Charles Blondin

popular name: Ed Warren

date_of_death: August 23, 2006

age: 79

cause_of_death: Complications from a stroke

claim_to_fame: The Odd and the Interesting

best_know_for: Ed Warren was a world renowned paranormal researcher and ghosthunter and was half of the husband and wife team of Ed and Lorraine Warren, Seekers of the Supernatural. The team was often asked to assist in numerous police investigations involving satanic ritualistic murders, and were in high demand by hundreds of colleges and universities to speak on the subject of the supernatural. Ed and his wife, Lorraine, have co-authored ten books on the subject of the supernatural. Two of the books were made into made for television movies, The Demon Murder Case and The Haunted. They were among only a handful of investigators asked to investigate the Amityville Horror Case, and were consultants on the first Amityville Horror film. At his passing, Ed Warren was one of only seven religious demonologists in the nation.

popular name: Eben Byers

date_of_death: March 31, 1932

age: 51

cause_of_death: Cancer due to excessive radiation exposure

claim_to_fame: The Odd and the Interesting

best_know_for: Eben Byers, popular Pittsburgh sportsman, socialite and industrialist, fell out of an upper berth in 1927 returning from a Yale-Harvard football game and injured his arm. His Pittsburgh physiotherapist, Dr. Charles Clinton Moyar, prescribed a patented drink called ''Radithor." Radithor, a popular and expensive mixture of radium 226 and radium 228 in distilled water, was advertised as an effective treatment for over 150 "endocrinologic" diseases, especially lassitude and sexual impotence. Over 400 000 bottles, each containing over 2 μCi (74 kBq) of radium, were marketed and sold worldwide between 1925 and 1930. Byers was drinking in excess of 3-4 bottles a day for years, claiming the elixir eased the arm pain and gave him a little energy boost. He enthusiastically recommended it to friends, sent them cases of it, even gave some to one of his horses. but stopped in October 1930 (after taking some 1400 doses) when that effect faded. Soon after he lost weight, had horrible headaches and his teeth began to fall out. In 1931, the Federal Trade Commission asked him to testify about his experience, but he was too sick to travel, so the commission sent a lawyer to take his statement at his home; the lawyer reported that Byers's "whole upper jaw, excepting two front teeth and most of his lower jaw had been removed" and that "All the remaining bone tissue of his body was disintegrating, and holes were actually forming in his skull." The death of the Pittsburgh millionaire sportsman Eben M. Byers, who was an avid Radithor user, by radium poisoning in 1932 brought an end to this era and prompted the development of regulatory controls for all radiopharmaceuticals. The grave of Eben Byers can be found at the historic Allegheny Cemetery in Pittsburg, Pennsylvania.

popular name: W W Pool

date_of_death: February 26, 1922

age: 79

cause_of_death: Pneumonia

claim_to_fame: The Odd and the Interesting

best_know_for: William Pool was a well respected account manager and bookkeeper for the wealthy and influential Bryan estate. His wife died in 1913 with William passing away several years later. They are entombed at Hollywood Cemetery and you would think that would be the end of the story. Years later local residents claim that the mausoleum of W. W. Pool (dated 1913) in Hollywood Cemetery holds the remains of a vampire with the rumor that Pool was run out of England in the 1800s for being a blood-sucking creature of the night. The legend may have been influenced by the architecture of the tomb, which has both Masonic and ancient Egyptian elements, and the "WW" over the entry to the crypt looking like fangs. At the same time another version of events began on October 2, 1925, when a disastrous cave-in at the Church Hill Tunnel occurred, with tons of rock and soil crashing down on a work train, killing, trapping and wounding several laborers. Shortly after the catastrophe, eyewitnesses saw a horrific creature running from the tunnel’s end – with fanglike teeth and rolls of decomposing flesh hanging from its body. The creature is said to have sprinted into Richmond’s Hollywood Cemetery and disappeared into the mausoleum of W.W. Pool where today the iron doors remain sealed to prevent the creature from escaping.