Gulf Breeze, Florida, a town with a population of just slightly over 6000, enjoyed their anonymity. But in the winter of 1987, their sleepy little town became the focus of the world.
For more than 800 years, man had known that finding a way into the delicate brain cavity and cutting or poking at the liquid filled tissue, would produce a dramatic change in a person’s behavior and demeanor. It was commonly used to “drive out the devil”. Although archaic and seldom used, by 1935, the practice…
Ilsa Koch, wife of the German commander of the Buchenwald concentration camp from 1939 to 1942, Colonel Karl Koch, was notorious for her perversion and cruelty. Known as the Witch (or Bitch) of Buchenwald, she acquired the reputation of a sadist and nymphomaniac beating the prisoners with her whip and requiring that they participate in…
Finding the earliest version of any given common fairy tale is an almost impossible endeavor. Before the Grimm Brothers gathered their collection of well-known German folk fairy tales into a single volume, these stories followed an oral tradition, being passed on from grandmother to mother to children. What you may not know is that these…
From birth Schlitzie looked like any other baby boy but as the years progressed, it became apparent that he suffered from microcephaly, a condition where the face grows at a normal rate but the head does not. Microcephaly bestows upon the person an abnormally small head (often only half the size of a normal head)…
Koo Koo, the Bird Girl was born Minnie Woolsey in Georgia in 1880. Fate dealt Minnie a bad hand – she was born with a rare skeletal disorder, Virchow-Seckel syndrome. Virchow-Seckel syndrome is also known as bird-headed dwarfism, Harper’s syndrome or Seckel dwarfism. It is characterized by growth retardation and dwarfism, an extremely small head,…
On September 29, 1982, 12-year-old Mary Kellerman of Elk Grove Village, Illinois, (a suburb of Chicago) woke up at dawn and went into her parents’ bedroom. She did not feel well and complained that she had a sore throat and a runny nose. Suspecting a cold was coming on, her parents gave her one Extra-Strength…