Tags: animal cruelty | Bizarre | executions

Poor, poor, Mary. Mary is the circus elephant who got lynched by the angry mob. Seems angry mobs don't only go after the humans, sometimes, they feel like executing some animals for human crimes as well.

One day in the lynch happy south they ran out of negros to hang... hmmm, so what do the fools do to entertain the masses? They lynch the African elephant... I mean they are from Africa, right?

At first glance this does look like a joke of somekind.. you really gotta look at the image and say WTF! This is the biggest lynching in history for sure.

But it is real, this is the lynching of an elephant named Mary.

The year is 1916 and vigilante justice is the rage, whether its a negro or an elephant at the end of the noose does not seem to matter, townspeople come out in mobs, a family affair, to see the spectacle of a good lynching to satisfy the bloodlust.

War was raging and... It was a good year for scapegoats. It was a good year to hang an elephant.

I do say lynching because lynching is the execution without trial carried out by an angry mob... and yes, there was a town angry at Mary.

A circus came to town along with the elephants, clown and trained seals. Mary the elephant was billed as the largest elephant around with the promoters hyping her up as have killed a dozen people for the show.

Here is part of the elephant lynching story and the event that led to such a sick act.

Mary was billed as "the largest living land animal on earth"; her owner claimed she was three inches bigger than Jumbo, P.T. Barnum's famous pachyderm. At 30 years old, Mary was five tons of pure talent: she could "play 25 tunes on the musical horns without missing a note"; the pitcher on the circus baseball-game routine, her .400 batting average "astonished millions in New York."

Rumor and exaggeration swarmed about Mary like flies. She was worth a small fortune: $20,000, Charlie Sparks claimed. She was dangerous, having killed two men, or was it eight, or 18?

She was Charlie Sparks' favorite, his cash cow, his claim to circus fame. She was the leader of his small band of elephants, an exotic crowd-pleaser, an unpredictable giant.

On Monday, September 11, 1916, Sparks World Famous Shows played St. Paul, Va., a tiny mining town in the Clinch River Valley.

Which is where drifter Red Eldridge made a fatal decision. Slight and flame-haired, Red had nothing to lose by signing up with Sparks World Famous Shows: he'd dropped into St. Paul from a Norfolk and Western boxcar and decided to stay for a while.

Eldridge was hired as an elephant handler and marched in the circus parade that afternoon. From statements from that time, it seems that Eldridge may not have had the experience or smarts to handle such large animals. Yep, he may not have realized a 5 ton animal can kill you with a step.

The story of what happened has many versions, the witness story seemed to keep changing. There were 5 versions of how the man was killed from being accidental to a fit of rage. Anyway... the town wanted justice and since mob justice and lynchings were all the rage in the early 1900's... an public elephant execution was demanded.

They tried to shoot Mary, but that had little effect. They tried electrocution but that did not kill her either. So they wanted the tried and true method of hanging. Mary was hung from a railroad crane that at first try broke, sent her crashing to the ground breaking her hip.

The following is way sick for society, even turn of the last century, and families with children but... more than 2,500 people gathered to watch Mary swing near the turn-table and powerhouse on that drizzly afternoon.

One of those witnesses, Myrtle Taylor, remembered that every child in Erwin was at the Clinchfield Yards. "And they took the other elephants and Mary down Love Street from the performance to the railyards, trunk to tail. We kids hung back because we were scared to death, but still we wanted to see it."

Wade Ambrose, who was 20 at the time Mary was hung, recalls that the roustabouts chained Mary's leg to the rail, then drove her companions back around the roundhouse.

"They had a time getting the chain around her neck. Then they hooked the boom to the neck chain, and when they began to lift her up, I heard the bones and ligaments cracking in her foot. They finally discovered that she'd not been released from the rail, so they did that."

Poor Mary, being of African heritage may have gotten her tortured and lynched without a trial as well.