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Atypical Deaths of these Historical Figures

Khalid Elhassan July 14, 2020 34 min

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In 1950, nineteen-year-old Pat Cogdon was living with her fifty-year-old mother, Ivy, in a suburb of Melbourne, Australia. Ivy was afflicted with a variety of nervous complaints, including night terrors. On August 11^th of that year, Ivy entered Pat’s bedroom with an ax in hand, and smashed her skull, bringing about her death. When police arrived, Ivy admitted what she had done, and was duly arrested and charged with murder.

In her defense, she claimed that she was sleepwalking when she left her bedroom, and in that state, she thought North Korean soldiers had invaded her suburban home and were attacking her daughter. So she reacted by grabbing an ax and rushed to her daughter’s defense, swinging at the imaginary North Korean soldiers to fend them off, and in the process, ended up killing her daughter.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.