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The world is a crazy place, and it always has been. Looking back at history, one can find a seemingly endless number of stories about real situations, events, moments, and actions that are hard to believe now. But they were real, they were documented, and in many cases, they are as disturbing today as they were bizarre in their time.
That's the path we'll take today with our list. Scroll down and find ten mind-blowing historical facts so creepy, disgusting, disturbing, or just plain weird that you'll wish they were true. Sit back and prepare to journey into the strangest nooks and crannies of history.
See also: 10 disasters that changed the course of history.
10. Field dentistry
The Dark History of Waterloo Teeth: The Horrible Tale of Dentures #HistoryDentures #HistoricalFacts
Hundreds of years ago, dentures were sometimes made from the teeth of deceased people. I suppose that makes sense. You have to get artificial teeth from a reliable source, right? And given the state of dentistry in the 18th and early 19th centuries, why not take the real teeth of deceased people and reuse them?
Human teeth could be set into the bases of ivory dentures, and battlefields provided a particularly grim source of such teeth. Soldiers were typically young, and their teeth were often in better condition than those of older men who had lost them to decay. Looters, soldiers, locals, and professional strippers could collect teeth from the dead and sell them in the dental industry.
This practice became particularly infamous after the Battle of Waterloo in 1815. After the fighting ended, scavengers roamed among thousands of bodies, taking valuables, including teeth. There were so many that dentures made from human teeth became known as "Waterloo teeth.".
Teeth were cleaned, sorted, and fitted into dentures for very real clients who probably preferred not to think too much about how their new smile came about.
What a terrible economy![1]
9. Be careful, it's creepy!
Thomas Edison's Talking Dolls | Henry Ford's Innovative Nation
Thomas Edison may have accomplished many great things, but his company also helped bring one of the creepiest toys imaginable into American homes.
After Edison developed the phonograph in 1877, inventors began looking for ways to shrink the device and fit it into toys. William W. Jaques patented an early talking doll mechanism, and Edison later refined this idea, creating the Edison Talking Doll, which went on sale in 1890.
The dolls had ceramic heads, movable limbs, metal bodies, and miniature phonographs hidden inside their chests. When users turned a crank, a mechanism played wax recordings of young women reciting nursery rhymes like "Mary Had a Little Lamb," "Hickory Dickory Dock," and "Now I'm Going to Bed.".
Due to the primitive nature of recording technology, voices came out thin, hoarse, and distorted. Even listeners of the time complained that the words were difficult to understand.
Unfortunately for Edison, the eerie voices were only part of the problem. The dolls were expensive, the wax records were fragile, the mechanisms were easily broken, and the handle was easily lost. Furthermore, customers had to rotate the doll at roughly the right speed, otherwise the already strange voice would sound even stranger.
The dolls were discontinued after a short run. More than a century later, the surviving recordings have been recovered—and somehow sound exactly as they would have sounded just before the lights went out in a horror film.[2]
8. The cat took your phone.
Can a cat be a telephone?
Did you know that researchers from Princeton University once turned a live cat into a telephone system?
In 1929, scientists Ernest Glenn Weaver and Charles William Bray wanted to understand how the auditory nerve responds to sound. So they anesthetized a cat, exposed its auditory system, and attached an electrode capable of detecting the electrical activity generated when sound entered the animal's ear.
The signal was amplified and transmitted to a telephone handset located in a soundproof room approximately 15 meters from the source.
Then one of the scientists said something in the cat's ear.
The researcher sitting next to the receiver heard the words clearly.
The experiment demonstrated that the auditory nerve transmits electrical activity that precisely matches the frequency of incoming sounds. Wever and Bray's work was a milestone in understanding how the ear converts sound into electrical signals and helped lay the foundation for subsequent hearing research, including technologies that ultimately contributed to the creation of cochlear implants.
The researchers then conducted control tests, altering or damaging various parts of the cat's auditory system. Finally, the animal was euthanized, and the signal disappeared after death.
Yes, for a brief and deeply disturbing moment in the history of science, a cat actually became part of a working telephone.[3]
7. Resurrection from the dead
The Mercy Brown Case and the New England Vampire Panic
You've heard of the Salem Witch Trials. But have you heard of the case in Rhode Island where residents dug up the body of a teenage girl because they thought she might be a vampire?
In the late 19th century, tuberculosis—then commonly called consumption—continued to devastate families in New England. The disease caused pallor, emaciation, fever, and weakness, sometimes accompanied by coughing up blood. In rural communities, where medical knowledge was slow to spread, some attributed the deaths to supernatural forces.
The Brown family of Exeter, Rhode Island, suffered particularly hard. Mary Eliza Brown died of tuberculosis in 1882, followed by her daughter Mary Olive in 1883. Years later, in January 1892, another daughter, 19-year-old Mercy "Lena" Brown, died. Her brother, Edwin, was also gravely ill.
Neighbors began to suspect that one of the dead women was somehow feeding on Edwin's blood from the afterlife.
In March 1892, the bodies were exhumed. Mary Eliza and Mary Olive had been dead for many years and were showing normal decomposition. Mercy, however, had died just a few months earlier, during a cold New England winter, and her body was still relatively well preserved. There was still blood in her heart.
This was enough to convince some observers that they had found their vampire.
Mercy's heart and liver were removed and burned. The ashes were mixed with liquid and given to Edwin as a supposed cure.
It didn't work. He died less than two months later.
Robert Koch identified the bacterium that causes tuberculosis ten years earlier. Unfortunately for Mercy Brown, modern germ theory didn't catch on quickly enough.[4]
6. A stream of… molasses?
The most dangerous liquid for drowning
One of the strangest disasters in American history began with something that sounds almost comical: a molasses flood.
On January 15, 1919, a massive molasses storage tank in Boston's North End ruptured. It contained approximately 2.3 million gallons (8.7 million liters) of molasses. When the steel structure collapsed, a wave of sticky liquid gushed into the surrounding area, reportedly traveling at speeds of up to 35 miles per hour (56 km/h).
It sounds funny until you realize what a wall of syrup weighing thousands of tons is capable of.
The flood killed 21 people and injured approximately 150. Buildings were destroyed, structures were shifted from their foundations, horses were trapped, and elevated railway supports were damaged.
Police, firefighters, sailors, and Red Cross workers rushed to the area, but the high temperature and viscosity of the liquid made rescue operations extremely difficult. Victims were trapped in the thick liquid and debris, and rescuers struggled to navigate streets that had effectively become a solid mass.
The cleanup took several weeks, and the molasses was spread throughout Boston on shoes, clothes, tires, and streetcars. A local legend later emerged claiming that even on particularly hot days, residents could still smell the sweet aroma wafting from the surrounding area years later.
«"Treacle flood" sounds like something out of a cartoon. For 21 people in Boston, it was deadly serious.[5]
5. The first syphilis epidemic in Europe was terribly severe.
Syphilis: The Disease That Changed Europe
At the end of the 15th century, Europe faced one of the most horrific epidemics of the era. Around 1494–1495, during the French invasion of Italy, a severe syphilis epidemic spread rapidly among soldiers and civilians.
The disease appeared so suddenly, and its symptoms could be so horrific, that contemporaries had difficulty explaining what was happening. Early descriptions include painful pustules, ulcers, fever, disfigurement, and sometimes death. In particularly severe cases, the lesions could destroy tissue in the face and body.
For centuries, historians have debated the origins of syphilis. One prominent theory held that sailors returning from Christopher Columbus's voyages brought the disease from the Americas to Europe. Recent studies of ancient DNA have strengthened the theory that the broader family of bacteria that causes syphilis and related diseases had deep roots in the Americas even before Columbus.
But this still doesn't prove that Columbus's crew personally introduced venereal syphilis to Europe. The exact causes of the European epidemic are still a matter of debate.
Much less controversial is the question of how frightening the first outbreak was. To people who had never seen anything like it, the epidemic of victims covered in spreading sores and disfiguring lesions likely seemed uncomfortably similar to a real-life zombie outbreak.[6]
4. Computing power
The craziest approximation of pi ever made.
In the 19th century, mathematician William Shanks was deeply interested in numbers. In particular, he was obsessed with calculating the digits of pi.
Well, you know: 3.14159...blah-blah-blah.
Shanks didn't like this "blah-blah-blah.".
After years of manual labor, he finally calculated pi to 707 decimal places. This was a remarkable achievement for a man who relied on pencil, paper, and manual arithmetic.
Unfortunately, only the first 527 decimal places were correct. There was an error in the calculation, causing everything after that to be incorrect.
Then computers came along.
In 1958, mathematician François Genuys used an IBM 704 computer to electronically calculate pi. The machine achieved the same level of accuracy Shanks had been striving for years, in about 40 seconds.
And it didn't end there.
The IBM computer continued calculating until it reached 10,000 decimal places, which took about an hour and 40 minutes. What had once represented years of painstaking human calculations suddenly became routine machine work.
We're glad Shanks wasn't around to watch the computer churn through the calculations that took so much of his life. Some technological advances are inspiring. Some are just plain rude.[7]
3. Another theater guest who was present at the meeting with Lincoln later killed his wife.
Lincoln Theater Guests: Witnesses to Tragedy, Followed by Assassination – The President's Story. Episode 109.
When Abraham Lincoln and Mary Todd Lincoln visited Ford's Theatre on April 14, 1865, they were accompanied by Major Henry Rathbone and his fiancée, Clara Harris.
After John Wilkes Booth shot Lincoln, Rathbone lunged at the assassin. Booth cut Rathbone's arm deeply with a knife, then jumped from the presidential box and fled. Rathbone lost a lot of blood but survived.
Lincoln didn't do that.
The trauma of that night haunted Rathbone for the rest of his life. In the following years, his physical and mental health deteriorated, and he eventually developed increasingly severe paranoia, jealousy, and erratic behavior.
Rathbone and Clara married in 1867 and later moved to Germany with their children. Then, on December 23, 1883, another tragedy befell them.
During the violence, Rathbone shot and stabbed Clara to death. He then stabbed himself repeatedly in an attempt to commit suicide.
He survived.
Rathbone was declared mentally ill and placed in a mental hospital, where he spent the rest of his life. He died in 1911.
The man who sat next to Abraham Lincoln on one of the most infamous nights in American history survived Booth's knife - only to become a murderer in his own family's tragedy nearly two decades later.[8]
2. The Pope who brought the dead Pope to justice.
The Trial of a Dead Pope: The Synod of Corpses | History Show
In 897, Pope Stephen VI decided that one of his predecessors should stand trial. There was only one problem.
Pope Formosus died about nine months ago. But that didn't stop Stephen.
Formosus' body was exhumed, dressed in papal vestments, placed on a throne, and brought to the church court for the so-called Cadaver Synod.
A deacon was appointed to speak on behalf of the deceased pope, while Stephen unleashed charges against the body. Formosus was accused of unlawfully assuming the papal throne and violating ecclesiastical rules related to his former position as a bishop.
It is not surprising that the corpse did not put up a particularly effective resistance.
Formosus was found guilty. His papal acts were declared invalid, his vestments were stripped, and the three fingers he used to bless his right hand were severed.
Eventually, his body was thrown into the Tiber River.
This spectacle horrified many Romans and contributed to the formation of negative public opinion against Stephen. Within months, he was deposed, imprisoned, and strangled.
History has produced many strange court cases. Only in very few cases has it been necessary to exhume the defendant before the trial.[9]
1. Pharaoh Tutankhamun's parents were brother and sister.
The results of a DNA analysis of King Tutankhamun's family tree have rewritten Egypt's biggest mystery.
Let's end on a creepy family note.
For years, researchers suspected that Tutankhamun's family tree was unusually complex. Genetic studies of the royal mummies ultimately clarified the picture considerably—and simultaneously complicated it considerably.
Following extensive DNA testing, the mummy from tomb KV55 was identified as Tutankhamun's father, most likely Pharaoh Akhenaten. The so-called "Younger Lady" mummy from tomb KV35 was identified as his mother.
Their relationship was unexpected. Genetic data revealed that Tutankhamun's parents were not merely distant relatives or even cousins. This supported the assumption that they were siblings.
Marriages between members of the royal family were not unheard of in ancient Egypt. Dynasties sometimes married within the family, seeking to preserve royal lineages, political legitimacy, or religious traditions.
Tutankhamun also suffered from a number of physical problems, including a foot condition, and researchers have found evidence that he contracted malaria. Close family ties can increase the risk of hereditary diseases. However, scientists cannot definitively claim that all of Tutankhamun's illnesses are directly related to his parents' family ties.
However, the results of the genetic study leave us with one extremely disturbing fact: one of the most famous pharaohs in history was almost certainly born into a family that included a brother and sister.
The ancient royal families seem to have taken keeping everything within the family very seriously.[10]
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Fact checked by Darci Heikkinen ShareTweetWhatsAppPinShareEmail0 reposts