tickled to death?

[jd58]

it's a fact that tickling has been used through history as a punishment but is there any record that someone has died from being tickled?

 

[isabeau]

it's a fact that tickling has been used through history as a punishment but is there any record that someone has died from being tickled?

i believe either Mastertank or Shadowtklr can answer that for you..they are very knowledgable in the uses of tickling as torture in history..

 

[BikerBadBoy]

it's a fact that tickling has been used through history as a punishment but is there any record that someone has died from being tickled?

I remember a story in a newspaper article in CT where a man broke into a house ande tied a woman to the bed and tickled her and she ended up dying and the article related the death to her being tickled. It wasn't clear if she had a heart attack or what but I remember this happening about 10 years ago or so.

 

[crydun]

My only thought is...

What a way to go!!!!

 

[badreligion]

I remember a story in a newspaper article in CT where a man broke into a house ande tied a woman to the bed and tickled her and she ended up dying and the article related the death to her being tickled. It wasn't clear if she had a heart attack or what but I remember this happening about 10 years ago or so.

gee thanks i live in CT now in addition to worrying about Millstone i gotta worry about a nutjob commin into my house and tieing me up and tickling me to death lol

 

[Mastertank1]

Thanks for the endorsement Izzy! You're a sweetie.

Here's what I know about the subject;

If the victim is in good cardio and respiratory health before the tickling starts, and if NO breaks are allowed, they will eventually die of THIRST. If they were well hydrated at the outset, this will take anywhere from 36 to 96 hours depending on the individual.

IF a saline solution IV is running so that they never dehydrate, then they will eventually expire from sheer muscular exhaustion. Again, if they had healthy circulation and respiration beforehand, this will take at least 4 or 5 DAYS, and with some individuals could take as long as 3 WEEKS(!).

The above could be drawn out even longer if the drip included glucose as well as water and salt, and longer still if one of the new fatigue poison scavenger drugs were included. The time for any given individual could be doubled that way. (Vicious idea, huh?)

Now, in medeival to early rennaissance Germany, they did tickle some people to death, but they shortened the process drastically by fastening the victims into a specially designed leather chest harness. When the straps were tightened to the max, the harness would restrict the chest so that a deep breath could not be taken, and death would occur in from 4 to 10 hours.
Bear in mind that VERY few of those victims would have enjoyed anything like good cardio-respiratory health beforehand, at least not by modern standards!

In general, a strong and healthy 'lee with no cardio-respiratory issues and not gagged or collared almost can not be tickled to death in any reasonable amount of time.

If the 'lee is asthmatic, totally different story, and major precautions MUST be taken! Personally, I always have one of her inhalers within easy reach, and I will have rehearsed administering it to her so that I can do it right the first time in a crisis. I will also be watching like a hawk for any sign of distress, so that I can avoid the crisis in the first place. I've always been very protective of my 'lees.If she has trusted me to place her in bondage, I am totally responsible for her safety and well being until she is unbound.

 

[Iggy pop]

it's a fact that tickling has been used through history as a punishment but is there any record that someone has died from being tickled?

I don't think it's fact. Nobody has ever been able to show me any historical sources that prove that tickling was used as "punishment." I think the concept is pure fantasy myself.

 

[unclebill]

i believe either Mastertank or Shadowtklr can answer that for you..they are very knowledgable in the uses of tickling as torture in history..

hmmm.....The thought of tickling you into torture history has crossed my mind on more than one occasion, Melanie.

 

[ShadowTklr]

Research I’ve done over the years suggests that very few people were probably ever actually killed by being tickled. Most often in medieval times, tickling was used as punishment for lesser offenses.

In ancient Rome (according to “The Straight Dope,” Ballantine books), tickling was used as a means of torturing a victim to death. The victim was tied to a scaffold out in the sun, and brine was used to coat the soles of the feet. Goats were then deployed to lick the brine from the soles, causing excruciating tickling. After several hours, the tickling gave way to excruciating pain from the rasping away of the skin by the goats’ tongue. After many hours, the victim died of exhaustion and dehydration.

The Inquisition claimed to use tickle torture in the book “Book of Torture,” in which it was aptly named “Torture of the Goat’s Tongue.” See above for process, but the victims in these cases were usually secured in the stocks first, and tickling was used in association with roasting the soles. The victims eventually died of pain and exhaustion. I have also read instances of medieval Germany in which the chest harness was used.

In Medieval England, tickling was used as an incessant, irritating torture to victims who were rendered helpless in either the pillory, or the stocks. Many times when victims were sentenced to spend time in the pillory (a wooden device used to secure the hands and neck while the victim was bent in a standing position), the victim would have his/her ears and nose tickled with straw, or their ribs tickled incessantly. It was suggested that a victim might collapse and strangle themselves during this process, although I have no hard data to show that this ever happened.

A passage from a book on the history of torture I read years ago also claimed that sometimes, tickling was used to expedite the demise of some victims placed in “The Press” (a large device that sandwiched the victim between to stone or wooden tablets and slowly crushed with the turn of a crank.) There was no detailed description, but I would venture to guess that while the victim was having the air pressed out of him, one of the torturers would tickle him to make his death as unbearable as possible.

20th Century Russian Gulag: Tickling was used as a means of driving victims insane. This usually consisted of several guards holding a prisoner down, and using small brushes to tickle the inside of the nostrils repeatedly. I don’t think anyone actually died, but I’m sure they wished it.

Singapore: A victim would be placed in a coffin-type wooden box just barely wide enough for him to fit with his hands tied to his sides. There would be holes on the top of the box for air only. The box would be placed in the Singapore sun for hours. Sometimes, insects would be dropped through the air holes to cause unbearable tickling and itching. Many victims expired this way.

I have a couple more examples, but that’s all I can come up with off the top of my head right now.

 

[Iggy pop]

First, I have read about the goat's tongue before, and from what I can determine, it's main purporse was not tickle torture, but to strip flesh off the bone. I've seen the torture describe before without even the mention of tickling. For example here in the British Medical Journal: http://www.bmj.com/cgi/reprint/323/7308/346.pdf

I find it very curios that tickling was used during the "press". It seems like one would be in a great deal of pain and would not be very ticklish.

The other tortures I am not sure about, but the insects and nostril tickling seems to be more annoying and not exactly what we consider tickle torture.

The pillory seems more likely, but even there I do not think it was very common occurance.

This is the thing about tickle torture: It's just not that effective. Pain works much better. First, there a lot of people not very ticklish. Second, people generally densensitize very quickly.

The people that have really been tickled tortured in history are brothers, sisters, cousins, girlfriends, boyfriends, etc.

 

[drew70]

My wife is from South America. Early in our marriage about 13 years ago, I basically grilled her for any instance of tickling she could tell me about. She told me that when she was a teenager in the 70s there was a 10 year old girl who tickled her grandfather right into a cardiac arrest. Killed him. Needless to say, the girl was permanently traumatized, and would likely be horrified at the idea of actually embracing the tickle torture lifestyle.

 

[Markofatickler]

Solzhenitsyn confirms the Russian tickling in the Gulag Archipelago.

It was not used to kill, it was used purely in interrogation as an alternative to more traditional methods of torture.

The book does not refer to any other body part being tickled, and only refers to it happening to men.

 

[ShadowTklr]

First, I have read about the goat's tongue before, and from what I can determine, it's main purporse was not tickle torture, but to strip flesh off the bone. I've seen the torture describe before without even the mention of tickling. For example here in the British Medical Journal: http://www.bmj.com/cgi/reprint/323/7308/346.pdf

I find it very curios that tickling was used during the "press". It seems like one would be in a great deal of pain and would not be very ticklish.

The other tortures I am not sure about, but the insects and nostril tickling seems to be more annoying and not exactly what we consider tickle torture.

The pillory seems more likely, but even there I do not think it was very common occurance.

This is the thing about tickle torture: It's just not that effective. Pain works much better. First, there a lot of people not very ticklish. Second, people generally densensitize very quickly.

The people that have really been tickled tortured in history are brothers, sisters, cousins, girlfriends, boyfriends, etc.

Let’s be clear about torture vs. fetish, so we don’t confuse the nature of tickling either as a torture, or supplement to more severe tortures with that of the romantic notion of dungeons and beautiful stocked captives in tight fitting peasant dresses, having their flawless bare feet tickled by torchlight with the feathers of insidious, yet almost likeable inquisitors.

Historical records of tickling used as a formal torture are virtually non-existent in public archives, and those that cite tickling as a death sentence are altogether non-existent. However, accounts of tickling used in conjunction with other punishments have been circulating by word of mouth for hundreds of years, which is how we arrived at the supposition we find ourselves at today.

What you need to understand is that MOST tortures were recorded formally, but MOST torture occurred during punishments. Punishment was not considered the same as torture. In order for someone to be “tortured,” their crime would have to rise to the level of conspiracy, witchcraft or some other imminent threat to all around them. The most notorious tortures were those of the Spanish Inquisition. And, both tortures and punishments were recorded by magistrates in each individual town or village as they saw fit. There was no such thing as central records. Also tickling would most likely have been viewed as a form of cruelty, but not a formal torture. So, while there may be records which announce the sentence of punishment for transgressors, there would be no record of what torture may have befallen them while undergoing such punishment.

For example, both England and the United States have a history of using the Pillory and Stocks as a means of punishment. Sentences ranged from 1 hour to death by starvation. The pillory was a device used to restrain more serious offenders and as such carried a more serious stigma, while the stocks were used as a milder form of punishment / humiliation. Passersby would have surely made this distinction and looked upon the captive with either contempt or milder scorn; the latter of which would almost certainly have stirred the impish nature of a tickler or ticklers.

Tickling is mentioned in some text as it pertains to the study and history of torture throughout the world, but in each case, the tickling is a footnote in the description of the torture or punishment which is being spotlighted.

It is most likely true that tickling was used in conjunction with the restraint of prisoners in stocks or pillories many times. Certainly, if you can believe that people threw rotten fruit at the heads of pilloried prisoners, you can certainly believe that people also tickled the feet of prisoners held in stocks. As for the hooded figure who presides ominously over the tautly stretched, albeit beautiful maiden on the rack, poised for his turn to administer a prolonged and heartless rib-tickling as his primary weapon of choice – none of us can say with any certainty that it NEVER happened or for how long, but if it did, it was most likely used as a sadistic prelude to a far more horrible fate.

 

[Phineas]

However, accounts of tickling used in conjunction with other punishments have been circulating by word of mouth for hundreds of years, which is how we arrived at the supposition we find ourselves at today.

One thing that needs to be made clear, though, is that "accounts" circulating by word of mouth for hundreds of years still does not equal fact. The study of urban legends and other types of folklore is full of factoids that "everybody knows" happened but lack no concrete evidence whatsoever. Heck, on this very forum I was once told that in China, being Christian is grounds for execution by the state - which is total baloney, because Beijing has a Christian church right in the center of downtown.

There's also that nice Jewish fellow who "everybody knows" walked on water and rose from the dead two days after his crucifixion. Accounts passed down by word of mouth through the centuries. Any actual proof? Eh. Just the Bible, which was written third-hand by people who never met the guy.

More recently, "Everybody knows" that Vietnam veterans were spit on after returning home from the war. Any actual news reports of that? No, of course not - but it must've happened, because people *never* falsely remember things. (Feminists never actually burned bras on any sort of wide scale, either.)

My ex-wife claims that stories circulated in China that tickle torture was handed down on the whims of sadistic government officials. I'm curious as to how she knows this, except as folklore "everybody knows", because she's an accountant, not a history major, and it's not something they teach in schools...

 

[Mastertank1]

There are history books.

Old books on the Albigensian Crusade in Provence, France mention Simon De Montfort The Elder, known to have been appointed Grand Inquisitor by the King Of France, using tickle torture to extract confessions from accused female heretics of noble estate.
His son, Simon De Montfort The Younger, got himself appointed Witch Finder General by the King Of England, and was said to have done the same to make accused Witches confess.
The family held extensive estates in both countries, and were vassals of both kings.
The primary source for practices in the Middle east and Far East was a respected Victorian scholar named Sir Georges Ryley Scott (sic). He was the author of the scholarly studies "Far Eastern Sex Practices", Far Eastern Judicial Practices" and "Official Use Of Torture in the Backward Nations".
Typical British attitude at the time. Copies of those books have mostly been stolen from modern libraries, they have not been reprinted for years except in highly expurgated editions, and all copies owned by the New York Public Library, The Brooklyn Public Library (a seperate system) the Allegheny County Library System (where I live now) and the Library Of Congress have been bowdlerized horribly. Relevant passages have been razored out entirely in many cases. All this because of the inadvertent prurient interest the texts contained. There were rumors that the earlist editions, from London, were illustrated with sketches, but no copies are known to have survived.
Scott attested to the use of tickling as punichment in remote parts of north Africa, in India, and in China and Japan.
My own grandfather, who was an officer of Czarist Cavalry in the 1900s, told me that tickling with bondage was used as foreplay by sophisticates in Moscow and St. Petersburg, and they were emulated widely across the empire. The practice had allegedly been brought to Russia by the Cossacks, who learned it from the tartars, who claimed to have learned it from the Chinese.
The use of tickling as punishment and/or an interrogation tactic is mentioned in some older histories of medieval/early rennaisance Germany. There are also collected folk tales of two individuals, Tobias Hackner and Till Eulenspiegel, who were alleged to have tickled women to death for their private amusement, Hackner supposedly was tried and executed for murdering several wives of his in that manner. These are in history books and should be Google-able.
And yes, I have BA and MA degrees in History.

 

[ShadowTklr]

Everyone's A Wise Guy. 😀

One thing that needs to be made clear, though, is that "accounts" circulating by word of mouth for hundreds of years still does not equal fact.

Thank god you’ve arrived to clarify my post. I was soooooo worried that I wasn’t making that point clear when I wrote "Historical records of tickling used as a formal torture are virtually non-existent in public archives, and those that cite tickling as a death sentence are altogether non-existent." LOL!

As for the spirit of intention for the remainder of my post, I'm not suggesting that we go on faith alone. I'm suggesting that since there is at least SOME documentation to corroborate the use of tickling having been used as torture in history (thanks to MasterTank for sharing some of his research) , then it stands to reason (not unreasonably) that there would have been many other instances of tickling that were NOT recorded.

I can’t speak to the rest of your examples, as they were unfortunately rendered moot by redundancy.

 

[Phineas]

Thank god you’ve arrived to clarify my post. I was soooooo worried that I wasn’t making that point clear when I wrote "Historical records of tickling used as a formal torture are virtually non-existent in public archives, and those that cite tickling as a death sentence are altogether non-existent." LOL!

Hey, thanks for being a smartass to someone who was trying to add to the discussion. Much obliged - should I seek your permission for attempting to agree with you and expand upon your points in the future?

What your post said to me, far as I can tell, was "just because there are no records doesn't mean that it didn't happen - after all, people say it happened."

My supplement was meant to add, "just because people say it happened, doesn't mean it actually did - before taking any second-hand information as fact, do your own research because sometimes, second-hand information is wrong".

Now as to the stuff Tank posted, that's the kind of sources I'd lend credibility to. (Thanks Tank, good stuff) Although (and this part is offtopic, kinda) I'm curious as to why there are records of books being expurgated if the intent was to censor the material.

I can’t speak to the rest of your examples, as they were unfortunately rendered moot by redundancy.

Three examples of stuff "everybody knows" that is not true (although the stuff about that Jewish fellow may or may not be, I Won't Go There). My ultimate point is not to unconditionally believe everything you're told without some kind of basis for acceptance and corroborative proof. Especially on the Internet, where I can be Paris Hilton if I felt like it.

Welp, I see things haven't changed much in my absence - time to go back into lurk mode. But before I go... recently I read an article on the web (some newspaper I sadly don't remember the name of, google for "India police tickling" if you're curious) that detailed police in India using tickling to extract confessions in recent times. Apparently Indian police departments were being criticized for being overly brutal to suspects, so they made the switch.

Also, the last time this topic was discussed in detail, someone posted accounts from Amnesty International about tickling being used as a weardown technique in Tibetan prisons on members of the Falun Gong. I don't have links to those, unfortunately, but they shouldn't be hard to dig up.

*Edit: bingo. Here's the article on Indian police.

Clicky

 

[ShadowTklr]

Hey, thanks for being a smartass to someone who was trying to add to the discussion. Much obliged - should I seek your permission for attempting to agree with you and expand upon your points in the future?

Actually yes. LOL. Okay, just kidding.
After re-reading my post, I realize that the "playful smartass" inflection I placed on those words while reciting them in my head, did not translate well to text. Please accept my apology. I came across much sharper than I intended. I'm in a rather sardonic mood today.

Let's be friends. Okay, not like that, but you get the idea. 🙂

 

[i1am2a3prick]

yes it was not a usual way of execution but it did happen during the middle-age. you put the victims feet, hands and head in the stockings and the neck was surrounded by sharp nails, so when you tickled the victims feet, his/her head was moving very fast and the nails penetrated his/her neck.

 

[ShadowTklr]

yes it was not a usual way of execution but it did happen during the middle-age. you put the victims feet, hands and head in the stockings and the neck was surrounded by sharp nails, so when you tickled the victims feet, his/her head was moving very fast and the nails penetrated his/her neck.

I think, like the Iron Maiden, this may be one of those imaginative devices and procedures invented AFTER sanctioned torture was abolished in England. Do you have any historical documentation to support the use of this torture in such a device? I'd be very interested to read it.

 

[Mastertank1]

Now as to the stuff Tank posted, that's the kind of sources I'd lend credibility to. (Thanks Tank, good stuff) Although (and this part is offtopic, kinda) I'm curious as to why there are records of books being expurgated if the intent was to censor the material.

My fault for not being clear; the expugations were NOT performed by the libraries in question. They were carried out surreptitiously by self appointed guardians of public morality, or else by thieves who wanted to steal 'the good parts' and knew they couldn't get away with the whole book.
The libraries documented the mutilations with a sense of horror, and apologized to current readers of the books.
The last time I saw a truly uncensored set of the Scott books was in a porno bookstore off Times Square in 1964. They wanted $150 per book or $400 for the set of 3, and they were shrink wrapped to prevent anyone from getting at the insides. At the time I was just 16, and could no way afford to buy even one of them. Remember, in terms of purchasing power $150 in 1964 was like $3000 today. By the time I had enough money to think about buying one of them, not only were the books gone, the store was gone!
I was VERY dissappointed.

 

[Phineas]

Actually yes. LOL. Okay, just kidding.
After re-reading my post, I realize that the "playful smartass" inflection I placed on those words while reciting them in my head, did not translate well to text. Please accept my apology. I came across much sharper than I intended. I'm in a rather sardonic mood today.

Let's be friends. Okay, not like that, but you get the idea. 🙂

No worries.

By the by, I ran across an interesting snippet while reading the Wikipedia entry on cannibalism. It summarizes my thoughts on this sort of thing better than I ever could. Just replace "cannibalism" with "tickle torture" and you've got the gist - I mean, just because it's written down in a book doesn't necessarily make it true... and whenever people quote sources to me it's always "I got it out of this book, which was written by a guy who heard it from another guy who just got back from the Middle East". In urban legends studies we call these "friend of a friend" (or FOAF) stories.

"Cannibalism" as cultural libel
See also: Blood libel
Unsubstantiated reports of cannibalism disproportionately relate cases of cannibalism among cultures that are already otherwise despised, feared, or are little known. In antiquity, Greek reports of anthropophagy were related to distant, non-Hellenic barbarians, or else relegated in myth to the 'primitive' chthonic world that preceded the coming of the Olympian gods: see the explicit rejection of human sacrifice in the cannibal feast prepared for the Olympians by Tantalus of his son Pelops. In 1994, printed booklets reported that in a Yugoslavian concentration camp of Manjaca the Bosnian refugees were forced to eat each other's bodies. The reports were false.

William Arens, author of The Man-Eating Myth: Anthropology and Anthropophagy (New York : Oxford University Press, 1979; ISBN 0-19-502793-0), questions the credibility of reports of cannibalism and argues that the description by one group of people of another people as cannibals is a consistent and demonstrable ideological and rhetorical device to establish perceived cultural superiority. Arens bases his thesis on a detailed analysis of numerous "classic" cases of cultural cannibalism cited by explorers, missionaries, and anthropologists. His findings were that many were steeped in racism, unsubstantiated, or based on second-hand or hearsay evidence. In combing the literature he could not find a single credible eye-witness account. And, as he points out, the hallmark of ethnography is the observation of a practice prior to description. In the end he concluded that cannibalism was not the widespread prehistoric practice it was claimed to be; that anthropologists were too quick to pin the cannibal label on a group based not on responsible research but on our own culturally-determined pre-conceived notions, often motivated by a need to exoticize. He wrote:

"Anthropologists have made no serious attempt to disabuse the public of the widespread notion of the ubiquity of anthropophagists. … in the deft hands and fertile imaginations of anthropologists, former or contemporary anthropophagists have multiplied with the advance of civilization and fieldwork in formerly unstudied culture areas. …The existence of man-eating peoples just beyond the pale of civilization is a common ethnographic suggestion."

Aren's findings are controversial, and his argument is often mischaracterized as "cannibals don't and never did exist," when in the end the book is actually a call for a more responsible and reflexive approach to anthropological research. At any rate, the book ushered in an era of rigorous combing of the cannibalism literature. By Aren's later admission, some cannibalism claims came up short, others were reinforced.

Conversely, Michel de Montaigne's essay "Of cannibals" introduced a new multicultural note in European civilization. Montaigne wrote that "one calls 'barbarism' whatever he is not accustomed to." By using a title like that and describing a fair indigean society, Montaigne may wished to provoke a surprise in the reader of his Essays.

Similarly, Japanese scholars (e.g. Kuwabara Jitsuzo) branded the Chinese culture as cannibalistic in certain propagandistic works — which served as ideological justification for the assumed superiority of the Japanese during World War II.