This Group Unearths History’s Most Unsettling Secrets, And Here Are 50 Of Their Best Finds

He used a rope around his waist and pulled them through shark-infested waters.

What Bly found was not care or treatment, but a system meant to control people. She described scenes so disturbing that she began to wonder how many women entered sane and were broken long before anyone questioned their confinement.

Kids were starved, denied care, forced to eat vomit. Some died, rotting from the inside, as researchers recorded their suffering.

In the 1940s and 50s, Canada secretly ran nutrition experiments on Indigenous people, mostly kids trapped in residential schools. Around 1,300 people, including 1,000 children, were used as human lab rats without consent.

Researchers led by government officials and famous doctors like Frederick Tisdall deliberately kept already starving children malnourished. They withheld dental care and medical treatment just to see how bad things would get. Some kids were given vitamin supplements; others were left to suffer without help.

Survivors later described brutal punishments, including being forced to eat their own vomit. Some children died slowly from hunger and neglect while researchers recorded the results.

These experiments happened in schools like Alberni, Shubenacadie, and St. Mary’s, and in remote Indigenous communities. Most victims never knew they were part of a study. Their suffering was written up in scientific papers.

The Canadian government kept it hidden for decades. It only came to light in 2013 when historian Ian Mosby exposed it. It’s one of the darkest chapters of Canada's history.

Her ordeal led to key advances in gynecology, and she is now remembered as one of the Mothers of Gynecology.

The Shell Grotto in Margate, England, was discovered in 1835 when James Newlove was digging a pond.

It’s a 104-foot passage covered with 4.6 million shells arranged in patterns, and its origin remains a mystery even now. You can still walk through it today.

Many gave birth behind bars. Their children were taken by the state, kept in prison until age ten, then sold to fund public schools for white children.

World War II veterans, newly home and fed up, picked up rifles and surrounded the jail until the officials inside surrendered.

In it, Cheul interviews a filthy young woman, homeless and reduced to eating grass. She was found [deceased] of starvation four months later.

He went on to tour with Buffalo Bill and Texas Jack, become the first Native American man to earn an MD, and fought the US government for indigenous rights.

She [passed away] there on May 18, 1943, at just 13 years old.

They were registered as deceased and hidden from the world in the Royal 'Earlswood Institution for Mental Defectives' in 1941.

She would not stop recording until 2012. Her collection of archived footage, consisting of over 71,000 tapes, represents the most complete record of American television ever made.

Blanche Monnier, aged 52, had been chained in an attic for 25 years, following a disagreement with her mother. Traumatized beyond repair, she [passed away] in an asylum in 1913.

Between 1915 and 1926 a strange illness called Encephalitis Lethargica spread across the world. It left people awake but unable to move or speak, and entire families watched their loved ones slip into a state where they could see and hear everything but could not respond.

Some stayed trapped inside their bodies for years while others died within weeks. In all, more than half a million people were affected before the disease vanished as suddenly as it appeared, and no one ever figured out why.