No. 528
Crime, Eccentricity, and the Sporting Life in 19th Century America.
August 30, 2021
A Man's Head Blown to Atoms.
A man's head blown to atoms by the explosion of a beer barrel on Long Island.
August 30, 2021
alias: COMBO, HAMILTON
PICKPOCKET
Via Newspapers.comTime to saddle up those ghost horses! The “San Francisco Chronicle,” December 30, 1931:Horses, horses, horses. Three phantom black horses, galloping soundlessly with the speed of the wind, have set Berkeley agog with a mystery that has even the scientific police department of that community guessing. The horses have been seen in the Berkeley hills north of the
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Strange Company - 10/1/2025
Soapy Smith STAR NotebookPage 24 - Original copy1884Courtesy of Geri Murphy(Click image to enlarge)
oapy Smith's "STAR" notebook page 24, 1882 and 1884, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Portland. Steamer Ancon.
This post is on page 24, the last of the "STAR" notebook pages I have been deciphering and publishing for the last two years, since July 24, 2023. The page is two separate notes dated 1882
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Soapy Smith's Soap Box - 9/17/2025
Before Riverside Park, before Riverside Drive, before the sparsely populated Manhattan district known since the 18th century as Bloomingdale was urbanized into the Upper West Side, there was a lone modest house. Perched on the edge of the Hudson River in the West 80s, the two-story, pitched-roof dwelling appears to have no neighbors. A back […]
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Ephemeral New York - 9/29/2025
Youth With Executioner by Nuremberg native Albrecht Dürer … although it’s dated to 1493, which was during a period of several years when Dürer worked abroad. November 13 [1617]. Burnt alive here a miller of Manberna, who however was lately … Continue reading
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Executed Today - 11/13/2020
Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, March 28, 1868.Robert Sprague, a normally peaceful man, was spending a quiet evening with his family in their home in Jasper, Iowa, on February 17, 1868. He was reading the Bible with his mother, wife, and children when his 70-year-old mother asked him a question in relation to a religious meeting the night before. At the previous night’s meeting,
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Murder By Gaslight - 9/27/2025
New to Warps & Wefts? We’ve been online since 2007 with hundreds of articles, posts, over a thousand images, animations, colorizations, newspaper coverage and clippings of the murders and trial day by day, cartoons, AI and imagined imaging, videos, profiles of important people in the case, on the road field trip vlogs and much more. We post every day on Facebook, usually 6-10 posts on various topics so everyone can find something to enjoy reading- why? Because we want a bit of the Borden case every day! We sign off every night around 10 p.m. and upload every morning around 9 a.m. Visit our Facebook and Youtube channel links below. Please do like and follow our Facebook page Send us your questions! No Patreons or monetization ever. No detail too small to be considered. Stop by to see us- we learn something new every day! https://www.facebook.com/lizziebordenwarpsandwefts/ https://www.youtube.com/@LizzieBordenWarpsandWefts See less Comments Author Lizzie Borden Warps &
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Lizzie Borden: Warps and Wefts - 9/26/2025
[Editor’s note: Guest writer, Peter Dickson, lives in West Sussex, England and has been working with microfilm copies of The Duncan Campbell Papers from the State Library of NSW, Sydney, Australia. The following are some of his analyses of what he has discovered from reading these papers. Dickson has contributed many transcriptions to the Jamaica […]
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Early American Crime - 2/7/2019
A few mornings since a terrible accident occurred; In the Long Island Brewery, on Powers, near Bergen street. by which Frank Gilram, an employee in the establishment, had his head blown to pieces by the explosion of a beer barrel. Gilram and Michael Quinn were engaged In cleaning barrels, which Is done by filling the vessel with hot water and slacked lime and then rolling it about in order to generate the gases. While they were thus engaged, a barrel which they were rolling exploded with a loud report and hurled the fragments in every direction. One of the pieces struck the head of Gilram, severing it from the body, and dashing it against the beams of the room so violently that it was crushed into a mass of blood, flesh and bone. Quinn was hurled to the distance of about twenty feet, where he laid in an insensible condition, but was not seriously injured. Gilram resided at No. 64 Union street, and leaves a wife and children.The Bloody Century 2
Takes the reader back to 19th-century America in all its gory glory.
