Time: 7 pm EST
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Long before David Carradine made autoerotic asphyxia mainstream, there were individuals that enjoyed suffocating themselves while masturbating. Sometimes they added other fetishes, sometimes they died of asphyxiation, and when that happened they left death scenes behind that baffled their contemporaries. A hanged man in a dress raises questions.
Deaths like these can be found in old newspapers under headlines like “Boy Hanged…Body Nude except for Two Bracelets and Pair of Women’s Shoes,” “Man Found Hanged Locked in Chains,” and “Divinity Student In Women’s Garb Kills Himself.” The detective conducting the investigation invariably calls it, “The most perplexing case of my career.”
“Otherwise Inexplicable” uses newspaper articles from 1884 to 1953 to look at how Americans struggled to understand autoerotic asphyxiation fatalities when they did not know that autoerotic asphyxia existed. It is the story of laymen and professionals trying to force events outside their experience into familiar categories where they did not fit. But this is not just history; modern examples of autoerotic fatalities will also be considered in places where the practice is unknown or unacceptable, and imaginative solutions invented to explain them.
Robert Damon Schneck specializes in strange, obscure, and Fortean, American history. His books include The Bye Bye Man (2005) and the Bram Stoker Award-nominated Mrs. Wakeman vs. the Antichrist (2014); his story, “Bridge to Body Island” was adapted into the 2017 horror movie, “The Bye-Bye Man”. Follow and contact him at “Historian of the Strange” on Facebook.
Image: The Artist with Two Hanged Women (Der Künstler mit zwei erhängten Frauen), Rudolf Schlichter, 1924