20 Celebrations From History That Went Horribly Wrong

Charles VI of France in 1393 attended a party at court celebrating the remarriage of a lady-in-waiting to Queen Isabeau. Charles and five others danced as “wild men” in costumes made of highly flammable materials. The King’s brother, Louis of Orléans, brought his torch too close to one of the dancers and set him on fire. That dancer then ignited the other dancers. Charles, though, was standing far enough away to miss the sparks. In addition, he was right next to his aunt by marriage, Joan, Duchess of Berry, who apparently doused the flames with her dress! Four of the dancers were burned to death.

William Douglas (6th Earl of Douglas) was a teenager in 1440 when he and his brother David were invited to stay at Edinburgh Castle, ruled by the young James II. Powerful nobles certainly had reason to fear the Douglases’ power, and the visit did not end well for them, with the two brothers being imprisoned and then executed. What came to be called the “Black Dinner” became famous centuries later.

In 1454, after Constantinople fell to the Ottomans, Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy, hosted a lavish banquet in Lille. He didn’t skimp on the festivities: there were elaborate decorations, performances, an allegorical entertainment and sufficient amounts of treasure to shout, “I am rich!”… in case any nobleman in the hall had failed to notice. Then Philip and his fellow nobles proceeded to make solemn vows to lead a crusade against the Ottomans. It didn’t happen.

The infamous banquet apparently occurred in 1501, within apartments at the Apostolic Palace. Johann Burchard, the papal master of ceremonies, recorded in his diary ( Liber Notarum) an evening replete with courtesans, risqué games involving chestnuts tossed on the floor, and prizes. Pope Alexander VI, Cesare Borgia, and Lucrezia Borgia were allegedly among the guests. The evening soon descended into one of the worst scandals in the Vatican’s history.

When Christian II of Denmark became King of Sweden at a coronation ceremony in Stockholm in 1520 (he had gained control of Sweden after several years of warfare), there were days of celebrations during which numerous Swedish nobles were present, most likely believing that they had escaped retribution. Then opponents were seized and charged with heresy. Scores of them were put to death in what came to be known as the Stockholm Bloodbath.

During the Field of the Cloth of Gold in 1520 near Calais, Henry VIII and Francis I turned what was meant to be a diplomatic meeting into a contest to see who could spend the most money. You can probably imagine the temporary palaces, tents, and fountains they built, as well as the tournaments and banquets they organized. Although the meeting was supposed to be about England and France becoming friends, due to the egos involved, it ended up being a massive waste of money, although that didn’t really matter in the end, as Henry VIII allied with Spain against France a short time later.

In 1572, the Catholic Margaret of Valois married the Protestant Henry of Navarre. It was mostly a match intended as a conciliatory gesture in the midst of France’s Wars of Religion. Many leading Huguenots came to overwhelmingly Catholic Paris for the festivities. Days later, Admiral Gaspard de Coligny was shot and wounded, and individual assassinations rapidly exploded into the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, which spread outside Paris.

The future Louis XVI married Marie Antoinette in 1770 to cement a significant diplomatic alliance between France and Austria, and Paris marked the union with public celebrations. On May 30, a massive crowd was drawn by fireworks. As they left the site, the resulting traffic jam soon degenerated into a stampede, crushing and trampling people; the death toll was estimated at around 130.

Sylvanus Thayer, West Point’s superintendent, had forbidden alcohol there. But the cadets of 1826 apparently viewed that order as merely a dare. Rebels will never let us be! For Christmas they hid bottles of whiskey on the premises, then poured them directly into their Christmas Eve eggnog. When the officers attempted to break up the party, the drunken cadets resisted, broke windows and chairs, and apparently drew their weapons. This “Eggnog Riot” led to the punishment of numerous cadets, including a young Jefferson Davis, who would later serve as president of the Confederacy.

In 1184, King Henry VI of the Romans met with nobles at Erfurt to resolve a political dispute. Someone thought to cram as many people as possible into one room upstairs, without checking to see if the ceiling could bear that much weight. The floor collapsed, sending everyone into the room below, where a lot of them fell into a septic tank under the building. I think this was a particularly bad way to resolve a political dispute.

Nicholas’s coronation in 1896 included a public celebration at Khodynka Field, where everyone who attended would be given food, beer, and souvenirs. When hundreds of thousands showed up, word spread that there might not be enough to go around. The resulting crush of bodies, combined with uneven terrain, concealed trenches, and general chaos, proved deadly. More than a thousand died. Nicholas II went on to a French Embassy ball later that night. His choice to attend the party was a PR nightmare that gave rise to the widely held belief that the new tsar just didn’t give a damn. Which, frankly, is not an unreasonable interpretation.

The Bazar de la Charité was a market that attracted the wealthy and aristocratic Parisian society to a temporary building full of stalls, and, in 1897, the latest trend, the cinematograph. The fire started near the projector and quickly spread throughout the building thanks to its highly flammable contents. One hundred twenty-six people perished, including Sophie Charlotte, Duchess of Alençon.

At the end of an entertainment at Victoria Hall in Sunderland in 1883, more than a thousand children were told that there would be a prize-giving, and they made a dash for a staircase. An obstruction left by a partially closed door created a bottleneck, and 183 children died in the crush.

In 1904, St. Mark’s Evangelical Lutheran Church chartered the steamship General Slocum for its annual excursion, and families went aboard, assuming they were taking part in a typical summer day out. Fire erupted aboard the ship as it steamed through New York’s East River, but the firefighting gear was either nonexistent or wholly unsuited to the occasion. Life preservers and other provisions were woefully insufficient. The resulting tragedy, in which more than a thousand lives were lost, among them many women and children, rocked Kleindeutschland, Manhattan’s German American community.

Copper miners and their families were celebrating Christmas Eve at a party in Italian Hall in Calumet, Michigan, in 1913, amid a particularly nasty labor dispute. Someone yelled “fire!” although no fire was ever discovered. They all headed for the stairs. A total of 73 people died, mostly kids.

In the Book of Daniel, we find the story of King Belshazzar throwing a massive party in Babylon. He commands that the gold and silver vessels from the Temple in Jerusalem be brought out and used for drinking. (So far, not great opening moves.) During the festivities, a disembodied hand appears and writes on the wall. Daniel is summoned and interprets the handwriting, delivering some pretty grim tidings for Belshazzar: God has judged him and his kingdom will be overthrown. The text says Belshazzar died that night. And indeed Babylon did fall to the forces of Cyrus the Great in 539 BCE, and the existence of a king named Belshazzar is also confirmed by surviving cuneiform tablets.

According to Pliny the Elder, Cleopatra once bet Mark Antony that she could spend a fortune on a single banquet. Then, she removed a massive, priceless pearl from her earring and dropped it into a goblet of vinegar. She drank the concoction as soon as the pearl dissolved. For context, the value of that unique gem could have sustained a large Roman city for one entire year.

Cassius Dio writes that the emperor Domitian summoned a number of wealthy Romans to a dinner party, and for some reason or other thought it was a good idea to imply that they were going to be killed. All the walls were covered with black drapes. The furniture was black. Each man’s chair was surrounded by items that hinted at his particular demise. They all assumed that they would not leave the dinner alive. Then nothing happened. They all left alive, and Domitian later sent gifts to each of them.

Have you heard of the art piece The Roses of Heliogabalus? While the painting is gorgeous, it also has a very sad origin story. It was based on a tale from the Historia Augusta in which Emperor Elagabalus supposedly rained thousands upon thousands of petals down from above on his dinner party guests. Cute, right? Well, except that the story goes that these poor guests were actually buried underneath the petals, and some of them allegedly suffocated.

One of Boston’s most popular nightclubs was the Cocoanut Grove. On November 28, 1942, more than a thousand people crammed inside for a Saturday night out. The fire spread through the building at an alarming rate, and it wasn’t long before smoke, overcrowding, misleading exits, and a revolving door that was jammed closed caused roughly 490 deaths. It would remain the deadliest nightclub fire in the U.S.

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