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.
Artist Birthday: Melanie Blatt of All Saints Author Julie S. Howlin post of the day: Aretha Franklin
Bummer March 25th
March 25, 1911: A fire in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in Greenwich Village, New York City, kills 146 factory workers, most of them young women from Italian and Jewish immigrant families.
March 25, 1990: In the early hours of the morning, young people gather at the Happy Land social club, an unlicensed club, in The Bronx, New York City. They’re celebrating Carnival. Many of them are from Honduran immigrant families, and often of the Garifuna community (people of indigenous Caribbean and African descent). The club has no fire exits, sprinkler system, or alarms.
Coat check worker Lydia Feliciano, working at the club that morning, is visited by her boyfriend, Julio González. They argue and Feliciano tells González she doesn’t want to see him anymore. González is thrown out of the club. He returns and sets fire to the club with gasoline, which he disperses at the bottom of the stairs below the club’s only exit. The fire kills 87 people.
Lydia Feliciano survives the fire, one of only six survivors. Julio González is arrested, confesses to the arson, and is sentenced to life in prison. He dies in prison in 2016.
Beatles Trivia February 1, 1964: The #1 single in the U.S. is The Beatles’s “I Want to Hold Your Hand.”
Bummer February 1st
February 1, 1891: Newspaper publisher Ignacio Martínez is assassinated by two men in Laredo, Texas, because they disagree with his newspaper’s criticism of Mexican president Porfirio Díaz.
February 1, 1974: The 25-story Joelma Building in São Paulo, Brazil, catches fire when an air conditioner malfunctions. An estimated 180 people lose their lives.
February 1, 1988: Heather Michele O'Rourke, the 12-year-old actress who starred in the Poltergeist horror movies, dies of septic shock due to stenosis of the intestine, which causes her to go into cardiac arrest. The previous day she’d been suffering from flu-like symptoms when she suddenly collapsed, prompting her parents to take her to the emergency room, where the narrowing of her intestine was discovered.
February 1, 2001: The Los Angeles funicular railway known as Angels Flight is built in 1915, discontinued in 1969, and restored in 1996. Using the original two cars, named Olivet and Sinai, the funicular has known maintenance issues in 2001, including a non-working emergency brake on the Sinai. As a result, the Sinai malfunctions while approaching the station at the top of the hill, descending back down the track and colliding with the Olivet. Seven people are injured; 83-year-old Leon Praport is killed.
What was Diane Meyer grateful for on February 1, 2024?
January 20, 1985: Czech-Canadian stunt performer Karel Souček dies from the injuries he sustained in a failed stunt the previous day. Souček, sealed inside a barrel, attempted to drop 180 feet into a tank of water inside the Houston Astrodome. The barrel is released prematurely, spins, and hits the rim of the tank. Souček is cut free of the barrel but is severely injured and dies in the hospital.
January 20, 2020: Former NBA player Kobe Bryant, his daughter Gianna, basketball coach Christina Mauser, pilot Ara Zobayan, and five others are killed when their helicopter crashes in poor weather in Calabasas, California.
January 16, 1862: A coal mining accident in Northumberland, England, kills 204 workers, some of them children as young as ten, and the pit pony. Most of them die of asphyxiation when the ventilation system breaks down, allowing the mine to fill with carbon monoxide.
January 16, 1942: TWA Flight 3 crashes into Potosi Mountain, Nevada, due to pilot error, killing all 22 people on board, including the actress Carole Lombard.
January 16, 1979: Ted Cassidy, the 6'9", deep-voiced actor who played Lurch on The Addams Family tv series, dies at age 46 from complications of surgery to remove a tumor from his heart. The tumor is a symptom of his acromegaly, the health condition responsible for his unusual height.
pesto pasta new books packages French press coffee saying what I want to say hugs motivation how far I've come bagels with cream cheese birthday cake banana bread being proud of others short stories making plans -- keep making them! Life is too short to want to see people and not follow through.
January 15, 1890: 26-year-old circus performer Lucía Zárate, who was born with Majewski osteodysplastic primordial dwarfism type II that gave her an extremely small stature, is traveling on a circus train with her fellow performers when the train breaks down in the Sierra Nevada mountain range in California. Zárate, who weighed only 4.7 pounds (2.1 kg) at age 17, dies of hypothermia while the train is stranded.
January 15, 1919: More than two million gallons of molasses spill from a tank that bursts in the North End of Boston, Massachusetts, flooding the streets. Over 150 people are injured; 21 people and an unknown number of horses die.
January 15, 1947: Betty Bersinger takes her 3-year-old daughter for a walk in their South Los Angeles neighborhood. Bersinger spots what she initially thinks is a mannequin lying in an empty lot. To her horror, she soon realizes the naked, bisected figure is a woman’s corpse. Bersinger phones the police from a nearby home.
The victim of this hideous crime is Elizabeth Short, 22 years old, last seen alive on the 9th of January. The murderer of the Boston native has never been arrested.
Some family members of Dr. George H. Hodel suspect their relative was involved in the crime; Hodel died in 1999 and this cannot be proven.
As of 2026, Michael Connelly, the journalist-novelist known for the Harry Bosch and Lincoln Lawyer novels series, hosts a podcast called Killer In the Code. It looks into a theory that the killer of Elizabeth Short and the self-named Zodiac Killer are the same person.
January 15, 1951: Mount Lamington on the island of Papua begins to erupt, spouting tall plumes of smoke. Its eruptions will continue until July 1956, resulting in the deaths of approximately 3,000 people. Many of them are residents of the village of Sangara, and most of their deaths come about either by burns from the dense pyroclastic flow or by inhaling and breathing superheated gases and toxic materials.
January 15, 2008: 25-year-old actor Brad Renfro dies of an accidental heroin overdose.
January 15, 2018: Limerick, Ireland’s alternative rock band The Cranberries’s lead singer Dolores O’Riordan dies at age 46 after becoming intoxicated with champagne and five small bottles of liquor and then accidentally drowning in a London hotel bathtub.
Today's Observance: New Year's Day Author Julie S. Howlin post of the day: J. Edgar Hoover
And Now: The collection is complete! Now you can go back and read the entire updated, revised, and consolidated "Bummer" collection of history posts for each month of the year.
Happy new year! I hope your 2026 isn't a bummer. And now, because I still haven't published this in book form and you won't find these anywhere else online, here are my sources.
Physical Books
1959: The Year Everything Changed by Fred Kaplan. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2009.
Our Dreaming Mind: A Sweeping Exploration of the Role That Dreams Have Played in Politics, Art, Religion, and Psychology, from Ancient Civilizations to the Present Day by Robert L. Van de Castle, Ph.D., Ballantine Books, 1994.
Happy Spotify Wrapped release day 2024! What was your top song of the year? Mine was "Joyride" by Kesha, surprising no one, since I already wrote a blog post about my obsession with this fun pop song.
Is 128 times a lot of times to stream one song? My top song last year was one that I listened to 49 times.
Rounding out my other top songs are tracks from ZZ Ward, New Found Glory, and Taylor Swift. But I'm not just a music girlie: I'm also a podcast girlie. These were my Top 5, including of course Disaster Area.
Now let's dive into my Top 100, which I'll divide into several posts over the next few days for easier readability.
100. "Headless Horseman" Kid Kasino, Shea - an electroswing version of the Bing Crosby-Disney tune with a female vocalist; Halloween playlist
Of course, I was in Sleepy Hollow, New York in October. Here's my photo of the Headless Horseman Bridge.
Does the mention of oysters make you think of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, specifically "The Walrus and the Carpenter?" Coincidentally, the next-most listened song is...
March 2, 1978: Two thieves steal the coffin containing the body of actor Charlie Chaplin, which was interred in Corsier-sur-Vevey, Switzerland. They hope to gain $600,000 in ransom, but Chaplin’s widow Oona (the daughter of American playwright Eugene O’Neill) refused to pay. The two men, auto mechanisms from Poland and Bulgaria, were instead forced to show police the corn field in which they’d reburied the coffin. Chaplin’s family took the precaution of burying the coffin in concrete when it was returned to the cemetery. The English actor had died at age 88 on December 25, 1977.
March 11, 1918: Private Albert Gitchell, stationed in the U.S. Army at Fort Riley, Kansas, is discovered to have the first-recorded case of influenza in what becomes the influenza pandemic of 1918. An estimated 50 million to 100 million people die of influenza during the pandemic worldwide.
In the Disaster Area Podcast episode on the Bazar de la Charite fire of May 4, 1897 in Paris, Jennifer Matarese loosely outlines how that tragic fire that killed 126 people indirectly related to the events that started World War I and the 1918-1920 influenza pandemic. To wit:
- The fire kills Sophie Charlotte of Bavaria, Duchess of Alençon.
- Sophie's sister, Empress Elisabeth of Austria, is inconsolable at the death of her favorite sister. Empress Elisabeth was already having a pretty rough time.
- Elisabeth's only son (of her four children), Crown Prince Rudolph, had died in an apparent murder-suicide, killing his mistress Baroness Mary Vetsera and himself, in 1889. Crown Prince Rudolph, who was to inherit the throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, dies without leaving a legitimate male heir.
- In 1898, Empress Elisabeth is assassinated in Geneva by an Italian anarchist, who stabs her with a thin needle-file as she walks between her hotel and a steamship.
- When Empress Elisabeth is assassinated with no son or male grandson to inherit the throne, rule of the Austro-Hungarian Empire passes to Elisabeth's husband's brother, Archduke Karl Ludwig.
- Archduke Karl Ludwig of Austria dies of natural causes (typhoid) in 1896, passing the throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire to his heir, Archduke Franz Ferdinand.
- Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie are assassinated by a Serbian anarchist on June 28, 1914, leading directly to the Great War when Austria-Hungary declares war on Serbia.
- Fort Riley is one of the major training grounds for the American Expeditionary Forces who will fight in the Western Front of the Great War. As American troops are moved into Europe, they are among those who spread the H1N1 influenza A virus.
- The virus kills an estimated 25 million to 50 million people worldwide between 1918 and 1920, with some estimates going as high as 100 million people.
March 20, 1964: Poet, novelist, and folk hero Brendan Behan, considered one of the all-time greatest Irish literary talents, dies at the age of 41 after collapsing into a diabetic coma in the street.
March 22, 1950: Convicted child sexual predator Frank La Salle is arrested for the kidnapping of Florence Sally Horner, whom he has abducted from her home in New Jersey 21 months earlier. Horner is ten years old at the time of the kidnapping. La Salle is sentenced to 30 to 35 years in prison.
Although he denied it during his lifetime, Vladimir Nabokov almost certainly based some of his narrative in his book Lolita on Horner’s story. In her 2018 book The Real Lolita, Sarah Weinman describes how literary scholars know this.
Today is Friday the 13th. No matter what you do today, chances are, you won't be as unlucky as the passengers of this plane.
Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571, with 40 passengers and five crew members on board, crashes in the Andes Mountains. Survivors of the crash, many of them members of a rugby team, are forced to eat parts of the deceased since no other food is available. By the time the survivors are rescued on December 23rd, only 16 of them remain.
121 years ago today, on 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!”
Here are some other disastrous September 19ths from history:
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, 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 cremated 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.
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, 1988: More than 300 people are injured and 75 are killed when three aircraft collide at an air show in Rammstein, 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.
If you enjoy the Disaster Area podcast and want to support author/podcaster Jennifer Matarese, the following are some links to her social media accounts. I want her to be able to afford to write her next book, because I really want to read it. Become her patron on Patreon; you'll feel like a Renaissance-era Venetian arts patron, turning your money into art.
If you don't have money--this is quite understandable--the best free way to support Jennifer and her research, writing, and podcasting is to give Disaster Area a 5-star review on any podcast platform that allows reviews. Especially Apple (https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/disaster-area/id1071491908). Giving a podcaster a 5-star review on Apple increases their podcast's visibility to new potential listeners.
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.
If you enjoy the Disaster Area podcast and want to support author/podcaster Jennifer Matarese, the following are some links to her social media accounts. I want her to be able to afford to write her next book, because I really want to read it. Become her patron on Patreon; you'll feel like a Renaissance-era Venetian arts patron, turning your money into art.
If you don't have money--this is quite understandable--the best free way to support Jennifer and her research, writing, and podcasting is to give Disaster Area a 5-star review on any podcast platform that allows reviews. Especially Apple (https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/disaster-area/id1071491908). Giving a podcaster a 5-star review on Apple increases their podcast's visibility to new potential listeners.
July 6, 1819: Sophie Blanchard, the first woman to pilot a hot air balloon as a professional balloonist, dies in a hot air ballooning accident. Performing balloon ascents for a crowd at Tivoli Gardens, the Parisian amusement park, she included fireworks in her show. The fireworks ignited the helium in her balloon. Blanchard became entangled in the balloon’s net and subsequently falls to her death.
July 6, 1944: A fire at the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus in Hartford, Connecticut, kills an estimated 167 people.
Here is the Hartford circus fire episode on Disaster Area Podcast:
July 6, 1971: Louis Armstrong dies of a heart attack.
July 6, 1983: Model/actor Tammy Lynn Leppert, 18 years old at the time, is seen for the last confirmed time getting out of a friend’s car in a parking lot in Cocoa Beach, Florida. The friend confirms he and Leppert argued and that he dropped her off in a parking lot; Leppert has never contacted her friends or family since then. Leppert appears briefly in the movie Scarface.
July 6, 1988: An explosion on the Piper Alpha oil platform in the North Sea off the coast of Scotland kills 165 oil workers and two rescue workers. Although no one from the platform’s owner, Occidental Petroleum (Caledonia) Limited, was ever charged with a crime, neglected maintenance and inadequate safety procedures contributed to the disaster.
The platform collapses and sinks. 61 survivors are rescued.
This is an affiliate link:
https://amzn.to/3XnRhKi
If you enjoy the Disaster Area podcast and want to support author/podcaster Jennifer Matarese, the following are some links to her social media accounts. I want her to be able to afford to write her next book, because I really want to read it. Become her patron on Patreon; you'll feel like a Renaissance-era Venetian arts patron, turning your money into art.
If you don't have money--this is quite understandable--the best free way to support Jennifer and her research, writing, and podcasting is to give Disaster Area a 5-star review on any podcast platform that allows reviews. Especially Apple (https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/disaster-area/id1071491908). Giving a podcaster a 5-star review on Apple increases their podcast's visibility to new potential listeners.
Near Hammond, Indiana, a 26-car train bearing workers and performers from the Hagenbeck–Wallace Circus crashes when the engineer falls asleep at the wheel. An estimated 86 people are killed in the accident. The fire resulting from the crash is severe enough that some of the victims are never able to be identified.
Here is the episode on Disaster Area Podcast:
If you enjoy the podcast and want to support author/podcaster Jennifer Matarese, the following are some links to her social media accounts. I want her to be able to afford to write her next book, because I really want to read it. Become her patron on Patreon; you'll feel like a Renaissance-era Venetian arts patron, turning your money into art.
If you don't have money--this is quite understandable--the best free way to support Jennifer and her research, writing, and podcasting is to give Disaster Area a 5-star review on any podcast platform that allows reviews. Especially Apple (https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/disaster-area/id1071491908). Giving a podcaster a 5-star review on Apple increases their podcast's visibility to new potential listeners.
Update (September 9, 2023): If you're interested in the alleged paranormal and haunting aspects of the Hammond Circus Train Wreck, Ghostly Podcast did a show about that on September 6th:
Train wreck at Hammond Circus Train Wreck, at Hammond, Indiana June 22, 1918. This work is in the public domain in its country of origin and other countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 70 years or fewer.
June 14, 2017: The Grenfell Tower apartment building in London catches fire due to an electrical fault in a refrigerator on its fourth floor. Fire and smoke spread rapidly, trapped by the building’s exterior cladding and insulation, which act like a chimney. 70 people die in the 24-story tower before the fire can be extinguished and two more die in the hospital. 70 others are injured.
If you enjoy the podcast and want to support author/podcaster Jennifer Matarese, the following are some links to her social media accounts. I want her to be able to afford to write her next book, because I really want to read it. Become her patron on Patreon; you'll feel like a Renaissance-era Venetian arts patron, turning your money into art.
If you don't have money--this is quite understandable--the best free way to support Jennifer and her research, writing, and podcasting is to give Disaster Area a 5-star review on any podcast platform that allows reviews. Especially Apple (https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/disaster-area/id1071491908). Giving a podcaster a 5-star review on Apple increases their podcast's visibility to new potential listeners.
Podcast host Robert Evans - not the Robert Evans you're thinking of - is an author whose novel is called After the Revolution. It's a dystopian fantasy about cybernetically-enhanced North Americans living after a civil war that splits the United States into very different countries. I haven't read it, but if you want to hear excerpts, Evans reads them on the show.
Disastrous History: A Disasters of History Podcast
Disastrous History's host, Anthony Finchum, is a firefighter by profession, which gives him an interesting perspective on how disasters happen and what kinds of safety measures could have prevented them.
Footnoting History
Ghost Town: Strange History, True Crime, & The Paranormal
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