If you live in the United Kingdom, there’s a new smartphone app on the market. Watch out though (literally) as it might not be for everyone.
Scholars from Bristol in southwest England have announced that they developed a mobile phone app which alerts walkers when they pass some of the most morbid sites from the region’s history. The app is apart of a project called “Romancing the Gibbet”. The University of the West of England has funded an array of audio guides that play clips of 250-year-old ballads and court proceedings as listeners walk through the scenes of well-known crimes.
In a statement released to the public, the University explained that “the extraordinary 18th century practice of hanging and sometimes gibbeting selected felons – exhibiting their bodies to public view in iron cages – at the scene of their crime was intended to leave an indelible and exemplary impression on disorderly villages and small towns.”
The walking tours will be launched through a smartphone app on July 20, and it will feature four murders from the time period of 1741 to 1813. It will include a woman who was killed by her cheating husband, and an aristocrat who was strangled by two sailors on his brother’s orders over an inheritance dispute. As the app will explain, after being hanged, the body of one of the sailors convicted of murder was put out for display in a gibbet on an island at the mouth of the Avon river, which flows directly through Bristol. Additionally, users of the app will learn all about how the body of the murderous husband was tarred and placed in an iron cage and hung on a 30-foot – or 9-metre – pole on a hill. It was on this hill that the murder overlooked the actual crime scene.
What are your thoughts on the latest smartphone app? Do you think you would you be brave enough to download it?
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