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 21, 1921: Ammonium nitrate fertilizer stored in a building owned by the BASF company in Oppau, Germany (now part of the city of Ludwigshafen am Rhein), explodes, killing an estimated 500 to 600 people, destroying about 80% of Oppau, and leaving 6,500 people homeless. The blast was felt 19 miles/30 km away in Heidelberg, where it derailed a tram.
September 21, 1989: 19 junior high and high school students from Alton, Texas, drown when a Dr. Pepper bottling truck collides with their school bus. The bus goes off the road and into a rock quarry filled with rainwater. Two more students will die of injures related to being submerged in water by September 29th. The victims were all between 12 and 19 years old.
September 21, 1998: Gold medal-winning Olympic track and field champion Florence Griffith Joyner, age 38, dies in her sleep of a severe epileptic seizure caused, in part, by an undetected cavernous hemangioma, a malformation of a vein that makes a person susceptible to epilepsy.
Today's Observation: Yom Kippur (begins at sundown)
Beatles Trivia September 20, 1974: David Bowie and John Lennon meet for the first time at Dean Martin’s 21st birthday party for Martin’s son Ricci. Ringo Starr, Elton John, and Elizabeth Taylor are also there.
September 20, 1973: Musician Jim Croce and five others die when their aircraft crashes into a tree shortly after takeoff from Natchitoches, Louisiana. Croce is 30 years old.
September 20, 1989: The last fluent speaker of the Kamassian language, Klavdiya Zakharovna Plotnikova-Andzhighatova, an approximately 105-year-old woman, dies. Kamassian is one of the Samoyed languages of the Ural Mountains. In fact, it was the last of the Samoyed languages to go extinct.
September 20, 1997: Musician Nick Traina, the son of author Danielle Steel, passes away from an overdose of the prescription medication lithium. He is 19 years old.
One year ago, I published Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters by H. Addington Bruce.
Bummer September 19th
September 19, 1692: Massachusetts Bay Colonist Giles Corey, having been accused of witchcraft but refusing to plead either guilty or not guilty in court, is subjected to a form of torture in which his body is crushed with increasingly heavy stone weights in an attempt to force him to plead. Corey refuses and is crushed to death, with his last words reportedly being, “More weight!”
September 19, 1881: U.S. President James Garfield dies of septic infection. He had been shot by his assassin, Charles Guiteau, on July 2, 1881.
September 19, 1902: One hundred fifteen members of the Shiloh Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, are killed in a stampede after one of them called out “Fight!” and this was misheard as “Fire!”
September 19, 1913: Purdue University student Francis Obenchain dies of a broken neck after taking part in a large-scale fight between first- and second-year students intended as a class hazing ritual.
September 19, 1973: Singer-songwriter Gram Parsons dies of an accidental overdose of alcohol and morphine at the age of 26. He dies peacefully in his sleep inside a room at the Joshua Tree Inn in California.
His stepfather Bob Parsons insists the singer’s body be flown to New Orleans for burial, but friends of Gram Parsons steal the body from Los Angeles International Airport and attempt to carry out what they insisted were Parsons’s final wishes, to be created in Joshua Tree National Monument (now Joshua Tree National Park). They pour gasoline into the coffin and light it with a match, causing a tremendous fireball, and are charged a fine of $750. What remains of Parsons’s body is buried in Louisiana.
September 18, 1961: United Nations Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld and 15 others die when their Transair Sweden DC-6 aircraft crashes in what was then Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia). Hammarskjöld had been traveling to Katanga, a disputed state that broke off from the Congo after Congo gained its independence from Belgian colonial rule. The cause of the crash is disputed. It may have been caused by pilot error, although some have speculated that it was shot down to assassinate Hammarskjöld.
September 18, 1970: 27-year-old Jimi Hendrix dies of asphyxiation at St. Mary Abbots Hospital in London. He appears to have aspirated vomit after taking an overdose of barbiturates, presumably his girlfriend’s sleeping pills.
September 18, 1988: Poet/filmmaker Kathleen Collins dies of breast cancer at the age of 46.
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What was Diane Meyer grateful for on September 18, 2024?
Happy 1-year book anniversary to Morality Without God.
Bummer September 17th
September 17, 1925: Frida Kahlo, a medical student at the time, is seriously injured in a bus accident. Her injuries leave her disabled and in chronic pain for the rest of her life. After the accident, she switches her career from medicine to art.
September 17, 1959: University of Southern California student Richard Swanson dies a few hours after choking on a piece of raw liver as part of a Kappa Sigma fraternity hazing ritual. When paramedics arrive, the other Kappa Sigma don’t tell them about the choking incident, and instead pretend that Swanson has had a seizure.
September 17, 1963: 58 agricultural workers in the Salinas Valley in California board a truck to return to the migrant camp where they’re temporarily staying during the harvest season. The truck approached an unmarked railroad crossing, where it was struck by a freight train traveling over 60 miles per hour. Of the 32 workers who are killed, nine die on the way to the hospital; the rest are pronounced dead at the scene. The driver and everyone aboard the train are uninjured.
Happy 1-year publication anniversary to this audiobook version of Josephine Baker in Berlin.
Bummer September 16th
September 16, 1932: 24-year-old actress Millicent “Peg” Entwistle takes her own life by jumping to her death from the H of the Hollywoodland sign.
September 16, 1972: Edward “Eddie” Waitkus, decorated World War II veteran and former star first baseman of the Philadelphia Phillies, dies of esophageal cancer at age 53. He’s been physically and emotionally traumatized since teenage stalker Ruth Ann Steinhagen shot him in the chest in 1949 and he subsequently developed an alcohol abuse issue.
September 16, 1977: T. Rex frontman Marc Bolan, who never learned to drive, is the passenger in a Mini 1275GT automobile when it crashes into a fence post and then a tree, killing Bolan instantly.
September 16, 1982: During the Lebanese Civil War, militia members allied with the Israeli Defense Forces “clear out” the neighborhood of Sabra and the Shatila refugee camp, killing at least 760 civilians. Some estimate civilian deaths at as many as 3,500.
September 16, 1985: Aerobatic pilot Arthur “Art” Scholl crashes his plane and is killed while filming spin footage for the movie Top Gun. He crashes into the Pacific Ocean; his aircraft is never recovered.
September 15, 1896: William Crush, who works for the Missouri-Kansas-Texas Railroad (“The Katy”), orchestrates a publicity stunt in which two obsolete, crewless trains will be deliberately crashed head-first into one another. The event, approximately 14 miles outside Waco, Texas, allowed members of the press to stand 100 yards from the trains, while members of the general audience are kept back to 200 yards from the tracks.
When the trains collided, the boilers of both trains exploded and shrapnel flew for hundreds of feet in both directions. One photographer lost an eye, six others were injured, and two people died as a result of the flying shrapnel.
September 15, 1958: A commuter train traveling from Bay Head, New Jersey, to Jersey City ignores warning signals and falls into Newark Bay through an open bridge lift. The crash kills 48, including Kurt Vonnegut Jr.’s brother-in-law James Carmalt Adams.
September 15, 1963: Four members of the Ku Klux Klan set off dynamite inside the 18th St. Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. The blast injures 20 people and kills four girls aged 14 and younger.
September 15, 2007: According to Chinese state media, a man aged approximately 30 years collapsed in an internet café in Guangzhou. Rushed to the hospital, he died despite being treated for a heart attack brought on by exhaustion after a 3-day gaming binge.
Devil Nut Day is also the 1-year anniversary of the publication of this audiobook, Aesop for Children.
Bummer September 14th
September 14, 1899: Real estate developer Henry H. Bliss becomes the first person killed in the U.S. from a motor vehicle collision. The previous day, he had stepped off a trolley car and been struck by an electric taxi cab, knocking him to the ground and crushing his chest.
September 14, 1901: U.S. President William McKinley dies of infection caused by the gunshot wound inflicted by his assassin on September 5th.
September 14, 1927: Dancer Isadora Duncan is killed in Nice, France, when her scarf becomes entangled in the open-spoked wheel and axle of the car she’s riding in, breaking her neck.
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.
September 6, 1901: Anarchist Leon Czolgosz shoots U.S. President William McKinley at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York. McKinley dies eight days later.
September 6, 1926:
September 6, 1951: Joan Vollmer is shot and killed in an American-owned bar in Mexico City by her husband, William S. Burroughs. Both were intoxicated. Vollmer is alleged to have placed a glass on top of her head, and Burroughs was supposedly trying to shoot the glass off her head with a pistol. Instead he shot Vollmer in the head and killed her instantly.
This is portrayed in the film Beat (2000). Vollmer is played by Courtney Love and Burroughs by Canadian actor Kiefer Sutherland.
September 5, 1970: German race car driver Jochen Rindt is killed when his Lotus 72 crashes during practice for the Italian Grand Prix. As Rindt goes to brake, the car's right front inboard brake shaft fails, propelling him into the guard rail. The improperly installed guard rail gives way, and the Lotus crashes head-on into a stanchion. Rindt’s 5-point seatbelt, with only four of the five restraints engaged, allows his body to slip forward. As he does, the belt slits his throat. Rindt dies on the way to the hospital.
Jochan Rindt. This is an image from the Nationaal Archief, the Dutch National Archives, and Spaarnestad Photo, donated in the context of a partnership program.
September 5, 1983: Canadian stunt performer Ken Carter is killed when the rocket car he’s using to jump over an Ontario pond overshoots the landing ramp, flips, and lands on its roof.
September 4, 2006: Wildlife expert, zookeeper, and filmmaker Steve Irwin is filming a dive in shallow water near the Great Barrier Reef. He is struck in the chest by a stingray’s tale. The barb of the tale pierces his heart, killing him. He's 44 years old.
September 4, 2014: Comedian Joan Rivers dies of complications from a minor surgical procedure days after she stopped breathing during the surgery. She's 81 years old. Rivers' only child, her daughter Melissa, sues her mother's doctors for medical malpractice; they settle out of court with the doctors admitting responsibility for Rivers' death.
Happy 1-year book anniversary to The Deep Space Scrolls audiobook:
Bummer September 3rd
September 3, 1991: Fire breaks out inside the Imperial Food Products chicken processing plant in Hamlet, North Carolina. Some workers are unable to escape due to locked doors, including one door labeled as a fire exit. The building had no sprinkler system or fire alarm. Of the 90 workers in the plant at the time of the fire, 25 died and an additional 54 were injured. Plant owner Emmett Roe pleads guilty to manslaughter and serves nearly four years in prison.
September 3, 2009: Hulda Clark, a Canadian naturopath who claimed that all cancers are caused by infection with flatworms and sold people an electric device she claimed would “zap” the cancer out of them without the need for surgery or medicine, dies of cancer. The woman who peddled a “100% effective” quack cure to other cancer patients died of multiple myeloma.
September 2, 1666: The Great Fire of London begins. It kills 16 people and destroys 13,000 homes.
September 2, 1791: Virtuoso violinist Frantisek Kotzwara dies of apparent erotic asphyxiation after having intercourse with sex worker Susannah Hill in London. Hill, who was initially charged with Kotzwara’s murder but acquitted, testifies that Kotzwara asked her to cut off his testicles, and when she refused, settled instead for having intercourse with her while wearing a ligature tightened around his own neck with the other end fastened to the doorknob.
September 2, 1885: Chinese-American mine workers in Rock Springs, Wyoming, are beaten and killed by white miners. The race riot kills 28 people and destroys dozens of buildings. Hundreds of Chinese-American workers flee the town out of fear for their lives.
September 2, 1900: A tropical hurricane formed over the Atlantic Ocean makes landfall in the Dominican Republic. This storm is among the deadliest in U.S. history, with a large number of fatalities coming from Galveston, Texas. Meteorologists of the time, and in particular Isaac Cline, didn’t believe that a significant hurricane was possible in Galveston, and so rejected requests from the townspeople that the city should build a sea wall. As many as 8,000 people in the Caribbean, the U.S., and the Maritime Provinces of Canada are thought to have lost their lives in this storm, including Cline’s wife and some of his children.
September 2, 2004: A fire at the Duchess Anna Amalia Library in Weimar, Germany, destroys 12,500 irreplaceable books and damages an additional 62,000 materials, including Friedrich Schiller's death mask and 35 oil paintings of historical significance.
September 2, 2018: An air conditioner short circuits, causing a catastrophic fire at the National Museum of Brazil. The museum loses an estimated 92.5% of its collection.
September 1, 1859: English astronomer Richard Carrington, among other scientists, records an extraordinarily bright solar flair. Later to be identified as a coronal mass ejection (CME), the solar storm turns the night sky red. The aurora borealis can be seen as far South as Colombia. The surge of electricity washing over the Earth destroys some telegraphs in different parts of the world, sparking a few fires. Other telegraph operators find that their machines still have power even when unplugged from an electric outlet. This solar storm, the strongest in recorded history, is referred to as the Carrington Event.
That one's only a minor bummer - I don't think anyone was injured. The bigger bummer is how solar storms are events that could happen again and disrupt modern electrical systems much more than they disrupted 1859.
September 1, 2019: Spanish dancer Joana Sainz Garcia is killed while performing during a music festival when a pyrotechnics display malfunctions. A faulty cartridge strikes the 30-year-old in the abdomen.
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.
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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.
August 20, 1966: The bodies of electricians Manoel Pereira da Cruz and Miguel José Viana are discovered lying on a hill in Niterói, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Each man wore a suit, was partially covered in grass, and had a lead mask over his eyes. An empty water bottle lay beside them, and a cryptic set of instructions found in a notebook nearby referred to “swallowing capsules.” The men’s bodies could not be tested for toxins, according to the medical examiner, supposedly because their organs were too badly decomposed.
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.
