Things that are utterly bloody fascinating

[ElizabethBest]

Let's hear it please - I love a good wikipedia rabbit hole. I'll start - The Willard Suitcases. Over 400 suitcases of possessions were found in an attic at the Willard Insane Asylum belong to patients who had died whilst inpatients so never left. The New York State Museum started a project to document the cases and their contents, and you can learn all about it and see the cases on their website.

Our property is well known and in a local museums
Archaeologists had been allowed on land near us and had noted that they had never been allowed access to our property and land. ( We we’re told this at the local history centre ) I say land it’s not huge, just an acre now.
When we bought it we asked if they’d like to dig.

We ve had about 20 here every summer for the past few years.
They’re back again this year.

Saved this thread late last night as I knew I’d get drawn in if I went further than the Foundling Museum.
Less exciting than many other posts here but I saw this photo earlier today. Obviously had to go look it up. www.instagram.com/p/BGZ7VwbvG6H/?igshid=YmMyMTA2M2Y=

In Bill Bryson's book about Shakespeare he says that during analysis of his idiolect, they have discovered that he hardly ever uses the word "also," and where he rarely does, the person saying it is a bit of a twat. He obviously had a downer on the word. But the other authors like Bacon and Marlowe, who are rumoured to have actually written the plays, use the word in a normal distribution and in the same way as we do.

The history of food. It's such a fundamental thing - we literally need it to live - and yet it says so much about us: our societal status and what we want to say about ourselves, our background, our culture, fads and fashions, scientific developments, political policy, education and public health...

Other things that fascinate me: space (especially nebulas), timeslips, mycorrhizal networks (as PPs have said, this includes how trees can communicate, I recommend Suzanne Simard's "Finding the Mother Tree"), clouds and weather (I mean, how does the wind blow?) and lots of lots of history. The latter includes the Mitfords, London, periods of change and transition, the Georgian era, the Underground, and the history of my house. Occasionally I find an old picture hook or a fragment of wallpaper and it fascinates me. I think it's social history that grasps my attention: how did we live and why?

I have ridiculously eclectic interests and often find myself down a rabbit hole. I'm off to read up on Mitochondrial Eve now!

Heartbreakingly, I am sure that you are right.

These few precious things - things that reminded them of previous life, of those they love, of their humanity - taken from them and put aside. "You have nothing now. You are nothing now. This is your life"

God - how dreadful.

Absolutely. But mainstream media needs to be challenged too. For example 'The Dig' reduced female archeologist Peggy Piggot to a young, pretty and lovestruck character who was chosen for the job because she was light and delicate. In reality, she was a highly respected, published archeologist who had already been in charge of digs.
They invented a male photographer to be her love interest erasing the two women who actually did the job - commended at the time for producing the first ever detailed, coloured documentation for an excavation project.
To create an audience- friendly trope, film makers/writers eliminated three fascinating and talented women.

The first automatic toaster (I want one but not the death trap this one is.......)

Northwick park hospital london has one!

@Emotionalsupportviper The residents were allowed access to their possessions - any they didn’t need were packed in their cases but they could have them whenever they wanted, and after their deaths their possessions were packed away in case their families wanted to claim them. Those that were unclaimed were forgotten about until the attics were rennovated in 1995, when the cases were given to the New York State Museum.

the residents were also allowed to make visits to friends and family etc.

The photographer’s blog contains conversations with staff, family members etc. Suitcase #2, which belonged to Anna, is a good example - Anna’s niece got in touch with the photographer to talk about her, and she would make frequent visits to her family.

Drying laundry in winter is a pain and got me wondering just how long humans have been fretting over getting their clothes dry. Looked it up and it could be as long as 34,000 years! And that's not taking into account the drying of skin clothes in earlier times. Makes me want to weep and also helps explain why I feel like I rule the Universe when I've made use of good drying days.

news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2009/09/oldest-known-fibers-discovered/

All the people who love the history of London and particularly its buildings - do you know about the UCL Survey of London at the Bartlett School of Architecture? The volumes are available to read online (which is lucky, as they cost ££££ to buy). The ones called British History Online are older, though still fascinating - the more recent ones are Vols 48 onwards and are just riveting.

Once you start on those, a) your head will explode
and
b) you'll never do anything else again
😊

www.oldbaileyonline.org/static/Crimes.jsp#killing

This link spells it out, I didn't remember that it was so clearly written. Under infanticide, so many poor women assumed to have murdered their own babies when they were already traumatised from having to give birth in secret. The only crime when the burden of proof was reversed.

This is horrific but I've never heard it discussed at all.

Thanks for that.
What a wonderful thread this is, I’m taking notes. I can’t wait to check that out at the Bartlett.

Bizarrely fascinating but I did feel a bit sick by the end of it.

I’ve just spent time looking up everything from people who believe they have lived previous lives to random air raid shelters due to this fantastic thread! Thank you @ElizabethBest

The infamous Leicester University paternoster was in the Attenborough Tower, I spent much of the early-mid nineties hopping on & off it as an undergraduate & postgraduate. As @Kucinghitam says, it was decommissioned 6 years ago. My old uni friends & I wondered about heading back there just to go over the top & under the bottom again before it closed 😀

@HarrietSchulenberg the Bold Street time slip fascinates me. I’m not generally woo but am beguiled by the idea that we may be experiencing brief time slips regularly that we don’t know about because there would be nothing visually obvious if time only shifted by a day or an hour or so. Those who believe they have time travelled often report seeing fashions from another era - the most obvious visual point of difference to indicate this isn’t the present day. If the shift was small this wouldn’t be a give-away.

Two lovely & very sane members of my family were driving down a deserted country road in rural Hampshire in the early 1960s & an ethereal figure of a Roman man walked across the road in front of them & went straight through a low wall at the other side. To the end of their lives (they both died around a decade ago in their nineties) they maintained the same story & said neither of them could explain it.

I might have to look in The Unexplained & see if there is a dedicated time travel thread there 🤔

@Trixiefirecracker I’m obsessed with Hidden London Underground & spent time last week on Clapham Common to see the WWII air raid shelter there.

The reversal of proof in infanticide cases was one of the things covered by the TV series Garrow's Law a few years ago (fiction based on William Garrow en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Garrow).

Although the presumption of innocence is an ancient concept - found in both Roman and Talmudic law - in more recent European history it wasn't really observed in practice. It was only in the 18th century that defence barristers became common in UK courts. Before that it was usual for a lawyer to present the prosecution case but defendants mostly represented themselves, and 'evidence' was often simply assertion and not put to much of a test.

Thanks BinturongsSmellOfPopcorn i will have a look into that, it's fascinating

Quote fail, Northwick Park has a Paternoster lifts

I am an Urbexer, or at least was for a long time before work/life took over and I don't get time anymore.
Here's some of my shots - www.flickr.com/photos/120082695@N07/

The Willard suitcases are fascinating, you see a lot of discarded belongings in asylums.
OP (and others) might enjoy Ward 81 by Mary Ellen Mark who documented some female psych inmates. Her photos are wonderful.

Some of my favoured wormholes -

Kensington Avenue, Philadelphia - Its regularly documented by this guy and I find it horrific and fascinating in equal measure -

kensingtonblues.com

Chernobyl and Pripyat

Pennhurst Asylum (as was not as its current "haunted attraction" bollocks which I find disrespectful in the extreme)

Anything paranormal (love the mumsnet threads on the topic) and Im from Enfield so the poltergeist was always of interest.

Here's the ward 81 link - www.maryellenmark.com/books/ward-81

That's a good point about regularity. Most women would have spent most of their married lives pregnant or nursing so actually the likelihood of having to deal with monthly periods probably wasn't that high. If you look back at family trees, especially for the poorer in society,many women had a baby once every 2 years.

@Halsall thanks for enlightening me!

What an absolutely fascinating thread this is! Thank you for starting it OP. Bookmarking for future reference.

I love anything historical, particularly social history and also little known facts, museums etc. I don't know if anyone has mentioned it on the thread but me and DH are loving Greg Jenner's podcast You're Dead To Me where he and two guests (an academic and also a comedian) discuss an historical figure, event, era of time etc. We recently listened to the episode called the History of Football which revealed some really interesting info on the history of the women's game. We've listened to several episodes which have made both of us go further down a Wiki rabbit hole to find further information.

When I were a lass, long ago, being "on the rag" was a euphemism for periods, which I'm guessing was a hanger-on of the period when women did use and wash rags held by a belt to catch menstrual flow.

Flowering intervals of bamboo. The longest flowering period is of P. Bambusoides of 120-130 years. All plants of the same stock (taken from cuttings as you can only get a new plant from seed) will flower at exactly the same time, regardless of location, climate, time zones and then die.

I don’t know why this fascinates me so much but it does. The fact it has an interval death clock, for every plant even if treated badly or well. It’s a bit like final destination of the plant world.

Then there’s discussions on why this mechanism occurred and how it works. No one can agree.

And then The fact that it has such a long flowering period. Why! If you know about plant cycles there’s various strategies as to why they have longer intervals, and usually a prime number as laps less with other species. But why so long! How many Darwinian ‘generations’ has it even had. Considering it has the most sophisticated systems for survival but less generations time to work it out.

Its just odd.

Paternoster lifts - my brother's close friend was livign in New York and there was a paternoster lift in the nightclub where he worked.
One day he tripped going in it and was dragged and jammed against the floor above.
He was nearly severed in two. Lost his spleen, part of his liver and had vast tissue damage. He won thousands in damages from the club.
he was extremely lucky that his spine wasn't damaged and he didn't bleed to death.