Just an interesting page I found that lists out a lot of various torture devices and thier uses.
Kind of got my mind wandering...
http://www.occasionalhell.com/infdevice/
Enjoy!
Gwyd

That's a very "nice" link. Thanks!
Pity that they do not have pictures of really ancient devices.

Yeah...Most of them are Spanish Inquisition era stuff. A couple were new to me.
The Spanish Pear for instance.
Yuck.
Gwyd

A very interesting site indeed. A few of them were also new to me. I have thought that displays of various torture devices might make a good theme for a haunt. I might have to keep it in mind for future use.

Dave

Reminds me of steve santini.

No list of torture devices is complete without including....a deck of playing cards in the hands of an average magician.

Uhf!! A lot of that devices are new to me, thanks for the link. mystic1 that coment about the cards totally true!!.

Interesting. Humans are such charming creatures to have created such hideous devices. Some of that stuff would make the cruelest demons hang their heads in shame.

One of the "finest" museums of this type of device is das Kriminalmuseum in Rothenburg ob der Tauber, which is a medieval walled city in Bavaria. To get to Rothenburg, you need to take a train to Steinach, where you change trains to Rothenburg.

The English link to the museum is here http://www.kriminalmuseum.rothenburg.de/Englisch/page1.html

One of the big attractions of the town is Hans Georg Baumgartner. From April until Christmas, he gives two walking tours per evening of this old town, as the Night Watchman. One tour is in English, the other in German. It is very entertaining and quite educational.

If you ever go to Germany, this is one stop that is an absolute must.

I enjoyed the "Coloring Book" of torture devices sold on that site. Just the thing for Bizarre Kiddie Shows. That ought to give the little so and so's nightmares.

Bill Palmer wrote:



Actually, the BEST way to get to Rothenburg is by bike.

Anyway, I would add this to Bill's advice about the museum: don't take your wife. I could easily have spent at least two or three more hours more during my only visit, but she was pushy to get out of there. And as I said, it remains my only visit to the museum: she never wanted to go back, though we've passed through Rothenburg three or four times on bike tours. (Germany may well be the best place in the world to go on bike tours--but that's another thread for another time and another forum.)

Gruss,
Jeff
Goettingen

There are a couple of other Torture Museums. I've been to the one in Vienna...a delightful place of bad dreams.

One of the places you can find mention of how some of the devices are used, is in Grimm's Fairy Tales. The Grimm Bros put out a new version of the book regularly, over a period of years. The earlier versions have some gruesome tales. The later versions are more Disneyfied, toned down, as the tales transitioned from being medieval adult morality stories to children's bedtime stories.

Harley,

Actually, I would think that the earlier versions of the Grimm collection would provide a rich source for Bizzarists. Do you happen to have any online sources? (I mean...it's got to be public domain by now.)

(UPDATE...I googled and found this: http://www.surlalunefairytales.com/authors/grimms.html
Would an 1884 translation would be early enough to have the earlier versions you're talking about?)

I know that here in Germany the stories generally told to children are versions I had never heard before. Much more violent, and often without a happy ending. I assume they are close to the originals.

Gruss,
Jeff
Goettingen (where the Grimm brothers worked for a while)

Where is the soft cushion?

There is some nasty stuff there. Just imagine a zealot armed with the Maleius Maleficarum and those play toys. But all in the name of "christianity" ya know....

I apologize for not being able to give you immediate references. If you do a web search, you'll come up with all kinds of things, and have a delightful evening in the process.

The Grimms began as folklorists, trying to preserve old tales. But as they became increasingly profitable, they toned down a lot of the stories, to please their buyers. Their tales are steeped in violence and deceit, no matter which version you read, but the flavors change.

One of the characteristics of horror fiction, is that often it goes through an historical transition that makes the characters become more (how shall I say this?) palateable.

Look at Frankenstein, for example. In the original, he's fascinating, yet a creature who abandons morality, in favor of emotional vendetta. In his current version, he appears on cereal boxes. Palateable?

Nope. Wrong. BZZZZZZT (sound of buzzer going off).

The Grimm brothers were philologists. They collected the Kinder- und Hausmärchen in order to see how the German language changed from one region of the German-speaking world to another. Their greatest work was not the Kinder- und Hausmärchen, but Grimms Etymologisches Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache. This massive set of books makes a full-sized set of the OED look like a dime novel.

However, some linguists believe that the Grimms collected more of their stories from people at diplomatic functions than in situ.

They were among those who promoted the idea of the existence of a root language from which all others came. Their work contributed greatly to the rise of nationalism in Germany.

One of the contributions they made to linguistics was Grimms' law of linguistic mutation. This law, which is very consistent, allows linguists to predict with a great deal of accuracy, what certain words would be, if the do not actually appear in the literature of a language. To give a simple example, if we know that in Spanish, the word for silver is plata, and that in Portuguese, the word is prata, then we can fairly accurately assume that since the word in Spanish for a beach is playa, the Portuguese word would be praya. Since Portuguese very seldom uses the y, we then can assume it would be praia. And this is correct.

The amount of "cleaning up" from one edition of the Kinder- und Hausmärchen to the next was really negligible.

I knew that degree in Germanics would come in handy some time!

Regarding trips to Rothenburg ob der Tauber -- if you go to the Kriminalmuseum, send your wife a couple of blocks over to Käthe Wohlfahrts Weihnachtsladen. Meet her back at the store before she checks out and remind her that she can get all that stuff in the States for less at Garden Ridge.

Oops, my bad! Philology...those guys have a word for everything!

There's a wonderful museum in Regensburg, though not of the torture variety.

Someday, I'll post my reasoning that the Grimm Brothers played a major part in the Holocaust.

Regensburg has some of the neatest things in it. Ever since the first year that I studied German in High School ** years ago, I have wanted to go there. There is a song about Regensburg and the monster that lives in the whirlpool in the Danube.

According to the legend, if a woman travels across the whirlpool, and she is a virgin, she will be fine. But if she is not, the monster will get her.

So, the last time we were in Germany, we took a side trip to see the whirlpool. We found out that there were cruises that took you to see the whirlpool, but they would only run if there were 10 people on the cruise. So we took a bus tour of Regensburg instead. After the tour, we went to the bridge tower. When we finished the tour of the tower, I asked the lady at the ticket desk if she could tell me where the famous whirlpool was. She pointed out the window at the foot of the bridge and said "Gerade dort." (Right there.) So, I walked out onto the bridge, leaned over and took several photos of the famous whirlpool. I also saved 28 Euros in boat ride tickets!