Rue Morgue’s Weird Stats and Morbid Facts
September 23rd, 2007 by Ghostfreehood!
Weird Stats and Morbid Facts
compiled by Monica S. Kuebler
+ In the 1700’s, consumption (known as tuberculosis) was treated with one of two concoctions: the first involved snakes being boiled in milk, and the second consisted of woodlice boiled in ale.
+ Jean Brooks, star of Val Lewton’s The Seventh Victim, succumbed to alcoholism and faded into obscurity in the years following the film’s release. When she died in 1963 at the age of 46, not a single obituary ran for her in any Hollywood paper.
+ When Petre Toma, resident of a small Romanian village died in 2003 his fellow villagers were so convinced that he was a Vampire and that his corpse rose from the grave to feed on them that they exhumed his body and cut out his heart.
+ Following university, Clive Barker toured with theatrical productions of Dog, Nightlives, and The History of the Devil plays he wrote in the Grand Guingnol tradition.
+ Just as colored roses today signify different things, so did various plants and flowers from Victorian times, including basil which represented hatred and bilberry which signified treachery.
+ John Landis once confessed to Dario Argento that he decided to go into directing after seeing the Italian film maker’s The Bird with the Crystal Plumage.
+ Each year burials in the US are responsible for the release of 827,060 gallons of embalming fluid into the environment.
+ Christopher Lee won the role of The Creature in Hammer’s 1957 film The Curse of Frankenstein primarily because he was bigger and taller than almost all other British actors at the time.
+In August of 2004, a single bolt of lightning killed more than 31 cows in Denmark.
+ Wes Craven was a teacher specializing in English and Humanities before embarking on his career as a filmmaker.
+ The military practice of draping flags over coffins had it’s genesis during the Civil War when there were no caskets left to hold the dead and flags were used to cover corpses.
+ The song “Hey Man, Nice Shot” by the rock group Filter was penned in reaction to the public suicide of Pennsylvania state treasurer Budd Dwyer on January 22, 1987. Dwyer had been convicted of receiving illegal monetary kickbacks but claimed innocence right up until his death.
+ A Belgian man was arrested this past July after one of his dinner guests discovered the bodies of his wife and son in the freezer while putting away some left-overs from the party.
