 |
| Madam, did you murder your husband? |
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.
 |
| We will kill them now |
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.
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 Inn near Reading, England
murdered wealthy patrons for years without getting caught.
 |
| Waiting for the victim to drop |
Their
process was elaborate. They outfitted a bedroom located above the kitchen (nice
and cozy 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 cauldron
used to brew beer. When the trapdoor opened the poor victim fell off the bed into
this boiling cauldron, 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 the new husband didn’t sleep well that night.
 |
| Someone died here |
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.
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
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
