The most unexpected things can kill you….

The Argus 3rd Dec 1910http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article10482014

This family is one you are glad you are not a member of. In fact I believe that it was not even safe to be in the same room as any of them.

Poor Miss Jane Cumming. A hobble skirt was fashionable in 1910 and is one that narrows somewhere below the knee and impedes walking. For general wear they had slits or pleats that made walking easier, but fashionable evening wear would have been extremely restrictive. That style is still worn now but we have the benefit of far more elastic fabrics!

Maybe Miss Jane would have been safer had she dressed in a downstairs room her hobble skirt caused her to slip on the stairs and….. well, you can guess the rest.

Some other members of the family died in regular ways for the times, explosion and shipwrecks, but one sister was killed by a snowball. Generally snowballs aren’t known for their lethality so what on earth happened?

Did a small snowball start rolling down a nearby hill, gathering more snow as it travelled, growing to a gigantic size and travelling faster and faster before finally crushing her as she innocently crossed its path?

Was she collateral damage from a giant snowball aimed at the roadrunner by the coyote? Sorry, but after hearing of a death by snowball I am only able to think of cartoon based scenarios for her untimely end.

The other sister was killed by a trunk lid falling on her head. That gives me more movie based mental images, this time it is just horror movies. Why on earth did she go into the dark attic alone? Nobody lifts up the lid of a heavy trunk and peers in when ominous music is playing unless they have a death wish!!!!!  What was she thinking!!

Ok, there is no indication that she was in a cobwebbed attic, searching through a mysterious trunk when the lid dropped unexpectedly, but that is what you want to have happened, isn’t it?

I wonder if the other sister really lost her mind from shock or is she just hiding in a small padded cell hoping nothing bad happens to her?