Evening Republican, Volume 16, Number 152, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 25 June 1912 — SEA AFFECTS MIND [ARTICLE]

SEA AFFECTS MIND

Ocean Madness Grips Women as Big Liner Sails. .> A ' Mr*, Helen Erickson Is Deported From Chicago and Spanish Seno’rita Is Seized With Insane Fear on Board Steamer St. Paul.

New York.—The sailing of the American liner St. Paul was marked by two fits of violent insanity among the women passengers. Mrs. Helen Erickson of Copenhagen, deported by government order from Chicago, broke out of the ambulance in which she' had been taken to the pier from Ellis island and assaulted Mrs. Fairman, the Ellis island matron, who had her in charge and was waiting for 0 her to alight. ~ The woman ran to the sodded parking in front of the piers, climbed to the rail and screamed for help. “Save me!” she shouted to a group of longshoremen. “They are trying to kidnap me and put me on that ship.!” Two policemen and the chauffeur of” the ambulance ran to her. Site scratched and bit them and tore their clothes before they could overpower her and take her to the ship, where she was locked in the hospital. Only a few moments later there was all irruption Of frightened men and women from the steerage gangway to the pier. The fugitives said a young woman was killing her mother below.

Senorita Fernanda Puertola, a daintily formed Spanish girl of high birth, and possesed of bewildering beauty of the true Castilllan type, was the other passenger driven suddenly mad by fear of the sea aboard the St Paul. It was only after she had torn and ripped the faces and clothing of several stewardesses and some of the husky sdilors of the St Paul, that she was carried down the gangplank and put in an ambulance to be taken to the psychophatic ward in Bellevue.

“Sailing madness,” is what the officers called the strange attack of hysteria. But her mother, Senora Marie Puertola, who was also roughly handled in the struggle with the crazed girl, said she had been reading everything printed about the disaster that overwhelmed the Titanic and she cried out in her sleep that the dead hands of the Titanic’s victims were waiting in the ocean, path way to seize her and pull her down.