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?

I used to pass the house he had lived in and always welled up at this on the gate...

Brace yourself @SparkyBlue it is extraordinary and moving and shocking. Brace yourself.

Agreed. I think, Disney is responsible for romanticising Romanovs family.
OP have you heard of the Khodynka tragedy? Nicholas couldn’t care less and still attended the ball that same day. I find those deaths devastating.

I don't think anyone would find it particularly tragic if it was just Nicholas that was executed - the tragedy is that it was the whole family including the children.

I don't think privilege stops deaths like the Romanov's or Anne Boleyn being horrific. Personally, execution is just a particularly appalling death to think about. Imagining what those people must have gone through mentally in the run up. It horrifies me to think about more than other tragedies.

Derek Bentley is another sad one.

I agree about Jack the Ripper's victims, and the way he's become some sick folk hero. Those women were real, complex human beings just like us and they were butchered because they were poor and vulnerable.

I get terribly sad when I think of all the people who were murdered just because of how they look.
If I listen to Nina Simone’s ´strange fruit’, I’m left disturbed for days

I'd never heard of Junko Furuta.. What a horrible, horrible thing. There was also that Indian girl who was gang-raped on a bus and died from what they did to her.
Aberfan haunts me. The fact that if it had happened an hour earlier or a day later no-one would have died. Hillsborough also. The lies by the media (The Sun) and the police trying to blame the Liverpool supporters.

Historically, Llewelyn ap Gruffydd. The last Prince of Wales. Poor Wales.

This. The constant walking tours around Whitechapel are horrible.
Would they do the same for the Yorkshire Ripper?

A display of pure human evil. Poor kid.
I think they shared the identity of the old woman on Twitter recently.
I didn’t get the point as it’s not going to bring him back.

There’s no way I will be able to watch the film ´Till’

Virginia Woolf for me, too.

I think it's partly because it happened near where I live, and I've walked pretty much the length of the stretch of river between my house and the coast, so must have walked past the spot where she went into the river on more than one occasion.

But also because I've loved her books since my late teens, and she had such massive talent and we'll never know how great her late work might have been, and because her struggles with her mental health were so severe.

I also get a pang of sadness when I drive past Shoreham airport since the awful air crash. When I stop at the traffic lights (which I invariably have to, they're never green) I think how terrifying it must have been for anyone who was in the traffic and realised that that plane was going to come down on them, and how shocking it must have been to witness it.

A former colleague was at the air show that day, and saw it happen, but from a distance and it really affected her. It must have been beyond awful for the people who were nearer.

Yes that's barbaric. Absolutely disgusting.

Agreed. I was asked at an interview what I’d do differently with my life if I had the ability to time travel for just one day, and they looked at me funny when I said I’d go and break into that house, and any of the others I could get to in time. I suppose it’s because it’s ‘nothing to do with me’ and so many terrible things have happened and will keep happening to defenceless infants people just say oh that’s a pity and move on, but that footage is torture. It’s forever stuck in my head as proof of how cruel people can be to their children and what makes it worse is I know this will be happening right now to countless others. Less sadness, more impotent fury.

Anne Boleyn always seems the saddest death to me(not taking anything from his other wives ,sad for them too of course) A recent trip to Hever Castle ,her childhood home was so sad.We visited her Bedroom ,which was so moving .Just a young girl with hopes and dreams .Also Henry 8th bedroom there when he stayed over .No hint of her terrible fate.

I hadn't heard about this tragedy until a year or two ago and I sobbed reading about the mothers who were digging with their hands and tore their fingers down to the bone.

No - I wish more people would actually think about historical deaths like that. There's a huge culture of 'gore tourism' in London about executions , Jack the Ripper etc and when you think about it, it's weird. They were real people who suffered but because it was long ago, somehow the humanity gets lost. I remember thinking this when I was in Westminster Abbey looking at all the tombs of people I had heard so much about in history books etc. It made it real.

Some more I have thought of.
Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman.It must have been especially terrifying for the second one to be killed as she would have known what was coming.
All the victims of the Yorkshire Ripper who were villified by the press for being street workers, with no thought to what drove them to that in the first place ( and not all of them were street workers).
The 5 girls in Ipswich murdered by Steve Wright, especially Paula Clennell who was interviewed by the local TV station. She said then how scared she was.

Oh my god all of these!

I am fascinated by Anne Boleyn, but have to say I don't feel terribly sorry for her. She was certainty not a Victim (and I suspect would rail against being portrayed as such), and she was absolutely hateful towards Katherine and Mary - also her own sister Mary.

Anne gambled for the Crown. She won for years, then didn't spot the warning signs in her arrogance.

How very odd. I'd just written a post referencing the many, many women who have been murdered to satisfy the perversions of men, then refreshed the page (losing my post) and saw yours.

I had also listed the five women who died at the hands of the monstrous Wright in Suffolk. Poor Paula was for some reason the one who stuck in my mind the most, perhaps because of that interview.

The senseless killing of Sophie Lancaster has haunted me ever since and I've never forgotten it. More recently her mother, Sylvia, who campaigned in her daughter's name ever since to S.tamp O.ut P.rejudice, H.ate and I.ntolerance E.verywhere.

It would have been a nice dream. Not possible, but Sylvia Lancaster was a wonderful example of returning good for evil. Just a tragedy; neither of them deserved that fate.

My mum had a autograph book that had been her mother’s. In it were some incredibly beautiful watercolours and pen sketches, including a pretty girl called Kitty. Mum told me that they had been done by my nanan’s fiancé, but he’d been killed before he was 19 in ww1. It emerged that after that Nanan (Kitty)became depressed and suffered from what we now know as bpd. Mum had rescued the book when nanan was having one of her regular burnings of photos, books and papers. I just felt so sad for that young man (and all the others) who died in another pointless war and for all the women and loved ones they left behind and how their lives had been shattered. (Though, if she had married him I wouldn’t be here)
We lost the book when the container it was in was damaged by sea water when we returned back to England.

Maolra Seoighe. A man wrongly convicted and hung in 19th century Ireland. He didn't speak English and the judge and his solicitor didn't speak Irish.

Agree!

I don't normally have any emotional reaction to people I don't know (obviously think it's sad / people are awful etc) but that one got me, I cried when I saw the footage, that poor boy!

I think about this too, she looks a little bit like one of my DD's. At the time I sobbed every time I saw a news article about it.

I also think the same of Maud Watkins who died of Sepsis 11 years ago. My DD had sepsis at 10 months old. Dr's told us over and over it was just viral. I think of poor Maud and her parents and think there but for the grace of god (and my instincts that something was seriously wrong)

Next to the old lifeboat station in Poole there’s a plaque dedicated to a young lad who died. Everytime I pass it I have to read the plaque and I have a moment of sadness for him and the family he left behind.

Imo if you're very sad about things that don't concern you personally, it's a sign of some sadness closer to home that you're projecting onto something else.

It's not so well known but it's absolutely horrific and I often think back to it but in Victorian York there was 'The York Industrial Ragged School' . It was effectively a workhouse for children. Apparently the 'school master' was a cruel man who used to stalk the streets and effectively abduct children who were homeless or orphaned. He received money from the church for each child he had in his 'care' so the more the better as far as he was concerned. Unfortunately he never spent the money on the children and they slowly starved to death. He couldn't be bothered to bury them so he just piled the bodies up in the back of the cupboard in the orphanage. I just can't imagine what those poor, poor children must have gone through knowing their friend's bodies were being kept like that, that any one of them could have been next. Eventually he went mad and slaughtered the remaining children with a knife. And this wasn't really that long ago. Comparatively recent history. The past was a very brutal place.