The 1890s Girl Who Loved Funerals So Much She Began Killing Friends So She Could Go To More
14-year-old Ella Holdridge had an obsession with death that led to her poisoning a number of her neighborhood friends in 1892
There are a good number of people who may act morbidly from time to time, but few who have it fully consume them. Unfortunately, 14-year-old Ella Holdridge loved death and funerals so much that she began killing her friends in 1892 because she believed they would look nice dead, and she also wanted to attend their services.
The July 20, 1892 edition of the San Francisco Examiner carried a bizarre story from the outskirts of Buffalo, New York. In the Tonawanda community lived a 14-year-old girl named Ella Holdridge. She was long considered to be odd, especially given her obsession with death. Her stepmother later said that she would run after any funeral procession she saw, and whenever she learned of someone having recently died, she would dance around the house, clapping her hands and joyfully shouting, “He’s dead! He’s dead!”
Holdridge’s attraction to death turned out to be not just a passing dark fancy of youth. It was discovered that in an attempt to feed her obsession, she had killed one of her friends and poisoned three others…
