The story of Mary, the only elephant in the world who was killed by hanging, has been causing chills down the spine of everyone who listens to her for a hundred years. Cruelty to animals is not uncommon, but events like this remind us of what man is ready for.
Mary was the largest elephant of the Sparks World Famous Shows circus, weighing about five tons. The circus was a guest in the small town of Kingsport in the American state of Tennessee. A new and inexperienced trainer, Walter Eldridge, rode on it to a source of water to water it. Mary, the Sparks ’biggest star who performed a musical point playing 25 tunes, stopped at one point to eat a broken watermelon that stood in the way. Eldridge swung his training stick and hit her, wanting to make her continue on her way. Although Mary, like all circus animals, was afraid of the stick, the inexperienced worker seems to have hit an extremely sensitive spot on the elephant’s mouth that went completely wild. Surlom threw him off and smashed his skull with one kick. A crowd of people gathered in the street around Mary who was standing quietly at the scene of her crime. They chanted, "Kill the elephant, kill the elephant." A local blacksmith fired five boxes of bullets, but none managed to pass through the animal's thick skin and seriously injured it. Mary was imprisoned, and her fate was to be decided by Charlie Spark, the owner of the circus.
Unfortunately, Spark decided to take advantage of Mary for the last time, attract the audience with her murder, prevent the negative reputation of his circus and cancel shows. Since the elephant unmistakably sensed the venom in the food, it was impossible to poison Mary. The firearms available in the small town of that time were powerless against the huge animal. Among the suggestions were that Mary be smashed between two locomotives in motion, or be tied to two trains going in opposite directions and thus torn apart. Spark decided something else, however, wanting to make the execution of the elephant a spectacle. He decided to kill Mary by hanging. How in little Kingsport there wasn’t a big enough crane, who could accomplish that insane mission, and the population was not large enough to provide Spark with the spectacle he had planned, Mary was taken to the neighboring town of Erwin.
On the day of hanging,the executioners chained the elephant's head to the crane used to lift the wagon, and tied her legs to the rail. The "genius" who led the execution process forgot to untie her legs before the hanging began, and as the crane rose, the assembled crowd listened to the eerie cries of the elephant, which was literally crucified between the railroad and the crane. This, unfortunately, was not the end of the gruesome execution. When her legs were untied, the chain of the crane broke and the elephant fell to the ground breaking her hip. They fastened a new and stronger chain, and Mary died in terrible agony for more than half an hour, with the boisterous chanting of the audience.
Gathering after this horrific event, Erwin city leaders have long tried to wash the stain off their name, claiming the story is a fabrication. Unfortunately, the analysis of authentic photographs and testimonies of contemporaries of the event showed that what everyone wanted to forget as soon as they heard, in Tennessee at the beginning of the XX century really happened.
Elephant Mary was hanged in the town of Erwin on September 13, 1919.
Nice article