1Catherine Howard
When Catherine Howard, the 5th wife of Henry VIII was taken from Syon Abbey to the Tower of London to prepare for her execution, she sailed in a barge down the River Thames. She passed under London Bridge, where the severed heads of her alleged lovers Thomas Culpeper and Francis Dereham were waiting for her, displayed on spikes, rotting and picked at by birds.
2. President Lyndon B. Johnson often peed in public, even during his presidency. One time, a gust of wind blew his urine onto the leg of one of his Secret Service agents. When the agent informed him he was being peed on, President Johnson replied, "I know. That's my prerogative."
3. The Royal Air Force and US Air Force dropped 3,316,000 magnesium incendiary bombs on Munich alone during World War 2. That’s 4 bombs for every inhabitant of the city. What’s even crazier is that USA dropped more bombs on Vietnam during the Vietnam War than they dropped in the entire World War 2.
4. Ilya Ivanov was a Soviet biologist who specialized in the field of artificial insemination and the interspecific hybridization of animals. He is famous for his controversial attempts to create a human-ape hybrid by inseminating three female chimpanzees with human sperm (with no results).
5. Drukpa Kunley is a famous 15th-century Tibetan monk and poet who was known for his crazy methods of enlightening people. Women sought his blessing in the name of sex, earning him the nickname "The Saint of 5,000 Women," and his penis is often referred to as, the "Thunderbolt of Flaming Wisdom."
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6Ticket to Heaven
Members of Mother Teresa's order would secretly baptize dying patients of other religions. Patients were asked if they wanted a 'ticket to heaven.' While pretending to cool the patient's forehead, words were quietly recited and the ceremony performed.
7. Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein, lost her virginity at a cemetery where she would secretly meet her future husband. After Shelley died, her family searched her desk and they found a copy of a poem written by her deceased husband, along with some of his ashes and the remains of his heart.
8. Mark Antony's wife, Fulvia, stabbed Cicero's tongue, after his decapitation, with hairpins before displaying his head on the Rostra. Supposedly this was to damn his power of speech.
9. When Roman Emperor Nero's wife died, he found a boy looking like her, removed his testicles, and had him appear in public as his wife.
10. John Kellogg, the inventor of Corn Flakes and founder of the Kellogg company, worked tirelessly to "reform masturbators" by wrapping their genitals in sharp wire to prevent arousal, burning their genitals with acid to desensitize, and circumcising small boys without anesthetic, among other things.
11Castrati
The Roman Catholic Church used to hire castrati. These were young male vocalists who had been castrated before their puberty. This allowed them to sing soprano, mezzo-soprano, or contralto well into their 40s. The practice started in the mid-1500s, reached its height in 1730, and ended in 1903. The last castrati died in 1922.
12. In 1933, Stalin deported over 6000 "unfit" people to an obscure island in Siberia. Around 4000 died, many from cannibalism, including a pretty girl who was tied to a tree and had her breasts cut off as food by starving people.
13. In 1876, Sigmund Freud dissected 400 eels looking for their testicles. To this day, the eel's mating habits remain a scientific mystery.
14. Henry VIII awarded sons of noblemen with the coveted title of "Groom of the Stool." The groom was responsible for wiping the king after defecation and keeping the facilities clean. It was an entirely honorable position that led to great intimacy with the monarch.
15. Genghis Khan's generals, Jebe and Subutai, after defeating the Russians laid thousands of them bound and stacked like cordwood, and built a platform above where he and his generals feasted, all the while the men below suffocated and were crushed to death.
16Jallianwala Bagh Massacre
In 1919, the British Imperial army opened fire, without warning, on a peaceful gathering in park named Jallianwala Bagh in the Punjab province of India. The crowd had gathered there to protest against the inhumanities of the colonialist government. On the order of British officer Gen. Reginald Dyer hundreds of unarmed men, women, and children were killed. The incident is known as Jallianwala Bagh Massacre.
17. You could not have been King of Ireland without nipples, as the kissing or sucking of King's nipples was a form of submission. If one attempted to become the Irish Monarch and was not successful, your nipples were removed. They were also cut off if you were sacrificed.
18. In 1984, during the Iraq/Iran war, Iraqi forces had laid hundreds of exposed electrical wires in the Majnoon Marshes which they knew the Iranians had to cross. Those wires were all snaked together and connected to large electrical generators. When Iran attempted to cross the marsh with boats, Iraq used just enough concentrated artillery to force the Iran Soldiers out of the boats and walk through the marshland. As soon as that happened, the Iraqis fired up their generators and electrocuted thousands of Iranian Soldiers in an instant. The Iraqis then sent in a road-building detail, collected all of the Iranian dead, and stacked the bodies like cordwood, 5 corpses high, and 5 across, covering them with lime, and then a bunch of sand. They used the Iranian dead to build a road for their trucks to cross the marshlands.
19. Johan de Witt was a Dutch Prime Minister who became so unpopular during his reign that a bunch of rioters lynched and partially ate him in 1672. They were never prosecuted.
20. ‘The Miracle of 1511’ was a festival in Brussels in which peasants built approximately 110 satirical snowmen. Some were even satirical and pornographic in nature, performing sex acts, to protest against socioeconomic inequalities between the peasants of Brussels and the ruling House of Habsburg.
21Taj Mahal Construction
Shah Jahan, who constructed the Taj Mahal, had his minions cut off the hands of the workers after the structure was completed so that he could preserve the mausoleum's blessed significance.
22. Ankhesenamun, King tut's first wife was his half-sister. But she also may have been his full sister and even at one point may have been his stepmother.
23. In the 19th century, in Siam, it was forbidden to touch a member of the royal family. When Queen Sunandha Kumariratana's boat capsized in front of many people, none of them went to help - as they were all afraid for their lives. The 19-year-old queen drowned together with her daughter.
24. In 17th century Paris, a group of apprentices, angered that they were treated worse than cats, imitated the felines screeching all night. The master ordered the noisy cats killed. The apprentices held a trial, convicted the cats of witchcraft, and hung them.
25. At the temple of Aphrodite in Cyprus, overlooking the legendary birthplace of Aphrodite, young virgin girls would tie a bowstring around their head and await a man to come along and throw a silver coin of any value into their lap. The man would say "I demand thee in the name of the goddess". The girl then had to have sex with the man. In this way, the girl would make her "first fruit" offering to Aphrodite.
