I’m not great about Halloween.
Lawrence, as a SF/fantasy/horror collector and writer, is more familiar with the highways and byways of the genre than I am. The things that tend to horrify me are the ugly realities of existence, so I leave October mostly to him.
But this channel popped up in my YouTube recs, and I thought it might be interesting to highlight these two kind of scary events from the “Fascinating Horror” channel. There are a lot of people I don’t link because I honestly can’t stand their voices, and this guy is right on the edge for me, but I think these have some enough historical value to where I can put up with the narration.
First up: “Disaster on Webb’s Bait Farm”. This one I was unfamiliar with.
On May 27, 1983, there was a massive explosion at a place called Webb’s Bait Farm, near Benton, Tennessee. Eleven people were killed in the blast.
The force of the blast shattered windows in several homes and other structures on nearby properties, which reportedly resulted in some neighbors receiving minor cut wounds. Parts of bodies were hurled through the roofs of the nearby house and carport and as far away as 500 feet (150 m; 170 yd) from the site. Nothing in the barn was left intact; all of the bodies had lost limbs and six were decapitated. Some were stripped by the force of the blast.
Several witnesses claimed to have seen a white mushroom cloud which was estimated to be 600 to 800 feet (180 to 240 m) tall, and the blast was heard and felt in Cleveland over 20 miles (32 km) away.
Now, Webb’s Bait Farm was a place that raised and sold worms for fishing. You’re probably thinking “What could possibly explode with that much force at a bait farm?”
Could it have been…meth?
Spoiler for those of you who didn’t follow the link above: it wasn’t meth.
Bonus #1: this is a disaster I’ve actually heard of (I think I was visiting my grandparents in Cleveland when this happened), but which seems to have been forgotten by many people: “The Beverly Hills Supper Club”.
Bonus #2 and #3: Here are two shorter videos from local news channels about the Beverly Hills Supper Club fire.
Wikipedia entry. The general consensus of opinion seems to be that this was a combined parade of failure and gaps in oversight, but there also seems to be a strongly held minority opinion that the Mafia actually started the fire.
Bonus #4: a documentary from the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) on Beverly Hills.
“Fire after fire, the lessons are the same…” I remember watching an episode of “Nova” about building fires. One of the people being interviewed commented that, in the profession, they considered NFPA’s Life Safety Code to be a holy book: every word in it was written in the blood of someone who died or was badly injured.