Browsing Category
1750-1900
William Corder, the Red Barn Killer
William Corder was born in 1803 in the village of Polstead in Suffolk, England. His father John was a well-off farmer, though as his second youngest son William wasn’t expected to inherit the farm. His father made sure that he didn’t forget…
Waking Dreams and Cadavers | Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (originally titled Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus) is often considered to be the first science fiction novel and is a landmark of gothic fiction. First published anonymously in 1818 when Mary Shelley was…
Jack Bee Garland aka Babe Bean, the Trousered Enigma
Jack Bee Garland, also known as Babe Bean, Beebe Bean, and several other names besides, was born in December of 1869 as Elvira Virginia Mugarrieta. Jack was the child of a former Mexican consul named José Marcos Mugarrieta and an upper…
Charles Robert Maturin | Money and the Root of all Evil
'I cannot again appear before the public in so unseemly a character as that of a writer of romances, without regretting the necessity that compels me to it. Did my profession furnish me with the means of subsistence, I should hold myself…
Severin Klosowski aka George Chapman, Victorian Murderer
Severin Klosowski was born near Warsaw in Poland in December of 1865. His father was a carpenter who earned enough to give his son a good education - Severin attended a boy’s school until the age of 14, and was then apprenticed to a…
Black Jack Adair, Donegal’s Most Hated Man
John George “Jack” Adair was born on the 3rd March 1823 in “Queen’s County” in Ireland. (The county in question was renamed “Laois” after Irish independence, for obvious reasons.) It was an appropriate home for the Adairs, who were all…
Longford’s Queen of Crooks | Chicago May, Blackmail Extraordinaire
It was on St Stephens day 1870 when Mary Anne Duignan was born to Thomas Duignan and Mary Elizabeth Brady in Edenmore, Ballinamuck. The eldest of two daughters and three sons, she grew up in comfortable surroundings on a 140 acre farm in…
Pauline Cushman, Actress and Union Spy
The woman who became famous as Pauline Cushman was born under the name Harriet Wood in New Orleans in 1833. Her father was Spanish, and her mother was French - two nations that had both ruled the Louisiana colony before the USA bought it…
Bad Science and Aryan Physics | Galileo, Johannes Stark and Philipp Lenard
Have you heard the one about the bad scientists who called the good scientists’ science bad science? Like so many historical goings-on recorded since recording became a thing, it is just one more preposterous example of bringing ad hominem…
Belle Starr, Wild West Outlaw Queen
The infamous Belle Starr was born Myra Maybelle Shirley in 1848, though everyone just called her May. The Shirleys lived in Missouri, where May’s father John owned a successful farm on the outskirts of Carthage. Her mother Eliza was John’s…