Whatever happened to health and safety?

Since it is Hallowe'en, I thought it might be fun just to mark the day with a link to a true ghost story that I came across in wikipedia.

That is most interesting about the case of the Hammersmith Ghost, is less the gullibility and superstitious nature of the people of the time (1803-1804), but the outcome of the court case that followed.

An excise officer, one Francis Smith, shot and killed what he thought was the ghost and upon conviction at the Old Bailey, was sentenced to death by hanging and dissection, though that was later commuted to a year in prison. It occurred the me that hanging and dissection was probably overdoing a bit as a method of execution, so I wandered off down the more ghoulish side of wikipedia and looked up other methods of execution (as you do), it being Hallowe'en and all and a little gruesome entertainment required.

Well, all I can say is, people have been very inventive in the ways the have executed each other over the centuries.

This one, the Brazen Bull, is a particular horror...

And those were just the approved methods. Cor.