[The following takes place in the city of Philadelphia, USA, during the early days of the spread of the 1918 Influenza Pandemic.]
It was a common practice in 1918 for people to hang a piece of crepe on the door to mark a death in the house. There was crepe everywhere. “If it was a young person they’d put a white crepe at the door,” recalled Anna Milani. “If it was a middle-aged person, they’d put a black crepe, and if it was an elderly one, they put a grey crepe at the door signifying who died. We were children and we were excited to find out who died next and we were looking at the door, there was another crepe and another door.”
There was always another door. “People were dying like flies,” Clifford Adams said. “On Spring Garden Street, looked like every other house had crepe over the door. People was dead there.”
Anna Lavin was at Mount Sinai Hospital: “My uncle died there… My aunt died first. Their son was thirteen… A lot of young people, just married, they were the first to die.”
But the most terrifying aspect of the epidemic was the piling up of bodies. Undertakers, themselves sick, were overwhelmed. They had no place to put bodies. Gravediggers wither were sick or refused to bury influenza victims. The director of the city jail offered to have prisoners dig graves, then rescinded the offer because he had no healthy guards to watch them.
Source:
Barry, John M. “Explosion.” The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History. Penguin Books, 2009. 222-23. Print.
Further Reading:
This place is empty these days. What mark should be left on this phuks website to indicate it is decaying and dying