23 Weird and Wild Facts To Give You a Braingasim

1.

Before becoming the LSD-fueled hippie guru who defined the 1960s and '70s, Ram Dass was a stuffy academic named Richard Alpert. While working as an assistant professor of clinical psychology at Harvard, Alpert had a fateful meeting with LSD pioneer Timothy Leary, and together they embarked upon a series of mind-altering and controversial experiments.

In 1962, Alpert and Leary conducted the famous "Good Friday Experiment," history's first controlled study of the connection between psychedelic drugs and mystical experiences, right inside the chapel at Boston University. The experiment got both men fired from Harvard, prompting Alpert to take a spiritual journey to India that saw him reinvent himself as the guru "Ram Dass" — and made him an icon of the hippie movement.

2.

In October 1983, Tami Oldham Ashcraft and her fiancé, Richard Sharp, began a 4,000-mile sailing trip from Tahiti to San Diego. Three weeks into the journey, they were hit by a category 4 hurricane that capsized their ship and knocked Ashcraft unconscious.⁠

Some 27 hours later, she awoke to find that her fiance was gone and she was stranded alone in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. With only a sextant and watch, Ashcraft journeyed for 41 days until she found the coast of Hawaii.

3.

Harry Haft was just a teenager when he was sent to Auschwitz. Once he arrived, the Nazi guards found out that he had some boxing experience — so they ordered him to fight his fellow prisoners in harrowing boxing matches where the loser would be executed. Forced to literally fight for his life, Haft never lost a single match, even though he would have known many of his opponents because the Nazis regularly sent people from the same town to the same concentration camps. From 1943 to 1945, he was forced to fight at least 76 people, none of whom he ever saw alive again.

Only in April 1945 did Haft manage to escape during a death march away from the camp — by killing a Nazi soldier and stealing his uniform. Haft then spent weeks running from village to village. Trained to fight to the death, he even killed an elderly couple who offered him shelter after he suspected they'd discovered that he wasn't really a Nazi. By the time he made it to Allied-controlled Germany, he weighed only 110 pounds and spent the next two years recovering in a refugee camp. But by 1947, he decided to fight again and immigrated to America to become a professional boxer — where he took on some of the biggest names in the sport.

4.

At age 17, Juliane Koepcke was sucked out of an airplane after it was struck by lightning. She fell over 2 miles to the ground still strapped to her plane seat and somehow lived. She then had to endure a 9-day walk through the Amazon jungle before eventually being rescued by loggers. She was the sole survivor of LANSA Flight 508 that killed 93 people in December 1971.

5.

By the age of 12, Drew Barrymore was already a self-described "party girl" — thanks to her mom who took her to nightclubs in Los Angeles and New York. By the time she turned 14, she had spent a year in rehab, been emancipated from her parents, and lived in her own apartment.

6.

By the time she was 17, Judy Garland was already reliant on "pep pills," a.k.a. amphetamines, and was being hounded by studio executives regarding her weight and looks. One executive called her a fat hunchback and encouraged her to smoke in order to suppress her appetite.

Garland's grueling work schedule — coupled with a strict diet of black coffee, chicken soup, and cigarettes imposed upon her by her Hollywood bosses — set the stage for her lifetime of body dysmorphia and substance abuse. The star attempted suicide at least 20 times in her life until her fatal overdose at 47.

7.

This is Simo Häyhä, the deadliest sniper in world history with over 500 confirmed kills in less than 100 days. He used no scope on his rifle and once held off over 4,000 Soviets with only 31 other Finns.

Over the course of the Winter War, which lasted roughly 100 days, Häyhä killed between 500 and 542 Russian soldiers, all with his antiquated rifle. While his comrades were using state-of-the-art telescopic lenses to zoom in on their targets, Häyhä was fighting with an iron sight, which he felt gave him a more precise target.

8.

Former NFL star Pat Tillman was hailed as a hero in 2004 after he was "killed by the Taliban." But it was a lie — he'd been killed by friendly fire. And while the shooting has since been described as accidental, some believe it was intentionally planned by the U.S. Army.

Not only was Tillman shot three times in the head, but he was also shot at close range and it was later determined that the Army had lied about his unit being ambushed by the enemy. Eerily, all of Tillman's personal items had been burned — including his uniform and private journals. On top of that, rumors had surfaced that he was about to go public about his opposition to the invasion of Iraq and the War on Terror with a televised meeting with Noam Chomsky. But this meeting would never happen.

9.

When Joe Pichler was just six years old, he made his acting breakthrough with a commercial for a Seattle department store. Soon after, he moved to Los Angeles, where he landed a part in 1999's "Varsity Blues" before earning a leading role in two installments of the "Beethoven" franchise.

Pichler then moved back to his hometown of Bremerton, Washington to attend high school and had plans to return to Hollywood after he had his braces removed — but he never got the chance. In the early morning hours of January 5, 2006, Pichler mysteriously vanished, and police have been unable to solve his disappearance to this day.

10.

On September 30, 1999, Hisashi Ouchi was exposed to the highest dose of nuclear radiation in human history. A 35-year-old lab technician at the nuclear plant in Tokaimura, Japan, Ouchi was mixing a uranium solution by hand directly over an open container when he accidentally poured in too much uranium, immediately causing a violent explosion.

For the next 83 days, Ouchi suffered unimaginable agony as the radiation worked its way through his body, obliterating his DNA and causing his skin to melt off and his eyes to weep blood before he finally died. And though he begged for death, doctors refused to listen and kept him alive against his will for nearly three excruciating months.

11.

"If I don't make it, please call my family and let them know how much I love them."

Todd Beamer was just 32 years old when his flight was hijacked by terrorists on 9/11. A passenger on United Airlines Flight 93, Beamer was forced to think quickly. He first tried calling AT&T, but both of his calls were terminated upon connection. Beamer then attempted to call his wife, but that call was also terminated. Finally, he contacted Airfone operators and was able to connect with a supervisor named Lisa Jefferson. While on the line, he pleaded with Jefferson to tell his pregnant wife and two sons that he loved them, but he also outlined a heroic plan to fight back against the hijackers alongside his fellow passengers and the flight crew. And that's exactly what he did.

12.

Between 2000 and 2003, biologist Amie Huguenard spent three summers in Alaska with her boyfriend Timothy Treadwell studying and filming grizzly bears. Treadwell, who was better known as the "Grizzly Man," had met Huguenard during a book tour in 1996 and the pair had instantly bonded over their love of animals. But then, in October 2003, the couple was brutally mauled and eaten by a half-ton bear that attacked them at their camp. And the audio of their horrifying final moments was captured on tape.

13.

In 1989, Billy Idol threw a three-week-long party in his penthouse at the Oriental Hotel in Bangkok. All the sex, drugs, and property damage eventually prompted the hotel to hit Idol with a $250,000 bill.

But when he still refused to leave, the military had to be called in to corral the British rocker. Idol was shot with a tranquilizer dart and hauled out on a stretcher before he would finally stop partying.

14.

Near the end of his life, Bob Marley was told by a doctor that he had "more cancer in him than I've seen with a live human being," and that he only had a few months to live, so "he might as well go back out on the road and die there."

Three years earlier, the reggae icon had been diagnosed with melanoma under his toenail in 1977. Doctors removed the nail and the nail bed, but Marley refused to have the toe itself amputated to stop the spread of the disease, insisting that it violated his Rastafarian religious beliefs. By 1980, the cancer had spread throughout his body, infecting his liver, lungs, and even his brain. Marley played his last show on September 30, 1980, in Pittsburgh, performing Queen's "Another One Bites The Dust" during the soundcheck to the bemusement of his roadies, who didn't know anything was wrong. He died eight months later at the age of 36.

15.

Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow skipped from bank robbery to bank robbery in America's heartland, becoming media sensations for their daring crimes and heart-throbbing love story. But all this came to a terrible halt in 1934 when an ambush stopped them dead in their tracks, decisively ending both their criminal careers and their young lives in a scene so gruesome that the photos cemented their untimely end into American history forever.

16.

In 1993, lawyer Garry Hoy fell 24 floors to his death while demonstrating the tensile strength of his office windows to a group of visiting law students. Far from being an unusual incident, body-checking window safety was his signature - and fatal - move.

Hoy's regular practice of hurling himself at window panels in front of onlookers and harmlessly bouncing off ended disastrously when it accidentally popped the glass out of its frame and sent "one of the best and brightest" lawyers plunging from the skyscraper.

17.

“4 days ago, a group of friends and I went to Murree together. We were having a walk through the Murree Hills at 2 or 3am and this happened. All of us were together. One friend asked to take a group photo of us, and took it with flash because there was low to zero lighting. When i went through my pictures later on, I was shocked to see a person standing right behind one of my friends. He had a pale white face and if you close in on his legs you can see it look as if it is not of human. None of us knew the person 3rd from the left.”

18.

On the morning of May 25, 1979, six-year-old Etan Patz convinced his mom to let him walk to the bus stop alone. When she got the call later that day that Etan never made it to school, her legs gave out from under her. His face soon appeared at breakfast tables around the U.S. as he became the original missing milk carton kid — but Etan was never seen alive again. However, after nearly 40 years of searching, Etan's case has finally been closed.

19.

Accused of murdering two white girls in 1944 without a shred of physical evidence, 14-year-old George Stinney Jr. became the youngest person in U.S. history ever executed in the electric chair.

When he was put to death, he was so small that the state electrician struggled to adjust an electrode to his right leg. Stinney even needed to sit on a phone book for the electrocution to work properly. He then survived the first round of 2,400 volts, which caused his oversized mask to slip off and expose his tears. It took two more jolts before he was dead with the room reeking of burning flesh.

20.

Strangely enough, the bizarre 2006 film ‘The Hills Have Eyes’ was actually based on the folklore story of Sawney Bean, the head of an inbred cannibal family.

Legend maintains that for over 25 years, Sawney Bean and his incestuous family of cannibalistic children terrorized medieval Scotland. According to folklore, the family would descend upon unsuspecting travelers and then dismember, pickle, and devour them. Some estimate that the family cannibalized up to 1,000 people — until one man escaped and told King James VI.

21.

Rescuing live climbers from the Death Zone on Mount Everest is risky enough, and removing their bodies is almost impossible. Many unfortunate mountaineers remain exactly where they fell, frozen in time forever to serve as macabre milestones for the living.

One body that every climber en route to the summit must pass is that of “Green Boots,” who was one of the eight people killed on the mountain during a blizzard in 1996.

The corpse, which received its name because of the neon green hiking boots it wears, lies curled up in a limestone cave on Mount Everest’s Northeast ridge route. Everyone who passes through is forced to step over his legs in a forceful reminder that the path is still treacherous, despite their proximity to the summit.

22.

On July 3, 1971, Jim Morrison's girlfriend Pamela Courson found the rock star unconscious and immobile in the bathroom of their Paris apartment. Before long, The Doors frontman was declared dead of heart failure, thought to be brought on by a heroin overdose.

In the years after Morrison's death, Courson's own addictions grew rapidly worse. She often described herself as "Jim Morrison's wife" — despite the fact that they had never married — and sometimes even delusionally claimed that he was about to call her. Nearly three years later, she suffered the same fate as The Doors frontman — and died at age 27 of a heroin overdose just like him.

23.

On June 8, 2018, 61-year-old celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain was found dead at a hotel in France, ruled suicide by hanging. Despite his massive success and role in exposing the unsavory secrets of the culinary underworld, the "original rock star" of the kitchen struggled with his own demons.

Bourdain's past heroin addiction may have been resolved, but his mental health continued to trouble him. He often discussed death, suicide, depression, and a darkness he couldn't shake, leading him to choose what experts called an "impulsive act."