73 Times Archaeologists Dug Up Something Truly Chilling

Not maybe as old as other discoveries, but I'm consistently disturbed by all of the children they are finding buried at old residential schools across Canada and the United States. Thousands and Thousands of children. Buried and hidden from history until now.

In 2016/2017, they unearthed something like 900+ remains of babies who died or were k****d by nuns in Tuam (two-um) Galway, Ireland. It was the septic tank of an old site where a laundry used to be.

This is a place you were sent if you'd a baby out of wedlock or your family cared too much about how the neighbours thought of them. You washed clothes until you have birth and your baby went to an orphanage. Wealthy Irish, British and American couples came to help the poor babies who's mother was well and alive in the laundry. Obviously sadly some babies never made it to the orphanage.

I always say it. Priests are now known to have done horrific things but the nuns are worse. They hide things and do things like Tuam.

Göbekli Tepe

the sheer magnitude and age of the site are itself mind-boggling. A civilization without writing and apparently lacking proper settlements or agriculture continued to develop thus temple complex for thousands of years since 10.000 BCE. Some monoliths might require up to hundred of people to bring and erect them. How did they pass the meaning of this endless project through generations?

and the disturbing part: this huge complex was deliberately buried (and thus well preserved) under hundreds cubic tons of dirt around 8000 BCE.

Imagine deliberately burying Louvre Museum or Vatican. What sort of horrible apprehension or presentiment about the future made them to abandon and inter a work of many generations?

This thought gave me goosebumps as I stand there looking at the part uncovered by archeologists (they mean only of 5% of the complex was uncovered yet). I highly recommend visiting the site and the museum of Urfa.

The unmarked graves of the indigenous children in Canada, literally terrifying and the fact that they stopped talking about it so quickly.

The fact that we've had 5 extinction events, and that the 6th and largest is staring us in the face and we are still arguing over politics, borders and most people think god(s) going to appear any minute now and bestow eternal bliss as a reward. I find it hard not to panic about that sometimes.

Probably the graves at the Catholic "Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home" in Tuam, Ireland, where in 2017 the bodies of over 800 children were dug up on the former homes grounds.

The average age of the victims was between 35 weeks and 3 years old and in its day, the care home served as a place of residence for orphans and abandoned children and as a location where unwed mothers (typically teenagers) gave birth. The overwhelming majority of the children had died from malnutrition, illness and general neglect and the consensus now, is that most were k****d (or allowed to die) as a result of feelings fostered by the patriarchal, ultra-conservative religious culture that ran the institution, which largely viewed the infants as worthless creatures that were the product of sin, poverty and immoral s****l conduct. The children's bodies were disposed of in an unmarked burial ground on the site (said to be a cess pit) and of the 800+ bodies that were dug up, only 2 of the deaths had ever been officially recorded by the institution.

The care home ran from 1921 to 1961 and the culture of the time was that unwed mothers (especially teen mothers) were treated as social pariahs and punished by their families and local communities severely (potentially for life), which often meant that the mothers had little option but to go to a place where they could give birth in secret and then have the baby removed. The midwife's at these institutions (which were not hospitals) could be very a*****e and denial of things like painkillers during childbirth was often enforced as the pain of childbirth was seen as part of the punishment for the mothers "sinful" s****l conduct. The baby would then often be taken away from the mother (whether she begged to keep it or not), where the institution then typically listed the child as "Abandoned" or "Orphaned" on it's record systems. (Officially), these taken children would then be raised by the institutions until they were adopted by someone.

Meanwhile, the biological mothers would not only be prevented from ever having contact with their child again, but even from knowing a shred of information about their childs eventual fate. After giving birth, it was also common practice at the care home for the teen mother to be sent to work in the Magdalene Laundries, which was a notorious work house style system with heavy religious undertones in Ireland that punished girls like them in a moral character "reform through prayer & hard labour" attitude type approach.
On the outside, the Magdalene Laundries was perceived by some to be a noble and charitable institution that offered women from the bottom dregs of society (unwed mothers, mothers who had left a*****e husbands, runaway girls, mothers who had had their children taken away due to poverty, etc) a 2nd chance in society to reform themselves and get a job, but most people were aware of the reality of the institution, which was that it was a place where endless girls & women were subjected terrible working conditions, verbal and physical a***e, and where many were maimed (or even k****d!) because of the terrible work conditions (some women there also suffered s****l a***e, for which there was obviously no justice). But most people socially tolerated the institutions place in society for the hatred & disdain towards the nature of the girls and women there was so widespread, that nobody had any issues knowing that they suffered such a***e & neglect as it was viewed as further (morally justifiable) punishment for the females "sins".

The people who ran these institutions were extremely well-connected within the church and very powerful in their local communities and they effectively ruled as untouchable Gods over the lives of the children "born out of sin", who conversely had no power nor status in their communities. The care homes were often run like prisons (with the children being almost never let outside the grounds) and due to the secretive nature of the births & record keeping, often the local communities had no idea that many of the children even individually existed. Nobody listened to the mothers pleas nor concerns for decades but even after very serious alarm bells started being rung in the 1970s after the Tuam care home was closed down (for example, when some workers discovered bags of children's bones in the basement, rumours in the communities of mass graves at the site abounded) the problem was the people who ran the former institution were still alive, influential and active members of the church and in their communities (and effectively used their connections and influence to cancel or discourage any formal investigations into the matter).

It took years of campaigning by various individuals before any excavations at the site took place. A part of what finally broke the barrier, was the discovery of 222 children's remains at a different but similar former care home. But an even bigger part of why a lot of these excavations took so long to take place is simply because the people who once ran these institutions have now largely died off (and with them not only their influence, but also a great deal of the accountability that the broader church has over these institutions of cruelty).

And if 100s of dead children was not bad enough...There are ongoing investigations at the moment that over 1000 children may have been human trafficked from the care home, to God knows what fate...And the scale of this problem (the m****r, s****l a***e and trafficking of children etc) does appear to be massive, affecting many more former religious run care homes and similar institutions across not just Catholic Ireland, but the broader UK.

Beyond a handful of verbal apologies, there has never been any real justice over this terrible slaughter and a***e of 1000s babies, women and kids by the Catholic Church.

It's not one particular thing, but essentially the millennia of brain drain. We've discovered a lot of instances of things that are exceptionally advanced. Successful brain surgeries, buildings with architecture such that they can sound like birds calling back to you, precision mapping techniques, etc. etc. And these are just the big ones that have made news or viral internet fame.

And through mankind's assorted upheavals due to war, famine, jealousy, politics, etc. we've managed to erase the knowledge that was poured into these advances. The most recent iteration of this, of course, is European colonization and the ongoing mythos around white supremacy, so much so that we have people who actually try to chalk these incredible advances up to aliens. Right, because surely in the 100,000 years of our species, only white Europeans ever made significant strides in technology, medicine, architecture, etc. These same a******s whose doctors protested at washing their hands before operating on patients.

We only see a fraction of the past. And there are entire empires and civilizations we can't even begin to learn about cause we have mere scraps of what used to exist of them. How far could mankind have gotten, really, if we didn't have to keep warring over resources or destroying one another's civilizations and culture? What kinds of insane butterfly effects have driven rampant ignorance and death because even one potential inventor/doctor/architect's life was snuffed out? The enormity of human potential never achieved looms large in my mind. I fear the reason we don't hear anything out there that might be aliens is because The Great Filter explanation of Fermi's paradox is a constant; that all civilizations are doomed to only dream of their potential before animalistic cruelty, rampant consumption, and war ultimately reduce then to nothing. And there's only so many times civilization can fall before humanity can't rise from the ashes again.

The discovery of the bodies at Pompeii and what happened there always get to me. An entire city wiped out and bodies mummified where they fell.

Edit - I’m aware it’s not mummification just wasn’t sure how else to describe it honestly.

Everytime they unearth a Woolly Mammoth they skip the part about how there are ancient viruses down there too and that they are only unearthing such great specimens due to climate change accelerated permafrost melting, which at some point will ramp up exponentially since melting releases so much CO2…….

The first King of Hawai'i, Kamehameha the Great, united the islands via conquest, and on Oahu he defeated the main force opposing him by trapping them on a cliff (the Pali) and essentially shoving them off. In the 1960's when they began building a highway through the mountains, they at one point were doing construction in the area where the battle was fought, and the construction unearthed hundreds of skulls and human remains. To this day no one camps or hikes in the valley beneath the Pali because of several supernatural incidents many believe are linked to the fact hundreds fell to their death in the valley.

OK so here's my time to show some very interesting info. It's very recent and that's the scary part. There have been found ,,vampire graves" in Carpathian Mountains ,,deep" countryside (Slovakia, Poland, Romania, Ukraine, Hungary, Serbia) which means graves of people who were beheaded, their heads put between their legs, teeth knocked out with wooden stakes, and bodies staked to the ground by limbs forming a cross. So basically people believed to have been vampires. The scary part: are they medieval or victorian era tombs? No, they are from the 1930's.

Archaeology student here. Here’s one I learned in class. A pueblo village went through a horrible drought and famine. A dwelling was found with the remains of a family that had died violently and had several cut marks all over their body. They also found a human coprolite (ancient p**p). It is common practice to run chemical analyses of coprolites to figure out a person’s last meal. It was human flesh. The DNA of the flesh particles matched the DNA of the family. Somebody m******d and ate the family, then pooped in the house.

Bog bodies. Being able to see the final pained facial expression of a m******d/sacrificed person, as well as the extraordinarily well-preserved details of the wounds that ended their life, after hundreds or even thousands of years... it's almost hard to fathom what you're looking at.

I mean, to understand the length of time this dude's skin and meat has survived more or less intact requires some serious meditation on the matter. It's like a time machine that lets you see what a man's recent corpse would have looked like millennia ago.

And he was just there, in that patch of bog that has remained a bog for all that time, fully-clothed in both garments and flesh, sometimes with a garrotte still attached to his throat, waiting for someone to discover him. His killers long dead and forgotten, his family long dead and forgotten, all turned to dust and scattered to the winds. And he's just chilling in there, with his face and bones and toenails just where they were all those thousands of years ago.

Empires have risen and fallen continuously since he entered that bog, and the greatest emperors have all been ground to nothing by the pestle of time, yet there he is, still fully-formed and still rockin' some sweet threads.

Creepy.

Lead coffins….

In 18th century Paris, the graveyards where becoming so full that bodies where not getting the time they needed to decompose before the area of the graveyard was being used to intern more people.

Usually with the earlier graveyards they would work round in a circle using the spaces to bury people. In about 100 years or more they would get back to the start and no one would remember who was buried there and they would reuse the space. Body has had plenty of time to decompose so no problem.

Skip forward to mass urban expansion in the 17-18th century where bad living conditions and a short life span was leading to over use of the now city’s graveyards. The normal practice of working around the graveyard to intern people was still being done. Only now it was only taking 4 years or so to have done a full round. The ground level was getting higher and higher and they where so full that the wasn’t enough soil around the bodies for them to fully decompose. The place was a mess and bodies where just not decomposing properly before they where being disturbed for more burials.

So to combat this, those that could afford it started using lead coffins which were sealed.

These coffins get recovered by archaeologists and because once they are sealed they become airtight the bodies inside can be perfectly preserved.

One had a girl in it that was so well preserved that her clothes were prefect, her hair was still plated and brown. She was so well preserved that her blue eye colour could still be seen.

Others that have been found have cracks in the coffin and this means that the rate of decay within them can be very varied.

This can vary from there being nothing left, to everything else gone but say just a hat remaining, to half a very well preserved body to a horrible jelly like goo (putrefaction) and every level in between.

Those that have worked on these sites and opened these coffins have been offered psychological counselling afterwards because of how disturbing the remains have been found to be.

When I was visiting Savanah I did a kayak tour through Ebenezer Creek. Hundreds of freed slaves followed the Union amy on Sherman's March to the sea. The union army was being sporadically shelled by in the rear by the confederates.

The union army built a bridge over the marshy, alligator infested Ebenezer Creek and told the freed people at the rear they could cross once his 14,000 troops had crossed first. Deciding that the freed people had become a burden however, he ordered the bridge to be cut, abandoning 600-1000 freed slaves on the western bank. The freed slaves had only death or re-enslavement behind them. Panicked, they opted for near certain death in the waters. Most of the men, women and children died attempting to cross. A few made it and tried to make rafts to help the others. Davis had no remorse for his actions and was defended by Sherman.

Some amount of bones have been brought up, but mosty the Creek remains a watery grave.

I'm going to go with something that is scary because it was apparently mundane. When I took an intro to archeology course for medievalists the instructor who had many years of medieval digs under her belt said that they were used to digging up cemeteries, and not usually much affected by it, but that you would occasionally find people who by their poses had apparently been buried alive and woken up and struggled before dying for real. This was common enough that it was not totally surprising, though it could never be common enough for you to get used to it.

The Aztec d***h whistle. It was used to mimic the cries of a human by the Aztec possibly during rituals or in the battlefield, and it worked a little too well. It is very unsettling to hear.

The mass graves of indigenous children found outside of Catholic etc. schools they were forced to attend, away from their families. In BC, Canada.

Most were nameless.

The minoans in Crete, it’s scary to think that such an important culture could be forgotten about for over 3000 years.

Robert Pickton is a serial k***r in British Columbia. He created a charity run on his pig farm called “Piggy’s Palace Good Times Society” where he entertained marginalized and transient people - including women and indigenous people - from Vancouvers downtown east side. Women had been going missing in large numbers for about 20 years. The police largely ignored concerns that people were going missing due to who they were. He m******d between 26-49 women and buried them on his pig farm.
Once the pieces were put together, his farm was thoroughly searched. Archaeology students were brought in to help with the work of identifying body parts. It might not be the most frightening thing discovered, but the quantity and, well, the horrific circumstances must have been difficult for those students to deal with.