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| Ready to do murder |
Apparently,
bedrooms are perfect for murder. The victim is usually already in a prone
position (won’t fall and break anything). The victim is usually already asleep
so there’s no resistance to their demise. The mattress will soak up the blood,
if that’s the way a murderer wants to perform the act. All he or she has to do
is cover up the dead body with blankets already on the bed. Easy-peasy.
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| The kitchen below 'the room'. |
Authors
have often killed off a person in the bedroom. Take Anya Seton in her
Dragonwyck. She used the oleander flower to brighten up a sick room. I’ve read this
plant is extremely poisonous. Even if a bee takes its pollen, and you later
gather honey from said bee’s nest, eat the honey, you can fall very ill. I
haven’t heard if you can die from the honey, though. Anya Seton merely had her
naughty protagonist set an oleander plant near his sick wife’s bed. The next
morning she was dead. Very cleanly done. No blood. Her body was already covered
with blankets.
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| Is she dead? |
Back
in the day (maybe even now), some innkeepers (sort of like the dastardly couple in the musical Les Mis) would kill a wealthy customer
for the gold he/she carried. One couple who owned the Crane near Reading UK
murdered wealthy patrons for years without getting caught.
Their
process was elaborate. They outfitted a bedroom located above the kitchen (nice
and warm in the winters I expect, what with heat rising, so a coveted room).
The innkeepers nailed the bed to a trapdoor located over a huge boiling caldron
used to brew beer. When the trapdoor opened the poor victim fell off the bed into
this boiling caldron, clothes and all, he never had a moment to cry out but
would be immediately parboiled, then drowned (sort of like the play Sweeny Todd but with water). The innkeepers
would mount a ladder into the bedroom, steal all his goods, and reset the
trapdoor. The body would then be cast into a local river.
That
seems like a lot of hard work.
Then
Thomas Harding (another author) wrote of a woman whose husband continually imbibed.
One night she couldn’t take it anymore and sewed her dead-drunk husband very
tightly in the bedclothes. She unstitched him the following morning to find him
quite expired. The coroners said it was a stroke. On her wedding night with her
next husband, she very casually told him what she had done. I’d wager he didn’t
sleep well that night.
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| Ready for the plunge |
There
are many bedrooms that are ghost ridden due to suicides, murders, and just
plain natural deaths. There was a time when if you tried to sell your home, the
estate agent would ask if anyone died there. If you answered yes, the house
would be difficult to sell. So, what do you say?
Nothing,
and do sleep well, tonight.
Post Script: The Ostrich Inn near Heathrow Airport has the same stories. You can decide where to stay and see how haunted these inns are.
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Many
thanks to: Warm & Snug, The History
of the Bed, by Lawrence Wright, First published 1962 by Routledge &
Keagan Paul, Ltd. England
Pictures
come from Wikicommon, public domain
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