Sad over historical deaths?

[Personyouneedisnannymcphee]

Obviously death happens every day and there are many recent, very sad deaths. But some historical ones actually make me ache a little when I think about them I think due to the details and historical background of them more so than sometimes things I hear on the news. Some of these being:

-the Romanov children. Of course the Tsar was horrific but how they died thinking they were going to safety and then didn’t get killed by bullets as jewels in their clothes protected them so they were finished with bayonets.

-Anne Boylyn’s death because the details of her ladies not letting the men touch her afterwards for fears they’d violate her headless body.

AIBU for sometimes being incredibly sad over these people I never knew or do you have your own historical death that makes your stomach drop when you think of it?

Aberfan.

Victoria Climbie. That picture of her in her pink wellies with a thousand watt smile, despite what those cunts did to her just kills me.

I’ve always hated Henry VIII anyway. Vile, abusive, narcissistic, corrupt and greedy even by the very different standards of the time. He makes Boris Johnson look like Santa Claus.

I always feel sad about Charlotte Bronte - never got the chance for motherhood and a happy marriage - and Jane Austen (she could have written so much more) and Franz Schubert, whose Ninth Symphony suggests that he was only just beginning to come into his own, musically.

But to me, one of the worst is Princess Charlotte (George IV’s daughter) dying in childbirth, along with her son. The really tragic thing was that forceps had just been invented and might have given her a fighting chance, but the Royal physicians were too stick-in-the-mud to try them.

Lady Jane grey. She was only 17 and didn't even want to be queen. Then she was executed knowing her husband and Father were about to be excuted too.
All the women (usually older unmarried and childless) who were accused of being a witch, then tortured and killed in the olden days.
All the poor children in the news tortured and killed by their own parents. Poor babies, makes me so sad to think of the way they suffered at the hands of their own flesh and blood.

I am really into mountaineering and get really upset about George Mallory and Sandy Irvine’s deaths. High altitude mountaineering is obviously really dangerous and lots of people have died doing it, but those two deaths in the 1920s really affect me, moreso than more modern tragedies.

This is the one I was going to say. Spent her whole life being groomed and abused, basically, killed for it by her horrible old husband, and for about 400 years history remembered her as a bit of a trollop rather than the victim and child that she was.

Dunblane. The horror is unimaginable 😢

This 😢

I am horrified by this too, I believe one of the jury members had to be excused due to illness, maybe the details made them ill? It only took a few weeks during lockdown and the poor mite became weaker and weaker, chilling. I hope the individuals who are guilty die in prison. To me, he is Arthur Labinjo, I wouldn't use his "father's" surname, also his biological mum should be released from her incarceration (unrelated) as she has suffered enough.

Not historical deaths but I went to the Foundling Museum in London and found the display of tokens left by the children's mothers incredibly upsetting.

Knowing how desperate the women would have been to have taken their babies there, knowing that they hoped that one day their situations would change and they would be able to reclaim those children and knowing that the tokens were on display because the poor mothers never came back.

Absolutely heartbreaking.

@JanJanie1962 That's a terrible story. That poor man.

There must have been so many people back then whose situations were utterly desperate.

I fairly recently re read quite a lot of information about Hillsborough. I knew quite a bit about the events and the police behaviour etc but had never really read anything about the individual victims before and I found it absolutely horrific. The way those people died and how their families were treated afterwards is beyond belief, and all so preventable. So many missed opportunities to save people who were treated as worse than animals in the moments of their deaths and afterwards. Unforgivable.

When I read the thread title I immediately thought "Romanovs". I'm never getting over that. It was a really evil thing they did.

The princes in the tower too.

I find Katherine Howard's execution really upsetting as she was so young and he was so old. Hideous.

Anyone who died in a horrible way as well which I won't go into as there are too many and they are too upsetting.

Not one which upsets me, but an interesting one was Rasputin. That's bonkers how many times they tried and failed to kill him

I recently visited Colchester and saw the little memorial garden outside the Castle to the innocent women who were executed there as witches in the 17th century. Really got to me. Bought some flowers to lay on the site.

This.
Also Baby P.
Arthur Labinjo Hughes.

Remember reading about a fire display at a fair in the 1920s or so. Where they built a tower and had men and boys inside and then the fire brigade would rescue them from a fake fire or something..only it went wrong and a real fire took hold and they all died. Just the thought of at first people not realising what was going wrong and the families in the crowd being witnesses to it..horrible

You know, OP, when I read your title, my first thought was "well yes, Anne Boleyn, of course. The Romanov children are also heartbreaking. Especially the hope all those years that Anastasia and Alexei may have survived only to find out they died along with everyone else.

Katherine Howard's murder is also very heartbreaking. I feel like everyone remembers Anne Boleyn (and they should, she was an incredible woman) but forget poor Katherine Howard who was barely an adult when Henry decided to behead her. She never really got a chance to have a life for herself.

Everything about the Challenger disaster brings me to tears, and the Titanic.

Oh and Anne Frank. She was so close to freedom. And after everything she'd suffered, to lose her life to disease. Just heartbreaking.

Any time you're in a graveyard and see multiple graves of children in one family all lined up - died aged 3, died aged 1, died aged 10, died aged 15. You know it was common back then, but still gets you.

A little girl of about 6 or 7 who shared a hospital room with my mother back in 1931. She was shot by someone who had a feud with her family (Arkansas). She threw herself in front of her dad and took a bullet for him. My granny made my mother give the little girl her new dress so she had something pretty to be buried in. Always makes me cry when remember her, and when I think that I am probably the last person who will remember that little girl, and I don't even know her name.

Not as famous as those mentioned by pp... but Bridget Donnelly was a young Irish girl who was visiting her cousins in Cananda in 1880 when the entire family was killed by a bunch of vigilantes over a long-running neighborhood feud. The description in the book "The Black Donnellys" about how she ran and hid in her bedroom while the family was being beaten to death in the kitchen, and then was found and dragged by her heels down the stairs with her head bumping on every step, then beaten to death to the sound of "loud and terrible laughter" from the mob... always stuck with me. She was only 22 years old and died in terror on that freezing cold night in February, far far away from her green and beautiful homeland, for something she had no part in whatsoever.

I'll be vague because I don’t want to put myself but I once had to, for reasons, read through an old record of deaths and as I flipped through I noticed the same surname appearing so I went back and checked and it was five children from one family who all died from fish that had gone off. They died over the course of a week. I remember trying not to cry as I imagined their poor parents.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gillingham_Fair_fire_disaster

Very sad.

Yes it always frustrates me when people talk about how we used to burn witches at the stake. We didn't - witches don't exist; we burned women.