Robert Wadlow

popular name: Berrien Upshaw

date_of_death: January 12, 1949

age: 47

cause_of_death: Suicide - leaped from building

claim_to_fame: The Odd and the Interesting

best_know_for: Berrien "Red" Upshaw was a mean, nasty, ill-tempered loser and wife beater - and those were some of his good qualities. But he did have one quality that served him well - he was known as a suave and charming man to the ladies. His charm wooed a young Margaret Mitchell and she married Berrien “Red” Kinnard Upshaw, an ex-football player from a prominent Raleigh (North Carolina) family, on September 2nd 1922. But after after 4 months Upshaw took off to the mid-west and engaged in bootlegging and other illegal pursuits. He returned back to Margaret but the family wanted nothing to do with him. The marriage was annulled two years later and Margaret married John Marsh (Red's best man at the wedding). Margaret went on to write the best-selling novel Gone With The Wind while Upshaw continued to drink heavily, was institutionalized briefly in the early 1940s and leaped to his death from the 2nd story of a Salvation Army flop-house in Galveston, Texas in 1949. In the end, Berrien Upshaw was so disliked, even by his own family, that his family in the last line of his brief obituary specifically requested no flowers be sent.

popular name: Hazel Kuser

date_of_death: December 9, 1924

age: 25

cause_of_death: Radium poisoning

claim_to_fame: The Odd and the Interesting

best_know_for: Hazel May Vincent Kuser was born on August 5, 1899, in Orange, Essex County, New Jersey. At the age of 16, she began working at the U.S. Radium Corporation in Orange, New Jersey, where she painted luminous watch dials using radium-based paint. This hazardous work led to her developing radium poisoning, a condition that caused severe health issues and contributed to her early death. She married Theodore C. Kuser, and they had one child together. Hazel passed away on December 9, 1924, at the age of 25, and was laid to rest at Rosedale Cemetery in Montclair, New Jersey. Her life and tragic death became part of the broader narrative of the Radium Girls, a group of 50+ female factory workers who suffered from radium poisoning due to unsafe working conditions.

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.