TUNNEL TRAGEDIES.

Northland Age, Volume 3, Issue 21, 2 January 1907, Page 2

TUNNEL TRAGEDIES.

LAID TO STRANGE DISEASE

If certain specialists are to be believed, the tragic mjflteries of two women’s death in railway tunnels in the vicinity of London within the year s havo p remarkable scientific explanation. It is asserted that they were not murdered, but the victims of strange nervous diseases, which become manifest only when the sufferers are shut up in a confined space The facts of tho latest case are as follows :

Mile. Lillie Rochald, .a French girl of eighteen, came to (England several weeks ago to visit relatives near Rugby. At Rugby the trainsmen found the door of a railway carriage open, and a subsequent search revealed her mutilated body in the Crick tunnel. The police decided that she had been murdered ami been thrown out on the tracks. The case was very similar to that of Miss Money, which occurred last October. Miss Money's mutilated body was found in Merstham tunnel, and the deduction was that murder had been committed. Now comes the mother, of one victim. Countess Rochaid, with a statement which is accepted by many as a solution of the gill's death. “My daughter ought never to have travelled alone,” said the Countess.

“She was always greatly agitated in railway carriages, and invariably suffered from a sort of feeling of oppression or suffocation. “Last Summer she spent her holidays with me in Paris. 1 met her half way, at Dieppe. On getting into the Paris train she suddenly became terribly agitated. She rushed from one side to the other of the compartment opening the windows and pressing her hAnds to her throat.

Had I not caught hold ‘of her dress she certainly would have fallen on to the line. She could not account for her nervousness, which was such that she would not travel inside an omnibus.” Physicians say the statement seems to prove that Mile. Rochaid was subject to a complaint to which the medical name of claustrophobia is given. The victim of this complaint which is only found among the nervous or very, highly strung, is afraid of being shut up in a confined space, and is always liable to attempt to escape from that confinement. Cases of this nervous disease and of its opposite, agoraphobia, or dread of open spaces, are not and are recorded in all works on nervous diseases. The victim is said to be suffering from an imperative idea, and each ideas rendsr men and woimp, incapable ot taking ears of the^