No. 216
Crime, Eccentricity, and the Sporting Life in 19th Century America.
August 18, 2014

The Girls Have a New Game.

August 18, 2014
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Via Newspapers.comThe following story goes in that bulging file known as “restless ghosts of murder victims.”  The “Ithaca Journal,” August 12, 1922:Painesville, Ohio, Aug. 12--A "ghost" which farmers living near Paines Hollow say has been haunting them for seven years, is "at rest" today. It disappeared several days ago with the burial of the body of Henry Lipenstick, found in an abandoned
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Strange Company - 8/26/2026
  [Editor’s note: Guest writer, Peter Dickson, lives in West Sussex, England and has been working with microfilm copies of The Duncan Campbell Papers from the State Library of NSW, Sydney, Australia. The following are some of his analyses of what he has discovered from reading these papers. Dickson has contributed many transcriptions to the Jamaica […]
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Early American Crime - 2/7/2019
"As his son I am proud of hisefforts to succeed in life"Jefferson Randolph Smith IIIArtifact #93-2Jeff Smith collection(Click image to enlarge) oapy's son hires a legal firm to stop the defamation of his father's name. At age 30, Jefferson Randolph Smith III, Soapy and Mary's oldest son, was protecting his father's legacy and his mother's reputation from "libel" and scandal. He was also
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Soapy Smith's Soap Box - 10/13/2025
(Illustrated Police News, April 3, 1886.)Agnes Anastasia Long moved out of her parents’ home in East Attleboro, Massachusetts, in April 1882. With her many male suiters, she was considered the black sheep of the family. Her father had enough of her bad behavior and, according to the Boston Herald, “refused to permit her to darken the threshold of his humble home.”She took a job at Streeter
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Murder By Gaslight - 8/22/2026
Youth With Executioner by Nuremberg native Albrecht Dürer … although it’s dated to 1493, which was during a period of several years when Dürer worked abroad. November 13 [1617]. Burnt alive here a miller of Manberna, who however was lately … Continue reading
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Executed Today - 11/13/2020
An Undertaker’s Assistant’s Mistake. | They Got Hilariously Full.

The Girls Have a New Game.

The Girls have a new game

They wile away the hours in the beach at Narragansett Pier in bewitching bathing costumes pitching clam shells at a mark. [more]

They wile away the hours in the beach at Narragansett Pier in bewitching bathing costumes pitching clam shells at a mark.
The girls at Narragansett Pier have a new game now played on the beach in bathing suit costume. They mark a ring in the sand and stand about twenty feet off and try to throw shells and stones inside the line. Once in a long while a girl gets inside the line and is allowed to rest and watch the others as a reward for her prowess. A poet who observed the game in progress the other morning said it reminded him of that beautiful poem beginning:

She threw a stone into the air,
It fell to earth, I know not where.
But there was a mile, I know full well,
Between where she aimed and where it fell!


Reprinted from The National Police Gazette, 9 Sep 1893.