In 1910 a doctor from Ossining, New York by the name of Amos Squire was appointed Chief Physician at Sing Sing Penitentiary. He held the job until 1925, when he left to become Chief Medical Examiner of Westchester County.
They were very busy years for a doctor at Sing Sing. During his fifteen-year tenure, Squire’s duties included not simply caring for inmates in the prison infirmary, but also determining whether or not a condemned man was sane enough to go to the electric chair, and declaring a prisoner dead following an electrocution. In the hours after an execution Dr. Squire also conducted an autopsy and filled out the death certificate.
For a period in the early 1920s when electrocutions were taking place at Sing Sing with mind-boggling frequency, it seems Dr. Squire was also conducting some quiet, curious, unpublicized experiments on the side. With all of these research subjects at his fingertips, he began seriously looking into the possibility of reanimating the dead.
That’s perhaps overdramatizing it a bit. What Dr. Squire was trying to do was see if it was at all possible to bring a newly-electrocuted prisoner back to life. (Which amounts, I guess, to pretty much the same astounding thing.)
The existing records are sketchy, so little is known about the exact nature of Dr. Squire’s investigations or the methods he employed in attempting to resurrect the corpses of condemned criminals. All that is known is that none of his experiments were successful. In one case, the heart of an inmate who had been clinically dead for an hour fibrillated faintly and briefly after Squire applied an electrical charge. That was as close as the doctor ever came to realizing Dr. Frankenstein’s dream (that we’re aware of, anyway).
(In the years following his stint at Sing Sing, Squire—perhaps understandably—became a very public and very vocal advocate for the abolition of the death penalty.)
Hearing that experiments such as this were taking place behind prison walls raises, of course, hundreds of questions. What was Dr. Squire thinking, exactly? What would have happened to the prisoner if the doctor had, in fact, resurrected him? Would he then be executed a second time? And how long would it have been before townsfolk, upon catching wind of all this, stormed the prison with pitchforks and torches?
We may never know the answers to those questions.    Â
Upon first learning about Dr. Squire’s investigations into the nature of life and death, my thoughts shot forward some two decades to Jack Bernhard’s 1946 film noir classic, Decoy.
When discussing the film, critics and audience members alike tend to focus on the outrageous level of violence and just how unrepentantly evil the femme fatale Margot (Jean Gillie) remains throughout the entire picture. They completely overlook the fact that half an hour into the picture a man is brought back from the dead. That’s the sort of thing you expect in a horror or science fiction film, not a crime melodrama.
Frank Olins (Robert Armstrong) is a death row inmate who has vowed to take to his grave the secret location of the $400,000 he grabbed in his last heist. Margot doesn’t care for that idea one bit. Figuring the only way to get her hands on that loot is to keep Frank alive until he spills, she makes plans to do just that. Having heard of a drug called Methylene Blue that might counteract the effects of cyanide gas, she seduces a kind-hearted doctor who, as luck would have it, divides his time between a free clinic for the poor and the prison. Fully in her claws, he agrees to help.
After Frank’s body is wheeled out of the gas chamber, the doctor gives it a shot of Methylene Blue, sneaks it out of the prison, and before you know it Frank is on his feet again and the story rolls on.
Seeing that sequence now I had to wonder. Were the screenwriters inspired by a fundamental theme—the reanimation of the dead—that has been part of horror, fantasy, and even religious literature from the very beginning, or were they instead inspired by Dr. Squire’s side project? The parallels are certainly there. Sure, in the film Frank went to the gas chamber and not the chair, but they’d of course had to take certain liberties. But how and where would the screenwriters have heard about the Sing Sing zombies?
Thinking about it, it seems much more likely that they were inspired by Frankenstein and White Zombie than by some obscure, unpublicized scientific experiments.
I was going to leave it at that, but then I found the answer. In a recent interview, Stanley Rubin, author of the original story upon which Decoy was based, reveals that both theories are wrong.
It seems back in the mid-40s Rubin read a magazine article about Methylene Blue. It’s not simply some imaginary, cool-sounding drug a mad scientist might use—it’s an actual chemical compound discovered in 1891 that has proven itself to have any number of medical applications. While primarily used as a dye, it has also proven to be an effective treatment for malaria, urinary tract infections, some forms of cancer—even psoriasis. It can also be used to treat cases of carbon monoxide and—here’s the kicker—cyanide poisoning.
 There have been no known cases of Methylene Blue bringing someone back from the dead (not that I’ve been able to find, anyway), but it was all Rubin needed to spark his imagination. With that extra nudge and jump, Methylene Blue gave him a fascinating, unique—and moreover scientifically plausible, sort of— plot twist to drop into his melodrama.
So there you have it. And if you or someone you know is headed for the gas chamber sometime soon, Methylene Blue is still on the market and readily available for about $5 a bottle.
Now to determine whether or not Dr. Squire was the primary influence on Lon Chaney, Jr.’s 1956 film, The Indestructible Man.
