1.
One of the most bizarre trials in history is the one in which Pope Stephen VI put the prior pope, Pope Formosus, on trial in 897. What’s so strange about it? Formosus was dead. Stephen VI had him exhumed so his corpse could stand trial, propping his body up. Formosus was found guilty of usurping the role of pope, meaning everything he’d done as pope could be undone. Stephen VI then had him dressed in rags, cut off three of his fingers, and dumped his body in a river. Good ol’ Stephen didn’t last long as pope; he was strangled a bit over a year later.
2.
TIL that there was once a bear who was a private in the Polish army. He was a Syrian brown bear named Wojtek, and an army subdivision adopted him after his mother died, raising him to assist in World War II. Wojtek would help carry artillery, and even had his own rank and number. He apparently liked beer and cigarettes (which he ate) and was quite friendly and mischievous, and served overall as a morale booster.
3.
Anyone else find mannequins creepy? Well, if you do, you might also find this story a little disturbing. Basically, back in the day, mannequins were made of wax, and they weren’t very realistic. Sculptor Lester Gaba (along with other artists) sought to change this with more realistic mannequins that included details and imperfections, like freckles. Enter Cynthia, a particularly realistic mannequin who essentially became a celebrity. She attended events with Gaba, had her own magazine spread in LIFE magazine, and was even issued a Saks credit card. But wait, it goes further — brands sent her jewels and clothes. She became a movie star. She got her own radio show. And she was engaged for a time to another radio star.
4.
Leather can be made from many different types of skin, but there’s one you probably haven’t thought much about…human skin. There are a few stories about human leather, but you’d expect those to be reserved for oddballs and murderers, not a state governor. That’s right, folks — Wyoming’s first Democratic governor owned human skin shoes and even reportedly wore them to his inauguration.
Whose skin was it, you ask? Local train thief and horse robber George Francis Warden*, known as “Big Nose George,” who was lynched after killing multiple lawmen. Two doctors stole George’s body, one of whom, John E. Osborne, had a personal grudge against George after he held up a train Osborne was in, causing him to miss a party. He made a bag and shoes out of George’s skin; the shoes also contained parts from George’s own shoes that he had been wearing when he was lynched.
5.
In another creepy historical moment concerning a politician, former Republican Senator Jeremiah A. Denton, from Alabama, was a long-term prisoner of war during the Vietnam War. Denton was captured in 1965, and the next year, he was actually interviewed on-camera while still a prisoner. As part of a propaganda effort, Denton had been told by captors to speak against the US government in an interview with a Japanese reporter. However, he refused to follow his instructions, speaking in favor of the US, although he also said he was being adequately taken care of. In the interview, he blinked strangely, complaining about the lights; US Naval Intelligence was able to decipher this as Denton blinking out Morse code for the word “torture.” This confirmed suspicions that POWs were being tortured in North Vietnam, without alerting his captors that he had done so.
6.
The CIA has done some wild things over the years, but one you almost definitely haven’t heard of is the project Acoustikitty (also known as “Acoustic Kitty”)…which is essentially exactly what it sounds like. Basically, in the ’60s, the CIA attempted to turn cats into spies, implanting a microphone and a transmitter into the cat, and putting an antenna in its fur. The project was largely a failure, as it was almost impossible to get the cat to go where the agents wanted it to go.
7.
And in a move that would be right at home in The Hunger Games, the CIA also used pigeons to take surreptitious photographs and attempted to use surveillance shaped like dragonflies as spies. But perhaps most oddly, they used tiger poop to track movement during the Vietnam War. Creating “seismic intruder detection devices” that mimicked the look of tiger poop (tigers were then more common in Vietnam), the CIA tracked movement through vibrations so they could try to figure out if people or vehicles were passing a certain area.
8.
And in an example that relates back to cats (sorry, I like cats), the CIA also came up with a plan to use dead rats to send messages to spies in the field — except cats kept stealing the rats, which were used to house money, carry messages, or store film. In an attempt to make the rats unappetizing to cats, they covered the rats in things like hot sauce. This did not prove effective, but wormwood oil did.
9.
Speaking of the CIA, they once invented the “heart attack gun,” which used a modified pistol with bullets of frozen shellfish toxin (saxitoxin) to near-silently shoot victims, who would then suffer symptoms similar to a heart attack and die with very little evidence of murder (just a tiny red dot where the bullet went in). It’s unknown to the public whether it was ever used, but it was meant for use in the Cold War. The KGB actually invented a similar weapon using cyanide and used it for at least two assassinations. Metal or terrifying? You decide.
10.
The Greek man Mihailo Tolotos reportedly never saw a single woman in his 82 years of life (except perhaps his mother directly after being born). His mother is said to have quickly died after his birth, and Tolotos was raised in an Orthodox monastery on Mount Athos, where he encountered precisely zero women and only knew of their existence from stories and books. As an adult, he apparently chose to remain on Mount Athos and died there in his 80s. Not only had he never seen a woman, but this article states he had also never seen a car, airplane, or film.
11.
In an example of hypocrisy perhaps unsurprising to modern Americans, Congress had its very own bootlegger during Prohibition. His name was George Cassiday, and he was well known by Congress members — and Capitol police — to smuggle and deliver alcohol to House and Senate offices. He was known by his green hat, and thus became memorialized as The Man in the Green Hat. He essentially got into a cat-and-mouse game with a man who became known as the Dry Spy, undercover agent Roger Butts, who eventually caught Cassiday. Cassiday then revealed in an article that 80% of Congress members had broken Prohibition laws through his services. The drama!!!
12.
Another Prohibition fun fact? Some moonshiners would wear these special cow shoes that would make their footprints look like those of cows, and aid them in escaping the notice of police as they came to and from the fields or forests where they brewed their liquor. They were also called “heifer heels” and were inspired by a Sherlock Holmes story in which a character did something similar to cover horse tracks. They became less useful when police found a pair and learned how to detect them.
13.
Did you know that North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un has been to Disneyland? Not the one in America, but Tokyo Disneyland, which has existed since the early ’80s. Japanese officials state that Jong-un, along with his brother Jong-chul, used fake Brazilian passports to visit the attraction in the ’90s. Their eldest brother, Jong-nam, tried to sneak in using a Dominican passport in 2001, but was caught at the airport; this is actually potentially why their father ended up passing over Jong-nam to succeed him (though Jong-nam contested this).
14.
Speaking of Disneyland, did you know that they used to sell bras? One of the shops on Main Street sold “Intimate Apparel, Brassieres, Torsolettes.” The store featured a rotating stage with recreations of undergarments from the 1890s versus today, with a large animatronic of the brand’s mascot, the Wonderful Wizard of Bras, introducing the setup. The store lasted less than a year, which is unsurprising considering the park is mostly geared toward children.
15.
I’m sure you remember the story of Abraham Lincoln’s assassination by John Wilkes Booth, but I highly doubt you know that Booth’s brother Edwin actually once saved Lincoln’s son’s life. During the Civil War, Abraham’s son Robert was traveling from Harvard, while the successful Shakespearean actor Edwin Booth, brother of John Wilkes, was traveling with the owner of Ford’s Theater, where the president would later be assassinated. Robert was pressed up against the train due to crowding as passengers purchased their tickets, and when the train started to move, he was pushed into the open space between the platform and the train. Edwin grabbed his collar and pulled him back to the platform. Having saved Robert would later give Edwin comfort after his brother killed the president.
16.
You’ve probably heard of the musical Evita, and you may even know that it tells the story of Eva Perón, who was the second wife of the former President of Argentina, Juan Perón. But I doubt you know the journey her body went through after she died of cancer — first, Juan tried to build a giant monument to display her body. When he was forced into exile as a result of a coup, the new regime ordered Eva’s body to be buried, though they didn’t want anyone to know where, lest she become a revolutionary symbol. They stored her corpse in trucks, military locations, behind a cinema, etc….before it came into the possession of Major Arancibia, who reportedly engaged in necrophilia with the corpse (this is disputed) and then shot his wife in the throat when he was discovered.
The corpse then went to Colonel Carlos Eugenio de Moori Koenig, who allegedly also had feelings for her and, according to some accounts, had his officers pee on her when the corpse did not return his affections. Her body was finally returned to her husband, Juan, who was now remarried, though a freak accident killed the transporters. The couple kept Eva’s body on their dining room table. His wife, Isabel, would reportedly comb Eva’s hair and sometimes lie beside her. Juan eventually became president again, with Isabel succeeding him after his death, and she had the corpse displayed. She was eventually buried in her family’s mausoleum, though another freak accident during transport again killed all three men accompanying her body. She currently resides in her fortified tomb, which has a trapdoor and fake coffins to distract from Eva’s real one.
17.
I can’t believe I’ve never heard of Edgar Allan Poe’s mysterious death before. Basically, in 1849, the then-40-year-old poet left Virginia to help edit a colleague’s poems, but never arrived at his destination. Nearly a week after leaving, he was found delirious outside a Baltimore public house, wearing old clothes and lying in the gutter. He remained out of it for days, plagued by hallucinations and calling out for “Reynolds,” then died due to brain swelling on Oct. 7, potentially caused by alcohol consumption. He was set to get married just days later. There are multiple theories as to his death, including murder and rabies, but it remains a mystery.
18.
Mystery writer Agatha Christie also went missing. Christie was 36 and had recently lost her mother, as well as discovered that her husband was cheating on her. After putting her daughter to bed, she drove off, and her car was later found abandoned, hanging over the edge of a pit. She had left three letters behind: one to her brother-in-law claiming she had gone to a spa, another to her secretary with “scheduling details,” and a third to her husband, who never revealed what the letter said. To find her, the police dredged a lake, brought in dogs, enlisted the help of over 10,000 people, and even looked to her novels for clues.
She was eventually found at a spa, like she had told her brother-in-law — except according to her husband, she no longer remembered who she was or recognized him. She had checked in under his affair partner’s surname, but with a different first name, going by Teresa Neele. In the only time Christie ever spoke of it, she admitted to considering driving into the pit her car was found by, and hitting her head — this, accompanied by the trauma of her husband cheating and her mother dying, led to memory loss. Still, people have continued to speculate that it was all a publicity stunt.
19.
One of the strangest unexplained moments from history involves the so-called Dancing Plague of 1518, where a group of people in Strasbourg in the then-Holy Roman Empire began to dance uncontrollably and constantly — some even to their own deaths. The city brought in a stage, professional dancers, and a band to support the hundreds of dancers, but it wasn’t all fun, with heart attacks and strokes sweeping through the group. The only explanation at the time was “Hot blood,” though some may have thought they were cursed by a saint, and the treatment was to just keep dancing until the urge subsided. This kept on for weeks until the remaining dancers were taken to pray at a shrine.
20.
If you doubt whether mass hysteria is a thing, it occurred in what’s now known as Tanzania in 1962, with over 1,000 people becoming afflicted with incessant laughing, which was accompanied by rashes, fainting, and restlessness. This began with young girls, forcing school closures due to the disruptions they caused. Fits could be interspersed with crying and last from hours to as many as 16 days. The cause was simply high stress, caused by both school and the country’s newfound independence.
21.
As someone terrified by plane crashes because they usually mean certain death, I’m always intrigued by stories where all — or most — passengers survive. That happened in 1988, during Aloha Airlines Flight 243 in Hawaii, where a large part of the roof ripped off the plane in the middle of the short flight. One flight attendant, Clarabelle “CB” Lansing, was ejected from the plane and died. However, the rest of the passengers — many of whom were completely exposed to the freezing, hurricane-level wind — survived after the captain successfully landed. Wires dangled dangerously, debris flew, and without access to oxygen, passengers struggled to breathe on the 13-minute descent. “I remember yelling, ‘I’m being electrocuted.’ I really thought I was being burned alive,” Passenger William Flanigan remembered.
Many were treated in a hospital after landing. Still, all survived in what air crash investigator Greg Feith called “one of the most remarkable flying events in history,” as “No airplane has ever landed with this amount of damage.” The cockpit was connected to the rest of the plane through floor beams only, essentially “holding on by a thread.”
22.
In a more devastating plane crash due to the death of nearly all its passengers, 17-year-old Juliane Koepcke was traveling with her mother to her zoologist parents’ ecological research station on Christmas Eve in 1971. During the flight, lightning struck the plane, causing it to disintegrate and the passengers to fall. Koepcke, still seat-belted and in her seat, survived the 10,000-foot fall…and also 11 days in the Amazon rainforest. Though she was injured, she was able to survive by pouring gasoline on a maggot-infested wound, and by following survival skills she’d learned from her parents, such as following water to civilization and sticking to edible food and drink. She was rescued and is still alive today.
23.
In a more disturbing bit of history than most on this list, did you know that the KKK had youth chapters called the Junior Ku Klux Klan (for boys) and the Tri-K-Klub (for girls)? They went even younger, too, with “Ku Klux Kiddies” and “cradle clubs.” Some were baptized not only into Christianity, but into the Klan and its ideology.
24.
In a similarly disturbing fact, many countries — including the US — once had human zoos. These were basically small fake villages where Indigenous peoples from different places — often Africa — would live in an exaggerated version of the culture these (primarily white) countries thought they lived in. Many of the residents died in these villages. One man, Ota Benga, was actually displayed (and caged) with an orangutan in the Bronx Zoo, suggesting he was an evolutionary link between orangutans and modern humans.
25.
Wanna hear a really weird coincidence? The story concerns Virginian farmer Wilmer McLean, whose farm was the location of the Civil War’s first battle. Wanting to get far, far away from the battle site, he moved to the Appomattox Court House and became a merchant. His new home ended up being the very place where Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses Grant. It literally happened in McLean’s living room.
26.
One odd and sad historical story is about the first dog in space. Shortly after the Soviets achieved the feat of the first manufactured object in Earth’s orbit, they built another spacecraft with a compartment for an animal. They chose stray dog Kudryavka (later dubbed Laika by the public), sending her into space with no intention of her returning. They had only left enough food for a single meal due to weight restrictions, and she could only move a few inches. She had a week’s supply of oxygen and was expected to die of oxygen deprivation just seconds after it ran out. Instead, she died shortly after reaching orbit due to a rapid temperature rise in the capsule. The Soviet Union pretended Laika had survived for multiple days.
Laika had had a surgical device implanted into her to monitor her vitals. It showed she was terrified during the ordeal, with her heart rate three times its resting rate and her breath rate four times what it usually was. After she died, the spacecraft orbited with her body for five months before burning up and disintegrating.
Later on, a cat was sent into space. Her name was Félicette, and she was a French stray who was flown in the rocket Veronique in 1963. This story has a happier ending; she made it back safely, and to this day, she remains the only cat to have traveled to space.
27.
And finally, sorry to tell you this, but the lack of mummies in museums is because we used to eat them. In the 16th and 17th centuries, many Europeans would consume “medicines” made from human corpses that were supposed to cure a number of different maladies. Some were from burial sites, stolen from gravediggers — other medicines were made from mummies stolen from Egypt. They’d crumble them and create tinctures as well as make powders out of skulls.
What shocking, weird, or disturbing historical fact do you know? Let us know in the comments!
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