The Chronicles of Poe

The robes of the holy were horribly stained, By vengeance most vile and venomously sustained. ​Reader, you observe daily the pitiful, pedestrian failures of our age—the slow stain of corruption, the careful cache of petty deceit. But, transport your soul to the darkest zenith of the year 897, to Rome itself, where the heart of Christendom staged a scene of such macabre absurdity that the very heavens might have shivered to behold it. ​This is the account of the Cadaver Synod (Synodus Horrenda), the ecclesiastical trial of Pope Formosus, who had been nine months in the stillness of his tomb. ​The architect of this dread spectacle was his successor, Pope Stephen VI, a man whose political debts and simmering psychosis demanded an act of retribution unbound by the laws of God or the decency of man. He commanded the body of the deceased Formosus to be exhumed, to be raised from its sacred rest. ​Imagine the grotesque pageantry: the rotting corpse, barely held together by the vestiges of its...

​In the year 2004, when the instruments of state sought to justify their vast and unsettling power, a project was formally sanctioned and funded by the National Science Foundation—an expenditure designed not for human succor, but for a bizarre, fruitless interrogation of the animal kingdom. It is a chronicle of governmental spending achieving the uttermost in negligible results, executed with a bureaucratic zeal worthy of a minor tyranny. ​We speak of the effort to quantify, with cold, scientific precision, the metabolic toll of a mountain predator. The chosen subjects were several Puma concolor, the grand, silent cat of the highlands. The ultimate goal, we were told, was to measure the energy expenditure of the wild hunter—a data point of remarkable, absolute uselessness to the common man. ​The dedication to this profound frivolity was unnerving. For this task, the grant was immense: the final published record confirms an expenditure approaching one million dollars (an amount that swe...

To the Archive, where the dread of the present fades, A morbid memory we shall retrieve from its shades. In the grim, frost-bitten landscape of 1994, when the nascent digital age was still a child and human credulity flourished like mold in the damp, a peculiar and utterly pointless drama unfolded in the city of Toronto. We turn our gaze to the figure of Dr. Hugh MacMillan, a surgeon of no small repute, yet one whose final act was delivered not in the surgical theater, but in the echoing chambers of a post-mortem obsession. MacMillan, having dedicated his life to the delicate artistry of the human form, met his end not by an unkind fate, but by his own hand, in the pallid, silent sepulchre of his garage. The act itself was a private tragedy, soon to be overshadowed by the dreadful, verifiable absurdity that followed. For the subsequent revelation—uncovered not by detectives, but by the bewildered agents of the city’s Public Works—was this: the good doctor did not depart alone. He had, ...

Within West Way, a wonderfully warm wednesday went wrong. The barrel burst, and a bizarre, brewing bath blotted the basements, a brown, bellowing blood-like body of beer. Men, mothers, and many mourned the massive, malty murder making its mark. This is the crazy chronicle of a castastrophic cask collapse, a calamity of curious consistency. The Bursting Barrel In the heart of London’s St. Giles neighborhood on October 17, 1814, the Horse Shoe Brewery operated near the intersection of Tottenham Court Road and Oxford Street. The brewery was home to colossal fermentation vats, one of which was an enormous wooden vessel holding the equivalent of 135,000 gallons of brown porter ale. At about 4:30 in the afternoon, the iron hoops binding this enormous vat suddenly snapped. The resulting pressure surge was so immense that it not only ripped the primary vat apart but also triggered a catastrophic chain reaction, knocking out the valves and tops of several other nearby vats. In an instant, an es...

This tale traces the tragic, terrible turn of things through a treacherous trauma of terrestrial threadbareness. For the flourishing figureheads of feudal family lines, fate felt a foul, final fall. This is the foulest factual fall-out of fourteenth-century conference collapse, a civilian calamity of curious, comical contrast. A Most Undignified End The event, known as the Erfurt Latrine Disaster, occurred in the summer of 1184 in the city of Erfurt, Germany. King Henry VI, son of Frederick Barbarossa, was presiding over a Diet—a formal assembly of nobles and dignitaries from across the Holy Roman Empire—at the Petersberg Citadel. The assembly was in a second-story room in the city's main church, packed with lords, counts, bishops, and other high-ranking officials who had traveled great distances to attend. The room was bustling with people and political tension. The Collapse The wooden floor of the room was apparently rotten and structurally unsound. It could not bear the collecti...

The Twentieth Century commenced with a crazy contest coined an Olympic event, but conducted with charming competition converted to characteristic chaos. As athletes assembled in August, all argued against all almost accidentally, as all almost alluded to abject abandonment. This is the chronicle of the St. Louis Olympic Marathon, a race where cheating, poison, and produce defined the podium. A Recipe for Disaster The 1904 Summer Olympics in St. Louis, Missouri, hosted one of the most infamously ill-conceived races ever run.  * The Course: The 24.85-mile course was run on open, dusty dirt roads during the hottest part of an August day, with temperatures soaring over 90°F (32°C). The runners had to contend with cars, horses, and pedestrians.  * "Purposeful Dehydration": The race director, James Sullivan, was a proponent of the bizarre and ultimately dangerous theory of "purposeful dehydration." As a result, there was only one official water station on the entire cours...