43 Horrifying Historical Facts That Only A Few People Know About

I think what happened at Lake Nyos in 1986 qualifies. Basically, a landslide caused the volcanic lake to belch up carbon dioxide which then asphyxiated 1700 people in the surrounding area.

Creatures crawled out of the oceans from the deep, evolved, multiplied to an obscene abundance, has ravaged the Earth for centuries, and is plotting their parasitic plans for other planets. Seems pretty creepy to me.

Creepy s**t? Okay. How about H. H. Holmes. This crazy m**********r built a hotel specifically to fulfill his lust for m****r. I don't really trust wikipedia anymore but this seems to be in order.

The Wreck of the Titan was a book published in 1898, which accurately mirrors the wreck of the Titanic: giant ship, hits iceberg, not enough lifeboats, same size/dimensions/passengers, etc - *14 years before the Titanic sank*.

As far as man-made events go, Mao's "Cultural Revolution" - basically, turning a nation of one billion people into a giant pseudo-religious cult - deserves more attention.

The "Rochester Mirage" is pretty wild.

An atmospheric event happened over Lake Ontario in 1871 that essentially acted like a giant lens. It amplified the view of Toronto across the lake. (It's normally well out of sight.) Observers could actually see buildings and carriages moving around on the other side of the lake.

The phenomenon has been documented in other places too, and is referred to as Fata Morgana.

Not exactly supernatural. But, creepy enough to inspire books, films, and the game Silent Hill, Centralia, PA.

The town that was condemned and abandoned in 1992 due to a 50+ year burning mine-fire that still burns today.

Here in Argentina, in 1989, was a case of two girls that where found n**e and dead in a bathtub. The autopsy showed up that they were dead for at least two months.

...BUT... Many people claimed to have seen the girls alive just two days before. One of the girls was at a hospital because she had a fever.

None of the girls had taken the medicine that the doctor gave for the fever. They where not suffocated, nor intoxicated by carbon monoxide, nor electrocuted.

Fast foward 4 months. A judge decides to came back to the case. The investigation came back and found that the bathtub, that was emptied and deinfectated, incubated again lots of cadaveric fauna and was filled with water... They had theories about this, nothing confirmed.

Fast foward A YEAR. An investigator came with an hypotesis: the girls where injected right at the heart with poison from a black mamba, which accelerate the decomposition proccess. But we are in Argentina... where in the hell can you get a black mamba in Argentina?

It came out that the oldest brother of one of the victims had a reptile house with two mambas. The judge ordered that he had to be captured... but they never found him, and he's still a fugitive to this day.

They then went to the morgue to investigate the hearts of the girls (whose bodies where freezed for the investigation) to confirm the poison hipotesis...

Annnd this is the final touch: all of the sudden, the hearts dissapeared. They could never find them.

This is to this day one of the most interesting mysteries in our country.

I wrote about 200 lines of code including some functions, and new calling protocols. It compiled the first time, it run in all scenarios with no errors, so I checked it into the repository and was done.

One and done, and will never happen again.

Rasputin, he just would not die......until he died. But still it took way more doing than should be humanly possible.

EDIT: OK. So apparently, according to a whole mess o' people down below here, Rasputin died from a single gun shot to the head. The stories were made up to make him into a monster or something.

There are unconfirmed reports though, that he may well have been Russia's greatest love machine. More on that later.

When you really think what is out there. In space. How can there be no end to it.

My Oma (German for grandma) is crazy religious. We were daily church goers and it wasn't until I was old enough to leave the house that I finally got to choose my own beliefs.

Oma was obsessed with constantly having someone praying in the chapel at our local church. In her mind, god required that someone had to be praying next to the tabernacle 24/7. No one ever wanted to take the 2-5am shift, so of course Oma always volunteered and forced me to go. But she didn't just pray, she would lay prostrate on the hard a*s ground for 3 hours, arms and legs out like a cross, face down and require that I do it too. I was only 10 or 11 at the time but even then the whole thing really freaked me out.

At about 3am on one of these mornings, I was laying on the ground feeling like a crazy person when all of a sudden someone starts belting out a super ominous song on the old organ in the church. I jumped up and sprinted around the corner curious to see who else was at the church. Not a soul in sight and the organ just kept playing over and over. Oma said it was the "angels"...to this day the thought of that song still scares the s**t out of me

Edit: for those calling Oma crazy...she really wasn't. She was and is admittedly fanatical about what she believes, but she isn't insane. It's hard to explain, but it's the way she grew up. We're lucky enough to live in a time where people tend to be more open minded and have a chance to be exposed to a litany of different belief systems through the internet and their peers. Many people didn't grow up with that opportunity and because of it are very closed minded. While I don't believe what she believes, if I become even a tenth the person she is I would be ecstatic. I watched her take in homeless people off the street, feed them, house them, give them work. I watched her care for a blind woman she met while volunteering at a nursing home like this woman was her own family, eventually taking her home with her and becoming her full time care giver with no compensation. I'll knock the beliefs and practices all day, but there is no substitute for the type of kindness and goodness she possesses. I refuse to believe that she could have such an insight into what it means to truly be a part of the human race and be insane at the same time.

In Edgar Allan Poe's only novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, published in 1838, Richard Parker is a mutinous sailor on the whaling ship Grampus. After the ship capsizes in a storm, he and three other survivors draw lots upon Parker's suggestion to k**l one of them to sustain the others. Parker then gets cannibalized.
In 1884, the yacht Mignonette sank. Four people survived and drifted in a life boat before one of them, the cabin boy Richard Parker, was k****d by the others for food.
Source

The fact that some of the people that perpetrated the Ho**caust are still alive.

I've been reading about The Carrington Event - a massive solar storm that struck the earth in 1859.

From History.com: "On the morning of September 1, 1859, amateur astronomer Richard Carrington ascended into the private observatory attached to his country estate outside of London. After cranking open the dome’s shutter to reveal the clear blue sky, he pointed his brass telescope toward the sun and began to sketch a cluster of enormous dark spots that freckled its surface. Suddenly, Carrington spotted what he described as “two patches of intensely bright and white light” erupting from the sunspots. Five minutes later the fireballs vanished, but within hours their impact would be felt across the globe.

That night, telegraph communications around the world began to fail; there were reports of sparks showering from telegraph machines, shocking operators and setting papers ablaze. All over the planet, colorful auroras illuminated the nighttime skies, glowing so brightly that birds began to chirp and laborers started their daily chores, believing the sun had begun rising. Some thought the end of the world was at hand, but Carrington’s naked eyes had spotted the true cause for the bizarre happenings: a massive solar flare with the energy of 10 billion atomic bombs. The flare spewed electrified gas and subatomic particles toward Earth, and the resulting geomagnetic storm—dubbed the “Carrington Event”—was the largest on record to have struck the planet."

A similar storm today, it is believed, would send us (briefly) into complete electronic and electrical darkness.

Albert Fish was pretty d**n scary.

He would take kids and k**l them, and then he would eat them as part of his cannibalistic ways. After all of that, he'd write letters to the kid's parents, telling them how they tasted and how much he enjoyed it.

In 1908, **something** exploded over Siberia. It's known as the Tunguska event.

It lit up the sky and knocked down *millions* of trees.

There have been numerous papers and theories about what it was - the most likely explanations are that it was a small comet or a meteorite.

Creepy? Unit 731

My favorite would be The Black Dahlia M****r. It's seriously twisted.

I think the creepiest thing I have read about so far is the civil war in Liberia, it involved large amounts of child soldiers who were taken from their families, d*****d and convinced/forced to do war atrocities.

So basically during this war there were roving gangs of d*****d up youths who would perform human sacrifices and eat people, apparently they also cross-dressed or wore outrageous outfits thinking they would be protected by them.

Vice interviewed a warlord from that time 'General B**t-Naked" (yes that was his name). You can tell this guy is a psychopath because of how friendly and slick he is, just to imagine that he ate the hearts of 14 yr old children before battle sends chills down my spine.