Almanac for October 31st

October 31, 1926 Douglas (AZ) Dispatch

Erin O'Riordan's Almanac for October 31st: https://ko-fi.com/post/Halloween-M4M2159Y79

Today's Observance: Halloween/Samhain (Witches' New Year)
"Halloween Horror on Old-Time Radio" on Once Upon a Screen blog

Poem for today: "WHO WE GONNA CALL" by Amanda Gorman

Bummer Halloween:

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.

Almanac for October 30th

Erin O'Riordan's Almanac for October 30th: https://ko-fi.com/post/October-30-Sense-and-Sensibility-D1D2159V23

The St. Paul (MN) Echo, October 30, 1926

Artist Birthday: Richard Brinsley Sheridan

The Milwaukee Leader, January 13, 1926

Bummer October 30th

October 30, 2015: A fire inside the Colectiv night club in Bucharest, Romania kills 64 people, including four members of the band Goodbye to Gravity, whose pyrotechnics display had initiated the blaze. Guitarists Mihai Alexandru and Vlad Telea die at the scene; drummer Bogdan Enache and bassist Alex Pascu die in the hospital. Lead singer Andrei Gălu is badly burned but survives. Many of those who die in the hospital do so from infections, possibly because of inadequate disinfectant measures used in Romanian hospitals.

On the same day in the United States, 20-year-old Richard Pananian of Burbank, California, is driving southbound on the 5 Freeway in Los Angeles, near Griffith Park, in his Ford Fiesta at approximately 7 p.m. According to other drivers, he's driving erratically and using the shoulder of the road when the Fiesta strikes a pickup truck occupied by a 45-year-old driver and two passengers. No one in the pickup is seriously hurt, but Pananian's Fiesta loses control, veers up the embankment, and ejects Pananian from the driver's seat. It's unclear whether Pananian dies of traumatic injuries due to the vehicle collision or from the ejection, but his body lands on the metal ledge of the road sign reading "Colorado St. 3/4 Mile." 

In the morning rush hour traffic, it's difficult for Los Angeles rescue workers and accident investigators to reach Pananian's body. His body, covered in a white sheet, lies on that ledge above the freeway for more than two hours. Since it's the day before Halloween, some witnesses reported thinking the accident victim's body is a prank or a Halloween decoration.

October 30, 2022: In the early hours of the morning, a Lyft driver drops off 23-year-old Bryce Broca and his friends near an apartment building in Eagan, Minnesota. Broca walks away from the group but continues a video chat with them until his phone goes dead. After that chat, Broca is never seen again.

The same day in Morbi in Gujarat, India, a pedestrian footbridge with a capacity of 125 people collapses when more than 500 people try to cross the bridge at once. 141 people die, most of them women, elderly men, and children. The youngest victim was an 18-month-old baby.

Almanac for October 29th

Erin O'Riordan's Almanac for October 29th: https://ko-fi.com/post/October-29-Winona-Ryder-M4M5150FEQ

Bummer October 29th

October 29, 1901: Leon Czolgosz, the assassin of President William McKinley, is executed by electrocution.

October 29, 1994: Francisco Martin Duran of New Mexico stood outside the fence surrounding the White House and fired 29 rounds from an SKS rifle at a group of men on the grounds. None of the men were injured, and Duran was tackled by three civilians. 

Duran is eventually sentenced to 40 years in prison for attempting to assassinate President William J. Clinton. Clinton is inside the White House watching a football (American football) game when the incident occurs. 

October 29, 1998: An arson fire at a Halloween disco celebration in Gothenburg, Sweden. Four teenagers were found guilty of starting the fire, allegedly because they hadn’t been allowed to enter the disco for free. The fire killed 63 people, many of them also teenagers.

October 29, 2003: A dust explosion at the Hayes Lemmerz aluminum wheel manufacturing plant in Huntington, Indiana, injures three workers, one of whom subsequently dies from his severe burns.

Almanac for October 28th

Erin O'Riordan's Almanac for October 28th: https://ko-fi.com/post/October-28-Gullivers-Travels-U7U2150E79

Bummer October 28th

October 28, 1905: Kenyon College (Gambier, Ohio) student Stuart Lathrop Pierson is hit by an unscheduled train and killed during a Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity initiation.

October 28, 1991: The commercial fishing boat Andrea Gail is lost amid the so-called Perfect Storm weather event that began with Hurricane Grace, formed on October 26th. The boat sinks with six crew members aboard near Sable Island, Canada. Their bodies are never recovered. In all, the Perfect Storm claims 13 lives.

October 28, 1995: During the evening rush hour on the Metro subway system in Baku, Azerbaijan, passengers aboard a subway car smell smoke. An electrical fault has sparked a fire. The train stops short of the station. Its tunnel quickly fills with smoke and carbon monoxide. Passengers aboard one car are forced to climb into another car to escape when the doors become stuck. A crowd crush follows, resulting in almost 300 injuries and the deaths of 286 passengers and three rescue workers.

Almanac for October 27th

Erin O'Riordan's Almanac for October 27th: https://ko-fi.com/post/October-27-Ariel-H2H8150DSM

Bummer October 27th

October 27, 1899: Cornell University student Edward Fairchild Berkeley is sent by the Kappa Alpha Society on an errand intended to keep him busy while the fraternity prepared for his formal initiation. Told to pin a particular piece of paper to either a tree or a bridge (accounts vary), Berkeley fell into a canal and drowned.

October 27, 2013: Lou Reed dies of liver disease after having received a liver transplant in May 2013.

October 27, 2019: The 56-year-old mother of a father-to-be in Knoxville, Iowa, is struck and killed by a fragment of metal at a “gender reveal” party for her son and his pregnant partner. The family had filled a metal umbrella stand with gunpowder with the intention that it would stream pink sparks like a firework, revealing that the unborn child is a girl. Instead, the gunpowder caused the umbrella stand to explode.

Almanac for October 26th

Erin O'Riordan's Almanac for October 26th: https://ko-fi.com/post/October-26-Happy-Birthday-Ms-Rodham-Clinton-G2G5150CKE

The October 26, 1926 Cordele (GA) Dispatch. 100 years ago, children in Chicago found it a merry Halloween prank to steal their neighbors' gates off the hinges. Notice the typo, "movies are houses cooperating" rather than "movie houses are cooperating."

Bummer October 26th

October 26, 1952: Hattie McDaniel, the first African-American to sing on the radio in the U.S. and the first African-American to win an Academy Award for acting, dies of breast cancer in Los Angeles. She’s 59 years old.

October 26, 1990: 15-year-old William Anthony Odom, setting up a gallows scene for a Halloween tableau in North Carolina, accidentally hangs himself when the rope he’s using tightens on him.

October 26, 2001: 25-year-old nursing assistant Chante Jawan Mallard of Fort Worth, Texas, is driving, allegedly under the influence of alcohol, marijuana, and ecstasy. She strikes 37-year-old Gregory Glenn Biggs, a homeless construction worker. The force of the collision propels Biggs through Mallard’s windshield, where his body becomes lodged. Rather than seeking aid for Biggs, Mallard continues driving home, parks her car in her garage, and leaves the injured man inside her garage. Biggs dies of his injuries some time between when Mallard arrived home and October 28th. At this time, Mallard and a male friend left Biggs’s remains in a park and attempted to burn the car in order to destroy evidence. 

Police arrested Mallard after witnesses heard her at a party talking about “hitting a white man.” The medical examiner testified in court that Biggs’s injuries were survivable if he had been taken to a hospital in time. Mallard was convicted of murder and tampering with evidence. The male friend and a cousin who helped him move the body are convicted and imprisoned for evidence tampering.

October 26, 2018: A bomb addressed to then-Senator Kamala Harris is intercepted by authorities in Sacramento, California. Cesar Altieri Sayoc, Jr. is later convicted of the terroristic threat.

October 26, 2022: Food writer Julie Powell dies of cardiac arrest at age 49 after battling a COVID-19 infection.

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What was Diane Meyer grateful for on October 26, 2024?

https://bottlecap.press/products/ordinarygratitude

acknowledging things that used to scare me
breakfast with friends
minding my own damn business
sunshine
the sweet old lady Uber driver
apple picking
fall air
leaving changing color
thinking about why I'm feeling the way I do
finishing my book
oatmeal cookies with chocolate chips
new opportunities
proud of myself today

Almanac for October 25th

Erin O'Riordan's Almanac for October 25th: https://ko-fi.com/post/October-25-St-Crispins-Day-O5O5150BN1

Bummer October 25th

October 25, 1958: Six days after his vehicle crashes and catches on fire during the Moroccan Grand Prix, English Formula One racing driver Stuart Lewis-Evans succumbs to his burn injuries.

October 25, 1993: Actor Vincent Price dies of lung cancer.

October 25, 1999: A Learjet flying from Orlando, Florida, to Texas fails to pressurize during flight. As a result, the two crew members and four passengers are all incapacitated by the lack of oxygen. The jet cruises on autopilot until it runs out of fuel, then crashes near Aberdeen, South Dakota. Among the six dead are professional golfer Payne Stewart.