The tragic true story behind why these women's graves glow, over 100 years later.

Pale skin. Brittle hands. Cataracts that glowed a sombre ember. Fragile teeth breaking away chip by chip. Necrosis of the jaw as the bones and flesh began to rot.

These were the terrifying symptoms of a mystery illness that swept the US in the 1920s. Years later, we now know how and why these people suffered.

They were slowly poisoned by their employers.

They were the Radium Girls, and this is their story.

At the beginning of the 1920s, radium dial factories became popular across the US, in particular, in the states of New Jersey, Illinois and Connecticut. It was at these seemingly innocuous factories where a hellish fate awaited innocent workers who tirelessly painted watch dials, clocks and various other wartime instruments with lethal radium paint. 

Radium was first discovered in 1898 by Marie and Pierre Curie and was used to treat cancer after it was discovered that radiation could kill living cells. It quickly became a cure for various other things, including hearing loss, chronic otitis in children and acne. In 1918, it even became a hit in the beauty industry, with companies selling radium as a way for women to keep their skin 'radiating' with youthfulness.

It then became a popular material used to make devices glow in the dark - a particularly helpful tool during the war. 

Working in these radium factories was a lucrative job for young women. Wages were higher than the average factory job and so word quickly spread, attracting new employees every week. 

Image: Chicago National Archives. 

When the industry was booming, thousands of women were employed to intricately paint watches and dials using fine brushes. They would often shape them using their mouths in a ‘lip, dip and paint’ routine. At the time, one factory worker, Grace Fryer, asked her employer if the substance was safe to ingest - she was assured it wasn’t dangerous at all.

But that was a lie.

The women would mix their own paint from radium dust and other ingredients. They were soon known as "ghost girls," because the radium dust made their skin, hair and clothes glow. Of course, they were oblivious to the deadly radiation emitted by it. 

Day in and day out they were showing up to work only to slowly rot away.

Nobody knew just how dangerous the substance was until people fell ill. Radium began seeping into their bones and disintegrating their jaws, eventually killing them.

Image: Chicago National Archives. 

The first victim was Amelia Maggia, who died in 1922 after suffering for years from radium exposure. What started as a sore tooth descended into aching limbs, pus-filled ulcers and her entire jawbone disintegrating. 

At first, doctors thought Amelia had died from syphilis, but as more of her former colleagues began to display similar symptoms, they connected the dots. 

As more people became gravely ill or died from radium poisoning, a handful of brave women came forward to fight the factories they once worked for.

Grace Fryer, Katherine Schaub, Albina Larice, Quinta McDonald and Edna Hussman banded together to sue Radium Corp for exposing them to lethal radium poisoning. Through their plight for justice, they became known as the Radium Girls.

Throughout the trial, damaging information came out about just how harmful the radium exposure was. Physicist Elizabeth Hughes tested the radioactivity present in the Radium Girls and found that all five had measurements so high their breath had become toxic.

As the trial garnered worldwide attention, Radium Corp had no choice but to settle out of court. But despite the win, just a few short years later, two of the defendants, Katherine Schaub and Grace Fryer, died from radium poisoning.

Now some 100 years later, the women's graves still shine a rich green from beneath the ground, emanating the radium that took their lives too early.

Feature image: Chicago National Archives.

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