24 Terrifying Facts That Help Put History into Perspective
2.
“The dancing plague of 1518, or dance epidemic of 1518, was a case of dancing mania that occurred in Strasbourg, Alsace (modern-day France), in the Holy Roman Empire from July 1518 to September 1518. Somewhere between 50 and 400 people took to dancing for weeks.”
3.
“When the USSR collapsed, multiple nuclear weapons and boxes full of vials of smallpox were lost” - mypenisisveryerect
4.
“A lot of sailors survived the bombing of Pearl Harbor, but were trapped in their sunken ships. There was no way to rescue them. People had to listen helplessly to the men banging on the inside of the hulls for days until they gradually went quiet.” - heatherbyism
5.
“When the Khmer Rouge was mass killing its citizens bullets were expensive, so when they were slaughtering babies they would grab them by the ankles and bash their heads open on a particular tree. That tree is still there by the way. It's just sitting there with a little sign on it that says 'baby killing tree'. So many people were killed in the fields that when you look down there you see these little white flecks everywhere in the soil, and at some point you realize they're bone.” - Matt01123
6.
“In Bridgeton, Missouri, near where I live, there is an underground fire through the years slowly nearing nuclear waste that was dumped in the 70s, it was dumped illegally, and would cost hundreds of millions to fix” - freethedamnsel
7.
“During the paraguayan war, paraguay sent 3500 poorly armed children between 9 to 15 yo, wounded soldiers and old men to face brazilian army (20 thousand men), because most of paraguayan combatants were killed. the date of this battle is now children's day in paraguay.” - anylifeonmars_
8.
“Near Mt St Helens, in the Gifford Pinchot National Forest, and before the volcano erupted in 1980, there were areas where you were not allowed off the footpaths. This was because Douglas Firs, which can reach 200ft, were buried in ash in prior eruptions, then rotted away. So you could step on a relatively thin layer of old ash, break through, and fall any number of feet into what amounted to a crevasse or a well.” - quikdogs
9.
“Agent Orange is nowadays still a viral toxin in Vietnam, still deforming children with parents / grandparents who were exposed to the drops in the 70’s.” - blemip
10.
“The radium girls were the women who worked in clock and aviation dial factories, painting the dials with radioactive paint that they applied by licking the brushes to point them. The long term effects of radium ingestion were known by the inventor of the paint, who was also the owner of the largest factory. He eventually died from his own creations in the same horrific ways as the women. Their struggle for justice directly lead to the creation of OSHA.” - Langstarr
11.
“In the warsaw ghettos they would pile up body’s of people that might have not even been dead. someone who collapsed could have been tossed to the side and be covered with other bodies, slowly crushing them and suffocating them. until they did actually die.” - Wise_Stock
12.
“Dutch Whalers and the like would raid Australian Aboriginal villages and kidnap the women, the would take them off shore and rape them in their rowboat, when the aboriginal men would try and swim out to rescue them they would wait until they reached the boats and hack off their hands with machetes. They would then kill and dump the women and sail away.” - WanderingMinotaur
13.
“22 Australian nurses where captured on Bangka Island by the Japanese, they where all raped, tortured, and then marched out into the sea and gunned down. Except for one who was allowed to survive. She was later gagged from saying anything and was disbarred from speaking at the Tokyo War Crimes tribunal after world war 2 ended, because the Australian government didn't want to look bad.” - WanderingMinotaur
14.
“In 1859 the largest known coronal mass ejection from the sun hit earth. If it hit us today, the nations affected would be without power for 6-18 months, most major technologies and infrastructure would be badly degraded, the cost would be upwards of $2trillion and there is every chance of those affected moving toward a social collapse.” - rohankent
15.
“Richard Nixon has written a special speech in case Neil Armstrong dies during the moon landing expedition.” - OctogoatYTofficial
16.
“During the Polish Operation of the Great Purge, the Soviet NKVD shot 111,091 Poles between August of 1937 and November of 1938. That’s 7,406 Poles every month for 15 months. 246 Poles being shot in the back of the head every single day or 10 Poles being murdered by the Soviets every hour. The vast majority of these Poles were of course, completely innocent of the imaginary crimes the Soviets accused them of.” - PhillipLlerenas
17.
“During WW2, the Nazis head doctor in Auschwiz did so many inhumane experiments he was named the ‘Angel of Death.’ In his office, he had a wall of eyeballs from everybody he killed in those experiments. The CRAZIEST thing, he was able to escape and ended up living in Brazil, where he died from drowning at a resort.” - Welp_shit02
18.
“There are cases where the Vatican actively worked to prevent kids orphaned by the Holocaust from being reunited with their remaining families after the war. - OwnPsychology8943
19.
‘In 1945 the USS Indianapolis sank between Guam and the Philippines due to a Japanese submarine. Out of nearly 1200 crew members, only 316 survived. The worst part? Only 300 went down with the ship in the initial event. The other 900 crew members were trapped in the open ocean for four days before they were spotted and rescued.
That means that around 600 men died due to exposure, dehydration, salt water poisoning and shark attacks by oceanic white tip sharks. We tend to believe that great white sharks, bull sharks, and tiger sharks are responsible for the majority of shark attacks on humans, but oceanic white tip sharks have likely killed far more humans due to ships/planes sinking and the deaths not being recorded as shark attacks.
They are known to commonly follow ships and can form big groups when finding food, and are pretty aggressive, but most of their victims are unrecorded in shark bite records since these attacks don't happen close to the shore.” - JulesLovesYou1993
20.
“8% of all Asian men have a particular Y chromosome haplogroup. This equates to 0.5% of the worlds population. It is a very specific male to male chromosome. And occurs everywhere that Gengis Kahn and his descendants conquered. This means that 8% of Asian men can trace their lineage directly back (father to son) to Gengis Kahn. There was a lot of rape.” - newsfromplanetmike
21.
“King Leopold and his colony in, what is now, the Congo. It was brutal. Ante Pavelic and the crimes of the Ustaše during WWII. Brutal enough that he was asked to tone it down by his Nazi Allies. He was protected by the Papacy during the war.” - Drulock
23.
“The Children's Crusade around 1200 started in France and Germany. They were convinced that God would allow them to take Jerusalem and convert the Muslims to Christianity. Somewhere in the neighborhood of 30000 set out for the Mediterranean Sea, which they believed God would part for them and allow them to walk to Jerusalem.
Well, it was apparently a pretty nasty winter, and a good number succumbed to the elements. Then when they finally arrived, the sea did not part. But, not to be deterred, they began asking various ships captains for a ride. A few ships agreed, and were loaded down with children. One ship sank and all drowned, and the rest were sold into slavery by the captains.” - pacodefan
24.
“Not so much history, but rather prehistory, but nonetheless. One time the human race nearly went extinct about 70,000 years ago when the Toba Supervolcano blew up. The ash and soot that was released into the atmosphere blocked out a lot of light, killing plants, which lead to mass animal deaths, and left us with barely anything to eat. The temperature would have also dropped significantly, resulting in an ice age starting. The end result was a cold world devoid of much life, with choking ash, soot and smoke in the air for years. Its estimated that as few as 10,000 humans survived globally, with perhaps only a few hundred of those capable of breeding. It was basically like surviving a nuclear war and then trying to keep in viable population in the after math... except all you have is stone age technology, no modern clothes, no modern creature comforts, no food to loot for, no medical supplies anywhere. Just you and whatever you can find in the wild.” - Youpunyhumans
25.
“Queen Elizabeth II had two disabled cousins that were declared dead and placed in care homes never to be visited by a single member of their family.” - thegashface
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