It’s February 8th, 1924. We’re at Nevada State Prison in Carson City, where 29-year-old Geon is beginning to lose his nerve. Just hours before, the gangster and hitman had adopted a kind of live by the sword, die by the sword attitude to his impending death. He told a journalist,
“Gas all the same as rope or shoot him gun. No worry.”
But now with the void yawning before him, it all seems too real. He actually begins to weep as the hour of his demise draws closer. His guards are appalled by his sudden loss of resolve. One tells him,
“Die like a man, John.”
But his executioners are pretty anxious, too. This morning, they’ll do something they’ve never tried before. They will carry out a death warrant using lethal gas. And so just before 9:40 a.m., Gon is strapped to a metal bench in his hastily constructed death chamber. The room is cleared and the process begins. As the pump kicks in, the sudden sound startles John. He turns his head as if in fright as hydrocyanic acid is sprayed into the room.
It only takes a few seconds for the gas to take effect as puddles of acid condense on the chilly floor of the chamber and witnesses watch on from outside. Gon seems to sink back onto his bench. Then the convulsions begin. This is the story of one of the more bizarre and disturbing entries into the United States litany of execution methods, one that was controversial when it first emerged 100 years ago and yet is still in use to this day. The gas chamber. Just like is so often the case with the cruelest forms of execution, the gas chamber was actually developed out of an apparent desire to be more humane. Alan Mlane Hamilton was a psychiatrist from Brooklyn, New York.
He specialized in the impact of trauma on mental health and in criminal insanity which put him in close proximity with the criminal justice system. At Singing Prison, New York in 1905, Hamilton witnessed something that changed him forever. The executions of Frank Remieri and Adolf Ko in the electric chair. The first execution went just fine.
Hamilton was unsympathetic to Remiieri, describing him as a degenerate Italian. Hamilton was unmoved as the jolt of electricity quickly transformed the prisoner into a limp thing. Ko’s execution, however, was a little different. Hamilton reported a distressingly perceptible and horrid smell of burning flesh.
This was too much for the psychiatrist. In his 1960 memoir, he wrote,
“It was not long before my nervous system and stomach rebelled, and I hurried to the cool outer air and left singing as soon as I could.”
The second execution had a profound impact on Hamilton. So much so that he began thinking of an alternative, something that would get the job of killing done without literally cooking the prisoner. This thought experiment led Hamilton to a new method, gas. One gas in particular seemed like the ideal candidate, hydrocyanic acid or cyanide gas. Swedish chemist Carl Wilhelm Shiel had first isolated hydroenic acid back in 1782. He derived the acid from the Prussian blue pigment used by artists to achieve deep rich blue colorings since the early 18th century.
Unfortunately for Shiel, his curiosity got the better of him. He had a tendency to smell and taste new substances as he discovered them, including hydrogen cyanide. Chill’s kidneys failed in 1785, and then he died in 1786, aged only 43. The official explanation was mercury poisoning, but tasting the deadly toxin hydroyanic acid couldn’t have helped either.
In gaseous form, hydroionic acid is known as cyanide gas, and it’s of course lethal. It essentially asphyxiates the body’s cells, which means the tissues, organs, and crucially the brain can’t get the oxygen they need. While Hamilton was publishing his memoir in 1916, World War I was already well underway.
Since 1915, both the onant and the central powers had been using gas to sow death and panic amongst the enemy. At the SA in July 1916, French forces began experimenting with hydrogen cyanide delivered via artillery shell. While these shells did cause casualties, the gas was largely ineffective. On an open battlefield, it was hard to achieve the massive concentrations that were required to kill.
But for Hamilton, this was a breakthrough. When applied within the confines of a gas chamber, it would be all too easy to achieve this concentration. So Hamilton then went on tour along with his supporter, the US Army Dr. Delos Turner. They approached state legislatures seeking a taker for their new method.
Hamilton ultimately died in 1919 and so he never got to see his gas chamber in action, but Turner continued his search and in 1921 he found a taker. The state of Nevada would be the pioneer that introduced gas chamber executions to the world. The Nevada Department of Corrections was truly venturing into the unknown. While everyone knew that hydroic acid was lethal, no one had ever attempted to make an execution with the stuff.
And in some ways, it’s not surprising that Nevada volunteered to go first. The state actually has a bit of a history with experimental execution efforts. In 1913, Andrea Mikovich had faced the shooting machine after a murder the previous year, and this was essentially a spring-loaded automatic firing squad. Though Mikovich seems to have died quickly, the shooting machine didn’t quite catch on.
Thanks to the recommendation from Hamilton and Turner, though, Nevada now had a new and innovative way to achieve the same ends. Now they just needed someone to execute. Enter Geon, who was a Chinese immigrant born in Guangong sometime around 1895. He’d arrived in San Francisco at about 12 or 13 years old and spent most of his life in the city’s Chinatown district.
As he grew, Gee found himself disillusioned with the idea of a normal career and was instead drawn into the world of organized crime. He fell in with the hips tong society, making good money in the drug and illegal alcohol trade. But when war broke out with the rival Bing Kong Tong Society, Gee was expected to become a soldier.
In August 1921, Gee and his young apprentice Huji Singh traveled to Mina, Nevada. They were there on business, and that business was murder. On August 27th, they paid a visit to the home of Tom Kuang Ki, who owned a Chinese laundry in the town. Tom was allegedly a member of the Bing Kong Tom. Standing only 5’4, Gee was not a physically intimidating man, but he was a man of action.
And when Tom answered the door, Singh seems to have frozen. Gee, on the other hand, did not. He fired twice with his pistol, striking the 74 year old man dead. The two men were arrested in Reno later that day. Singh, who was born in the US and seemed to be cooperative with the authorities, got life imprisonment and was released in 1934.
Gee, on the other hand, was described by the judge as an illiterate Chinese unacquainted with American customs. And as he’d been the one to pull the trigger, he was the one sentenced to die. So, Nevada had their man. Now, they just needed to figure out what they were going to do with him. Things didn’t go as smoothly as they’d hoped.
Their sources for the hydroenic acid was the succinctly named California Cyanide Company in Los Angeles. But the CCC was a pest control company. They killed insects, not people, and they refused to deliver the poison for such a purpose. So, representatives of the Nevada State Prison went to fetch it themselves. Next, four prison guards grew disturbed by the process and then promptly resigned.
This prompted officials to attempt to carry out the execution in secret. Bizarrely and probably unconstitutionally, they pumped the cyanide gas into GE’s cell while he slept. But this didn’t work as the gas just leaked out. Finally, they then set up a death chamber appropriately in the prison’s butcher’s shop. But they weren’t going to just send the man into this death chamber without testing it first.
So they executed two cats in there just to find out if it actually worked. After an apparently pain-free death, which took just 15 seconds, the chamber was declared good to go. On February the 8th, 1924, Geon went to his death. Over his time spent on death row, Gee had taken to starving himself. On the morning of his execution, his already tiny frame had shrunk even further, and he weighed just a little over 40 kilos.
As his confidence and spirit faded from him, the sight of the wretched weeping man unsettled the guards. But rather than invoking sympathy, the guards were disgusted. One of them instructed him rather uncharitably to, as we said,
“Die like a man, John.”
He was strapped into his metal bench, and at 9:40 a.m., the hydrocyanic acid was sprayed into his chamber. Outside, witnesses began chain smoking cigarettes, apparently to protect themselves against,
“any vagrant gas that might drift their way.”
Immediately, it was clear that the chamber hadn’t properly been set up. An electric heater was supposed to keep the room at 24 C, enough to ensure the gas remained a vapor, but the heater broke down, and the chamber was only 11 C.
So, the acid began to condensate into puddles on the floor. When the pump kicked in, Gee was seen to turn his head, startled at the sudden noise. However, he seemed to lose consciousness within just 5 seconds. Witnesses stated that Gee appeared to be in some discomfort. He kept nodding his head up and down for at least 6 minutes before he was finally pronounced dead by a doctor outside the chamber.
Once the grim spectacle was complete, no one seemed quite sure of what to do. Witnesses waited for some time until all the gas had been vented out of the room and the puddles of acid had evaporated. Though eager to conduct an autopsy, doctors decided against it. They were concerned that GE’s corpse might release more of the gas.
The bizarre speculation continued long after GE’s death. Delos Turner was thrilled to see his new method in action and wanted to carry out more experiments. He requested permission to inject camp into Ghee to see if this might bring him back to life. Prison wardens denied the request. This led to rumors that Gee wasn’t fully dead and was just in a stage of suspended animation.
When he was buried in Mineral County, Nevada, local residents seemed genuinely concerned that Gee might rise from the ground and stalk the region as some kind of vengeful zombie revenant. Many were repulsed by the grim process of Geon’s demise. One journalist from San Jose Mercury News, who evidently quite fancied a career as a novelist, was a vocal opponent. He wrote,
“100 years from now, Nevada will be referred to as a heathen commonwealth controlled by savages with only the outward symbols of civilization.”
But despite these scathing criticisms and despite the fears that the condemned man might rise from the dead, many seemed to think that the execution had been a success. In their eyes, Gujon had been killed according to his sentence and had been killed humanely. According to the Nevada State Journal, Nevada’s novel death law is upheld by the highest court. Humanity.
So Nevada and the United States had their precedent. Over the next 15 years, Nevada would execute eight more people using the gas chamber. By 1934, states like Colorado and Arizona were actively using the chambers, too. In 1936, North Carolina began doing the same, and 11% of executions conducted in the USA that year were carried out by gas. Wyoming, Missouri, California, and Oregon would all conduct their own gas chamber executions by the end of the decade.
By this point, of course, history had entered one of its darkest chapters, the Second World War. And while this video is mainly going to focus on the gas chamber in the United States, gas has become so synonymous with the atrocities of World War II that we just can’t leave this out. But interestingly, the gas chamber had gone international even before the outbreak of war in Europe.
Lithuania had been using a gas chamber at counters since 1937 and executed at least nine people in this way prior to 1940. From the 1930s, the Soviet Union had been using gas vans or dugupki, literally soul takers or soul killers. Victims would be arrested, placed in a van, and then exhaust fumes would be piped into the back of the vehicle, killing them.
Nazi Germany evidently thought that such contraptions were a good idea. They began doing the same thing to their prisoners in the early years of the war. One witness described how harrowing these gas vans truly were. Victims were pushed inside until there was no more space, at which point the van was sealed and the fumes were pumped in.
From the outside, it was possible to hear the screaming from within and the desperate banging on the walls as the victims slowly died. The corpse were described as blue, wet with sweat and urine, the legs covered with excrement and menstrual blood. There’s some debate around whether these horrifying results led to the Nazis developing something more sophisticated for the final solution.
Criminologist Nester Russell has said that the Nazis required four key conditions from their own mass extermination policies. First, victims should remain totally unaware that they’re about to die. Second, perpetrators need not touch, see, or hear their victims as they die. Third, the death blow should avoid leaving any visual indications of harm on the victim’s bodies.
And finally, the death blow should be instantaneous. This may have led the Nazis to start using other methods. The first method that the Nazis tried was carbon monoxide, possibly inspired by the 19th century French scientist Claude Bernard and his executions of various luckless animals in the name of science. At Pausnan in occupied Poland, hundreds of victims were subjected to involuntary euthanasia as carbon monoxide was pumped into improvised gas chambers.
At least six carbon monoxide gas chambers were in use in Germany in 1940. But this didn’t seem to provide the Nazis with what they needed. And so the hydrocyanic acidbased cyclone B was developed as well as formalized gas chambers housed in designated extermination camps. But the idea that the Nazis went to all this trouble to be more humane is a tad suspect.
For one, Zyclon B produced many of the same effects as exhaust gas. So it wasn’t any more humane. And on top of this, we have to remember that the scale of the Nazi atrocity meant changes in methods. At the height of the Holocaust, the Nazis were killing up to 6,000 people every day. And that’s just the Achvitz alone.
Rather than being more humane, Zyclon B was probably just more efficient. A more formalized process was just a better way for the Nazis to murder millions of innocent people. What had begun as a way to end a prisoner’s life humanely had become a tool of a murderous regime. It was something that made mass killing not just feasible but easy.
As the allies then swept into central Europe in the spring of 1945, the full extent of the Nazis final solution became clear. The world was revolted by what had taken place and rightly so. The Holocaust was an act of astonishing cruelty, a policy of genocide conducted on a vast industrial scale. And I make a point to stress that because even though this video is about the gas chamber in general, some people will deny the previous points I’ve just made or say that it didn’t happen at the scale I’m claiming it did.
If you think these people don’t exist, go on to my comments and click newest and watch your faith in humanity nose dive. Anyway, as the camps were liberated, soldiers discovered the mechanism of this slaughter. There were, of course, the chambers designed to asphyxiate large groups of people on mass. These discoveries have left an indelible stain on humanity.
So much so that the word holocaust has almost become entwined with the phrase gas chamber. So you’d think that with such grim associations, the victorious United States would distance themselves from this method of execution. You would of course be wrong. By 1945, the gas chamber was the second most common method of execution in the United States behind only electrocution.
More than a quarter of the Americans executed in 1945 were put to death with gas. And this would continue. Writing for the Washington Post, journalist Randy Doinger, states that 600 people died in this way between 1924 and 1999. Author Billy Wayne Sinclair, himself, former death row inmate, believes the true number is much higher.
He states that 955 men and seven women died in the gas chambers between 1930 and 1999. In their 2009 book on capital punishment, Sinclair and his wife Jod described the process used to end people’s lives via gas. Quote,
“The inmate is led into the death chamber and strapped into a chair by the arms, waist, ankles, and chest. A mask covers the inmate’s face. The chamber is sealed. An executioner pours sulfuric acid down a tube into a metal container on the floor below a metal canister on the floor that contains cyanide pellets. The executioner hits an electric switch that opens the bottom of the canister and releases the cyanide pellets into the acid, unleashing a cloud of lethal gas.”
For Sinclair’s, this is far from a humane operation. They describe how it usually takes between 6 and 8 minutes for inmates to die this way. Vomiting, convulsions, and seizures are common. Inmates who attempt to avoid breathing in the gas only prolong their suffering, and partial inhalation is said to only make the convulsions worse.
This has led to a series of unpleasant incidences over the years. In 1983, Jimmy Lee Gray was sent to the gas chamber in Mississippi after abducting, saing, and murdering three-year-old duress Gene Scales in 1976. Gray had been in prison before. In fact, in 1968, he’d been sentenced for the murder of his 16-year-old girlfriend, Elder Louise Prince.
He’d only been out of prison a year when he killed Deresa. Gray’s mother had actually petitioned for her son to be executed. And in September of 83, she got her wish. As the gas began to take effect, Gray exhibited signs of considerable distress. Because his head had not been properly secured, he had full range of motion in his neck.
There was a metal bar nearby in the execution chamber, and Gray repeatedly smashed his head into the bar as he strained against the gas. In the words of Dr. Traman, who witnessed the execution,
“he raised his entire body, arching, tugging at his straps. Saliva was oozing from his mouth, his eyes woed open. He gazed through the window. His fingers were tightly gripping his thumbs. His chest was visibly heaving in sickening agony. Then he rolled his eyes upwards.”
Still his heart was beating. He was pronounced dead 12 minutes after the pellets were released. Mississippi would execute three more inmates this way before finally decommissioning its gas chamber in 1998.
Elsewhere in the US, similar scenes took place in 1992 when Donald Harding was executed by gas chamber in Arizona. The spree killer was executed just after midnight on April 6th, but this took more than 10 minutes to kill him. His attorney, who watched over his final minutes, said that Harding repeatedly gasped for breath while his body racked with spasms.
The attorney called the spectacle slow, painful, degrading, and inhumane. By the late 1990s, this string of farical and barbaric episodes had pushed the gas chamber out of favor. The few states that retained this execution method offered it only voluntarily. Where the German BR brothers Carl Hines and Vultar Lrand were executed in Arizona in 1999, Carl Hines chose lethal injection while Vulta chose the gas chamber.
In doing so, Vogrand became the final prisoner to be executed via the Grizzly method in American legal history. At least until last year. In 2024, a quarter of a century after the last execution by gas chamber, the state of Alabama brought the practice back. Kenneth Eugene Smith was sentenced to death in 1996 after the contract killing of Elizabeth Senate in 1988.
In a drawn out assault, Smith and his accomplice used fireplace irons, a walking stick, and a piece of pipe to beat Senate as she struggled before finally stabbing her to death. Smith was due to face lethal injection in 2022, but the execution was botched amid bizarre scenes in which executioners repeatedly stabbed Smith in the neck with a needle.
The execution was ultimately called off. A new method was sought. It was a similar story for Alan Eugene Miller. In 1999, Miller shot two of his co-workers before driving to the premises of a previous employer and shooting his former supervisor. Very American. Miller was also scheduled to die in 2022, but prison staff were unable to apply the lethal injection.
So, the two men went back to death row. Everyone scratched their heads until in 2024, they were brought to the gas chamber. On January 25th, 2024, two weeks shy of the 100th anniversary of Geon’s execution, Kenneth Smith was put to death. The method would be nitrogen hypoxia, a method that had never been used in any other recorded execution in the world.
The gas was applied at 7:57 p.m. Several witnesses stated that Smith remained conscious for several minutes and thrashed violently on the gurnie. After 5 minutes, Smith appeared to fall unconscious, but continued to writhe and buck in the gurnie for six more minutes. At 8:25, almost half an hour after the execution began, he was pronounced dead.
8 months later, Alan Miller followed Smith to the chamber. In the words of witness Lauren Gil,
“Miller visibly struggled for roughly 2 minutes, shaking and pulling at his restraints. He then spent the next five or six minutes intermittently gasping for air.”
Despite the disturbing scenes, Alabama authorities dismissed the concerns of Smith. Alabama Corrections Commissioner John Q. Ham said his movements were involuntary and took place while he was unconscious. Ham also said that Smith had held his breath for around 4 minutes, which made the convulsions appear worse. State Attorney General Steve Marshall agreed saying that nitrogen hypoxia was an effective and humane method of execution of Miller.
Ham stated,
“There will always be involuntary body movements as the body is depleted of oxygen. So that was nothing we did not expect. Everything went according to plan and according to our protocol.”
And so, 100 years after the bizarre spectacle of Geon’s execution, lethal gas was back on the menu for prisoners on death row in America. As of February 2025, there were 157 inmates on death row in Alabama. While the majority of these will never see the inside of a gas chamber, some of them will. Since bringing the gas chamber back in 2024, Alabama has executed five more people in this manner. In fact, literally as we were putting this video together, Alabama was sending another prisoner to the gas chamber, Anthony Boyd, who was executed on October 23rd, 2025.
Witnesses described how the gas caused Boyd to violently react, thrashing against his restraints. He apparently then gasped 225 times and was still drawing deep breaths almost 20 minutes after the execution commenced. He was pronounced dead. It’s the 1570s. You’re in Ihazen in the Netherlands and the city’s stat holder Jed Sonoi would like to have a word.
This is a serious matter because the land is in the grips of a bloody struggle. The Spanish Empire has ruled the Netherlands since 1556 and now the region’s northern provinces are in revolt. It’s the Dutch rebels against the Spanish Habsburgs. It’s Dutch Protestantism against Spanish Catholicism. And as a Dutch rebel leader, Jeredic Sonoi wants to know what side you’re on.
It’s a drafty cell beneath the city of Einhoen where Sonoy’s men get to work. Their interrogation is brutal and bewildering. They demand information, but you tell them you’ve no information to give. Sonoy watches on, eyes cold and steely. He doesn’t believe you. Before long, Sonoy grows tired of the process. He gestures to a guard.
It’s time for phase two to begin. Your shirt is ripped from your body. Your torso is bared to the damp chill of the dungeon. And now a guard approaches you. In his hands is a basket, a wicker cage. As his footsteps echo around your prison, there’s another sound. A kind of weaking and hissing, something alive. Then you see it.
Inside the basket, now held inches from your bare abdomen, is a writhing mass of squirming, squeaking rats. Rat torture has an uncertain place in history. On the one hand, it makes sense that rat torture would be used. Plenty of people are afraid of rats. And even if you don’t personally think you have rodent phobia, you’re probably still not keen on the idea of dozens of rats crawling across your body or gnoring away at your skin.
So for someone like Jed Sonoi looking to interrogate his Catholic prisoners in ever more inventive ways, using rats seems like a good play. But on the other hand, there really aren’t that many documented cases of rat torture. The method seems to exist on the fringes of history in that gray area between fact and legend. In fact, arguably the most famous case of rat torture emerges from mere conjecture, a story passed between two army comrades.
This is the case of Ernst Lanza, who I’ve covered in more detail in my video, The History of Nightmares. But basically, Lanza had been an officer in the Austrohungarian Army in the first years of the 20th century when he heard a story told by a fellow soldier. The soldier spoke of a torture method used in China in which a live rat would be placed into a pot.
This pot was then strapped tightly to the victim’s buttocks. The torturers would then apply a red hot poker to the bottom of the pot, heating its surface and sending the rat into a panic. The rat would then be left with two choices. Either it could be burned to death on the floor of the pot, or it could move away from the burning surface and begin noring its way to safety directly through the anus of the hapless victim.
Needless to say, the rat chose the second option. This is certainly a disgusting and unsettling story, and it’s enough to make anyone’s skin cruel, but for Lanza, it became an obsession. He became consumed by the fear that this unpleasant torture was going to be inflicted on him or his girlfriend or on his father. If this story sounds familiar, it’s because it became one of Sigman Freud’s most famous case studies.
The pioneering psychoanalyst met with Lanza regularly over a period of 3 months starting in October 1907. For a more in-depth examination of the Ratman case, please check out my video on the history of nightmares after you finished with this one. But in short, it transpired that Lanza was suffering severe mental health problems, plagued with fantasies of murder and suicide, and exhibited a litany of bizarre compulsive behavioral patterns.
When Lanza heard the story of the rat, it resonated deeply within him. And over the years, it became a fixation that he just could not shake. But despite this, Lanza remained in the army and would eventually lose his life in the First World War along with more than a million Austrohungarian soldiers. It’s unknown whether he ever managed to shed this demon.
But where did the story that he heard actually come from? On the face of it, it sounds like a fantasy, a classic bit of early 20th century western orientalism. By the turn of the century, China had become a sort of boword for exotic weirdness and barbaric cruelty. The Daily Mail ran a series of scathing articles on the so-called heathen Chinese communities of London, obsessing over things like opium dens and their filthy state of dilapidation.
In America, China was a favorite topic of novelist Jack London for a while. When he wasn’t writing about plucky wolf dogs pulling sledges in the Yukon, London wrote things like The Yellow Peril and The Unparalleled Invasion in which he fretted about the Chinese threat to the West. So, if Lanza’s officer comrade was going to make up a story about a scary torture and wanted to make it extra disturbing, China was a good setting to choose.
Of course, the officer may have not made up the story at all, but simply have been misrepresenting fiction as fact. In 1899, French writer Octave Mibur published his novel The Torture Garden. And part of the novel focuses on a woman named Claraara who deres perverse pleasure from witnessing cruel and bizarre acts of torture and execution.
One act in particular seems to have left a lasting impression on Lanza’s fellow officer because yes, there are rats involved. Yes, they are used in the way Lanza relates. And yes, the action does take place in China. So, it’s possible that the officer read the torture garden or heard about it from somewhere else and got his facts mixed up.
Or it’s possible that he simply wanted to frighten the hell out of poor Mr. Lanza. And if that was his aim, he certainly succeeded. But really, was the story just the product of the author’s imagination? Or might it have some basis? In fact, well, it might be a bit of both. While Merber certainly used a hefty dose of artistic license in his own depiction of rat torture, there are a few historical examples that reflect his vision, but they aren’t from China.
Instead, they actually come from much closer to the author’s Parisian home. Our first example comes from just 100 miles north in the Netherlands. When the Netherlands rose up against the Spanish Habsburg rule in the 1560s, they set into motion a bloody struggle that would last decades and cost hundreds of thousands of lives.
The Dutch contingent was headed by William the Silent, Prince of Orange. But even the Prince of Orange needed support and some of his most viciferous came from the Hen or the Beggars. This was a group of nobles who were committed to ousting the Spanish from the Netherlands and forcing the triumph of Protestantism over what they saw as heretical Catholicism.
And few of the Hen were more committed than the politician and military leader Gedric Sonoy. Sono was a brutal man, fanatical of both his religion and his barbarity. He was an avowed fan of torture, using any means necessary to get information from his victims. One of his favorite methods was the rat torture.
The victim would be stripped to the waist and then tied spread eagle onto a table or platform. Then a cage of rats would be placed upon the stomach of the victim, top down, so that the rats scurried and scratched against the victim’s very flesh. Hot coals would then be brandished. The victim would be informed that these hot coals were to be placed upon the base of the cage, driving the rats into a burning frenzy.
The heat would force them to burrow downwards into the flesh of the victim’s stomach. They chew through the skin and the muscle and senue, finally reaching the internal organs. The torment would have been hideous. Of course, the knowledge of this torment alone was usually enough for the victim. They’d agree to the torturous demands before any of the coals were placed on the cage.
The victim would probably then be hanged, but at least they wouldn’t have to suffer hours of hideous biting and scratching as the rats chewed through their insides at a snail’s pace. And then if they survived that, they wouldn’t have to go through the days of septic shock and peroditis that would surely come after this.
We don’t have any confirmed names for people subjected to Sonoy’s methods. A Franciscan lay brother named Engelbert Turbrook was tortured by Sono’s men after the capture of Alkar in 1572, but it’s unclear whether rats were involved. Our second example comes a little closer to Merboy’s home in Paris, just a short hop across the channel to England.
Just like with Sono’s interrogations, the torture was used on Catholics, but the methodology of English rat torture was a little different. When George Lily Craig and Charles McFaran were compiling their history of England in the 1
