Not so much creeped out, but “Hmm!”:
Stephen King relayed a story he got from the Wallachinsky folks (The Book of Lists) about a little girl who was trampled to death in a circus fire back in the 1940s. Even though her face was untouched and there was nationwide media coverage, including pictures in all the major newspapers, nobody claimed her. To this day, no one is sure who she is.
I think you’re describing Little Miss 1565, one of 167 people killed in a Ringling Brothers Circus tent fire in Hartford, Connecticut in 1944.
That’s the one; Charles Nelson Reilly was there as a toddler.
I learned about that fire at some point in a Connecticut public school education. (And, BTW, she’s since been identified.)
Wikipedia was sorta sketchy regarding who claimed her; do you have a name?
The Wikipedia article says she was identified in 1991 as Eleanor Emily Cook. Here’s a gift link to a New York Times article about how she was ultimately identified. It doesn’t mention DNA matching, though that may not have been possible in 1991 but says, “On March 8, 1991, the Connecticut State Medical Examiner ruled that corpse 1565 was Eleanor.”
Much obliged! Another good yarn slain by the facts.
Actually he was a teenager, and the fire had a profound effect on him for the rest of life as would be expected. Even though he spent most of his acting career on the stage he all but refused to sit in an audience and when he did he insisted on sitting at the very back next to an exit.
The Wikipedia article also mentions that the actress who played Madge the manicurist in those old Palmolive commercials was also present.
And thanks for the NYT article. Some people in this world still know how to write.
BTW: Eleanor is sometimes mislabeled as Little Miss Nobody, which is a whole different story. Accept no substitutes.
(It was a good yarn while it lasted.)
There continues to be doubt as to whether that child really was Eleanor Cook.
They could do DNA testing, though that would require disinterring the remains.
Who put Bella in the Wych Elm?
And the community does not want this done. They want her to stay at rest, whoever she was.
I just watched an episode of Diabolical on Cindy McKay. That woman left so much wreckage behind her. She stole from so many people and killed several. She effortlessly moved from one name to another and escaped justice for years.
I do not understand people like her, thankfully.
Whew, it’s a lot.
Video Unavailable.
Especially if you see the picture of Samantha Koenig. I’ve heard the picture you see online was actually a fake made for the movie on it, but even if that is true (it may be real) still creepy af after hearing the backstory on how the real photo was made.
ETA: If you read this and don’t know what I’m taking about that’s a good thing. It is seriously fucked up.
Very late reply, but it doesn’t seem all that mysterious that the lake would contain bodies - looking at the photos in the article, it’s basically at the bottom of a steeply conical crater. It’s easy to imagine that if there was a fair bit of ice cover, a person could slide down into the bottom of that place and not be able to climb back out before dying of exposure.
The sheer quantity of bodies there is disturbing, I suppose, depending on how remote or frequented the place is.
Regarding the hundreds of bodies around the remote lake: My guess as to why they were there, only to be killed most likely by a freak storm, is that the lake held some kind of religious or cultural significance that is long forgotten, and they were there for a ritual gathering.
But the BBC article says
They found that the dead were both genetically diverse and their deaths were separated in time by as much as 1,000 years.
“It upends any explanations that involved a single catastrophic event that lead to their deaths,” Eadaoin Harney, the lead author of the study, and a doctoral student at Harvard University, told me. “It is still not clear what happened at Roopkund Lake, but we can now be certain that the deaths of these individuals cannot be explained by a single event.”