My room 101 would be getting squicked into a permanent vegetative state by bill gates in a room filled with deaths head hawk moths.
The horror… the horror…
My room 101 would be getting squicked into a permanent vegetative state by bill gates in a room filled with deaths head hawk moths.
The horror… the horror…
Tree roaches skittering everywhere… I would talk before I went in. AAAGGGHHHHH!!!
Are you sure it wouldn’t be dust bunnies? 
I think you’re mixing up your little victims. Wasn’t Mary Phagan the girl who was murdered in Georgia around 1913, and Leo Frank got lynched for it?
Marion Parker (another little girl), on the other hand, was kidnapped in California by William Hickman in 1927. Hickman led the parents on for a long time, then took their ransom money and left them the murdered girl wrapped in a blanket by the roadside. When they opened the blanket, they found he had cut off her arms and legs.
I would say the Marion Parker story was the creepier of the two.
Anybody want me to tell some MORE stories? Come on down to Room 101!
No, I am NOT mixing up my prepubescent murder victims, Ike. Admittedly, the Marion Parker killing itself may be creepier—but the song about Mary Phagan is the one that gives me the willies. It’s because of “this is what the dirty Jew bastard did to her” songs like that that Leo Frank was lynched.
Good point. But surely that record must have come out AFTER the lynching? What was the time-line on the murder-lynching, no more than a couple of days, right? Phagan found dead, suspects rounded up and tossed in jail, the good people of Atlanta decide the Jewish fellow did it (Hey! We can re-post this in the “What to do in Atlanta” thread!), Frank hanged from a lamp-post. The record was a response, celebrating the lynching of a man they thought killed a 12-year-old girl. Still hideously chilling, though, as a reminder of the mob pinning the crime on the “other.”
Frank wasn’t even exonerated until 1985 or somewhere around there, right?
I may be wrong, but I think there was nearly a year between the initial murder and the lynching—Leo Frank was tried and found guilty, and was being transferred to another jail, where he’d be “safer,” when he was taken off the train and hanged.
It was sometime in the 1980s when someone confessed to having seen a janitor kill Mary Phagan (the janitor was black, so he’d no doubt have been strung up, too!).
I got the impression the song was written after Mary’s killing but before the lynching, which puts it on my Creepy Hit Parade.
The lynching followed the murder by over two years, actually. Mary Phagan was killed April 26, 1913. Leo Frank was lynched August 17, 1915. Frank was tried and convicted of the murder in July-August 1913, sentenced to death, appealed (unsuccessfully) all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court, and finally had his sentence commuted by Governor John Slaton on the last day of Slaton’s term in office (June 20, 1915), Slaton having become convinced of Frank’s innocence. The original trial judge and the attorney for Jim Conley, the black man convicted as an accomplice whom many suspect of having been in fact responsible, had also urged Slaton to commute the sentence. The commutation came two days before the long-delayed execution was scheduled, and Slaton immediately got the hell out of Dodge, leaving Georgia the moment his successor was sworn in and spending the next several months traveling.
In the next two months, Frank was moved from the Fulton County Jail to the Georgia State Prison in Milledgeville and survived having his throat slashed by another inmate. On August 16, a large party of men traveled to Milledgeville, cut the phone lines to the prison, entered Frank’s barracks, and took him by car back to Marietta, where he was hanged from a tree (not a lamppost) east of town the next morning.
Frank was officially pardoned in 1986, following by four years the disclosure by Alonzo Mann that he’d seen Jim Conley carrying Phagan’s limp body. The Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles stonewalled throughout this time, claiming that Mann’s implication of Conley didn’t exonerate Frank. Even when they did finally act, the pardon was officially based on the state’s failure to protect Frank, not any official recognition of his innocence.
This site was the first I found with a reasonably complete chronology. Can’t vouch for the validity of everything there, but reviewing it didn’t turn up any obvious discrepancies from my recollection of other sources.
Thank you, rackensack. Queasily informative.
First, I apologize for the Atlanta crack.
Second, I used lamppost as a figure of speech. Y’know, “we’ll get aholt of them bastards and hang 'em from lampposts!”
Third, NEXT time you come in here, tell us what your Room 101 fear is! <grin> MadPoet hates us all enough for the multiple hijacks.
Leeches. Ick.
Nope. That would be my employer, Vera. Very good, though!!
Lessee … whay would be in my own personal Room 101?
[ul]
[li]Concentrated sulfuric acid[/li][li]Never-ending reruns of the 1976 Mickey Mouse Club[/li][li]Overwhelming scientific evidence that Wilhelm Reich was absolutely positively 100% correct[/li][li]The bedposts that haunted my nightmares when I was a pre-schooler[/li][/ul]
Guinea worms. These are parasites found in Africa. The eggs are ingested when you drink the water. When the larvae hatch they grow to be about three feet long, big around as a pencil lead. These full grown worms then burrow out thru the skin at any point they feel like it, the feet, between the eyes, etc. When they break the skin in a boil-like sore you can’t pull on them to get them out cause they would break off. You have to pull out a centimeter or so and wrap it around a stick or something to prevent it from going back in, then you pull it out about an inch a day until it is all out.
I could have lived my whole life blissfully ignorant of the guinea worm. Now you know.
“Live from Room 101, with your hosts Kathie Lee Gifford and Tom Vu…” 
Seriously, I really dislike bats. Was spooked by some as a kid.
Scribe is a superstitious, cowardly lot, so my disguise must be able to strike terror into his heart. I must be a creature of the night, black terrible…a…
clowns.
lots and lots of clowns.
mojo57 wrote:
Do they sometimes burrow through a major organ on their way out? I assume they have to pierce their way through the intestinal wall at some point, which can’t be any good for you either. How does someone survive a guinea worm infestation long enough for them to GET to the skin surface?
Hee hee hee…
(“It’s George Clooney…noooooooo!” )
Bah… this is the longest any of my threads has got… loves them hijackers.