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.
October 11, 1984: Aeroflot Flight 3352 crashes into airport maintenance vehicles while attempting to land at Omsk Airport (now Tsentralny Airport). Poor visibility and an air traffic controller who fell asleep on duty contribute to the crash, which kills 174 people on the plane and four people on the ground. Five people survive.
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October 10, 1901: 23-year-old David Park Barnit, a poet of the Decadent school of poetry, dies suddenly of what newspapers describe as “an enlarged heart.” Some suspect this may be a cover story and that the young poet may have taken his own life.
October 10, 1963: 47-year-old French cabaret singer Édith Piaf dies of liver failure from liver cancer and cirrhosis after years of alcohol and drug addiction.
October 10, 1984: One employee and three customers are killed when a fire breaks out at Ole's Home Center in South Pasadena, California. The youngest victim is two years old. The fire is determined to be arson by investigators who include John Leonard Orr. In 1992, Orr will be convicted of this and several other arson fires in the Los Angeles area.
The series Smoke was wild because it was a fictionalized version of Joseph Wambaugh's book about John Orr with the serial numbers filed off. But it had Jurnee Smollett and I loved her as a child in the movie Eve's Bayou and then again when she popped up on True Blood.
Beatles Trivia: October 9, 1940: John Winston Lennon is born in Liverpool, England, U.K. at Liverpool Maternity Hospital.
October 9, 1971: On her husband’s 31st birthday, Yoko Ono Lennon’s solo art exhibition This Is Not Here opens in New York City. Among the guests who attend opening night is Allen Ginsberg.
Bummer October 9th
October 9, 1740: More than 10,000 civilians of Chinese ethnicity are murdered by the Dutch East Indies Company and its Javanese collaborators in what was then called the city of Batavia (now Jakarta, Indonesia). The massacre was a retaliation for a revolt of Chinese sugar mill workers who burned mills and killed 50 Dutch soldiers.
On the 9th of October, Dutch troops entered a Chinese neighborhood and began burning houses. Some people died in their burning houses; others were shot as they fled the fire. If they reached the Besar River, they were shot down by Dutch troops waiting on boats. The killing continued until October 22nd.
October 9, 1816: Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley's half sister, Fanny Imlay, dies by suicide via an overdose of laudanam.
October 9, 1967: Baylor University student John Clifton dies of cardiac arrest after drinking a mixture of laxatives and garlic while running in place as part of a Baylor Chamber of Commerce hazing ritual. Clifton aspirates the mixture, has difficulty breathing, and collapses. He has a hemorrhage in his lungs before his heart stops.
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October 8, 1871: The Great Chicago Fire begins; over the next two days it kills approximately 300 people and destroys most of the city, which consists of mostly wooden buildings.
October 8, 2009: Motivational speaker James Arthur Ray hosts a meditation retreat near Sedona, Arizona. The retreat is held inside a purpose-built “sweat lodge” (although not built according to any traditional Native American practices) with approximately 50 participants. The temperature inside the lodge soon becomes dangerously high. Two men faint from heat exhaustion and are carried outside, where they both pass away from heat stroke. Others have to be treated at the hospital, and on October 17th, a 49-year-old woman who participated in the retreat also dies of heat-related injuries. Ray is subsequently convicted of negligent homicide.
October 8, 2014: Thomas Eric Duncan dies, becoming the first person in the U.S. to die of infection with the Ebola virus. Duncan was from Monrovia, Liberia, where he rode in a taxi with his landlords’ daughter, who subsequently died of Ebola virus disease. Four days later, Duncan visits his girlfriend in Dallas.
On the fourth day of his visit, Duncan arrives at the emergency department of Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital. He is misdiagnosed with a sinus infection, given antibiotics, and sent home. By the time he returns to the hospital, Duncan’s condition is critical. He dies in the intensive care unit.
Two of Duncan’s nurses contract the virus through caring for him. Both of them recover. They are the first two people known to have contracted Ebola virus disease inside the U.S.
October 7, 1849: In Baltimore, Edgar Allan Poe dies.
October 7, 1914: Julian Carlton, having murdered seven people and drunk hydrochloric acid in an attempt to commit suicide, starves to death due to the injures to his esophagus caused by the acid. He has been receiving medical attention the whole time he is in police custody.
October 7, 1957: Santa Barbara College student Max Caulk drowns during a Delta Tau Delta fraternity hazing ritual in which his fraternity brothers threw him off a pier.
October 7, 1992: The last fluent speaker of the Ubykh language, Tevfik Esenç, dies at the age of 88. The Ubykh people are a subset of the Circassian people, who were the victims of ethnic cleansing by the Russians in the 18th and 19th centuries.
What was Diane Meyer grateful for on October 7, 2024?
smoked salmon and dipping bagels in cream cheese bought a new antique fork that says bloom! growth mindset looking forward to the future sand long walks cold air country roads long books plum muffin barbecue ribs! risotto! green beans! girls loving themselves! -- working on it always roasted vegetables
October 6, 2017: Travis Maldonado, an employee of Greater Wynewood Exotic Animal Park run by Joe Exotic (Joseph Schreibvogel, who became well-known through the Netflix documentary Tiger King) is known to point guns at other employees of the park. According to Maldonado, the gun is a Luger, which will not fire without a magazine. To prove this point to one of Joe Exotic’s associates, Maldonado places the gun to his head and pulls the trigger. Despite not having a magazine in it, the gun does fire, killing Maldonado. Maldonado is 23 years old.
Photo (c)2007 Derek and Julie Ramsey (Ram-Man) edit by Chris_huh., Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
October 6, 2018: Seventeen people board a limousine, headed for a birthday celebration at a brewery near Cooperstown, New York State. Unknown to the passengers, the limo driver should have had his license suspended but hasn’t due to a clerical error. The limo itself had been observed by patrons who’d previously rented it to be in a state of disrepair, with an unusually loud engine.
The limousine, speeding, failed to make a stop at an intersection with a stop sign. It continued on into a parking lot, where it struck a parked car, struck two pedestrians, and came to rest in a gully. The driver, all 17 passengers, and the two pedestrians were killed.
October 5, 1995: 50-year-old voice actor Linda Gary, who provided an impressive number of cartoon characters with their voices in American animation of the ‘70s and ‘80s, dies of brain cancer.
October 5, 2001: Robert Stevens, a photographer for the tabloid newspaper Sun in Boca Raton, Florida, dies of pulmonary anthrax. His death is the first in a series of anthrax terror attacks that killed Stevens and four other people and sickened 17 others.
Microbiologist Bruce Ivins is the lead suspect in the FBI investigation into the anthrax attacks. He dies by suicide before he can be arrested and charged.
October 5, 2003: Environmentalists Timothy Treadwell (nicknamed “Grizzly Man”) and Amie Huguenard are attacked, killed, and partially eaten by a brown bear while camping and setting up film equipment in Katmai National Park, Alaska.
Their video camera, apparently with the lens cap on (or otherwise unable to capture any light), recorded six minutes of audio of the attack. Film director Werner Herzog, who made the documentary Grizzly Man about the attack, listened to the audio, but deemed it too horrifying to use in the documentary.
