Murder Will Out: Unusual Bleeding Corpses December 4, 2016
Author: Beach Combing | in : Modern , trackback
This passage comes from one of Beach’s recent favourites (for which he must thank Mike G), the Athenian Mercury. The AM was a late seventeenth-century journal that has been described as the first advice column in history. Readers would write in questions and the editors, a cabal of level-headed Londoners, would then do their best to explain life’s mysteries. Usually questions relate to courtship or religious practice, but there are some curious ones which give us a window onto seventeenth-century superstitions. Here is one such.
A young gentlewoman, a companion of mine, having entertained a gentleman that was very deserving, her mother thereupon, fearing she would give this gentleman encouragement, sends her daughter to London; the gentleman falls sick and dies, her mother is invited to the funeral, and entering the room where the corpse lay and drawing near to view it, it immediately fell a-bleeding till the mother went out of the room, and then gave over again, which exceedingly amazed the spectators. You may be assured of the truth of this, therefore I pray your thoughts upon it?
Beach will most certainly not print the answer, which is almost offensively sensible. But let’s focus on what is happening here. First, we have an eye-witness account or something close to it. The writer is apparently friendly with the family involved and presumably heard the account from those who had seen it. Second, the body bleeds when the mother enters the room. This refers to the idea, sometimes examined on this blog, that bodies bleed in the presence of their murderer. Beach could easily bring together several score of these were he so minded. What is fascinating about this case is that the mother has not murdered the gentleman in any conventional sense. Yet, by depriving the gentleman of his true love, she has effectively killed him. Hence the resentment of the body as she walks in and out of the room. Any other cases of bleeding corpses for non-conventional murders: drbeachcombing At yahoo DOT com
