PiiXIE Dust Magazine: Issue 4

News reports

Halloween is, for some of us, the most enjoyable holiday of the year. We get to dress up as witches, ghosts, bloody doctors and zombies. We get free candy and we can finally scare the little kids without getting told off. But Halloween is also the celebration of death and because of this, it is considered the darkest time of the year.

It is at Halloween that people like to tell their best urban legends. We all assume that they are stories invented by other to set the mood for Halloween, but how many of those stories are actually true? Here I will tell you about three urban legends that have been proven to be true.

Human Halloween decorations

A few days before Halloween in 2005, a Delaware woman hung herself from a tree in a public part of town. Her body, suspended fifteen feet above the ground, was in clear view of passing vehicles. Despite this, many hours passed before authorities thought it might be a good idea to examine this incredibly realistic-looking decorative item. This is a case of someone deliberately hanging herself and being mistaken for adornment. Sadly, it isn't the only documented case involving hanging and Halloween.

In 1990, in Chicago, a teenager was supposed to put a noose around his neck and fake-hang himself during a pre-Halloween hayride. Everything was going according to plan, until he actually hanged himself and died. In the newspaper story about the incident, James Holzapfel said the stunt had worked on other nights and there was no indication of foul play.

Buried Alive

In the late 19th century, William Tebb tried to compile all the instances of premature burial from medical sources of the day. He managed to collect 219 cases of near-premature burial, 149 cases of actual premature burial and a dozen cases where dissection or embalming had begun on a not-yet-deceased body.

The concern over being buried alive back then was so real that the must-have hot-ticket item for the wealthy and paranoid were "safety coffins" that allowed those inside to signal to the outside world (usually by ringing a bell or raising some type of flag) should they awake 6-feet under.

The dead monster under your bed

In Las Vegas. Also, Kansas City, MO and Atlantic City, NJ and several times in Florida and California , people who checked in at different hotels all noticed a strange odour in the room, and after the hotel management came to investigate, a dead body was found in their mattress.

If you think about it, it makes some sense. The wardrobe and the bed are the first places where you'd most likely hide a dead body. The people who had the bad luck of having such an unwanted guest in their room are said to have taken quite a lot of time to report the dreadful smell. I wonder why it took them so long. Surely a smell as foul as that of a dead, decomposing body, is not something you don't notice pretty quickly.