HistoryExtrahttps://www.historyextra.comHome of Britain’s bestselling history magazine and award-winning podcast2026-10-11T17:31:04.000Zhourly12000-01-01T12:00+00:00"She was mad with the acrid lust of blood": 6 murders that shocked Victorian Britainhttps://www.historyextra.com/membership/she-was-mad-with-the-acrid-lust-of-blood-6-murders-that-shocked-victorian-britain/2026-10-11T17:30:42.000ZThis article contains graphic descriptions of blood, injury and death – reader discretion is advised
“Get me a murder a day!” So demanded the press baron Alfred Harmsworth, who understood exactly what Victorian readers wanted from their newspapers. Parliamentary reports and stock prices were all well and good, but nothing made a title fly off the newsstands like a gruesome killing.
The Victorians had an insatiable appetite for true crime – so insatiable that one of their most popular papers was devoted to nothing else. Every week, the Illustrated Police News served up lurid engravings of the latest shocking offences. Respectable critics damned it as “the worst newspaper in England” and accused it of glorifying crime, but the public bought more than 100,000 copies a week, reaching a circulation of 300,000 by 1888.
Some of the Victorian period’s most infamous murderers – Mary Ann Cotton, Charles Peace, and of course Jack the Ripper – are already familiar to modern true crime fans. But for every household name, there were hundreds of other cases that gripped the nation in their day, only to fade from memory.
Here are six of the strangest, bloodiest, and most sensational...
1. Mysterious circumstances
Reported on 4 January 1868
Victorian readers loved an element of mystery in their murders, so the strange death of Thomas Farrant in Bristol made news across the country. Passers-by were shocked to see the young man fall from the top-floor window of the Colston’s Arms. He plunged, head-first, onto a ledge, then rolled onto the pavement, his neck broken and skull fractured.
A passing constable rushed into the pub to investigate and found clear signs of a violent scuffle upstairs. The only likely culprit was a 53-year-old man named Giles Clift, who had tracked his estranged wife to Farrant’s bedroom. There was just one problem – the suspect was completely blind.
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A few days later, witnesses gathered for the inquest and the coroner tried to make sense of the case. A downstairs neighbour heard two men and a woman shouting, as well as the sound of a struggle near to the window. A woman on the street claimed to have heard the victim crying “Don’t! Don’t!” just before he fell. But no one in court actually saw what caused him to fall.
The only person who knew what happened in that room was Mrs Clift. She insisted that her husband had threatened Farrant – “Damn thee! I’ll break thee damned neck out of the window!” – and then pushed her lover to his death. But she was hardly an impartial witness, and the law forbade a wife from giving evidence against her husband.
A doctor examined Farrant’s body and concluded that his injuries were more consistent with a man who had been trying to escape from the window and had slipped. The jury agreed and Clift was released, but the full truth remains a mystery. The Illustrated Police News naturally preferred the most sensational version of events and printed a dramatic illustration of the enraged blind man throwing his rival from the window.
2. The Kennington Tragedy
Reported on 31 August 1867
On a summer’s afternoon in 1867, 12-year-old Charles Roberts and his seven-year-old brother Frederick were playing outside their south London home when they heard their mother calling. “Fred, I want you!” she cried, and the younger boy trudged inside. Charles followed close behind and saw his brother go upstairs. A few moments later, he heard a strange scraping from the ceiling above, followed by the sound of running water.
When Charles went upstairs to investigate, he was astonished to see his mother burst through a door clutching a bloody knife. Inside, Frederick lay in a pool of blood, his throat cut open. Charles watched in horror as his mother rushed to the bedroom and slashed the neck of his sister Annie, before turning to chase him downstairs.
Charles dodged around the kitchen table and ducked when his mother hurled the knife at his head. He slipped past her and fled into the street shouting, “Murder! Police!” By the time a neighbour reached the house, Anne Roberts had turned the knife on herself and lay bleeding to death on the kitchen floor. “Oh, Mrs Roberts,” the neighbour gasped, “what have you done?”
Few crimes horrified Victorian readers more than a mother killing her own children, and the press spared no detail. Though Roberts had been mentally unwell for some time, journalists showed little sympathy, branding her a “wretched woman” who was “mad with the acrid lust of blood”. The Illustrated Police News dubbed the case ‘The Kennington Tragedy’ and dispatched its artist to sketch the house, alongside a graphic depiction of each death.
The public couldn’t look away. For days afterwards, crowds flocked to South London, eager to inspect the blood-spattered bedroom walls they had read about over breakfast. The murders had become a tourist attraction and, not for the first time, the Victorian press had turned private tragedy into public spectacle.
3. A double execution
Reported on 14 September 1867 and 19 October 1867
Hanging days were major public events in London and, in October 1867, the city’s crowds were treated to a rare double bill.
At 8am, outside Newgate Prison, they watched John Wiggins hang for the murder of his lover, Agnes Oakes. A policeman had found him in a room “covered in all directions with blood”, Agnes already dead and Wiggins bleeding from his neck and hands. He claimed Oakes had attacked him in his sleep following a quarrel and then cut her own throat. Debate raged in the press, and many among the public were convinced by his story, but a jury sentenced him to death. On the gallows, Wiggins struggled violently with his executioner, shouting, “Don’t hang me! I am innocent!” before he was, as the Victorians put it, “launched into eternity.”
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View Green Video on the source website
Two hours later, outside Horsemonger Lane Gaol in Southwark, a new crowd assembled for the execution of Louis Bordier, a Frenchman found guilty of murdering his partner, Mary Anne Snow, with whom he had three children. In the early hours of the morning, Snow had staggered into her aunt’s bedroom, blood pouring from her neck. Bordier followed shortly after, calmly kissed her head, and said he “hoped she would die.” Asked why he had done it, he replied that he “could not help it” and “could not think of parting with her.” Snow, it turned out, had been planning to leave him for another man.
William Calcraft, the era’s most famous executioner, rushed across the river after dispatching Wiggins and must have been relieved to find that Bordier was resigned to his fate. The Frenchman bowed to the 20,000 spectators who had gathered to watch him die, and within moments it was over, his body left hanging for an hour, as custom dictated.
These were among the last public executions in Britain. The following year, hangings moved behind prison walls, and the press lost their final moment of public spectacle.
4. A shocking revenge
Reported on 9 May 1868
The murder of a respectable gentleman was particularly shocking to Victorian readers. Edward Adolphus Walsh was a 50-year-old man with a lawyer’s education and good connections. He worked as a station master in Dover, and for some time, he had struggled to discipline a badly behaved young carriage-cleaner named Thomas Wells.
The young man had recently been spotted firing a gun at a target near the station. Walsh – who already found issue with Wells’ general attitude to work – informed him that this was most improper behaviour, but generously offered to say nothing more, so long as Wells promised not to do it again. The boy denied the accusation and petulantly refused to make the promise.
The next day, Walsh called in his superintendent as backup. They summoned Wells to an office and made him the same offer. When he refused, they sent him away for ten minutes to reconsider, expecting him to return with an apology. Instead, he went to fetch his gun.
A few minutes later, Wells burst back into the office and fired, point blank, at the station master’s face. The bullet entered under Walsh’s eye and, as one paper bluntly put it, “scattered his brains in every direction.” The young man fled but was soon found hiding in a nearby railway carriage. He was engaged to be married – a future he had now thrown away.
His punishment attracted an unusual amount of public curiosity, for it was the first execution in Britain performed under the new law that moved the gallows behind prison walls. Instead of meeting his end in front of a raucous crowd, Wells’s execution was witnessed by only a handful of officials and journalists. The chaplain sang a hymn as the drop fell and, after “two or three convulsive struggles”, all was still. A black flag flown above the prison was the only public sign that justice had been done.
5. A barbaric massacre
Reported on 26 February 1868
The Victorian press’s appetite for murder was so strong that they often looked abroad to satisfy it. When news arrived from Germany about a series of killings that promised to be “unequalled in barbarity,” translations of the grisly news were gleefully reprinted in papers throughout Britain.
23-year-old Timm Thode belonged to a farming family from Schleswig-Holstein. He was on bad terms with his father and brothers and so, in the summer of 1866, he resolved to kill them all so that he might inherit the farm. For months, he deliberated about how to do the deed and eventually settled on using a five-foot metal handspike.
One by one, he crept up behind each of his four brothers while they worked and bludgeoned them to death. Next, he lured his father outside and struck him down in the farmyard. When the family dogs began to bark, Thode, worried they would give him away, attempted to kill them too.
Then, wielding an axe, Thode brutally murdered his mother and sister, before running to the servant girl’s room. He grasped in the dark to find the bed, then brought his axe crashing down on the sleeping girl’s head. “There”, he said, “I have them all dead!”
His plan was to dispose of all eight bodies in the barn and then set it alight, but neighbours saw the fire before it had time to destroy their remains, and the culprit was soon arrested and sentenced to death. In Germany, the murders were soon set to music, with ballad sheets recounting Thode's crimes sold on street corners. When the news reached Britain, the Illustrated Police News depicted each stage of Thode’s killing spree in typically graphic detail.
6. Criminal on the run
Reported on 20 February 1869
On a Sunday night in February 1869, a woman returned to her family’s house in Poplar in the East End of London and discovered a horrifying scene in the kitchen. Her 86-year-old father lay slumped in a chair, his throat cut from ear-to-ear, just above his black silk cravat. The woman’s daughter lay lifeless on the floor with a gash to her neck so deep that her head had almost been severed. The floor and furniture were soaked with blood.
Suspicion soon rested on the dead woman’s husband, an out-of-work engineer named John William Cooper. It seems that Cooper hated living under the roof of his in-laws. “I advise you not to get married,” he told his brother on the night before the murders. “I am miserable”, he moaned, “but it won’t be for long.”
In the moments after the killing, Cooper washed his hands in a bowl of water, tore his photo out of the family album, and then vanished into the night.
Detectives from Scotland Yard were soon on his trail and circulated a description of the suspect, including the fact that he was missing the thumb on his left hand. He was well known in the neighbourhood and everyone assumed that he would be caught in a matter of hours. But hours soon turned to days, and the fugitive remained at large.
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The press followed the hunt with great excitement. Almost every day brought news of the capture of a man with a missing thumb, but none turned out to be Cooper. Pressure on the police quickly mounted. After a week of fruitless searching, a £100 reward was offered for the killer’s capture, but it seemed to have come much too late. As one armchair detective scathingly put it, Scotland Yard’s investigation was a textbook example of “How Not To Do It.”
After a month of frantic searching, Cooper was finally discovered. He was not found by a police officer, but by a waterman, who fished his decomposing body out of the Thames. The press had little room to dwell on his demise – or indeed apologise to the police – for a new and equally horrifying double murder had since been perpetrated in the East End, and the papers were once again full of fresh blood.
This constant supply of gruesome murder news took its toll. As one Victorian journalist put it, they had begun to “feel that to sleep in a tent in the desert with the hyenas howling round us, is sometimes a safer thing than to rest within the walls of a house in London.”
Bob Nicholson is a professor of public history at Edge Hill University. He co-wrote and presented the podcast series Killing Victoria for BBC Sounds
]]>Botched executions: 9 death sentences from history that didn’t go to planhttps://www.historyextra.com/period/general-history/botched-executions-capital-punishment-gone-wrong-hanging-beheading/2026-10-08T00:00:21.000ZMary, Queen of Scots: a royal reckoning
Mary, Queen of Scots, had been held captive in England for 18 and a half years before she was sentenced to death for plotting to kill her cousin, Elizabeth I. It appears that Elizabeth did show some hesitation in signing the death warrant, as she only did so four months after Mary’s trial.
Mary’s execution – a beheading, which was seen as being more humane than hanging – took place in the Great Hall of Fotheringhay Castle in Northamptonshire. The first blow didn’t sever her head, nor did the second. A third swing was needed to fully part her head from her body.
Unbeknownst to the executioners, Mary’s dog had been hiding under her dress the entire time and proved very difficult to part from his dead mistress.
Thomas Cromwell: a neither swift nor merciful end
Being the right-hand man of Henry VIII was a dangerous position to be in – something Thomas Cromwell, the king’s chief minister from 1532–40, knew all too well. It was Henry’s marriage to his fourth wife, Anne of Cleves, that proved Cromwell’s downfall – Cromwell himself had been the mastermind behind the disastrous match, which was annulled six months after the January 1540 wedding. By June of the same year, Cromwell’s enemies had persuaded the king that he was a traitor.
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Cromwell was executed on Tower Hill on 28 July. “[He] patiently suffered the stroke of the axe, by a ragged and butcherly miser, who very ungoodly [sic] performed the office,” wrote contemporary historian Edward Hall, whose description has led many to believe that the beheading was neither swift nor merciful, and that Cromwell may have suffered multiple unsteady blows as a reportedly unskilled executioner hacked away at him.
John ‘Babbacombe’ Lee: the man who survived the hangman
There is a saying that things happen for a reason – and John ‘Babbacombe’ Lee may well have thought this applied to him. In 1884, elderly spinster Emma Whitehead Keyse was horrifically murdered near Torquay in Devon and – on weak evidence – Lee, who was her servant, was arrested.
He was due to hang in Exeter Prison on 23 February 1885, but three times the trapdoor beneath the scaffold failed. The medical officer refused to continue with the execution, so the sentence was commuted to imprisonment. Lee served 22 years before his release in 1907. He became known as the ‘man they couldn’t hang’.
Tom Edward Ketchum: too loose of a noose
Tom Edward Ketchum – known as Black Jack – gave up his life as a cowboy in 19th-century America and turned to crime. He joined a gang and terrorised Texas and New Mexico, robbing trains and even committing murder. His final caper came in 1899, when he attempted to rob a train, but was shot by the conductor when he was recognised.
On 26 April 1901, people came from all over to witness the hanging in Clayton, New Mexico – but the spectators were in for an unpleasant surprise. No one in the county had any experience of carrying out a hanging. The rope used was too long, and the weight Ketchum had gained in prison meant that as soon as he fell through the trapdoor he was decapitated. His head was sewn back on to enable viewing of his body.
Margaret Pole: a bloody end to the Plantagenets
Margaret Pole, Countess of Salisbury, suffered the misfortune of an inexperienced executioner. The daughter of George, Duke of Clarence (himself the brother of Kings Edward IV and Richard III), she was one of the few surviving Plantagenets at the end of the Wars of the Roses. At the beginning of Henry VIII’s reign, Margaret was in favour, yet the winds swiftly changed when her son, Reginald, spoke out against the king’s separation from Catherine of Aragon. The Poles’ Plantagenet blood was suddenly seen as a threat and various members of the family were taken to the Tower of London, charged with treason.
The 65-year-old Margaret was arrested in November 1538. All of her titles were stripped from her, and evidence was produced that appeared to show Margaret’s support for Catholicism. She was held in the Tower for two years before her execution on 27 May 1541 – conducted away from the populace, on account of her noble birth, though it was ghastly all the same. According to one account, the inexperienced axeman missed her neck on the first blow; 10 further blows were needed to finally remove her head, making a hideous mess of her torso.
William Duell: saved by divine intervention
Sixteen-year-old William Duell was hanged on 24 November 1740 for the murder of a servant – remaining strung up for more than 50 minutes before being declared dead and cut down. But later on – as his body was on the table being prepared for dissection by medical students – Duell woke up with no recollection of his ‘execution’ and seemingly no ill effects.
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The problem now was what to do with him, as officially he was dead. An Old Bailey hearing was held to decide his fate, which posed quite a quandary: rescheduling his execution would make a mockery of the law and publicise that surviving the gallows was possible. There were also concerns that Duell’s survival was a sign from God. In the end, it was decided that he would be transported to America.
William Kemmler: a dubious first
New Yorker William Kemmler holds the dubious record of being the first person to have been executed by electric chair. Apparently an alcoholic, he had been convicted of murdering his common-law wife with an axe during a drunken argument. On 6 August 1890, Kemmler was sent to the newly designed electric chair – a form of execution believed to be humane and painless.
A current deemed strong enough to kill was sent through his body for several seconds. The physicians present soon noticed that Kemmler was still breathing, so, to the horror of those in the audience, another current was passed through him, this time rupturing blood vessels and sending a foul stench into the air. Many witnesses would later claim that it was a much worse form of execution compared to hanging.
Ginggaew Lorsoongnern: the woman with a hidden heart
In Thailand in 1978, a six-year-old boy was kidnapped and murdered. His nanny, Ginggaew Lorsoongnern, was one of those behind the horrific plot and sentenced to death by firing squad. She was shot 10 times, pronounced dead and carried off to the morgue.
As her executioners were preparing for the next execution, a cry was heard from within the morgue. What happened next was like something from a horror movie: Lorsoongnern was discovered trying to sit up. A second round of bullets eventually ended her life, and it was later discovered that she had survived her first execution due to her heart being on the right side of her body.
Wallace Wilkerson: unlucky shots
American murderer Wallace Wilkerson did not enjoy a quick and easy death. In 1877, a fight broke out between Wallace and another man over accusations of cheating during a card game, leading to Wallace shooting the other man in the head. Wallace was found guilty and chose to be executed by firing squad rather than hanging.
On 16 May 1879, Wallace was seated in front of the gunmen with a target pinned over his heart. At the sound of the countdown, he sat up straight and unintentionally moved the target. All of the bullets missed his heart and he tried to leap from the chair, screaming, but bled to death after nearly 30 minutes.
This article was first published in the March 2020 issue of BBC History Revealed
]]>The Soviet spy who couldn't lovehttps://www.historyextra.com/membership/the-soviet-spy-who-couldnt-love/2026-09-25T14:36:53.000ZIn 1981, a Soviet spy walked into MI6 HQ in Tehran and offered to defect to Britain – if, in return, Britain could help him improve his performance in bed.
In this episode, Ben Macintyre introduces Spencer Mizen to an extraordinary agent with a sexual secret – a secret that changed the course of Iranian history and may, just may, have averted nuclear war.
]]>The slave ship that changed historyhttps://www.historyextra.com/membership/the-slave-ship-that-changed-history/2026-09-23T08:47:48.000ZIn 1781, more than 130 enslaved Africans were deliberately thrown from a ship called the Zorg into the Atlantic. The horrifying story of this slave ship – long mistakenly known as the Zong – was to have consequences far beyond its murderous voyage.
In this episode, historian and author Siddharth Kara speaks to Elinor Evans about the brutal economics of the Atlantic slave trade, the extraordinary court case that followed the massacre, and how the Zorg helped galvanise the abolitionist cause.
]]>How bullies shaped 19th-century Americahttps://www.historyextra.com/membership/how-bullies-shaped-19th-century-america/2026-08-31T06:12:20.000ZAmerica's Gilded Age is often remembered for rapid expansion and opportunity, but beneath the surface lay a brutal society in which it paid to be a bully.
In this episode, Elinor Evans speaks to historian Andrew Wender Cohen about his new book Gangster of New York: A Violent Life in Nineteenth-Century America. Following the remarkable career of Louis Bieral – a boxer, gambler, political enforcer and American Civil War veteran – Cohen uncovers how one man's life illuminates the brutal realities of the 19th-century US, from slavery and organised crime to political corruption and the struggle to establish the rule of law.
]]>I visited one of America's "most haunted" historical sites. What I found there astonished mehttps://www.historyextra.com/membership/i-visited-one-of-americas-most-haunted-historical-sites-what-i-found-there-astonished-me/2026-08-09T14:30:02.000ZIn August 2024, my husband and I embarked on an eccentric adventure: a week-long, 1,500-mile road trip through the American South, visiting supposedly haunted landmarks along the way. The primary impetus for this eerie excursion was to experience in person some of the properties that would feature in my book How to Build a Haunted House (Profile Books, 2025).
To be clear, I wasn’t on the hunt for ghosts per se. Rather, I was in search of an explanation for why certain historic houses develop the reputation for being haunted – and why we can’t seem to get enough of them. I knew that in the US – below the Mason-Dixon Line demarking the former divide between free North and enslaving South, especially – there were numerous examples.
It was this quest that brought my husband and me to the small town of St Francisville, Louisiana for a night’s stay at the notoriously haunted Myrtles Plantation. What we found there astonished us.
Spiritual awakening
Standing in a fertile upland region flanking the Mississippi River, Myrtles Plantation is 30 miles north of the state capital, Baton Rouge, and some 100 miles from the region’s cultural capital, New Orleans.
Constructed in 1796 for General David Bradford, the 22-room mansion once sat at the centre of a thriving 1,600-hectare (4,000-acre) cotton and indigo plantation. Before the abolition of slavery in the US in 1865, the plantation’s extensive fields were worked by as many as 500 enslaved Black labourers.
Over a century and a half, the property was occupied by a succession of owners, most of whom enjoyed a luxurious lifestyle financed by the cotton industry. Since at least the 1950s, though, the house and grounds have been open to the public – and the mansion earned a reputation as one of the most haunted homes in America.
The earliest recorded references to spiritual presences at the plantation date to the 1940s, in publications such as Louisiana: A Guide to the State (1941) and Ghosts Along the Mississippi (1948). Notably, these early accounts mention only one resident spectre: an unknown white woman described as “a little old French lady in a green bonnet”.
Over the ensuing decades, however, the Myrtles’ ghost population would not only grow but diversify. By the early 1980s, at least five spirits had been reported: an enslaved female, a Union soldier, a pair of adolescent smallpox victims and a murdered estate manager – William Drew Winter, the only apparition with a firm identity, who was shot by an unknown assailant on the front porch in 1871. At present, there are said to be no fewer than 12 supernatural entities active on the property – the most famous of whom is known as Chloe.
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As the story goes, Chloe was a beautiful young enslaved woman who got caught eavesdropping through the keyhole of her master’s office. As punishment, he lopped off her left ear and banished her from the mansion to toil in the blistering heat of the nearby cookhouse.
In revenge – or, in some versions of the story, a misguided attempt to get invited back into the mansion to care for the family – Chloe baked a poison-laced birthday cake, which killed the master’s wife and two of his children. The penalty was death: she was hanged from the bow of a live oak tree on the front lawn. Unsurprisingly, her ghost is said to have haunted the plantation ever since.
Today, Chloe is the star attraction at the Myrtles. Indeed, a large black-and-white photo purportedly capturing her ghostly silhouette greets visitors at the main entrance to the mansion. Aside from that grainy image, though, there is very little evidence to support her existence – living or dead. Like so many other legends attached to haunted houses, the historical record suggests that her story is, in fact, a synthesis of real and imagined individuals and events that have coalesced over time to create a compelling narrative.
Ominous omens
I can’t say that I feared encountering the infamous Chloe during our stay at the Myrtles, but I was slightly apprehensive about the visit. It probably didn’t help that our first introduction to Louisiana bore all the hallmarks of a horror film.
On the last leg of our days’ long drive through the heart of the South, just as we passed over the Mississippi-Louisiana border, the hazy late-summer sky suddenly blackened. In an instant the heavens opened, unleashing a deluge so heavy that it nearly obscured our vision through the windscreen. Thunder rumbled; fork-lightning cracked.
It was an appropriately ominous start to a night spent at a haunted house. By the time we finally pulled up to the plantation gates and made our way down the oak-lined drive, though, the rain had subsided. And here we were more than a little surprised to find that the property didn’t quite live up to the stereotypical haunted house of our imagination.
Rather than a derelict old wreck, the Myrtles Plantation is a bustling tourist enterprise. We arrived on a Friday night, and the place was teeming with visitors. Some had come for a celebratory meal at Restaurant 1796, the plantation’s high-end eatery, others for a tour. A few, including my husband and me, had booked a night’s stay in the boutique bed and breakfast.
The main house, where we would be staying, was not nearly as imposing as I had expected. A relatively compact one-and-a-half-storey clapboard structure with seafoam-green shutters and delicate ironwork railings, it appeared less haunted mansion and more quaint country cottage.
Alongside the house stood a noticeably older, more rustic building. Once the original farmstead, it has been converted into a brightly lit cafe and gift shop. Nearby, a centuries-old carriage house has been similarly retrofitted into a funky modern eatery.
Beyond that stretches landscaped parkland, whimsically illuminated by twinkling fairy lights strung from the branches of the plantation’s signature crepe myrtles. The excited shrieks and peals of laughter of guests on one of the evening’s two scheduled ghost tours reached us through the still night air.
It was an oddly incongruous scene at a property steeped in a very dark history. Its very existence was the direct result of the institution of slavery. What’s more, as a heritage attraction, its main claim to fame was being haunted by tortured enslaved people, murder victims and assorted other casualties of disease and war.
Yet, far from a sombre setting, the atmosphere at the Myrtles was almost jubilant. It welcomed a throng of happy holidaymakers enjoying decadent Southern cuisine, playful ghost stories and plush accommodation.
Allure of the eerie
How did this former enslaver’s home come to be transformed into a multi-million-dollar leisure business attracting some 60,000 visitors annually? It seems a strange turn of events for a historical setting seemingly mired in misery. Yet the Myrtles Plantation is by no means an anomaly. It’s just one of hundreds of heritage sites across the American South capitalising on the rise of so-called ‘dark tourism’.
Simply put, dark tourism is the recreational practice of visiting sites associated with death and suffering – places such as historic crime scenes, battlefields, prisons, sanitoriums and cemeteries. Such sites can be found across the globe and, to some extent, have always drawn the morbidly curious: consider, for example, the ancient Roman Colosseum or the Tyburn Gallows in the 18th century. But over the past few decades, dark tourism has experienced a notable boom in the Southern states.
In dark tourism epicentres such as New Orleans and Savannah, Georgia, visitors looking for a scare are spoiled for choice, with literally dozens of tour companies catering to their needs. In these settings, the most popular form of dark recreation is the ghost tour – a walking tour of a historical house or city that highlights the location’s macabre past and paranormal pedigree, typically focussing on slavery-related narratives. The tone of the tour is often light-hearted or darkly humorous, and the stories are sometimes accompanied by other forms of recreational activity such as the consumption of alcohol.
Unsurprisingly, such tours have attracted a fair amount of scrutiny, with many critics questioning their value, ethics and impact on the public understanding of the past. But even the most vocal opponents are usually able to recognise the motives behind the practice. Beyond simple voyeurism, dark tourism in the South reflects a popular desire to engage with the history of slavery, tempered by a reluctance to face its horrors head-on.
“Without slavery there is no South, as a region or an idea,” says Tiya Miles, a bestselling author and Harvard history professor specialising in African-American studies. “But if vacationing tourists must somehow confront the ugliness that repels as well as attracts their notice, they would probably rather do so from a safe emotional distance.”
Hence the ghost tour – and the proliferation of stories similar to the one told about Chloe at the Myrtles Plantation. These tales are just detailed enough to lend them an air of historical authenticity, but sufficiently vague and fanciful enough to allow us to dismiss them as fiction should we wish.
And if we still can’t shake the uncomfortable feeling that, even if Chloe never existed, someone like her certainly did, and suffered equally – well, we can distract ourselves with a tour guide’s gallows humour, or perhaps a cocktail or two.
Suffice to say, neither my husband nor I met a ghost at the Myrtles Plantation. But we did experience something frighteningly uncanny: an enjoyable night’s stay in a setting that once witnessed the true horrors of slavery.
Caitlin Blackwell Baines is an art historian and author who specialises in Georgian art and architecture. She is the author of How to Build a Haunted House: The History of a Cultural Obsession (Profile Books, 2025)
]]>Why did witches confess?https://www.historyextra.com/membership/why-did-witches-confess/2026-08-07T13:54:50.000ZWho were the people that were accused of witchcraft in the 1640s British witch trials? And why did they confess to being in league with the devil? In this episode, Marion Gibson breaks down the trial and interrogation records left behind by the witch hunters, to reveal the real stories of the individuals who were accused.
Speaking to Charlotte Vosper, Marion explains why so many of these seemingly ordinary individuals actually agreed to the witchcraft accusations...
]]>Renaissance Italy's firearm revolutionhttps://www.historyextra.com/membership/renaissance-italys-firearm-revolution-podcast/2026-07-31T12:39:40.000ZLong before the modern debates over gun control, Renaissance Italy was grappling with many of the same questions. As firearms became smaller and easier to conceal, guns spread rapidly through society: moving from battlefields to appearances at court, and the streets of the Italian city states.
Speaking to Emily Briffett, historian Catherine Fletcher reveals how they were weapons of war, tools of personal protection, and sources of deep social anxiety.
]]>"This would be your place for the rest of your life": the haunting history of Ireland's Magdalene laundrieshttps://www.historyextra.com/membership/this-would-be-your-place-for-the-rest-of-your-life-the-haunting-history-of-irelands-magdalene-laundries/2026-07-29T15:00:34.000ZWhen I was seven years old, my Nanna told me that in her youth, when she lived in the west of Ireland, you knew when a girl “got into trouble” because she would disappear one day – and no one ever spoke of her again.
It was a throwaway remark, but it shocked me then – and it has haunted me ever since. What frightened me most was the collective silence. It seemed worse than death – at least then they would be grieved, but it was as if these girls had never existed. How could this have happened? And where did they go?
For much of the 20th century, Irish hearts, minds and institutions were in the possession of the prevailing Catholic morality. In that censorious climate, people who did not fit – and who were deemed dangerous to the national image – might be removed. Ireland had prisons, of course, but also psychiatric hospitals – known then as mental asylums – industrial and reformatory schools for poor orphaned children, county homes (workhouses, rebranded after Irish independence), and mother and baby homes where unmarried pregnant women and girls were sequestered. Then there were Magdalene laundries. Together, these institutions formed a web of social security in which people became ensnared rather than supported.
In a regime distinguished by its excessive inhumanity, the Magdalene laundries were its deep end. Named in honour of the biblical Mary, they are believed to have held somewhere between 10,000 and 30,000 women and girls in Ireland. In 1951, for every 100,000 Irish males, 27 were in a prison – of which there were only five. Of every 100,000 females, 70 were in a laundry.
Haunting history
I am certainly not the first to have felt troubled by this history. The story of the Magdalene laundries has been told and told again. Yet as I researched the topic for my new book, reading archives, meeting people who remembered and experienced the laundries, I came to discover that what we know now about the Magdalene laundries is often fable and innuendo.
The laundries were the fate of those women and girls considered to be beyond the help of the mother and baby home, beyond the industrial school, beyond the prison, and beyond the pale of normal life.
That had not always been the case. These institutions had initially been benevolent refuges run by ordinary people, both Catholic and Protestant. The first Magdalen asylum was opened by the Church of Ireland in 1765 to undertake a programme of reform. It aimed to help sex workers and other ‘fallen women’, including those who were homeless and alcoholic, deemed to be in need of moral and spiritual recovery; this was described as ‘rescue work’.
Many were established by Catholic nuns, and these were usually larger than those operated by laypeople. In convent-run laundries, days were regimented and religious, but these were not punishing places and they had not been established for profit. Nor was their purpose detention. Women were allowed to leave; in trying times, they often came and went.
By the early 20th century, intakes at the smaller lay refuges were dwindling. Eventually they were all abandoned, leaving only the larger religious institutions in operation. When Ireland became independent from Britain in 1922, there were only 10 laundries across the country, run by Catholic nuns.
Laundries were not distinctly Irish. They operated into the 20th century in the US, Canada, Britain and Australia. But some aberration after independence in the 1920s caused Irish laundries to grow in scale and expand in use, becoming more exclusionary and punitive.
In its first decade of independence, the new nation faced enormous hardship, and by the mid-1920s “famine-like conditions” were being reported. One newspaper stated that famine was “imminent [and] as bad as 1847” – considered the worst year of the Great Famine, which led to the deaths of 1 million Irish people and the emigration of at least another million. There was disquiet and disbelief that, after attaining long-fought-for independence, the Irish were being plunged back into the depths of despair.
Catholic values
At this afflicted moment a new populist and nationalist political movement emerged, proposing a radical social and economic plan of protectionism and calling for a return to traditional Catholic values. As the fortunes of the newly independent nation plummeted further still, leading to the imposition of severe austerity measures by the government, those rightwing suggestions began to gain traction in a society seeking stability and renewal.
The desire to identify the culprit of a nation’s malaise can unite people with a mob-like purpose. At the end of the 1920s, a prominent new campaign to cleanse Ireland of the distorting influences of culture of an ‘evil kind’ developed. Looming large over these discussions was the figure of the ‘fallen woman’. But the image of the fallen woman was being voraciously re-imagined, and began to expand well beyond sex work and sex outside marriage to encompass all forms of behaviour that, as one priest decried, “shattered the ideals of womanhood”. She was lustful, indulgent, had foreign tastes, was unbridled by the demands of family and, according to the newspapers, “lacked moral fibre”. The concept even stretched to those women “on the verge of being wrecked in the whirlpool of the busy world”. As one government commission in 1927 described them, these women “have become sources of evil, danger and expense to the community”. A new detention policy for wayward and unwieldy women and girls was proposed.
Today, the laundries tend to be thought of primarily as places of punishment for those women and girls who committed the ‘mortal sin’ of having sex outside marriage and, worse still, who bore ‘illegitimate’ children. The conflation of mother and baby homes with laundries is widespread. Countless people I spoke to in Ireland about the laundries repeated the same vehement mantra: it was awful what the church and state did to those women and their babies. But no babies were born in Magdalene laundries, and pregnant women were not admitted.
In fact, girls came to the laundries from every corner of Irish life, and entered them for many vastly different reasons. They sometimes arrived via the courts, sent by judges as an apparently merciful alternative to prison. Girls at industrial schools were transferred to a laundry if they were deemed troublesome teenagers in need of stricter supervision and more rigorous training.
Young women might also be sent to laundries if they were considered lively and high spirited. In one sermon in 1933, a priest praised the nuns who ran the laundries for their work with those girls who were, as he saw it, “giddy, irresponsible and undisciplined from the start”. Looking back on why she had been brought to a laundry, one woman named Mary who survived these institutions could think of only one thing she was guilty of. “I just love life,” she said. “I loved enjoying myself.”
Sins of the father
Then there were girls such as Katie, who was abused by her father and brothers from the age of five. In 1977, when she was 16, a teacher dutifully reported her suspicions to the authorities, who instructed Katie’s sister to take her to an address that turned out to be the local laundry in Dublin. Katie was told that she would spend the next two years there. The males in her family were not questioned by the police, let alone detained. Their sins were foisted onto Katie’s shoulders while they continued their lives.
Other girls had become surplus to their family’s requirements. At 14, Catherine was brought to a laundry on the back of her father’s bike. Her mother had died a few years earlier in childbirth, and her father had swiftly remarried. Having initially farmed out his children for others to raise, he soon exhausted his roster of willing female relatives – so turned to the laundry.
- Read more | A Victorian-era journalist snuck into an infamous asylum, and what she exposed shocked New York
Girls such as Catherine, Katie and Mary were rarely told where they were going, and certainly not why. That would be for them to figure out later. The reason for sending them to a laundry was something that nobody around them seemed able to articulate.
Once they crossed the threshold into the institution’s cloistered world, they were no longer little girls, daughters, sisters or people of worth in their own right. Now they were ‘penitents’. Each of them was perceived to have fallen in some way, and now they would begin their ascension.
Upon entry, a new arrival’s hair was cut short. Her name were taken and replaced by a pseudonym. Sometimes a girl wasn’t even afforded the dignity of a pseudonym, and was instead designated by only a number. That’s how Eileen, who was sent to a laundry aged just 15, spent two years known only as 60. It was a world of anonymity.
They were forced to maintain a strict rule of silence: no talking, no making friends. The only noise that perforated the quiet was the relentless murmur of prayers. A nun would always be present, reading litanies, rosaries and stations of the cross out like an incessant incantation to which the women and girls could make only curt collective responses.
They were put to work: they washed, they scrubbed, they spun and they pressed. Priests and prisoners had their uniforms and vestments processed alike. The crisp linens of hotels, restaurants and family dining rooms passed through these women’s hands, made pristine and professionally transformed. These women endured Ireland’s stench and dirt, removing stains and odours. They did this from morning till evening, Monday to Saturday.
But what most tortured those confined in Magdalene laundries was that this could be indefinite incarceration. There was a chance that they would die after a lifetime in the convent laundries and be buried on the grounds or in an unmarked or mass grave. These were Ireland’s disappeared. Unlike in conflict zones, though, no one was looking for the bodies of these women.
Another survivor, also named Mary, recalled the horror of realising – as she put it – that “this would be your place for the rest of your life… you’re washing and washing”.
For those whom the nuns decided to release, a strange thing happened: they had to pretend that they had not been in the laundry. Take 21-year-old Nora, who had given birth in a mother and baby home in the 1960s. She was described as a “repeat offender”, this being the second time she had had a baby outside of marriage. In 1932, the Department of Local Government wrote that “these women appear to be feeble-minded and need supervision and guardianship. The Magdalen Asylum offers the only special provision at present for this class.” Nora became one of the few women who was sent to a Magdalene laundry after a mother and baby home so that she could receive further penance and discipline.
Her family knew where she had been, and why – indeed, her confinement at the laundry had been arranged by her own mother. Yet when Nora came home after a year, her baby having been given away, it was, she said, “a non-event… nobody else was talking about it, so I didn’t either…the rest of the family were as if nothing had happened”.
When Nora was ‘legitimately’ pregnant years later, her sister asked how she felt, and if the morning sickness was very bad. “I don’t know,” Nora responded. “I haven’t been pregnant before, so I have nothing to compare it to.” In that moment, Nora and her sister both knew the truth – yet even in the privacy of her own home, with no one watching, they both maintained this pretence.
Other women who were bolder and not so discreet, who revealed where they had been sent and how they had been treated, were told to whist – to leave well enough alone – and were met with denial at every turn. The disavowal of these places and transgressions was somehow formalised in small, everyday exchanges such as these. So it was, another survivor named Margaret lamented, “as if it never, never existed, what happened”.
The system continued to operate until as recently as 1996, when the last of Ireland’s Magdalene laundries closed. Yet that wasn’t the result of political lobbying for their abolition, nor of a civil campaign to close the laundries. The laundries quietly slid out of existence.
Justice and reconciliation
How can we make sense of these institutions? And how do we reconcile ourselves with such a dark history? Ireland has, of course, changed utterly since the last laundry closed. The law, not the church, is now the main arbitrator of justice. The modern legal language of human rights has helped forge a new consensus that shifts blame from oppressed women and girls onto church and state, which colluded to hoard and abuse power. This wasn’t a service: these institutions had breached the human rights of thousands.
We have become used to discussing this history as if in a courtroom. Our public discourse, political speeches and reportage about the laundries are now often tidied into the same legal binaries: victim and offender, innocent and guilty, admissible and inadmissible, black and white, us versus them. Yet it is clear that the laundries were not nearly this discrete.
Women and girls were sent to the laundries by courts, police, social workers, priests, missionaries, mothers and fathers – all of whom then sent their washing in after them. Even if someone had wanted to blow the whistle, who was there to tell? Who was willing to listen? If we want justice and reconciliation, ideas of blame and legal guilt will get us only so far. The laundries underlay every part of Irish life. For a time, at least, the whole nation seems to have become a strict enclosure. The dynamic of laundries was writ large.
- Read more | Who was to blame for the Irish famine?
Permeating silence
The rule of silence was not just for the fallen but was expected of everyone. Silence lay across Ireland, permeating intimacies between sisters, families and neighbours. That was the basis of the Irish social order. Ireland could be the nation of a thousand welcomes, a classless society of great craic and good times – sure, the best Catholics in the world! Because those who had defied this facsimile of harmony had been exiled in their own land, their existence disavowed.
It was then, a world of winks and nods, knowing looks and looking the other way. A world where ordinary people, such as my Nanna, learned not to ask about those girls, never to mention their names, let alone grieve their absence. Sisters, aunts, cousins, neighbours, mothers, even newborn babies could disappear, never to be spoken of again.
The question of how to make amends for the laundries is contested, fraught and, necessarily, ongoing. But remembering is also a source of reparation. Writing history is, I hope, one way to remember. It makes us capable of seeing that which might otherwise have gone overlooked. Nothing can undo the past or bring the dead back to life, but we can acknowledge that they lived. So my book is the story of the Magdalene laundries, of what actually happened and why, told through the voices of the women who were there, the nuns who presided over these institutions, and the communities that lived alongside them. It is an act of recovery, to save the truth from being lost.
Louise Brangan is a writer and academic, author of The Fallen: The Magdalene Laundries & Ireland’s Legacy of Silence (Bodley Head, 2026)
This article was first published in the August 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine
]]>Is The Westies a true story? Here's the real history behind the Ronald Reagan-era gangster dramahttps://www.historyextra.com/period/20th-century/westies-true-story-real-history-mgm/2026-07-22T14:24:43.000ZIn 1975, New York City was synonymous with violence and deprivation. It was also on the verge of bankruptcy. President Gerald Ford was so loathe to extract the city from its fiscal crisis that he inspired a famous headline in the New York Daily News: “Ford to City: Drop Dead.”
But the new decade brought a new sense of optimism and the beginning of a long era of gentrification. Big projects helped to drive the change in mood, such as the construction of the vast Jacob K Javits Convention Center in Hell’s Kitchen, a neighbourhood long associated with working-class Irish-Americans, between 1979 and 1986.
- Read more | “They caused a great deal of mayhem”: The Westies creators on bringing the drama to life
It’s this project that forms the backdrop to The Westies, named for a real-life gang active in the area, and which moves with the percussive energy of Peaky Blinders, not least in the way loud music punctuates the action and, from the moment The Dropkick Murphys’ raucous ‘Dropped on My Head’ kicks in, sets the mood. But how much of what we see on screen is based on the historical record?
Does The Westies tell a true story?
The Westies certainly existed, although there’s not much evidence they adopted this name themselves. Many of the show’s main plot-lines are fictional and major characters have been invented. That said, the series draws heavily on the historical record as it explores life in Manhattan at the beginning of Ronald Reagan’s first presidency.
This was a time when there was moolah to be made in the Big Apple, including for those running rackets and taking backhanders. There’s plenty of evidence to suggest developers paid off mobsters to ensure their projects went ahead without disruption.
Who were the real-life Westies?
While not as famous as the Italian-American Mafia, the Irish Mob has its own violent history. It’s a story that underpinned, via a 1927 non-fiction book by journalist Herbert Asbury, Martin Scorsese’s 2002 epic Gangs of New York – starring Daniel Day-Lewis as the terrifying Bill the Butcher, a figure based on the real-life William Poole (1821–55).
- Read more | The relentless rise of the mafia: a grisly tale of extortion, execution and Don Corleone
As for the Westies specifically, the gang emerged in the early 1960s. Their leader from around 1977 is said to have been James Coonan (b1946), who was convicted of racketeering – among other charges – in 1988 and sentenced to 75 years in jail. Today, he resides at Federal Correctional Institution, Schuylkill, a medium-security prison in Pennsylvania.
There’s an underlying truth in JK Simmons’ portrayal of gang leader Eamon Sweeney as a man capable of terrible violence, yet who projects the image of an affable community leader. Mickey Spillane (1933-77), Coonan’s predecessor as the kingpin of Hell’s Kitchen, was a “gentleman gangster” who supposedly gave turkeys to needy families at Thanksgiving.
Did the Westies clash with Italian-American mobsters?
In the series, the Westies have an uneasy truce with the Gambino family, but there’s an undercurrent of suppressed violence in the relationship. The real-life Westies certainly partnered with Italian-American crime families and carried out contract killings on their behalf.
However, there was also tension. In May 1977, Mickey Spillane was murdered, shot five times, likely by Roy DeMeo (1940–83), though this has never been confirmed. It’s widely assumed the killing came about after, as part of manoeuvrings to take over leadership of the Westies, Jimmy Coonan made a deal with Gambino leader Paul Castellano (1915–85).
- Read more | Who were the real Peaky Blinders?
How much did the construction of the Jacob K Javits Convention Center change Hell's Kitchen?
Today, Manhattan is a place where the purchase price of single-family homes and townhouses averages between $9 and $12.4mn. It’s an island for the rich, but this follows years when money has poured into Manhattan.
Things were very different in December 1979, when detailed plans for the Javits Center were revealed. It was a vast project and its announcement alone led to a surge in real estate prices in the area. However, the build was beset with issues and plans for it to open in 1984 had to be cancelled because of difficulties in manufacturing custom parts. It finally opened on 3 April 1986 and cost many millions more than expected.
Throughout its construction, there were stories of mobsters taking kickbacks and payoffs. Ironically, this can be said to have backfired on the Westies. As in the series, the gang, grown notorious for its violence, attracted the attention of the FBI, which worked with federal and local authorities to bring down the gang and break its hold on Hell's Kitchen.
Did the IRA seek support in New York?
A major subplot in The Westies involves Bridget Walsh (Sarah Bolger), the girlfriend of Sweeney’s sharpest lieutenant in a not-strong field, Jimmy Roarke (Tom Brittney of Granchester fame). When her old flame, Brendan Cahill (Allen Leech), an Irish republican who has taken up arms, shows up asking for a favour, it’s clear she has much to hide. While the specific storyline is fictional, the Irish Republican Army (IRA) often looked to the Irish-American communities of the USA for funding.
Throughout the Troubles, the Irish Northern Aid Committee (NORAID), supported the republican cause. It still exists today – though on a much smaller scale – and has always maintained it raised money purely for humanitarian relief.
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