Hi all,
Sorry to be so gruesome, but I, in my wide reading, have come across stories about recently hanged men (still swinging) to have an erection and sometimes ejaculate post-mortem. A lovely story indeed, but a) does anyone know any qualified sources for these facts?; and b) has anyone else ever read about this?
Best wishes,
LB
can’t add any fact based information, but WS Burroughs mentioned that phenomena several times in his body of work, especially “The Lost Boys”
Now you got me curious…
Why, yes. One of my favorite quotes: “A similar association between sperm and mandrake is found in the European folk belief that mandrake may grow beneath a gallows from the sperm of a man who was hanged for thievery or some other crime and then emitted his semen into the ground.” (Simoons, Plants of Live, Plants of Death, p. 108). Footnote to the Grimms’ Teutonic Mythology, but I don’t see the reference in there via the google books preview.
The mandrake legend is also repeated in the movie Flesh & Blood with Rutger Hauer. In that movie they use the mandrake as an aphrodisiac, also.
I know it is a cheap shot, but Wikipedia has answers to both questions: Death erection - Wikipedia
Probably not an authoritative cite but:
There has to be a David Carradine joke in here somewhere…
I think it depends how well they’re hung.
I once read a book about the eruption of Mount Pelée in Martinique, West Indies in 1902 that some of the men killed by the pyroclastic flow in St. Pierre were found in this, er, condition.