28 WTF Moments in History We Don't Talk About

1.

In the 1970s, a film team was filming an episode of The Six Million Dollar Man at an amusement park fun house. A stage hand was moving a fake wax figure on a rope when one arm fell off, revealing human flesh and bone underneath. Following an autopsy, it was discovered to be the body of a 60-year-old outlaw who had been taxidermied to some extent.

2.

The Filipino Zoo Girl, which was on display in the Coney Island Zoo in 1914, is one that stands out to me. People threw peanuts at her while she was restrained by ropes. It's sad to witness anything like that, especially when it involves a child so young. Many people are unaware that [human zoos] occurred, but they are a horrible chapter in human history. What's amazing is that some have survived into the twenty-first century, but not as cruelly as they once were.

3.

The Children's Blizzard. It occurred in January 1888 on an unseasonably warm day. The weather was nice and many school-kids were tricked into not wearing coats or jackets to school, some only in short sleeves. While the kids were in class, the weather outside changed dramatically from warm and sunny at noon to dark and heavy like a thunderstorm, with heavy winds and visibility at 3 steps by 3 pm. Children left school to go home and do their chores (this was in Minnesota) and were expected to milk the cows and do whatever else was involved in the family farm. But they got lost in the darkness and snow and the wind and many froze to death in their town, just yards from houses or other sources of refuge. 235 people, mostly children died.There is a novel about the blizzard out now, and there is a nonfiction book about the event as well. I think they have the same title, different authors:The Children's Blizzard (Nonfiction by David Laskin)The Children's Blizzard (Fiction by Melanie Benjamin)

4.

Jellyboys.During the 1800s British noblemen in India would use so called jellyboys (local boys smeared in jam) to walk beside them attracting all the bugs, flies and mosquitoes, creating a neat golfing experience for the nobility and a not so neat experience for the boys.

5.

Magdalene asylums, also known as Magdalene laundries. Places of "reform" for women that didn't fit the idea of a good upstanding citizen. The most well known ones were in Ireland. The women and girls were abused and mistreated by asylum staff, most of whom were nuns.Mass graves, selling these women's children to people in other countries, blocking any parental rights... There's apparently at least one movie coming out, a lot of stories about it, and so many people sharing stories from their mothers and grandmothers. I guess it's more well known than I first thought.

6.

The Radium Girls. In the 1920s, they worked at a watch company painting the hours on the watches using radium, a radioactive element that glows in the dark. They did this with no PPE and weren't told radium is dangerous. Meanwhile, the chemists had full PPE and worked in a sealed environment.Worse, they were instructed to lick the tip of the brush to make a very fine point. Some of them would paint their nails or their teeth with it for fun when they went out at night.They would develop cancer whenever the paint touched, and many of them had such decay in their jaws that their mandibles had to be held on with bandages.

7.

In my family's region in Africa they used to carry out the "capital punishment" by snakebite.Just a snakebite to each ankle, and then letting the man spend his remaining time with his family before he [passed away] (under supervision).I thought it sounded sort of humane in a way, like our lethal injections, but apparently they say it was one of the most horrific ways that existed.

8.

The Vipeholm Experiment.Sweden are mostly known as a not very scary country. With good and mostly accessible dental care.The Vipeholm experiments were a series of human experiments where patients of Vipeholm Hospital for the intellectually disabled in Lund, Sweden, were fed large amounts of sweets to provoke dental caries (1945–1955). The experiments were sponsored both by the sugar industry and the dentist community, in an effort to determine whether carbohydrates affected the formation of cavities.The experiments provided extensive knowledge about dental health and resulted in enough empirical data to link the intake of sugar to dental caries.[1] However, today they are considered to have violated the principles of medical ethics.Hey, you are institutionalized and suffering and powerless - let's make your teeth rot out of your skull. For uhhh science.

9.

The sad case of Ota Benga. He was a “pygmy” boy from the Congo who was essentially captured and brought to the USA to be displayed in freak shows. He had undergone tribal customs such as having his teeth filed into points before his capture.He eventually got out of the carnivals and dreamed of returning to Africa, then WWI happened, making the trip impossible for the foreseeable future. He [ended himself] by gunshot.

10.

"Khuk Khi Kai," or the "Chicken Poop Prison" in Thailand. Used by French forces to hold political prisoners (rebellious Thai people) in the Chanthaburi region.The long-standing impacts of this much-feared torture are still felt in the region today - there's a Thai saying for those who buck authority that roughly translates to "Be careful not to get caught in a chicken poop prison." I learned about this prison from my parents who learned about it from theirs.How it worked, was there was a small, 2-story prison. Bottom floor houses the prisoners, and the top floor is basically a huge chicken coop.The grated floor/ceiling ensures that the chicken poop falls onto the prisoners below.Apparently, even though the "maximum sentence" in Khuk Khi Kai was around a week, it was one of the most feared punishments there was.

11.

The Ideal Maternity Home here in Canada. From the 1920s till the 1940s, they took in babies from unwed mothers and they were selling them especially to desperate jewish families in New Jersey (adoption was illegal in the US back then).It was later discovered that the people who ran this business would starve the "unmarketable" babies by feeding them only molasses and water (the babies would last around 2 weeks on this diet). They put the corpses in wooden box often used for butter and that's why the victims are called the Butterbox Babies. The boxes were either buried on the property or at sea or burned in the home furnace.

The parents who gave their child to this maternity home would go back and see how their child is doing but were told the child has died when in fact it had been sold to adopting parents. Between 400 and 600 died in that home and at least a thousand were adopted but sadly, the adopted babies often suffered from diseases because of the unsanitary conditions and lack of care at the home.

12.

The massacre of kalavrita. It is a village is Greece. The Germans entered it and rounded up all the male villagers in a field. They then shot them all with machine guns. After that they got the children and women and put them in the church. When everyone was inside, they locked the doors and set fire to the church. Around 20 minutes into the burning, a German soldier couldn’t take it anymore and opened the doors. Around half of the people escaped the fire but the rest perished.

The German soldier was shot for this, and if you go to kalavrita today his name is on the memorial. No one was punished for this apart from the leader of the division, who I was told by my grandmother that he died in a gulag. But everyone else got away with it. It is sad that no one knows about this, as things like this happened all over Greece and Russia and Poland. I only know about this because my Great grandmother was one who escaped in the church. This massacre was in retaliation for the villagers supporting the local resistance force, which had recently [unalived] about 10 nazis.

13.

The January 1945 sinking of the MV Wilhelm Gustloff. It was a German ship carrying fleeing Germans from the Eastern Front to the West through the Baltic Sea. It was sunk by the Soviet Navy shorty after setting sail. The total death toll is unknown but estimated at over 9000 since there were so many stowaways. It is the worst maritime disaster ever, several times more than the Titanic.It didn't get nearly the press because they were the enemy so who cares, and the Nazi media certainly didn't report it because they're at the waning days of a war they're badly losing so the last thing they need is more hits to their already sinking morale.

14.

The Cadaver Synod.Basically the pope had a previous Pope's corpse exhumed so the corpse could stand trial for something made up. So they dug up his bloated 7 month old corpse and convicted him, retroactively nullifying his papacy. Then they dumped his bloated and convicted corpse in a river. The people got pissed and overthrew the pope, who was strangled in prison. The next pope came along and had the corpse collected from the river and its papacy posthumously reinstated.897 was a crazy year.

15.

Human “experimentation” by Japanese Unit 731 during WWII, committed primarily against innocent Chinese civilians. Nothing I’ve ever heard of in my life, including in fiction, is darker than the horrors committed for years by Unit 731, a military biological and chemical weapons research division of the Japanese Imperial military.There’s not enough room in a Reddit post to list half of it, but here’s a taste: Dissections of living babies, pregnant women, etc. without anesthesia (also known as a vivisection) usually after they had been deliberately exposed and left to suffer from horrible diseases, chemical and biological weapons, and so on. Freezing limbs off of victims.

Horror-movie sadistic surgeries involving cutting off limbs and attaching them to the wrong sides of a victim, or removing organs and connecting the tubes back together without the organs to see what would happen, such as running the esophagus straight to the intestines with no stomach in between.Not to mention the fact that the victims were routinely tortured for the sake of torture, without even the flimsy excuse of “science” being conducted.And we’re talking about thousands upon thousands of victims, usually hapless Chinese civilians, political prisoners, POWs, and the homeless, over the course of years in huge facilities with thousands of staff committing these atrocities.The icing on the cake? General MacArthur and the rest of the US government found out about it when they captured Japan — and they granted Unit 731 immunity for their war crimes so long as they share their findings with America and ONLY America.

Many of the former Unit 731 members even went on to have very successful and profitable futures in Japan after the war.Edit: Based on a couple of the comments I’ve gotten where people are making judgement calls about the modern day Japanese for this - I’d just like to make clear that I hold no prejudice against the Japanese, and I’m certainly not encouraging others to — every country and people has truly horrific pasts, and almost all of them sweep it under the rug as best they can. Even in our generation. We can argue that torture conducted by US soldiers in Guantanamo or Abu Ghraib, for example, aren’t half as bad, or were more justified, but ultimately torture is torture and sadism is sadism. A culture or government that begins to permit such things and justify them is well on its way down the spiral with enough motivation. Let’s not fool ourselves into comforting racism or nationalism that our countries or people are incapable of atrocities of our own, even today.

16.

In the US it was common to do invasive surgery on infants without anesthesia until the mid 1980s. It was thought that newborns couldn’t feel pain.

17.

The New London School Explosion. On the afternoon of March 18, 1937, the shop teacher at the school in New London, TX turned on an electric sander. Unbeknownst to him, there was a massive natural gas leak under the school. The sander sparked, which ignited the gas and caused a massive explosion that [unalived] almost 300 students and teachers. It was absolutely horrific. The force of the explosion was so great that a two ton block of concrete crushed a car parked 200 feet away. This event is actually why natural gas has a smell now. They started adding it after the explosion so that something like this couldn’t ever happen again.My grandfather was actually one of the survivors of the explosion. He never talked about it, even to his own family, so I didn’t really know too much about it (other than the fact that he’d survived) until after his death. Toward the end of his life, he’d suffered a series of strokes that left him pretty physically incapacitated, so my dad had given him a voice-activated tape recorder and suggested maybe he could record his memoirs for his grandkids to listen to someday. 12 Life Tips Everyone Should KnowAs it turns out, he did. We have hours and hours of cassette tapes of him telling the story of his (actually very interesting) life, including a big section on the New London school explosion. For the sake of everyone’s privacy, I’ll call my grandfather Papa and use an initial for anyone else.Papa was in eighth grade when it happened, in his English class at about 3:00 PM on a Thursday afternoon. At the beginning of class, Papa and his buddy T had been messing around and being loud in the back of the classroom (as eighth grade boys often do). His teacher, Miss M, had enough of their disruptions and made Papa switch seats with another student.

He moved into the girl’s desk in the front row, and she moved back into his desk in the back of the room. When the school exploded, they were taking a test on the book Ivanhoe. Papa was knocked out for a short time, and when he woke up, he couldn’t see anything because the dust was so thick. He looked down and saw that his pencil had blown clear through his hand. When the dust cleared, he saw that the whole back of the room was gone. I won’t go into details, but there were bodies (and parts of bodies) everywhere. The students in the front half of the room survived. The students in the back half did not. That included Papa’s friend T and the little girl who’d been forced to take Papa’s desk because of his misbehavior at the beginning of class. If he hadn’t been acting up, he would have been [unalived] and she would have lived. He carried the guilt of her death until the day he died.Papa’s classroom was on the second floor. There wasn’t any way to get to the room other than the open cavity of the explosion. After the few seconds of initial shock wore off, he and another classmate jumped into action.

They were the only two kids in the class who hadn’t been badly injured. They made a tourniquet out of a sock and a shoelace for a girl with a severe injury to her arm and dug out their teacher, who was alive, but badly injured. By then, men were running up underneath the hole, so Papa and the other boy started lowering the injured to them. Then those who could walk, including Papa, climbed down. He ran off to look for his older brother, B, to see if he was OK.As it turned out, B had been supposed to be in Geometry class. However, he and his buddy had snuck out to go fishing. The explosion happened as they were opening the door to head out to the parking lot. The force of the blast sent them tumbling head over foot across the lot. They were both banged up and dazed, but they survived. The rest of their Geometry class was [unalived].

I don’t know that there’s a moral in the fact that both my grandfather and his brother survived because they were misbehaving that day. I do know that it weighed very heavily on both of them for he rest of their lives.There’s a lot more to his story about the day and the aftermath (most of it absolutely horrific), but I won’t go into all of it here. A few small tidbits though:- Papa and the boy who helped him rescue the other students from their classroom were both awarded medals and certificates of valor for their actions that day.- Nearly every family in town lost a child - some all of their children. I’m sure you can imagine the extreme toll this took on everyone’s mental health. Papa described New London in the months following the explosion as a “town with no children.”

To help with the healing process, the oil companies actively recruited families with kids to transfer in, so that there was some sense of normalcy when school started again in the fall.- Papa had played French horn in the school band. However, when school started up again, he was asked to switch to trumpet, as the entire trumpet section had been [unalived].A few years later, my grandfather went on to fight in World War II, and he saw some of the worst conflict in the Pacific (including Peleliu and the liberation of Manila). But he said that nothing he saw during the war was ever as bad as what he saw the day of the explosion. I’m always amazed that more people don’t know about it. It was major international news at the time.

18.

Anyone who's familiar with Mary, Queen of Scots most likely knows that she was beheaded, but many people don't know *how* she was beheaded. My APUSH teacher told my class this story and it's probably one of the most simultaneously interesting, funniest, and saddest executions in history.The first thing to note was that Mary wore a red dress rather than a white one for a very specific reason: after the execution of a royal or high-class person, commoners would often tear off blood-stained fabric from their clothing solely to flex that they got their hands on the blood of a noble. With red fabric, it would be difficult to see actual blood on the dress. Smart move on Mary's end.During the actual execution, it was said that Mary's executioner was not very experienced and actually *missed* the initial swing, jamming the axe or whatever weapon they used into the back of her head rather than through her neck. This didn't [take out] her yet, though, and she instead made some sort of medieval olden-time exclamation that can be roughly translated to "goddamn!"

EDIT: After the executioner was done, he picked up her head by the hair, not knowing it was a wig, and the head fell out and rolled onto the floor (thanks Plug_5 and moiochi for reminding me)After Mary was properly [unalived], her body was left for public viewing, but the audience was surprised to see her red dress start to rustle before allowing Mary's small terrier dog to climb out from underneath. Tragically, the dog refused to leave the body and eventually passed away after staying at the same spot for a lengthy amount of time.History buffs, please feel free to make any corrections as I heard this story a while ago and probably made a few errors in my recalling! :)TL;DR: Mary, Queen of Scots avoided crazy memorabilia-savers at her execution with a very intelligent move, got shanked in the head during a failed attempt, the executioner dropped her head onto the floor, and had her dog in her dress with her the entire time

19.

Not many people outside of Canada know about the abusive residential schools many indigenous kids were forced to go to (up until the 90’s!!), but even less know that many were also experimented on in the quest to cure tuberculosis. Truly sick stuff.

20.

Margaret Beaufort - mother of Henry VII (father of Henry VIII)She was married off at age 12 to Edmund (25) who was desperate to get her pregnant as quickly as he could. It was not unusual for members of the aristocracy to marry young. It was slightly more unusual, because of the risk to both mother and child, for them to get pregnant before the age of 14.Edmund died of plague while Margaret was pregnant, she was widowed and alone and pregnant during war. The birth was a very difficult one and would scar her forever. For a time they believed that she and her unborn child would perish. Not only was she very young but she was also slight of stature and undeveloped for her age so it’s a wonder she even survived childbirth. It was so difficult for her that she never became pregnant again over the rest of her years, despite remarrying two more times. It is widely believed that she was physically damaged during the childbirth and was unable to conceive again, but it’s also possible she was too traumatized to ever put herself in that situation again. Either way, Margaret devoted herself to her son, calling him “my dearest and only desired joy in this world.”

21.

The St. Pierre Snake Invasion / The Eruption of Mt. Pelee.Volcanic eruption, Snake attacks, Boiling Mud Slide, Government negligence, Major volcanic eruption, Tsunami.Population of 30,000 reduced to a population of 2.In the late 1890’s and early 1900’s, St. Pierre, Martinique was known as the “Paris of the West Indies”. It was renown for its red-tiled cottage, beautiful tropical plants and charming streets. Although most of the population of 20,000 were native Martiniquans, most of the wealthy were Creoles or French colonial officials. The only thing marring this paradise was the volcano looming over its picturesque streets. Citizens of the area were so use to the volcanic activity on the ‘bald mountain’, that no one took it seriously when the fresh steaming vent-holes and earth tremors stared during April 1902.On April 23, 1902, minor explosions began at the summit of the volcano. By early May, ash began to rain down continuously, and the nauseating stench of sulfur filled the air.

The homes on the mountainside were made uninhabitable. Even worse, more than 100 snakes slithered down and invaded the mulatto quarter of St Pierre. The 6-ft long serpents [unalived] 50 people, mostly children, and many animals.There are reports of horses, pigs and dogs screaming as red ants and foot long centipedes crawled up their legs and bit them. Things came to a head when on May 5, a landslide of boiling mud and water from the Etang Sec crater lake spilled into the River Blanche. Near the mouth of the river, 23 workman were [unalived] in a rum distillery.This was followed by a tsunami that [unalived] hundreds. This naturally caused concern in the town, and many wanted to leave for Fort-de-France, Martinique’s second most important city. Unfortunately, this all coincided with a national election and public officials wanted to keep people in town to cast their ballots.

They convened a committee to assess the danger, with the only scientist involved being a high school science teacher. The report they sent to Governor Louis Mouttet said “there is nothing in the activity of Mt. Pelée that warrants a departure from St. Pierre.” It concluded that “the safety of St. Pierre is completely assured.” On the assurance of that report, people from the countryside flocked into St. Pierre for safety.They could not have been more wrong.Three days later, May 8, Mt Pelee finally exploded, sending a murderous avalanche of white-hot lava straight toward the town. Within three minutes, St Pierre was completely obliterated.There was a V shaped notched cut through the cliffs surrounding the summit crater.

This acted as a gun sight pointing down at the town sending super-heated gas, ash and rock down at more than 100 miles per hour. The on slot was enough to move a three ton statue sixteen meters from its base, and blow one meter thick masonry walls to smithereens. It continued down to the shore and hit the ships in the harbor with hurricane force, capsizing several ships killing their crews. The heat set rum warehouses and distilleries ablaze and sent rivers of flaming liquid through the streets.Of its 30,000 population, there were only two people survived.Louis-Auguste Cyparis survived because he was in a poorly ventilated, dungeon-like jail cell.Léon Compère-Léandre lived on the edge of the city and escaped with severe burns. Havivra Da Ifrile, a young girl, reportedly escaped with injuries during the eruption by taking a small boat to a cave down shore, and was later found adrift two miles from the island, unconscious. The event marked the only major volcanic disaster in the history of France and its overseas territories.

22.

The Halifax Explosion.Regarded by many as the biggest man-made explosion prior to the invention of the atomic bomb. A ship laden with explosives collided with another vessel in Halifax Harbour. The resulting explosion flattened much of the city's downtown core, [unaliving] roughly 2,000 and injuring 9,000.The blast is said to have temporarily displaced the water in the harbour, forming a tsunami that reached up to 15 metres high, surging over the wreckage of the waterfront.The following day, Halifax was hit by a blizzard that dumped 40 cm of snow on top of the city, further complicating rescue efforts.The city is also home to a cemetery where many victims of the Titanic were laid to rest. It is said that the body identification system developed at the time of the Titanic's sinking in 1912 aided efforts to identify victims of the Halifax explosion in 1917.

23.

During prohibition the government funded and lead an operation to release barrels of alcohol that they had poisoned to make people sick and shy away from bootleg liquor. Lots of people ended up [passing away] but people still drank more than ever.

24.

Child marriage in America isn't talked about as much as it should be.What's worse is that it's *still* a thing.

25.

Cannibalism at Ma'arrat al-Nu'man. In 1098 crusaders occupied the city, massacred 8000 people and then ate their dead bodies. It is well documented in christian sources because they were not ashamed of what they did.

26.

The Tuskegee Syphilis Study.If I remember correctly, Between 1932 and 1972 they basically had around 600 all black subjects where they treated syphilis on some patients, and then faked most to others, just to see how the disease would attack the body. Like the ones they were fake treating told them “oh you’re good. You’ve been treated for this s**t.” And they continued to get worse and be documented it. This is also the time we discovered that aspirin was called a “miracle drug” for the relief it gave these patients in back aches, headaches, etc. These people, may I remind you not a single one of them was white, were treated like lab rats. To this day I’m still in shock that for over 40 these so called scientists had the moral turpitude to perform such atrocities on other human beings, and at the end of it all day “eh. It was for science.” Disgusting.

27.

You know Jameson Whiskey?Well a long a*s time ago in like the 19th one of their family Heirs fed a little girl to cannibals.Like legit went and bought a little girl in the Congo as a slave and brought her up to a cannibal tribe because he wanted to see them.Sick f**k drew pictures of it and s**t as it was happening.Of course for years the family tried to bury the fact, and the stories and such. Discredit the witnesses.But the crazy bastard was happy to document the whole thing, his only rebuttal incase it reflected badly on him was that "he wanted to see if they would do it"And his accounts matched up with the evidence witnesses had provided.

28.

People may know about the Great Depression, but not many people know that it was so bad for certain people that they had no choice but to sell their own children. I could have never imagined that happening in the United States of America.Another note: two UCLA Anderson School of Business professors published a paper claiming that Franklin Delano Roosevelt's economic policies—notably the New Deal—were so bad, they extended the Great Depression by 7 years.