Can I do reviews of YouTube channels? Is that weird? I hope nobody does a review of my channel…
Anyway, Fascinating Horror is a channel I binged recently, and it’s… fascinating.
It’s primarily a channel about documenting disasters and otherwise unfortunate incidents from the past. They’ve covered everything from Jack the Ripper and Dyatlov Pass incident, to more modern events like the Slenderman Stabbings and various theme park disasters.
I’m not really a history guy. I don’t care about histories of railroads or theme parks. Well that’s a lie… I do care about the history of railroads and theme parks. When they include huge disasters or accidents.
I wish I could explain my obsession with tragic theme park accidents and other mundane events gone wrong. I guess I kinda just spelled it out right there, now that I think about it. I find it inherently interesting with something usually mundane goes wrong.
It’s shocking. You never expect a kid to get decapitated from a Batman roller-coaster, but nevertheless, it happened. Videos like that tap into that fear that anything can go wrong at any moment, for no reason at all.
Take his video covering people who fell into the Grand Canyon. The one that stuck with me is the dad who was visiting with his daughter. He was known for doing pranks, so naturally, he decides to play a prank where he acts like he falls off the edge, but in reality, he just jumps to a lower hidden ledge. She jokingly ignores him and continues walking down the path. Little did she know, that he actually did fall. He silently plummeted ~400 feet to his death. She didn’t notice until later in the day, when she became slightly more concerned.
It’s horrifying. I said earlier that these incidents tap into that fear that anything can go wrong, for no reason, but as Fascinating Horror often likes to point out, nearly all of the disasters he covers could have been prevented, or at the very least, heavily mitigated.
The most preventable accident that he’s covered, in my mind, is the Crash at Crush. The Crash at Crush was an event carried out by William Crush in 1896, that featured two 32 ton trains colliding into each other head on at 45 mph. I was going to say that I’m glad the internet exists nowadays, so we don’t do events like that purely for entertainment, but I would pay good money for a Crash at Crush 2.
Anyway, the initial collision isn’t what caused this event to become infamous. It’s the boiler explosion caused shortly after the collision.
“A crash, a sound of timbers rent and torn, and then a shower of splinters… There was just a swift instance of silence, and then as if controlled by a single impulse both boilers exploded simultaneously and the air was filled with flying missiles of iron and steel varying in size from a postage stamp to half of a driving wheel…” – The Dallas Morning News. September 16, 1896.
Despite insisting on some safety precautions, like ordering civilians to be 200ft back (and reporters only 100ft back for some reason), two people were killed and 6 others were seriously injured.
I needn’t go into the ways in which this event could have been prevented or mitigated, I think that goes without saying.
But the scariest incidents that the channel covers, are when no party seems to be truly at fault. This is best represented in the Victoria Hall Disaster.
The night of June 16th 1883 is a harrowing one. Around 1,100 children are packed into a concert hall to see a traveling variety show. Near the end of this show, the hosts tell the crowd of children that kids with specific ticket numbers can come down and receive a prize. After this information is revealed, an unknown amount of kids begin to rush down the steps to the stage, and a pile-up occurs almost immediately. Kids are falling over and getting stuck on other kids. The hallway becomes literally filled with children as they keep running in and adding onto the pile. There’s an illustration floating around of what supposedly happened at this incident if you want an actual visual, and it’s awful.
183 children died of compression asphyxia that night. 183.
And who do you blame for that?
You sure as hell can’t blame the kids, as much as one might want to. You can’t blame the people who built the building, because buildings weren’t really rated for child stampedes in the 1800s. You can’t really blame the show hosts, because it’s not like they told everyone to do that. And I don’t even think you could have expected them to realistically prepare for that.
I think it’s just one of those things that happens. One kid sees another kid running down the steps, and he doesn’t wanna miss a prize, so he runs. Then 5 kids see that kid running, then they run after him. Then 30 see them run off, and now it’s uncontrollable.
Shit sucks. That’s about all I can say.
I spent a lot of time in this “review” talking about the events, rather than the channel’s presentation or writing, but I think the strength is in the events they pick. Most of the time I’ve never heard of them, but they’re incredibly interesting. Interesting enough to surprise me that I’ve never heard of them before.
As for the presentation and writing, they’re both fantastic. The visuals on the channel are mostly still images, considering a lot of events from the 19th and early 20th century are covered, but it’s something you just gotta deal with with events from that time period.
I don’t have much else to say. It’s just one of those channels that once you find, you instantly want to binge all the videos. And that’s pretty much what I did over the course of a couple nights after discovering it.
Would I Recommend It?
If you found my descriptions of the events mentioned above interesting in any way, I wholly recommend you binge Fascinating Horror. There’s dozens of more events and they’re covered in way more detail than I went into here.
There’s a lot of channels out there covering disasters like Fascinating Horror, but none really match it in terms of the events chosen, vocal delivery, and overall quality.