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The Hanging Elephant

March 1st, 2007

Elephant Hanging Tennessee

This is a strange tale of a murderous elephant and her frustrated executioners. The story of how Mary the elephant killed her trainer Red Eldridge isn’t clear, but the attempts to exact revenge on the elephant are what legends are made of.

Guns hardly phased her. 44,000 volts of electricity only made her dance. So they decided to hang Mary.

It doesn’t seem surprising that the chain from which Mary hung snapped shortly after she was raised off the ground. It was, after all, just a 7/8″ chain, and Mary weighed 10,000 pounds. She hit the ground and sat upright, immobilized from the pain of a broken hip.

“It made a right smart little racket when the elephant hit the ground,” says eyewitness George Ingram, with admirable understatement.

Seeing Mary loose, not knowing that she had broken her hip and couldn’t move, the crowd panicked and ran for cover. Then one of the roustabouts “ran up her back like he was climbing a small hill and attached a heavier chain”; the winch was put in motion a second time, and Mary died.

They left her hanging for a half-hour, witnesses say, and then they dumped her in the grave they’d dug with a steam shovel 400 feet up the tracks.

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Entry Filed under: Weird