Bioparanoria

Despite all the ingenious entertainment and heartwarming memories, there has been a great deal of tragedy at the Disney theme parks. One doesn’t have to do much online investigating to discover decades of deaths that have occurred on Disney property. While a fair number of these are merely the result of natural causes such as heart attacks, there have been a number of deaths or severe injuries caused by the rides themselves. Considering that the people who do get harmed in this way are but an extremely small percentage of the total number of people who visit Disney, the parks are actually remarkably safe. You’re doubtlessly at greater risk on a highway rather than a roller coaster. Nevertheless, there have been cases, few and far between, in which a person has been murdered on Disney property. Such is the forgotten fate of Melanchthon “Mel” Christian Yorba (September 6, 1962-March 7, 1981). Yorba was attending a private party at Disneyland in Anaheim, California, a celebration thrown...

There’s a funny phenomenon we have of adding artificial darkness and mystery to artists, insisting that wild rumors we hear about their sordid private lives are true. Consider the long-running urban legends of Walt Disney freezing himself or of Mr. Rogers being a Korean War sniper. Perhaps when we see a person create genuine innocent art we are intimated and assume that more is at work here, a shadowy side being loosely hidden from public view. In the case of today’s post, we’ll be looking at an unusual hypothesis about Charles Dodgson (1832-1898), better known by his pen name of Lewis Carroll. Carroll was a mathematician but wrote fiction as well. Today the only works of his that are widely known are the Alice in Wonderland books, far from a poor literary legacy. In 1996, a man named Richard Wallace published a book promoting an alarming theory about Carroll being none other than Jack the Ripper, quite a scandalous claim to pin against the creator of the White Rabbit! Wallace’s book, ...