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.
November 6, 1816: Gouverneur Morris, who signed the Declaration of Independence, dies at the age of 64. Morris had attempted to treat a urinary blockage using a whale bone. He caused himself internal injuries, which became infected, causing his death.
November 6, 1986: On approach to an airport in the Shetland Islands, a Boeing-Vertol Model 234LR Chinook helicopter loaded with workers returning from the Brent oilfield has its transmission fail, causing its two rotor blades to collide. The helicopter nose-dived into the sea and crashed. Of the three crew members and 44 passengers on board, only one crew member and one passenger survived.
November 5, 1605: Guy Fawkes attempts to blow up the English Parliament, an act known as the Gunpowder Plot. The plot is foiled, Guy Fawkes is convicted and hanged, and burning an effigy of Fawkes becomes an English tradition.
November 5, 1976: St. John’s College student Thomas Fitzgerald dies from a chest wound he sustains when members of the Pershing Rifles military honors society, intimidating him with a bayonet as part of an initiation ritual, accidentally pierce his chest.
November 5, 1983: Four British and two Norwegian divers are working on the semi-submersible oil drilling rig the Byford Dolphin in the North Sea. The party consisted of four divers and two dive tenders. All four divers were inside a diving chamber, connected by a short passage to a diving bell. The chamber and the diving bell were separated by a clamp, a safety precaution needed for the divers to safely move from one to the other.
For some reason, one of the dive tenders opens the clamp prematurely, causing an explosive decompression in the chamber. All of the air rushes forcefully out of the chamber at tremendous pressure. The tender who opened the clamp and all four divers are killed instantly. The body of one of the divers is forced through a 24-inch opening. The other dive tender is severely injured, but survives.
November 5, 2021: Ten people die in a crowd crush at musician Travis Scott’s Astroworld event in Houston, Texas. An additional 25 people are hospitalized for injuries.
November 5, 2025: Former U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney dies of pneumonia. Just kidding! That's not a bummer; he was a horrible human being.
November 4, 1918: One week before the Armistice that will end the war, the poet Wilfred Owens is killed in the First World War.
November 4, 1982: The family of Dominique Dunne takes 22-year-old Dominique off life support after medical tests reveal that she has no brain activity. The young actress has been in this state since she was attacked and strangled by her estranged boyfriend on October 30th. Her killer was convicted of manslaughter rather than murder and sentenced to only six years in prison. Dunne’s parents, Dominick and Lenny Dunne, became advocates for crime victims after the outrage of their daughter’s killer’s light sentence.
November 4, 2001: University of Miami (Coral Gables, Florida) student Chad Meredith drowns after consuming alcohol and then being told to swim by members of the Kappa Sigma fraternity as part of a hazing ritual. Meredith’s family sues Kappa Sigma and is awarded $12,600,000.
November 4, 2004: Working at a hospital in Minnesota, 31-year-old Tracy Kraling enters a walk-in washer, a room where large equipment can be sterilized with jets of hot water. Kraling becomes trapped in the washer, which then scalds her with water at 180 degrees Fahrenheit. She dies in hospital of her burn injuries the following day. Her employer is later found liable for multiple OSHA violations.
November 4, 2012: A 2-year-old visits the Pittsburgh Zoo with his 34-year-old mother. The mother holds the boy up on a railing to view Lycaon pictus, the African wild dog or African painted dog. The child loses his balance and falls 11 feet into the animal enclosure, where he is attacked by the pack of wild dogs and killed.
African wild dog photographed by Mathias Appel. Public domain
November 3, 1793: Playwright and early feminist Olympe de Gouges is executed by guillotine by the French Revolution’s Revolutionary Tribunal. Although convicted of “seditious behavior” and attempting to reinstate the monarchy, of which de Gouges is not guilty, her real “crime” is criticizing the Revolution and wondering in writing if it had gone too far.
November 3, 1900: 12-year-old Porter Military Academy of Charleston, South Carolina, student Thomas Finley Brown dies of internal injuries after his classmates haze him by blindfolding him and dropping him 12 feet into a mostly-empty swimming pool.
November 3, 1973: Engine failure aboard National Airlines Flight 27 between Miami and San Francisco damages the other two engines, the right wing, and the fuselage, causing the plane to lose a window. A passenger sitting near the missing window was fatally sucked out of the plane through the window opening. Some sources report that only the man’s tobacco pipe and sunglasses were ever found; one source reports that the man’s arm was discovered two years after the incident. The flight makes an emergency landing in Albuquerque; 24 passengers are injured.
Beatles Trivia: November 2, 1994, South Bend: In our continuing exploration of the Beatles in Media, I learned that “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” is not about LSD at all, but rather about a drawing that Julian Lennon drew when he was quite small.
Fair use.
Bummer November 2nd
November 2, 1973: John Lennon releases his fourth solo album,Mind Games, and Ringo Starr releases (in the U.S.) his third solo album,Ringo.Ringo features songs written with John Lennon, Paul McCartney, and George Harrison. Studio musicians onRingoinclude Marc Bolan and Billy Preston.
November 2, 1987: George Harrison releases his final album, Cloud Nine.
November 2, 1920: On the day of the U.S. presidential election between Warren G. Harding and James Cox, white residents of Ocoee, Florida attacked African-Americans in their community in order to prevent them from voting. The Ocoee Massacre, as the violence came to be known, killed two white residents and 30 to 35 Black residents of the Orange County town. Ocoee’s police chief was openly a member of the Ku Klux Klan.
November 2, 1944: Chemical engineer Thomas Midgley Jr., whose environmentally-unfriendly accomplishments included putting lead in gasoline and inventing Freon, dies of strangulation in his home after becoming entangled in the rope-and-pulley system he had rigged up to help him cope with disability stemming from a bout of polio.
November 2, 1962: Actor Alan Ladd, age 48, is found lying in a pool of blood in his home with a bullet wound to the chest. He tells police who investigate that he’d shot himself accidentally after thinking he’d heard a burglar in the house. Ladd, whose mother had died by suicide when Ladd was 24, may have attempted suicide, missing shooting himself in the heart only by the accident of the bullet bouncing off his ribs.
Public domain in the United States
November 2, 2004: Vincent Van Gogh’s 47-year-old great-grand-nephew Theo Van Gogh, a filmmaker, is shot and then has his throat slit while riding his bicycle on the east side of Amsterdam. His killer is a 26-year-old man, Mohammed Bouyeri, who has ties to Egyptian terrorist group Jama'at al-Muslimin, a radical Islamist offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood. Van Gogh was a vocal critic of some Islamic practices, especially those associated with fundamentalist Islam.
Today's Observance: All Saints Day Artist Birthday: Laura La Plante
Sadly, I lost the Dangerous Innocence audiobook when my laptop crashed earlier this year.
The Watauga (NC) Democrat, April 8, 1926
Beatles Trivia: November 1, 1968: George Harrison releases Wonderwall Music, the first solo album by any of the Beatles.
Public domain in the United States
Bummer November 1st
November 1, 1755: The city of Lisbon, Portugal, is devastated by an earthquake, subsequent fires, and a tsunami. Lisbon is Europe's 4th-largest city at the time. It’s estimated that between 12,000 and 50,000 people die as a result. Among the priceless artifacts destroyed in the disaster were navigator Vasco da Gama's records and original paintings by Peter Paul Rubens and Titian.
October 31, 1871: Emily and Mary Wilde, the older half-sisters of Oscar Wilde, attend a Halloween party at Drumacon House near Ulster, Ireland. During the last dance of the evening, Mary gets too close to a candlestick and catches her dress on fire. Emily, too, catches her dress on fire as she rushes to help her sister. Party host Andrew Reid leads the women outside in the hope that the snow would help them extinguish the flames, but both sisters die of their injuries, Mary (age 22) on November 9th and Emily (age 24) on November 21st.
October 31, 1926: Harry Houdini dies of peritonitis due to a ruptured appendix. Houdini had visited Canada’s McGill University on October 22, when a student asked to punch Houdini in the stomach (which Houdini was famously able to withstand, when properly prepared), but then did so before the magician was ready.
October 31, 1963: Spectators gather to watch a Holiday on Ice performance at the Indiana State Fairgrounds in Indianapolis, Indiana. A natural gas explosion starts in a storage area that food vendors use to store pre-popped popcorn. The explosion kills 81 people and injures an additional 400.
October 31, 1974: Ronald Clark O’Bryan gives Pixy Stix candy straws laced with cyanide to his two children, two neighbor children, and a fifth child he knew from church. Only one of the children, O’Bryan’s 8-year-old son Timothy, ate the poisoned candy. After Timothy died, police confiscated the other contaminated Pixy Stix, which O’Bryan claimed he had gotten from a neighbor. O’Bryan was convicted of the murder, which he appears to have planned to collect insurance money, and was executed by the state of Texas in 1984.
October 31, 1990: Magician Joseph “Amazing Joe” Burrus, age 32, attempts a Halloween night stunt at Blackbeard’s Family Fun Center in Fresno, California. He’ll attempt to escape from a coffin made of plastic and glass and buried under mud and wet cement. The weight of the cement and mud crushes the coffin, burying Burrus alive. Although he is quickly dug out of the grave, he can’t be revived.
October 31, 1993: 23-year-old actor River Phoenix is pronounced dead at 1:51 a.m. at Cedars Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, California, after collapsing from an overdose of cocaine and morphine.
October 31, 2002: A 21-year-old man named Chris Jenkins leaves a costume party at the Lone Tree Bar in Minneapolis. He's never seen again until his body is discovered near a dam in February 2003. Although police at first ruled his death an accidental drowning, it's now believed Jenkins was murdered by being thrown from a bridge.
October 31, 2006: 18-year-old Nicole Catsouras dies immediately upon impact when the Porsche belonging to her parents, which the teenager is driving without permission, strikes a toll booth at over 100 miles per hour. The accident is terrible enough, but Catsouras’ family suffered further when gruesome crash scene photos taken by the California Highway Patrol were leaked on the Internet.
October 31, 2016: Natalie Babbitt, the author of Tuck Everlasting, dies of lung cancer.
On the same day in Bemidji, Minnesota, a 17-year-old student named Jeremy Jourdain goes missing and hasn't been seen since.
And here is a screenshot that my cat Jerry took by putting his little paws on my phone.
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