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Tea Bone posted:The Jonestown massacre, from wikipedia I've always found Jonestown super creepy and interesting. This is a really good documentary on it for those that're more interested in everything.
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May 28, 2014 09:57
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Lampsacus posted:I've always known about Jonestown and read the wiki pages ages ago. But that doco.. Oh my! And that audio too! Yeah, the documentary does a pretty good job of painting how crazy the whole thing was, but also how Jones went about bringing normally completely sane individuals to the point where they'd think that poisoning their own babies and then themselves was the best choice of action. I can't imagine how frightening it must have been for the few people that survived, having to hide in the jungle or under beds hoping that the guards with guns didn't come find ad shoot them because they refused to kill themselves.
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May 28, 2014 19:11
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acephalousuniverse posted:I think he was also fairly unstable himself. I mean obviously any cult leader is some kind of hosed up, but Jones was bipolar or something and his decision to have a mass suicide was definitely influenced by actual apocalyptic type feelings in his own mind. A lot of people feel legitimately infuriated that he took the easy way out (gunshot) compared to the agony of the people who drank the poison, though. The documentary linked earlier definitely confirms he was pretty nutso. He killed small animals as a child so he could hold funerals for them, and he believed (or at least preached) that he was the only actual straight person on the planet, and every other person that acts straight is actually just doing so to cover up the fact that they're gay. He also made sexual advances on both men and women in the temple.
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May 29, 2014 03:14
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Strongylocentrotus posted:Honestly, this isn't even the craziest theory people have put forward. In the Death Valley Germans case, some internet people theorized that the missing family had somehow been vanished by the US Government for getting too close to a military facility. Honestly, it just sounds like the dude wanted to get lost or start a new life or whatever. He could have easily just forgotten something or needed to buy something so he drove away and then back to the parking lot but in a different parking spot - this explains the different eye-witness reports on location of the car, and also the officer not seeing any car at all. He went to a different location than he told his fiance and gave her a bum phone number so he could get out of his life. CodfishCartographer has a new favorite as of 07:15 on Jun 14, 2014 |
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Jun 14, 2014 07:10
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Strongylocentrotus posted:It would explain almost everything, except there's the troublesome business of the cellphone ping received on that Sunday morning. Apparently, according to the physics of it and what Verizon told the investigators, the phone must have been within ~10 miles of a certain cell tower in Joshua Tree National Park. It must have also been turned on at the time the ping was sent. Which raises the question of why his phone stopped pinging after he called his girlfriend on Thursday morning, and then it suddenly pings, just once, briefly, from within the park and the vicinity of the cell tower, three days after his initial disappearance. I dunno, I've gotten random text messages even while my phone is in airplane mode, so maybe it was some weird fluke like that? The cell phone thing is the only bit that throws me off about it. I'm not sure how cell phone pinging works, but is it possible he accidentally turned his phone on by accident, then quickly turned it back off again? If he was hiking through Joshua Tree Natl Park to escape, it'd make sense he could have passed within range of the tower.
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Jun 14, 2014 08:36
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FourLeaf posted:But the Burakumin were explicitly associated with performing low-status, unclean jobs. Whereas the Cagots were restricted to occupations like carpentry or butchering, jobs that weren't considered sinful in medieval Europe like, say, moneylending (because the Jews were forced to take those jobs). On the other hand, it appears discrimination against burakumin still exists today.
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Nov 22, 2014 20:03
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Aesop Poprock posted:How long did you have that page of this thread open for cause I feel like that conversation is from like a week ago It was, but it was reposted near the end of last page.
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Sep 1, 2015 17:49
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Oh, are we talking about fires? How about the 1911 Triangle Fire in NYC? At the time, it was the deadliest workplace fire in the city’s history - 146 garment workers burned to death in the Triangle Shirtwaist factory, the vast majority of which were women. Most of the victims were immigrants, and some were as young as 14 years old. Old cloth scraps piled up, and while we don’t know exactly what caused the start of the fire (some believe it was just a dropped cigarette) it broke out on the eighth floor. There were no alarms in the building, and while the tenth floor was warned of the fire via a phone call, the employees on the ninth floor didn’t know about the fire until it was already on top of them. There were only a few exits - those that weren’t on fire were locked to prevent workers from escaping, so the higher-ups could search the women’s purses before they left each shift. The foreman who had the key escaped via another route without opening these locked doors. Victims tried to use the one single fire escape, but due to the heat and weight it quickly collapsed (dropping 20 people almost 100 ft onto the pavement below!). The elevator operators stuck around and saved as many as they could, up until the elevators ceased functioning. While one elevator car buckled under the heat, the other car was put out of commission due to employees hurling themselves down the empty elevator shaft to escape the flames. The weight and impact of the burning corpses warped the elevator car beyond usage. The fire department arrived very quickly, but their ladders were only long enough to reach the sixth floor. Furthermore, so many victims were hurling themselves from the building that it made it difficult for firefighters to approach the building. Life nets held by the firefighters were simply torn by the force of the falling bodies. After a certain point, there was literally no escape. What anti-fire measures were there inside the building itself? A dozen red pails of water. PBS has a really good documentary on the disaster.That also details a lot of the history and conditions of the factory and its workers leading up to the fire. CodfishCartographer has a new favorite as of 00:27 on Dec 2, 2015 |
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Dec 1, 2015 23:46
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Doctor Malaver posted:I would've preferred more commentary though. The sinking is well documented so they could've added a bunch of events to the timeline. Wish granted http://www.titanichg.com/archives/ The guys that made the animation have a podcast that follows along with the video, starting at around 10 minutes into the podcast. The audio balancing is a little funky, but they go through the video in real time talking about various events and people and stuff, and a little behind-the-scenes on the animation. Apparently the animation is also a pseudo-advertisement for a game they're making, which is intended to be a super realistic recreation of being on the Titanic as it sinks. So that will probably be pretty terrifying.
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Apr 21, 2016 17:31
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One of my favorite less-known stories, it’s not the spookiest thing in the thread but it’s interesting and some parts of it are fairly unsettling: The Collyer Brothers. The two of them were basically the original hoarders, but they took it really far. The two brothers’ parents collected quite a lot of stuff / junk, so when they passed away it all went to the two brothers, who lived in a four story brownstone in Harlem. While most of it was random nicknacks, there was some valuable stuff - including all the parts needed to assemble an entire Ford Model T. When the great depression hit and the rich white people in Harlem started being replaced with poor black people, the brothers started getting scared of leaving their home and became more and more secluded with all their inherited junk. Rumors spread about the brothers, leading to neighborhood kids and teens harassing them, leading to them being even more secluded. Eventually the older brother, Homer, lost his eyesight due to some hemorrhages in the backs of his eyes due to a stroke. If that wasn’t enough, he also became paralyzed due to rheumatism. The brothers’ father was a gynecologist and had tons of medical books that the brothers had inherited, so they decided that they were the best ones to deal with the affliction instead of taking Homer to an actual doctor. Langley, the younger brother, began collecting newspapers so that when Homer got his eyesight back, he could catch up with the world. Despite having inherited quite a lot of money from their parents, the brothers refused to pay any bills. They became roughly self-sustaining, using the parts from the Model T to generate electricity and a small kerosene heater for warmth. Langley would care for his brother and read to him, and then would go out after midnight to get food from all over the city, and would gather water from nearby pumps. Eventually, the bank began eviction procedures and sent a cleanup crew to retrieve the property. The brothers had become something of a local legend at this point, so when the workers came to force their way into the house, it drew quite a crowd of people interested in seeing inside the house. Rumors had spread that there were some great treasure buried deep in the house. The police were summoned to help with the eviction process, and after breaking down the door it was finally revealed quite how bad the hoarding had got - they were met with a sheer wall of junk from the floor to the ceiling. Eventually they found Langely in a clearing he had made, and he wrote them a check for $6,700 (almost $100,000 nowadays) on the spot to pay off the mortgage all at once. He refused to let anyone see his brother Homer. Oh yeah, haven’t mentioned Homer in a while. Because nobody had seen him in quite some time, more rumors spread about him. The police received numerous calls that one of the brothers had died, but Langley would never let anyone in. Eventually he gave way, and allowed the police to search the house. This is when the true extent of the hoarding really became known. Worrying about burglars, Langley had arranged elaborate maze-like paths and tunnels - many of which were booby-trapped. Some were just there to alert the brothers of intruders, others were specifically designed to crush and suffocate anyone who triggered them. Homer and Langley would live in small nests and clearings in the junk, and only they knew the “safe” routes through the debris that was piled to the ceiling. The police found Homer curled up on a bed, still very much alive. He was unable to move due to his rheumatism, but seemed quite lucid - he berated the policemen and asserted he was very much alive. Time went on, and the police received more and more calls of reports that the brothers had died. It became common practice that they’d knock on the door, and Langley would yell at them to prove that he was alive. However, after one report of a strange odor emanating from the building, nobody responded when the police came to check up. As all the entrances were blocked or barricaded (the entire first floor was completely filled with junk), the police were forced to break the second-floor windows in order to gain entrance. After two hours of careful excavation and exploration to ensure no booby traps were triggered, police finally found Homer. He was dead. The autopsy had revealed that he had been dead for only around ten hours, and that he hadn’t had anything to eat or drink in three days - starvation was the official cause of death. Langley, however, was nowhere to be found. The police suspected that he might have been the one that submitted the anonymous tip, and so a search was held across nine whole states to try and find him. Officers were also posted at the house, in case he returned. However, nothing could be found of Langley. Eventually the police began pursuing the possibility that Langley was still somewhere in the brownstone building. The police began excavating junk from the building, for three whole weeks. The amount of stuff in the house was truly unfathomable, and was estimated at weighing around 120 tons. Finally, Langley’s decaying body was discovered. He was buried in debris only ten feet away from where Homer had been found - he had tripped one of his own traps in a tunnel, and was crushed and suffocated while trying to bring Homer food. As Homer was unable to move, he could only sit there motionless as his brother suffocated. He then had no other choice but to wait there, alone, until he starved to death next to his brother’s rotting corpse. I glossed over quite a few details, but the end always gets me. Ironically, their home was torn down and turned into a park, which is still there to this day. There’s a decent documentary about them up on youtube, if people want some more information: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=81jV9D8FiFA
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May 17, 2017 18:21
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Your Gay Uncle posted:http://www.rollingstone.com/tv/features/mommy-dead-and-dearest-doc-what-we-learned-w482263 This was a real pro-watch, thanks a ton for sharing it.
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May 19, 2017 19:51
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