“Executioner Calcraft...replied, ‘Well, I have heard it said that when you are tied up and your face turned to the Castle wall, and trap falls, you see the stones expanding and contracting violently, and a similar expansion and contraction seems to take place inside your own head and breast. Then there is a rush of fire and an earthquake, your eyeballs spring out of their sockets, the Castle shoots up in the air, and you tumble down a precipice.‘”
“It was a Tyburn tradition that ‘if, en route to execution, a strumpet should beg to have the condemned man as a husband, he would be reprieved and would then marry her, so that both sinful lives would be cleansed....‘ But one felon, about to have the rope placed around his neck, happened to catch the lascivious eye of a particularly unattractive woman in the crowd; turning to the hangman he exclaimed, ‘Dispatch me quickly, before I am begged!‘”
“James Botting, the London hangman of the day, was once jeered at by some youths loitering at a street corner. When asked why he did not verbally respond to their abuse, he commented drily, ‘I never quarrel with my customers.‘
Nor was he wrong in this judgement; ironically one of his tormentors...did qualify as one of his customers, being later found guilty of rape and...had the dubious pleasure of meeting Botting again—on the scaffold.”
“Guilty of murdering one of his crew, Captain James Lowry was another who had been sentenced to be hanged at Execution Dock but, unlike that of Captain Kidd, his corpse was to be coated with tar, trussed in a tight-fitting ‘suit‘ of iron straps, and suspended from a gibbet as a dire warning to all felonious mariners.
Another condemned seafarer...saw the blacksmith enter the...cell with his tape measure — and promptly dropped dead with fright.”
The Executioner Always Chops Twice: Ghastly Blunders on the Scaffold | 
