Intimate Acquaintance with Death: Funeral Practices in Colonial and Victorian America

by Marianne Ruane

As I am now so you shall be,

Prepare for Death & follow me.*¹

Seventeenth century Americans were very familiar with death. One of ten children died in its first year of life, and in the cities where people were less healthy, such as Boston, three out of ten infants died within the first year. Of children born in the 1600s, only sixty percent reached adulthood. Puritans believed that even young children were blighted by original sin, and children were continually reminded that their ultimate destination was most likely Hell, sooner rather than later. Puritan minister Cotton Mather (of Salem witch trial fame) was recorded saying, “Go into Burying-Place, CHILDREN; you will there see Graves as short as your selves. Yea, you may be at Play one Hour; Dead, Dead the next.” Even Puritan schoolbooks reminded children of looming death, “Tis not likely that you will all live to grow up.” “T--Time cuts down all/Both great and small.”²

Blackbeard: Famous in Philadelphia, Part 3

by Marianne Ruane

Some pirates who managed to escape disease died a quicker death at the hands of authorities. William Kidd was captured in Boston and convicted of piracy, then sent to England to be hanged in 1701. While his first noose broke, landing him on the ground dazed but unharmed, the second attempt was successful. His body was tarred and hung in a gibbet over the River Thames as a warning to other pirates to change their ways. A gibbet, iron bands in the shape of a human form designed to hold a corpse together, was generally left hanging for several years until the body completely decomposed. The only complete gibbet in America is on display in Philadelphia. It was made for the pirate Thomas Wilkinson, but because he received a reprieve from hanging, the gibbet was never used. It hung in the Walnut Street Prison and then Moyamensing Prison as a warning to prisoners (wasn’t it already too late?) and eventually made its way to the Atwater Kent Museum.

Blackbeard (also known as Edward Teach) is another pirate with a colorful history and ignominious end. He was a large man, very tall, with crazy black hair and a long beard braided and tied in colored ribbons. Historians believe he may not have killed anyone while plundering – he was so frightening that everyone simply surrendered.

Pirate Living: Grim and Gritty, Part 2

by Marianne Ruane

The majority of pirates were honest sailors who were either forced to become pirates when their ship was conquered or who willingly did so to escape the horrible conditions on their own ship. The British navy commonly forced men into sailor jobs, and seventy percent of those coerced died within two years.¹ Being captured by a pirate ship offered a slightly better alternative.

When pirates captured a ship, they would ask the sailors whether they had been fairly treated by their captain and commanding officers. If they hadn’t, the offending parties would be killed or tortured. “This was actually a common practice among some pirates, some of whom used more elaborate forms of punishment, like making the torturers run in circles for ten minutes while the men stuck forks, knives and compasses into their butts.”²

Philadelphia: Popular Pirate Destination, Part 1

An 1861 article from the Philadelphia Ledger announced that three coffins containing the remains of pirates hanged in 1800 for stealing cargo were found on Windmill Island (a now non-existent island in the Delaware River which had extended from Race Street to South Street) by some workers loading coal in the area. “The coffins were in an excellent state of preservation, and the skeletons within them were perfect, with the exception of two of them being without the skulls.”¹

Pirates not only walked the streets of Philadelphia, they also played a significant role in the city’s history, particularly in the first half of the eighteenth century. In 1699, four of Captain Kidd’s crew members were arrested and tried in Philadelphia. Around the same time, the pirate Henry Avery frequented the city. One of his men married the daughter of Pennsylvania’s Acting Governor William Markham and another entrusted his money to Governor Markham’s safekeeping when he was imprisoned in Philadelphia. Blackbeard reportedly stayed at an inn located at Second and High (now Market) Streets in Philadelphia during his visits from 1716-1718. “He is said to have made repeated visits to Philadelphia, and to have been countenanced and abetted by men in respectable repute.”²

Mob Madness: the Philadelphia Riots of 1844

by Marianne Ruane

            In 1844 the American Republicans — a Protestant Nativist 
            group — announced that they would hold a meeting in 
            Philadelphia’s Third Ward, an Irish stronghold in the 
            Kensington district. On May 3 and again on May 6, the 
            Irish repelled their unwanted visitors with force. After the 
            second incident, in which a young Protestant man was killed, 
            the city was in an uproar. On May 7, a Protestant mob 
            marched to the Irish section. On that day and the next, the 
            mob burned down more than 30 homes. The Church of St. 
            Michael was set ablaze as was the Church of St. Augustine, 
            along with its monastery and splendid library. Firemen were 
            kept away. When Mayor John Morin Scott…pleaded for 
            calm, he was struck on the head with a stone and knocked 
            unconscious. ¹

The Philadelphia Riots of 1844 exemplify a particularly grim portion of US history. Anti-Catholic, anti-immigration sentiment stoked by urbanization, industrialization, and an economic depression erupted in several days of violence in May and again in July of that year.

Food From Colonial Times: Something To Bite My Teeth Into

by Marianne Ruane

(originally posted in April 2013; recreated in August 2015)

Teeth whitening is all the rage now; braces are popular for children and adults, and in general, Americans are known the world over for their bright white, straight teeth. Back in the late 1700s though, Americans were lucky to have teeth. “[T]he women, generally very pretty, are often deprived of these precious ornaments (teeth) at eighteen or twenty years of age…"¹ A visiting Frenchman, one Monsieur Robin, attributed this toothless affliction of American colonial women to eating hot bread, particularly corn meal biscuits, which the French who visited the new country complained wouldn’t even be eaten by their army. An exaggeration, perhaps, but what did colonial Americans eat? 

Vampires, Sex, and GHOSTS!

by Marianne Ruane
(originally posted Feb. 2013; recreated in August 2015)

When the crypt goes creak,
And the tombstones quake.
Spooks come out for a swinging wake.
Happy haunts materialize,
And begin to vocalize.
Grim grinning ghosts come out to socialize.**

Grim Philly’s ‘Vampires, Sex, and Ghosts’ tour is not strictly a ghost tour. It’s more a retelling of the seedy side of Philadelphia’s history (colonial prostitution, dead bodies in Washington Square, macabre treatments for 18^th Century diseases, etc.) with a few ghost stories sprinkled in for real/unreal, dead/undead balance. I don’t have paranormal experiences myself, but while leading the Vampire tour during the 2012 season, several customers had encounters during my tours that defied explanation.