The Cheerful Insanity of Me

When digging around family history, you sometimes come across newspaper articles about your relations. The vast majority of the ones I've seen about my family have been someone has been to visit a relation or an obituary rather than big newsworthy stories.

And then there's this article from the London Chronicle 18 February 1873 concerning the death of my 3x Great Grandmother, which seems to be a lot more grizzly then I'd ever imagined...

( Cut for whatever is happening between the lines here )

Left me with far more questions than it answered, but certainly changed the way I look at my 3x Great Grandfather.

I do find it strange how matter-of-fact the article is. I know it was a different time, but I'd like to think that even back then something like this wasn’t completely normal.

This sounds cool also:

Sarah and Jenny Angliss (Spacedog UK) join psychologist and Quirkology author Richard Wiseman for one of the strangest shows on the Fringe. The sisters use the haunting sounds of the female voice, bells, vintage synth and theremin to coax out any resident ghosts of Brighton’s venerable Marlborough Theatre. And when their death ballads and eerie electronica have chilled the audience to the bone, the theatre will fall into complete darkness, as Wiseman invites the audience to participate in a theatrical reconstruction of a Victorian séance.

The live performers are accompanied by some unsettling home-spun automata (created by Sarah), including a robotic bell rig and Uncanny Valerie, a moving, ‘all-seeing’ 1950s doll. The music is a shameless mix of the outfit’s favourite Weill and Brel ballads, songs from British cult classic The Wickerman, some of the band’s own numbers and electronic interpretations of 13th-century tales of necromancers.

Electroplasm (via richardwiseman)

Thinking about the 9.40 showing on 8th May.