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.
August 31, 1869: Mary Ward, a 42-year-old Irish scientist and author, becomes the first human being ever to be killed by a motor vehicle. She and her husband are riding in an experimental steam-powered motor vehicle invented by Ward’s cousins. On a bend in the road, Ward is thrown from the vehicle, run over by one of the wheels, and suffers a broken neck.
August 31, 1965: Herpetologist Frederick A. Shannon Jr., age 44, dies after being bitten by a rattlesnake he was trying to catch.
August 31, 1997: Princess Diana of Wales, her companion Dodi Fayed, and driver Henri Paul are killed in a traffic accident inside a Paris underpass. The vehicle strikes a pillar head-on at 65 miles per hour. The sole survivor is Fayed’s bodyguard, Trevor Rees-Jones, who suffers head and facial injuries. Paul’s blood-alcohol level is found to be three times the French legal limit.
Beatles Trivia August 29, 1966: The Beatles play their last public performance together at Candlestick Park in San Francisco.
Bummer August 29th
August 29, 2005: Hurricane Katrina, having been upgraded from Tropical Storm Katrina the previous day, makes landfall in Southeast Louisiana, causing the mandatory evacuation of the city of New Orleans. An estimated 1,800 people die as a result of this storm.
August 28, 1943: A housekeeper enters Room 729 of the Claypool Hotel in downtown Indianapolis and discovers the body of 28-year-old Cpl. Maoma L. Ridings of the Women’s Army Corps (WACs). Partially dressed in her WAC uniform, Ridings appears to have been beaten with the half-empty whiskey bottle found in her room. The case is never solved.
August 28, 1976: Actor (Mary) Anissa Jones, who starred as the character Buffy on the sitcom Family Affair from 1966 to 1971, dies at age 18 from multiple drug intoxication. Jones is found unresponsive in bed at the home of a teenage friend with whom she’d attended a party the previous night. An autopsy finds the street drugs cocaine and PCP in her system, along with the prescription drugs Seconal and Quaalude, both sedatives.
August 28, 1988: More than 300 people are injured and 75 are killed when three aircraft collide at an air show in Ramstein, Germany.
August 28, 2003: 46-year-old pizza delivery driver Brian Wells dies in Erie, Pennsylvania, after robbing a PNC Bank branch. His cause of death is by an explosive collar around his neck rigged to explode. Four people are charged with conspiring to commit the crime; Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong receives a life sentence for being the mastermind behind the strange crime. Investigators suspect Wells may have been a willing participant in the robbery, possibly under the impression that the bomb wasn’t real, although Wells’s family disputes this accusation.
August 28, 2004: 23-year-old Francis Brohm has been drinking and watching NASCAR in a bar with his friend John Hutcherson. Hutcherson drives them home in his truck. On the ride home, Brohm feels nauseated and sticks his head out the window. His head strikes a telephone pole support wire, decapitating and killing him instantly. Hutcherson continues to drive 12 miles home and goes to bed with Brohm’s headless body in his truck.
Brohm’s death is reported to police the next morning when one of Hutcherson’s neighbors, out for a walk with his one-year-old daughter, sees it inside the truck. Police arrive at Hutcherson’s home to find him in bed, still intoxicated and apparently unaware of what’s happened the night before.
August 28, 2020: 43-year-old actor Chadwick Boseman passes away from colon cancer.
January 24, 1926. From the East St. Louis Daily Journal by Gerald Miller
Bummer August 27
August 27, 1883: Mount Krakatau (Anglicized as Krakatoa), which had begun to erupt on the 20th of May, intensifies in seismic activity with an eruption that destroys more than two-thirds of its island. The eruption is one of the loudest sounds ever heard by human ears, with the explosion being heard 4,800 miles away from the Indonesian site of the volcano. Pyroclastic flows, ash expelled into the atmosphere, and resulting tsunamis are estimated to have killed more than 36,400 people. Only the 1815 Mount Tambora explosion is thought to have been deadlier.
August 27, 1971: Lillian “Lil” Hardin Armstrong suffers a heart attack while playing the piano during a televised concert performed as a tribute to her late husband Louis Armstrong. She dies in the ambulance on the way to the hospital. She had been working on her autobiography in the months before her death; sadly, the manuscript has been lost.
August 27, 1990: Blues-rock musician Stevie Ray Vaughan takes a helicopter to get from Alpine Valley Music Theatre in East Troy, Michigan. The helicopter crashes into a ski hill shortly after takeoff, killing Vaughan, pilot Jeff Brown, tour manager Colin Smythe, agent Bobby Brooks, and bodyguard Nigel Browne.
Beatles Trivia August 26, 1968: The Beatles release their single “Hey Jude” in the United States. The B-side track is “Revolution.” Between September and November 1968, it will be the #1 single in the U.S. for nine straight weeks.
Bummer August 26th
August 26, 1981: Three-year-old Los Angeles resident Kelly Lynn Keen is attacked and killed by a wild coyote in the driveway of her family’s home. This is the only documented fatal attack on a human being by a coyote. Coyote attacks on humans rarely result in serious injuries.
***
And now, for something completely different, an affiliate link to a Gumroad creative product you may enjoy: The Abandoned Realm audiobook
August 25, 1823: Fur trapper Hugh Glass is mauled by a bear in what is now South Dakota and left for dead by his fellow trappers. Not dead, Glass sets his own broken leg and journeys more than 200 miles to reach the nearest European settlement on the Missouri River.
Leonardo DiCaprio played Glass in the 2016 movie The Revenant and won his first Oscar for doing so.
August 25, 1914: During World War I, German troops occupying Leuven, Belgium, set fire to the city and destroying almost half of it. 300 civilians die. Included in the burning and destruction is the library of the Catholic University of Leuven, which loses approximately 230,000 materials, including priceless medieval manuscripts.
August 25, 1945: OSS (the forerunner to the CIA) agent John Birch is killed by Communists in China.
August 25, 1959: Miles Davis performs at the Birdland jazz club on Broadway and 52nd St. in New York City. Pausing for a cigarette break between sets, Davis is told to “Move along” by a police officer on patrol. Davis points out that he’s headlining the club and the two exchange words. Another officer, Donald Rolker approaches and hits Davis repeatedly with his blackjack before the two officers place Davis under arrest. Later cleared of all charges, Davis nonetheless needs five stitches for his head injury and remembers the incident bitterly.
August 25, 1984: Truman Capote dies of liver disease.
August 25, 1992: The National and University Library of Bosnia and Herzegovina is destroyed by Serbian bombing during the Siege of Sarajevo.
August 25, 2001: Aaliyah Haughton, who sang and acted under the mononym Aaliyah, and eight others are killed when their Cessna 402 aircraft crashes and catches fire shortly after takeoff from Marsh Airport Harbour in the Bahamas. The artist and her crew had finished filming a music video for her song “Rock the Boat,” and the plane was loaded with video equipment. Smaller than the Cessna 404 they had originally planned to fly back to the U.S. on, the plane couldn’t handle the extra weight. The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) determined the overloaded aircraft to be 700 pounds too heavy for a safe flight.
August 25, 2014: 39-year-old Charles Vacca is accidentally shot and killed in White Hills, Arizona, while teaching a nine-year-old girl in how to shoot a Mini-Uzi submachine gun. The gun recoils and the child loses control of the gun, causing the barrel to be aimed at Vacca. Vacca suffers a gunshot wound to the head. Although airlifted to a hospital in Las Vegas, Nevada, he dies of his injury.
August 25, 2026: Sadly, I must report that this is the day on which the USA's beloved Dolly Parton passed away at the age of 80.
August 24, 1814: During the War of 1812, British troops set fire to the White House, the U.S. Capitol, and other buildings in Washington, D.C.
August 24, 1943: Philosopher Simone Weil dies of malnutrition. The exact cause of her malnutrition while hospitalized is unclear; she may have been unable to eat due to illness, fasting due to religious reasons, or fasting in solidarity with French people living under Nazi occupation.
August 23, 2025: Tim Miller writes the "To the Reader" afterward of Time & The River From Columbine to the Invention of Fire: Poems by Tim Miller in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Bummer August 23
August 23, 1926: Early Hollywood sex symbol Rudolph Valentino dies at the age of 31 in New York City. Eight days earlier, he’d collapsed from severe gastric ulcers mimicking the symptoms of appendicitis. He developed peritonitis and the tissue surrounding his left lung became inflamed, making it difficult for him to breathe. His infection develops into septicemia and he lapses into a coma and dies.
August 23, 1981: East German comedic actor Rolf Herricht suffers a heart attack and dies while performing in Kiss Me Kate at Berlin’s Metropol theatre.
August 22, 1770: Captain James Cook claims the Torres Strait island of Bedanug on behalf of Britain, wresting control of the island from its rightful owners and native inhabitants, the Kaurareg people. The Colonial name for the island is Possession Island.
August 22, 1849: History’s first recorded air raid occurs when Austria launches unpiloted balloons at Venice.
August 22, 1902: The Kashgar Earthquake near the border between China and Kyrgyzstan kills an estimated 6,000 people. Building collapses and landslides were the primary causes of most deaths.
August 22, 1944: Nazis massacre the villagers of nine Amari Valley villages on the island of Crete. The massacre kills 164 people. Large-scale looting, razing of buildings, pillaging of livestock, and destruction of crops are also reported. These attacks are meant to deter local guerilla forces from resisting the Nazis.
August 22, 2004: Edvard Munch’s paintings The Scream and Madonna are stolen at gunpoint from an Oslo art museum.
August 21, 1986: A naturally-occurring limnic eruption of Lake Nyos in Cameroon releases poisonous carbon dioxide into the air, killing 1,746 people.
August 21, 1994: 32-year-old Younes Khayati deliberately crashes Royal Air Maroc Flight 630 into the Atlas Mountains in Morocco, killing himself, the other three members of the flight crew, and all 40 passengers onboard.
August 20, 1910: The so-called Great Fire of 1910 breaks out, burning through the forests of the northwestern United States. An estimated 87 people die in this series of forest fires that stretch from Montana to Washington State.
According to a friend of the men, they may have been spiritual seekers of some kind, attempting to contact extraterrestrials or spirit beings, possibly by ingesting psychedelic drugs. Their cause of death is unknown, but authorities did not suspect foul play.
August 20, 1994: Abusive elephant trainer Allen Campbell is trampled to death by male elephant Tyke, who had been known to exhibit a fear of Campbell. Tyke broke free of his enclosure while performing at a circus in Honolulu.
August 19, 1929: Aviator Marvel Crosson dies at the age of 29 in an airplane crash. She is competing in the Women’s Air Derby when her aircraft apparently has trouble over the Arizona desert. When her body is found, it appears that her parachute has been released, but not deployed, perhaps meaning that she attempted to jump from the plane while too low to the ground for the parachute to help her.
August 19, 1936: According to LitHub, “Federico GarcÃa Lorca—the Spanish avant-garde poet, playwright, and ardent socialist—was shot and killed by Nationalist militia before being buried in an unmarked mass grave somewhere outside Granada, where he remains to this day.”
Lorca had predicted his manner of death in his 1929 poem “The Fable And Round of the Three Friends:”
“Then I realized I had been murdered. They looked for me in cafes, cemeteries and churches …. but they did not find me. They never found me? No. They never found me.”
August 18, 1992: On or around this date, 24-year-old adventurer Christopher McCandless dies of apparent starvation in the Alaskan wilderness. The story of his nomadic, short life is the basis of the book and film Into the Wild.
August 17, 1896: Bridget Driscoll, the 45-year-old mother of a teenage daughter, has the dubious distinction of being the first person in Great Britain known to have been killed in a automobile-pedestrian collision. Driscoll, walking near the Crystal Palace in London, was struck by Arthur James Edsall, who was taking the vehicle for a test drive.
August 17, 1920: Cleveland Indians shortstop Ray Chapman dies of his injuries after having been hit the previous day by a baseball pitched by New York Yankee Carl Mays. The Indians go on to win the 1920 World Series.
August 17, 1966: English race car driver Ken Miles is killed when the Ford Mk IV he is test-driving crashes at over 200 miles per hour.
August 17, 1997: Antony Wheeler, playing Judas in a Greek production of Jesus Christ Superstar, accidentally dies by hanging during the scene in which his character is supposed to hang himself.
August 17, 2007: Former NBA basketball player Eddie Griffin, intoxicated, drives his car through a railroad warning barrier and collides with a moving train, killing him instantly. Griffin is 25 years old.
August 16, 1920: New York Yankees pitcher Carl Mays throws a fastball at Ray Chapman of the Cleveland Indians during a baseball game. The pitch strikes Chapman. He dies the following day, becoming the second person in major league baseball history to die from injuries sustained during a Major League game.
August 16, 1948: George Herman “Babe” Ruth dies of a cancerous tumor in his neck near the base of his skull. It’s unclear whether Ruth is ever told that he has cancer. He undergoes chemotherapy, which is still experimental at the time, but his tumor is inoperable, and he dies peacefully in his sleep.
August 16, 1949: Gone With the Wind author Margaret Mitchell dies in the hospital of injuries she sustained on August 11th. As she and her husband are on their way to see a film version of The Canterbury Tales, Mitchell is struck by a speeding car with an intoxicated driver. The driver is convicted of involuntary manslaughter and serves 11 months in jail.
August 16, 1987: Northwest Airlines Flight 255 crashes shortly after taking off from Detroit Metropolitan Airport. A power interruption causes a stall warning to go unannounced, so the plane isn’t configured properly for takeoff, which in turn causes its rate of climb to be too slow. The plane’s wing strikes a light pole in the parking lot of car rental business, causing the wing to catch fire and disintegrate. The disabled plane then strikes the roof of an airport building, inverts, and falls onto the road, where it strikes a car and breaks apart.
All six crew members, 148 of the 149 passengers, and two people inside the car crushed by the plane are killed. The sole survivor is a 4-year-old girl who is severely injured. Among the dead are Phoenix Suns center Nick Vanos, age 24, and Vanos’s fiancee.
Saturday, August 16, 2003: Doug McKay has recently taken over ownership of Paradise Amusements park in Idaho. The park had a small roller coaster called the Super Loop 2, and its track needed lubrication. Doug decided to climb onto the ride and lubricate the track, unfortunately, while the ride was still in operation. Some part of his body, possibly his hair, became entangled with a passenger car, which dragged him approximately 40 feet before he dropped from the ride. His body hit the ride, then landed on a metal fence. Doug’s grisly sudden death was witnessed by visitors to the park, many of them children.
On the same day in Las Vegas, Nevada, 39-year-old Becky Longhoffer is electrocuted while crossing Las Vegas Boulevard. Walking across a traffic island, Longhoffer stepped in a puddle. The puddle was hiding a cast iron plate that was part of the traffic signal box. Frayed wiring in the box, the rain water from the puddle, and Longhoffer's open-toed shoes combined to create the electrical tragedy that took her life as she crossed the street while talking to her brother on her cell phone.
August 15, 1868: In what is believed to be a racist and anti-Semitic hate crime probably carried out by the Ku Klux Klan, a group of masked men break into a store belonging to a Jewish man, Samuel A. Bierfield. The men shoot and kill Bierfield and his Black store clerk, Laurence Bowman. No one is ever charged with the crime.
August 15, 1914: Julian Carlton, a servant who worked in the household of architect Frank Lloyd Wright, sets Wright’s Taliesin house in Spring Green, Wisconsin, on fire, then murders seven people inside the house with a hatchet. Wright is not inside the home at the time, but the victims include Wright’s lover Mamah Borthwick Cheney, her two children, gardener David Lindblom, worker Thomas Brunker, draftsman Emil Brodelle, and the son of another worker. Carlton will drink hydrochloric acid in a suicide attempt but, despite severely damaging his esophagus, will live another seven weeks.
August 15, 2021: 30-year-old Ellen Chung, her husband Jonathan Gerrish (age 45), their year-old daughter Aurelia (known as Miju), and the family’s Akita mix dog Oski embark on a day hike in California’s Sierra National Forest. Although they try to reach help via cell phone, service in the mountainous region is spotty. With the temperature reaching 107 to 109 degrees along some parts of the hiking trail, especially in those parts that receive full sunlight with no shade, all four succumb to hyperthermia and dehydration. Their bodies are found on August 17th.
August
14, 2017: Sequana Joi Harris, a motorcycle racer and stunt performer,
dies at the scene of a motorcycle crash in Vancouver, British
Columbia, Canada while performing as a stunt double for Zazie Beetz
on the set of Deadpool
2. Harris’s
motorcycle hits a curb; Harris is thrown off the motorcycle and into
an exterior wall of Shaw Tower. She was 40 years old.
August 13, 1944: Lucien Carr, friend of Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs, stabs and kills his acquaintance David Kammerer. Carr will serve two years in prison for manslaughter, then go on to father children who include novelist Caleb Carr.
August 12, 1964: Ian Fleming, author of the James Bond novels and of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, dies of a heart attack.
August 12, 1982: Japan Airlines Flight 123 crashes into a mountain after the pilots lose the ability to steer the plane. Of the 509 passengers and 15 crew members, only three passengers and one crew member survive. Rescue operations are delayed due to darkness and mountainous terrain, which means many people who may have initially had non-fatal injuries died of exposure, blood loss, and other conditions.
August 12, 1988: Haitian-American Neo-Expressionist artist Jean-Michel Basquiat is pronounced dead at the hospital after being found unresponsive at his home in Manhattan. His cause of death is heroin overdose. Basquiat is 27 years old.
August 12, 2022: Indian-British author Salman Rushdie is stabbed ten times at an event in Chautauqua, New York, allegedly by a 24-year-old man from New Jersey. Rushdie suffers nerve damage to one arm, one eye, and his liver. The attacker was apparently motivated by a late Iranian religious leader’s description of Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses as blasphemous since it depicted the prophet Muhammad as a fictional character.
Rushdie is an atheist. The attacker had not read The Satanic Verses.
Happy 1-year anniversary to the publication of this audiobook by Aphra Behn.
Bummer August 11
August 11, 1956: Painter Jackson Pollock dies in a single-car accident while driving drunk.
GraceBrown2498, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons
August 11, 1978: British medical photographer Janet Parker dies of smallpox, which she’s accidentally been exposed to while working in a hospital. She is the last recorded person to die of smallpox before the disease is declared eradicated.
August 11, 2000: Saudi Arabian musician Talal Maddah collapses and dies suddenly in front of his fans near the start of a concert televised on Saudi TV.
August 11, 2022: A 42-year-old man who participated in the January 6, 2021 Capitol insurrection attempts to break into the FBI field office in Cincinnati, Ohio, after posting on social media that he wanted to kill FBI agents. Armed with a nail gun and a rifle, the man tried unsuccessfully to pass the building’s lobby and fled when confronted. After being chased by police in his vehicle, the middle-aged man raised his weapon at police and was shot to death.
August 10, 1969: Leno LaBianca, who worked for a supermarket chain, and Rosemary LaBianca, who owned a dress shop, are murdered at their home by members of Charles Manson’s cult. The murderers write the words “Helter Skelter” on the LaBianca’s walls in blood. The words, from a Beatles song, refer to Manson’s delusional belief that Beatles lyrics are personal messages to him.
August 10, 1978: Three teenage girls, all members of the Ulrich family, are killed in an automobile accident while riding in a Ford Pinto. The state of Indiana charges the Ford Motor Company with homicide, claiming that the company was aware of manufacturing defects that made the vehicle more likely to cause death in the event of certain types of accidents. Ford is found not guilty.
August 10, 2018: 29-year-old Richard Russell steals a Horizon Air Bombardier Q400 aircraft from Seattle-Tacoma airport. Russell has no previous experience as a pilot. In communication with an air traffic controller, Russell states that he had no intention of landing the plane. He is killed when the aircraft crash-lands on Ketron Island. The crash site is near a residential cabin, but no one on the ground is hurt.
Author Julie S. Howlin post of the day: Betty Boop
Uncredited, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Artist Birthday: Gillian Anderson
Bummer August 9th
August 9, 1945: The U.S. drops an atomic bomb on Nagasaki, Japan.
August 9, 1969: Actress Sharon Tate, coffee heiress Abigail Folger, celebrity hair stylist Jay Sebring, aspiring actor Wojciech Frykowski, and Tate’s unborn baby are killed when members of Charles Manson’s cult break into Tate’s home in Benedict Canyon, Los Angeles, California.
August 9, 2010: Skeletal human remains are found in Malibu Canyon in California. They are later determined to belong to Mitrice Richardson, a 24-year-old woman whose family reported her missing in September 2009.
A bright, beautiful young woman who worked as a forensic psychologist’s intern by day and as a dancer by night, Richardson is observed acting out of character before her disappearance. She eats a meal at Geoffrey’s restaurant in Malibu, California, on September 16, 2009. Staff call the police when she refuses to pay and appears to be experiencing some kind of mental health crisis. Richardson is arrested, but released from detention at 12:28 a.m. on the morning of September 17th. No arrangements are made for her to be picked up or otherwise find transportation home from the county sheriff’s office.
She was next seen wandering through the Monte Nido residential neighborhood about three miles north of Malibu. Asked by residents if she needed help, Richardson is said to have declined any assistance. However, she was wandering alone at night with no transportation or resources of any kind in a mountainous area. By the time her remains are discovered, it’s impossible to determine whether her cause of death was exposure to the elements, accident, homicide, or some other cause.
In 2020, private investigator Catherine Townsend uncovered some, not entirely conclusive but compelling, evidence that Richardson may have fallen prey not only to a mental health crisis but also a local predator with a history of abusing women.
August 9, 2021: Matthew Taylor Coleman, a surfing instructor from California, is staying with his two children, a 2-year-old boy and a 10-month-old girl, in Rosarito, Mexico. Suffering from delusional thinking encouraged by his consumption of Qanon conspiracy media, Coleman has come to believe his children inherited “serpent blood” from his wife’s side of the family. Tragically, he stabs both children to death with a spear-fishing gun.
August 8, 1965: American author Shirley Jackson dies at age 48 of cardiac arrest, possibly brought on by her alcoholism and use of a variety of prescription medicines.
August 8, 2010: More than 1,400 people in the Gansu region of China are killed by mudslides.
Four of my audiobooks are having a first anniversary today:
Humpty Dumpty by Lewis Carroll
The Kiss by Kate Chopin
The Mummy's Foot
What Was It?
Bummer August 7
August 7, 1904: A flash flood near Pueblo, Colorado, washes a train off the tracks, killing 96 people.
August 7, 2016: 10-year-old son Caleb Schwab is killed while riding the Verrückt water raft ride at Schlitterbahn Water Park in Kansas City, Kansas. The tallest such ride in the world at the time, the ride had a screen over the top, held in place with a series of metal support rings, to keep guests from accidentally flying off the ride in the event that the raft should become airborn. Caleb, who was riding on the front of a raft with two unrelated women riding on the back, struck the metal support ring and was decapitated when his raft became airborne.
Happy book birthday to this audiobook by Jonathan Swift that I published on August 6, 2025:
Bummer August 6
August 6, 1931: 28-year-old jazz cornetist Bix Beiderbecke dies of pneumonia and edema of the brain, possibly related to chronic alcoholism, in his Queens, New York, apartment. The excessive heat of the summer may have been another contributing factor.
August 6, 1945: The United States military drops the world’s first weaponized nuclear bomb on Hiroshima, Japan. The bomb immediately killed 80,000 people. Another 60,000 die later from the effects of radiation.
August 6, 2001: 27 hospital patients being treated for various mental health disorders die when the Moideen Badusha Mental Home in Erwadi, India, catches fire. All of these patients are chained to their beds at night and therefore had no chance to escape from the fire. Many other patients are injured.
Happy 1st anniversary to this audiobook, The Glass Dog by L. Frank Baum.
Artist Birthday: Yungblud
20th Century Fox, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Bummer August 5th
August 5, 1955: Hours after performing a song and dance number for The Jimmy Durante Show, 46-year-old Portuguese-Brazilian samba performer Carmen Miranda dies of a heart attack. Friends find her collapsed in the hall between her bedroom and the bathroom, clutching a mirror. Miranda, who struggled with drug and alcohol addiction, apparently expired on her way to remove her makeup for the night.
August 5, 1981: In a sign of his administration’s hostility to workers’ rights causes, U.S. President Ronald Wilson Reagan fires more than 11,000 air traffic controllers who are on strike for more pay, a shorter work week, and safer workplace conditions. Technically it had been illegal for U.S. federal employees to strike since 1947, but Reagan is the first president to actually invoke the 1947 law.
August 5, 2022: Actor Anne Heche ingests cocaine and fentanyl, gets into a car, and is involved in three vehicle accidents. She first strikes a garage with her car, causing minor damage, and leaves the scene of the accident. She then strikes another car; the driver of the second car is not injured. In the third, high-speed crash, Heche drives her car through the wall of a house, sparking a fire.
Heche is trapped inside the vehicle for over 40 minutes while firefighters try to put out the house fire, which renders the home uninhabitable. Heche suffers severe burns and smoke inhalation, requiring her to be hospitalized and medically ventilated. She will be declared brain dead on August 11th and taken off life support on August 14th.
August 4, 1875: Hans Christian Andersen dies, possibly suffering from liver cancer and never having recovered from injuries from falling out of his bed.
August 4, 1892: Andrew and Abby Borden are murdered in their Fall River, Massachusetts, home by an assailant with a hatchet. Andrew’s 32-year-old daughter Elizabeth, called Lizzie, is the primary suspect in the murders. She is tried for the crime and acquitted.
August 4, 1962: Marilyn Monroe dies, apparently by suicide, of an overdose of prescription sleeping medicine.
August 3, 1924: Author Joseph Conrad dies of a heart attack at age 66.
August 3, 1959: More than 50 dock workers on strike are killed by police in the small African country of Guinea-Bissau. At the time, Guinea-Bissau is a colony of Portugal, and the dock workers’ strike threatens Portuguese political officials, who regard it as a sign of rebellion against Portuguese rule. Guinea-Bissau won’t win its independence from the European colonial power until 1973.
August 3, 1966: 40-year-old comedian Lenny Bruce is found dead of an apparently accidental morphine overdose.
August 3, 1983: Bruce Wayne Campbell, the glam rocker who performed under the stage name Jobriath, dies at the age of 36 of AIDS-related illness.
August 2, 1923: The 29th U.S. president, Warren G. Harding, becomes the 3rd U.S. president to die in office from natural causes when he suffers a deadly heart attack in San Francisco. Following the assassinations of Lincoln, Garfield, and McKinley, he is the 6th U.S. president to die in office of all causes.
August 2, 1973: Approximately 50 people are killed when the Summerland indoor amusement park catches fire. The building’s ceiling is constructed using a transparent acrylic material, which melts, raining burning-hot liquid acrylic down on the victims of the fire.
August 2, 1997: William S. Burroughs dies, having had a heart attack the previous day.
Author Julie S. Howlin post of the day: Lughnasadh
Bummer August 1st
August 1, 1966: Marine Corps veteran Charles Whitman, who has killed his mother and wife the night before, takes a sawed-off shotgun, a Magnum .357 revolver, and several rifles with him to the campus of the University of Texas at Austin. He took them, loaded onto a hand-truck, in the elevator and up a set of stairs to the observation deck of the university’s Main Building. He encounters receptionist Edna Townsley, whom he kills by striking her with the butt of a rifle.
Over the course of 96 minutes, he shoots 44 people on the ground. The first person he shoots is Claire Wilson, who is pregnant. Wilson is injured and lives, but loses her pregnancy. Thirteen other people die of their bullet wounds. Houston police officers Ramiro "Ray" Martinez and Houston McCoy work together to kill Whitman, ending the murder spree.
August 1, 1994: An electrical fault sparks a fire at Norwich Central Library in Norwich, England, that destroys an estimated 100,000 books and historical papers.
August 1, 2004: 394 people die when a fire breaks out inside the Ycuá Bolaño supermarket building in Asunción, Paraguay. An poorly installed barbeque chimney causes the blaze. The death toll is worsened when two of the owners decide to lock some of the exits to prevent customers from fleeing the fire with unpaid merchandise. These owners and a security guard are later convicted of negligent homicide for this heartless act.
August 1, 2018: 32-year-old Canadian model, artist, and actor Rick Genest, known as Zombie Boy for his numerous bone- and viscera-themed tattoos, dies from an accidental fall from an icy balcony where he has apparently gone to smoke a cigarette.
July 31, 1703: Daniel Defoe is locked in a pillory as a punishment after being found guilty of seditious libel. He has criticized church officials in a pamphlet.
July 31, 1964: Country musician “Gentleman” Jim Reeves takes his Beechcraft Debonair aircraft and his manager Dean Manuel on a flight from Arkansas to Nashville, Tennessee, so that they can negotiate a real estate deal. The aircraft encounters a severe thunderstorm. Reeves, who is flying the plane, is thought to experience spatial disorientation. The aircraft crash-lands nose-first into the ground in a wooded area near Nashville International Airport. The wreckage is discovered two days later with the bodies of Reeves and Manuel inside.
July 31, 1988: A passenger at the Sultan Abdul Halim ferry terminal in Malaysia collapses, killing 32 people and injuring 1,600 others. The passengers had arrived in Butterworth, Penang state, to celebrate the Kuan Yin Goddess Festival. The platform hadn’t been built to accommodate such a large number of people.
July 30, 1866: A racist mob of white people in New Orleans kills 38 African-American politicians and their supporters and wounds an additional 46 people. The New Orleans police department joins the violence on the side of the racists. Almost all of those killed or injured were African-American.
July 30, 1918: American author Joyce Kilmer is killed in action, shot by a sniper at the Second Battle of the Marne in the First World War.
July 30, 1945: The heavy cruiser U.S.S. Indianapolis is torpedoed by the Japanese Navy after departing from the Philippines. Of the 1,195 sailors on board, about 300 go down with the ship when it sinks 12 minutes after the torpedo hits. Of the 890 who manage to abandon ship, only 316 survive. The others fall prey to shark attacks, salt water poisoning, dehydration, and exposure.
July 30, 1997: A landslide in Thredbo Alpine Village, New South Wales, Australia destroys two ski lodges and kills 18 people. The sole survivor of the landslide is Stuart Diver, who is freed from the wreckage on August 2nd. Diver had been trapped inside the collapsed building in which his wife, Sally, had drowned after becoming trapped in an area that had slowly filled with water.
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