Morbid Wave

Taxidermist Carl Akeley posing with the leopard he killed with his bare hands after it attacked him, 1896 Carl Akeley with the leopard that nearly killed him, 1896. Carl Akeley, considered the father of modern taxidermy, was not only a taxidermist but also a naturalist, sculptor, writer, and inventor. Best known for the Hall of African Mammals that bears his name at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, Akeley revolutionized the field of taxidermy by developing a method of reconstructing the animal from the inside out. In 1896 Akeley started his first trip in Africa and it was also on this trip that Akeley came face to face with a deadly 80-pound leopard. During a journey to Somaliland, Akeley and his assistant were out hunting ostriches for the Field Museum in Chicago when the hunter spotted something lurking in the tall grass. As this was his first big trip, Akeley was a bit inexperienced and thought the mystery creature was a warthog. Wanting to bag “th...

Terry Fox: The Relentless Runner Who Turned His Cancer Battle Into a Movement Terry Fox was a Canadian athlete, humanitarian, and cancer research activist whose remarkable determination turned personal tragedy into a national movement. In 1980, after losing his right leg to cancer, Fox set out on an ambitious cross-country run to raise money and awareness for cancer research. Though his journey was cut short, his legacy continues through the annual Terry Fox Run, an event that began in 1981 and now involves millions of participants across more than 60 countries. It has become the world’s largest one-day fundraiser for cancer research, raising over C$850 million in his name as of September 2022. From an early age, Fox displayed an unwavering commitment to sports. As a student, he was both a distance runner and a basketball player for his high school, which now bears his name, and later for Simon Fraser University. His athletic ambitions were interrupted in 1976 when a car ac...

Hiroo Onoda: The Japanese Soldier Who Refused to Surrender, 1974 Lt. Hiroo Onoda, sword in hand, walks out of the jungle on Lubang Island after a nearly 29-year guerrilla campaign. March 11, 1974. Lieutenant Hiroo Onoda is the most famous of the so-called Japanese holdouts, a collection of Imperial Army stragglers who continued to hide out in the South Pacific for several years after World War II had ended. An intelligence officer, Onoda had been on Lubang since 1944, a few months before the Americans invaded and retook the Philippines. The last instructions he had received from his immediate superior ordered him to retreat to the interior of the island – which was small and in truth of minimal importance – and harass the Allied occupying forces until the Imperial Japanese Army eventually returned. “You are absolutely forbidden to die by your own hand”, he was told. “It may take three years, it may take five, but whatever happens, we’ll come back for you. Until then...

THE SECOND VULTURE: In the 1990's there was a widely circulated photo of a vulture waiting for a starving little girl to die and feast on her corp. That photo was taken during the 1993/94 famine in Sudan, by Kevin Carter, a South African photojournalist, who later won the Pulitzer Prize for this 'amazing shot'.* *However, as Kevin Carter was savouring his feat and being celebrated on major news channels and networks worldwide for such an 'exceptional photographic skill', he lived just for a few months to enjoy his supposed achievement and fame, as he later got depressed and took his own life!* *Kevin Carter's depression started, when during one of such interviews (a phone-in programme), someone called in and asked him what happened to the little girl. He simply replied, "I didn't wait to find out after this shot, as I had a flight to catch..." Then the caller said, "I put it to you that there were two vultures on that day, one had a cam...

The hunt for Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann, 1961 Adolf Eichmann awaited trial in Israel, 1961. Adolf Eichmann inspired Hannah Arendt’s famous phrase  ‘the banality of evil’ . A career civil servant in Nazi Germany, he was put in charge of administering the ‘Final Solution’ and organized the seizure of Jews from all over Europe and their transportation to the concentration camps to be killed. Other observers also thought he brought to the job the same bureaucratic, unemotional, form-filling attention to detail that he would have given to road maintenance, say, or food rationing. Eichmann joined the Nazi Party in April 1932 in Linz (Austria) and rose through the party hierarchy. In November 1932 he became a member of Heinrich Himmler’s SS, the Nazi paramilitary corps, and, on leaving Linz in 1933, he joined the school of the Austrian Legion at Lechfeld, Germany. From January to October 1934 he was attached to an SS unit at Dachau and then was appointed to the SS Sicherh...

Vasily Blokhin: History’s Most Prolific Executioner Vasily Mikhailovich Blokhin. Vasily Blokhin is recorded as having executed tens of thousands of prisoners by his own hand, including his killing of about 7,000 Polish prisoners of war during the Katyn massacre in spring 1940, making him the most prolific official executioner in recorded world history. He was the NKVD major in charge of executing the Polish officers from the Ostashkov camp, and he believed in personally doing the killing that his superiors had ordered him to supervise. Born in 1885, he was known as the NKVD’s chief executioner, having been hand-picked for this position by Joseph Stalin himself. Blokhin personally killed tens of thousands of men and women during Stalin’s Great Purges of the 1930s, so it was only natural that the NKVD would turn to him when it came time to dispatch the officers held in the Soviet prison camps. Along with a team of about thirty NKVD men from Moscow, mainly drivers and pri...

I WENT TO PICK UP MY WIFE AND NEWBORN TWINS FROM THE HOSPITAL — I ONLY FOUND THE BABIES AND A NOTE. I can't explain the excitement I felt as I drove to the hospital to bring Suzie and our newborn twin daughters home. I had spent the past few days decorating the nursery, cooking a big family dinner, and planning the perfect welcome. I even picked up balloons on the way. But when I arrived, my excitement turned into confusion. Suzie wasn't there. I just found our two sleeping daughters and a note. My hands shook as I unfolded it: "Goodbye. Take care of them. Ask your mother WHY she did this to me." I froze, rereading it over and over. What the hell did this mean? Where was Suzie? I asked the nurse, my voice trembling. "Where's my wife?" "She checked out this morning," the nurse said hesitantly. "She said you knew." Knew? I had no clue. I drove home with the twins, my mind racing, replaying every moment of Suzie's pregn...