance on top of a wooden barrel, Rand either falls off the barrel or has it kicked out from under him. A broken bottle pierces his neck and he bleeds to death before help can arrive.
September 12, 1977: Poet Robert Lowell dies of a heart attack in a taxi cab on his way to see his ex-wife, writer and literary critic Elizabeth Hardwick.
September 12, 1992: Actor Anthony Perkins, age 60, dies of AIDS-related pneumonia at his home in Los Angeles.
September 12, 1994: Truck driver Frank Eugene Corder flies a stolen Cessna 150 aircraft onto the lawn of the White House, crashing the plane and dying in the attempt. No one else is injured. Corder’s motivation may have simply been publicity.
Shamley Productions, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Artist Birthday: Taraji P. Henson (don't go in the Taraji tag unless you're willing to read spoilers for the Person of Interest tv series!)
Bummer September 11th
September 11, 1943: Aviation enthusiast and one of the heirs to the DuPont chemical fortune Richard Chichester du Pont dies at the age of 32 while attempting to parachute from an experimental glider. He dies when his parachute fails.
September 11, 1963: 15-year-old Michael Murphy is killed in a hazing ritual performed by members of the Charleston (West Virginia) High School marching band. Band members repeatedly strike Murphy in the abdomen, trying to give him a “pink belly.”
September 11, 1987: Reggae artist Peter Tosh and two friends are shot and killed when Tosh’s home is invaded by a street gang demanding money.
September 11, 2001: The World Trade Center, Pentagon, and a third target (possibly intended to be the White House) are attacked by commercial jets hijacked by terrorists. Three planes hit their targets, destroying both towers of the World Trade Center and significantly damaging the Pentagon building. The fourth plane is retaken by passengers and crashes into a field in Pennsylvania at over 500 mph. Nearly 3,000 people are killed, including all of the passengers aboard all four planes.
More than 3,000 workers who responded to the tragedy and helped in the cleanup and recovery effort have subsequently died of health issues directly stemming from breathing toxic air during that effort. The Donald Trump-Elon Musk "DOGE" scam cut funding to their health care fund.
As soon as Trump leaves office, he needs to be indicted for enriching himself and his scummy family at the expense of the best, bravest, and most innocent Americans. And, as a reminder, George W. Bush is still a war criminal responsible for the deaths of over 1 million people in Iraq. Don't let the media woobify him just because he's elderly now.
September 11, 2014: A 65-year-old Thai women visits Samut Prakan Crocodile Farm in Bangkok. She takes off her shoes, neatly sets them aside, then intentionally jumps into the crocodile enclosure. She is killed by several adult crocodiles, an apparent suicide. The woman is known to have had depression.
Sept. 11, 2015: Muslims are preparing for the Hajj pilgrimage at Masjid al-Haram, the Great Mosque of Mecca, when a construction crane collapses. A combination of high winds from a sand storm and human error contribute to the disaster, which injures almost 400 and kills 111.
September 11, 2018: 55-year-old hiker Diane Bober is killed by a mountain lion at Mount Hood National Forest in Oregon.
September 10, 1509: An earthquake and tsunami centered near what was then Constantinople (now Istanbul, Turkey) kill an estimated 10,000 people.
September 10, 1920: 25-year-old silent film actress Olive Thomas dies of kidney failure five days after ingesting her husband’s topical syphilis treatment, which is not intended to be taken orally. The exact circumstances of her death are unknown, but it has been speculated that Thomas couldn’t sleep, went into the hotel bathroom to take a sleeping pill, and accidentally mistook the mercury-containing medicine for the sleep pills.
September 10, 1935: U.S. Senator and demagogue Huey Long dies of internal bleeding while recovering from emergency abdominal surgery after being shot by the son-in-law of a political rival. The shooting occurred at the Louisiana state capitol building on September 8th.
September 10, 1971: Sardinian-American actress Pier Angeli dies of an apparently accidental barbiturate overdose. She is 39.
Dell Publishing Company, Inc. Modern Screen, Pages 1056, Issue 1957., Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
September 10, 1977: Murderer Hamida Djandoubi is executed by guillotine at Baumettes Prison in Marseille, France. He is the last person in the Western industrialized world to have been lawfully executed by beheading. France outlaws the death penalty in 1981.
September 10, 1985: Tokyo’s Sankai Juku Dance Company performs The Dance of Birth and Death while harnessed to ropes on the side of the Mutual Life insurance building in Pioneer Square in Seattle. 31-year-old dancer Yoshiuki Takada falls five stories to his death when his rope breaks.
Beatles Trivia September 9, 1971: John Lennon releases the single “Imagine” in the U.S.
Author Julie S. Howlin post of the day: Luigi Galvani
Bummer September 9th
September 9, 1898: French poet and literary critic Stéphane Mallarmé dies suddenly while suffering from what had been a relatively mild case of tonsillitis. While being examined by his doctor, Mallarmé has a coughing fit so severe he dies of asphyxia. He is 56 years old.
September 9, 1901: Impressionist painter Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec dies at age 36 from complications of alcoholism and syphilis. Toulouse-Lautrec was born with several congenital conditions and walked with a cane, which was said to be hollow and filled with liquor at all times. One of his favorite drinks was a combination of cognac and absinthe known as an Earthquake Cocktail.
September 9, 1949: Canadian Pacific Air Lines Flight 108 blows up mid-flight from Montreal to Baie-Comeau due to a dynamite time bomb. All 19 passengers and four members of the flight crew are killed.
The culprits are three individuals who hope to collect life insurance on their relatives aboard the plane. The female conspirator, Marguerite Pitre, is the last woman to be executed in Canada before Canada abolishes the death penalty.
September 9, 1971: The Attica (New York state) prison uprising begins when inmates demand better living conditions. The 5-day standoff will result in the deaths of 33 prisoners and 10 prison guards.
September 9, 1990: The Sri Lankan army massacres Tamil civilians, including infants, in three villages in the Batticaloa District. The victims are rounded up, then attacked with swords, knives, and burning tires. A single survivor, 21-year-old Kanthasamy Krishnakumar, is wounded but manages to escape. No action has even been taken against the perpetrators.
September 9, 2002: University of California Los Angeles student Kenitha Saafir, who couldn’t swim, is ordered to swim by members of the Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority as part of a hazing ritual. When Saafir appears to be in distress, Kristin High jumps into the water to try to save her. Both women drown.
September 8, 1965: Cleveland-born actress/dancer Dorothy Dandridge, the first Black woman to be nominated for a Best Actress Oscar, dies at the age of 42, either from an accidental overdose of the tricyclic antidepressant imipramine or a fat embolism that broke free and entered her bloodstream due to a fractured bone in her foot, an injury she’d sustained in a fall a few days before.
September 8, 1985: Cuban-American ecofeminist installation artist Ana Mendieta falls from the window of her apartment on the 34th floor of a building in Greenwich Village. Mendieta’s husband, sculptor Carl Andre, insists that her death was accident. Andre was acquitted of any legal responsibility in Mendieta’s death, but witnesses heard them arguing just prior to her fall from the window, and Andre had scratches on his face. Andre’s exhibitions are frequently protested by Mendieta’s fellow feminist artists.
September 8, 2016: 59-year-old performer The Lady Chablis, who’s featured prominently in Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil by John Berendt and played herself in the 1997 film based on it, dies of pneumonia at Candler Hospital in Savannah, Georgia.
September 8, 2017: Kenneka Jenkins, age 19, attends a party at the Crowne Plaza Chicago O'Hare hotel. The next day her body is found inside a latched freezer belonging to the hotel’s kitchen; she appears to have frozen to death after entering the freezer for an unknown reason.
Footage from the hotel’s cameras show her wandering the halls with a small injury on one foot. Authorities speculate her unusual behavior may have resulted from the combination of alcohol and a migraine medication, possibly not prescribed to Jenkins (sources vary), found in her system; this combination may have also hastened the effects of hypothermia.
September 7, 1936: The last-known Thylacinus cynocephalus, the Tasmanian tiger or thylacine, dies in a zoo in Tasmania.
September 7, 2010: Actor Glenn Shadix, known for playing Otho in Tim Burton’s film Beetlejuice and providing the voice of the Mayor of Halloween Town in The Nightmare Before Christmas, uses a wheelchair while recovering from surgery to repair a broken ankle. While using the chair in the kitchen of his condominium, Shadix suffers a fall, strikes his head, and dies at age 58 from blunt force trauma.
September 7, 2018: Rapper Mac Miller, aged 26, dies of an overdose of alcohol, cocaine, and fentanyl.
