Last night someone mentioned that once you are inside a fridge and have closed the door, it is impossible to open the door from the inside. Apparently this has to do with the pressure difference or some such nonsense. To me, it looks like one commits this impossibility every time the fridge door is opened from the outside. So, Cecil, before I empty the salad from my fridge and venture inside myself, can you tell me if I’ll make it out alive or if my chilled corpse will disturb those looking for a glass of milk? –calum, via e-mail
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Well, let’s see. Here we are, Spitz and Fisher’s Medicolegal Investigation of Death (1993). On page 486 we find a photo of “three [dead] children [who] were discovered in a discarded refrigerator in an unused garage two days after having been reported missing by their parents.” Their corpses appear to be room temperature, not chilled, but would definitely disturb anyone seeking a glass of milk, I’d say, and most likely so would yours.
Problem solved, eh? Not exactly. Plenty of old refrigerators, presumably bought in the first flush of postwar prosperity, were still out there, and as time went on and they began to be discarded, suffocation deaths rose. In 1961, after an 11-year-old boy died in a refrigerator in Brooklyn, hundreds of New York health inspectors prowled the city’s vacant lots, yards, and cellars looking for old fridges and smashed the locks or removed the doors on 554 of them. Despite such efforts, at least 163 deaths were reported nationwide between 1956 and 1964, all in old-style fridges, and 96 between 1973 and 1984. The problem hasn’t entirely disappeared–two kids in Guyana died in an old fridge in 2003. Though the press account is sketchy, odds are the thing had a mechanical latch.
