The original "Brooklyn Daily Eagle" published from 1841 to 1955.
The Brooklyn Public Library has put online the 1841-1902 archives of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. Amid the earth-shattering stories of wars, treaties and calamities that effected millions are the bizarre stories that simply rocked a trolley-load of people. An excerpt from the December 17, 1899 article “Morey Loses A Foot In Trolley Mishap” which was subtitled “Passengers in a Coney Island Car Startled by an Exceptionally Queer Accident; Shock for the Motorman; Morey, who is a Well Known Gravesend Man, Exhibits Remarkable Nerve”:
“A ‘horrible accident’ occurred on a Brooklyn trolley car on Coney Island avenue yesterday afternoon. Lewis Morey, who for a long time has kept a bicycle repair shop and storage place on Surf avenue and who holds the championship medal for a twelve hour bicycle race, won at the Sea Beach Palace, was the victim. Morey had been to Manhattan and was returning to his home when the accident befell him.
While the car was moving at a fast rate of speed down Coney Island avenue toward the West End a woman passenger signaled the conductor to stop. The car was crowded and Morey was standing outside on the rear platform. As the car began to slow up the men on the platform tried to make way for the woman, stepped down on the stirrup of the car and sprang off.
The ground where Morey jumped off was very rough, and his foot striking a small stone, caused him to fall to the ground almost under the car. As Morey slipped and fell the woman standing ready to get off screamed and the conductor and the other men on the platform had little shrieks of horror torn from their throats at the awful sight.
As Morey’s right foot struck the stone it was given a twist and the right foot snapped off at the ankle, like a piece of brittle glass. The foot, encased in its shoe and with the upper end of the sock hanging out of the shoe mouth and hiding the snapped off joint, rolled a few feet away from the prostrate man.
As the car came to a standstill those inside rushed off, and, seeing the foot broken off and Morey lying like a dead man, they, too, began screaming. The conductor went wild with fright. He called to the motorman to come help with Morey, but that was not needed, for there were many willing hands. In an instant a dozen men were trying to get around Morey to carry him someplace where he could be given medical treatment. But nobody had the nerve to pick up the foot. All viewed it with agonized horror.
‘Oh, get away from me,’ Morey snapped out as the sympathetic passengers crowded around trying to lend him aid. This was rather startling coming from a man who had just lost his foot but the passengers were more than shocked when they saw the footless man rise up to a standing position and hobble around on his one sound foot and the jagged stump.
‘Where’d my foot go?’ Morey asked as he looked around for the missing member. ‘Darn that foot anyway.’
‘Oh, there it is,’ he exclaimed in a relieved tone as he caught sight of the foot and the shoe. Pushing several of the half dazed passengers aside, he picked up the foot and began to look at it in a rueful, sorrowful way.”
The kicker to the story was that Morey had a prosthetic limb, and what had fallen off was his artificial foot. Clearly sounds like a fictional urban legend, but it was presented as fact.
