55 Disturbing Historical Facts And Events That May Leave You Uneasy

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Carl Tanzler removed Elena Milagro's body from her tomb, covered her rotting skin with silk and plaster, held her bones together with wires and coat hangers, replaced her eyes with glass, and slept with her corpse for 7 years.

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

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

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.

The goal was to make people too sick to vote so the cult could win a local election and take control of the town.

When one died suddenly in 1993, the other finally spoke. She said one had to [go] so the other could live.

They were called the Silent Twins. Doctors, teachers, and even prisons couldn’t break their silence.

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.

It was discovered that Froon’s cell phone had been used until April 11, with her camera full of photos taken in the dark. Their partial skeletons were found a few months later.

He became the first missing child to appear on a milk carton. The case stayed cold for decades. [Criminal] wasn’t caught until 2012.

He was just two blocks from home. The search went national. It took 33 years to find the man who did it.

Between 1880 and 1930, over 4 million Europeans were brought in and interracial marriage was encouraged to reduce Black and Indigenous ancestry over time.

The dancing plague of 1518, or dance epidemic of 1518 (French: Épidémie dansante de 1518; German: Straßburger Tanzwut), was a case of dancing mania that occurred in Strasbourg, Alsace (modern-day France), in the Holy Roman Empire from July 1518 to September 1518. Somewhere between 50 and 400 people took to dancing for weeks. There are many theories behind the phenomenon, the most popular being stress-induced mass hysteria, suggested by John Waller. Other theories include ergot poisoning.

He had survived alone for 113 days on plants and small animals. When discovered, he weighed only 67 pounds.

[They wanted] to test whether humans could live in a self-sustaining habitat, often framed like a prototype for a Moon/Mars-style colony.

This image is likely a recreation for the camera. In reality, Howard Carter’s excavation of the boy pharaoh’s tomb was unorthodox, to say the least. Carter, his patron Lord Carnarvon, and Carnarvon’s daughter Lady Evelyn secretly entered the burial chamber before resealing the entrance to conceal their actions. Carter dismantled Tutankhamun’s mummy to remove it from the sarcophagus.

That said, the 50-year-old, self-trained Egyptologist was meticulous and, compared to many of his contemporaries, more respectful of ancient remains. Carter resigned from the Egyptian Antiquities Service after siding with Egyptian guards during a dispute with tourists. His careful documentation and methods ultimately preserved a remarkable amount of the tomb’s 3,000-year-old artifacts, many of which might otherwise have been damaged or lost.

He considered circassians to be a "lowly race" and had a collection of Circassian body parts. Zass is portrayed as the Devil or Satan in Circassian folklore.

Authorities forcibly committed many people there for life on bogus grounds. More than 5,700 patients lie in graves marked only by numbers.

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.

In 1820, Martin Fugate and his wife, Elizabeth Smith, settled near Hazard, Kentucky, along Troublesome Creek. Both carried a rare recessive trait, and several of their children were born with striking blue skin.

The family stayed in an isolated area with a tiny local dating pool, and the gene kept circulating through marriages within the same small community, including between relatives. Over generations, more descendants were born with the same blue tint, and locals began calling them the “Blue People of Kentucky.”.

This practice was painful and limited women's mobility and economic opportunities, leading to its abolition after a campaign by Chinese reformers and Christian missionaries.

Her brother couldn’t accept it. That would mean admitting the family had left her in institutions for the criminally insane for 50 years.

Its only egg was then deliberately crushed under a hunter’s boot during the struggle.

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.

The man who found it even took it home and washed it before realizing it was human.

The 14 year old, known for his quiet intelligence, bought a one way ticket to London in 2007, stepped into King’s Cross Station and disappeared from view.

he was convinced that the Noid character and 'Avoid the Noid' ad campaign used by Domino's had "stolen his name" and was targeting him personally. The Noid character was retired for years after the incident.

To drive him out, American troops surrounded the building and blasted rock music through loudspeakers day and night.

The 3-year-old vanished from apartment 5A while her parents ate about 55 meters away, and in a very short window between checks, they found her gone from bed.

She left a friend’s hotel to walk back alone and disappeared halfway along the route. Her phone pinged hours later in a remote marsh. She vanished without a trace.

In 1861 she published her memoir, becoming one of the most powerful voices.

That sentence turned into 34 years after 13 escape attempts, 7 successful. DeFriest could memorize key patterns and recreate them from almost anything.

Before it was demolished in 1994, it had 50,000 inhabitants on 26,000 m², and therefore a very high population density of 1,923,077/km².

He chose banditry after multiple failed prospecting ventures, and robbed stagecoaches for 8 years. He would only spend few years in prison.

their Oldsmobile was left in Sears’ upper lot and a “we had to get away” letter arrived the next day.

Cameras covered every exit, yet neither was recorded leaving, and later searches did not find any bodies.

On the night of December 16, 1773, 252 years ago, Boston stopped arguing and started acting. For weeks, the city had been locked in a standoff over the Tea Act, which allowed the British East India Company to sell tea directly to the colonies while still enforcing Parliament’s right to tax it. To many colonists, this was a continuation of taxation without representation. Three tea ships sat idle in Boston Harbor, their cargo unwanted and legally unable to leave without paying the duty. Thousands of Bostonians packed into meetings at Faneuil Hall and the Old South Meeting House, debating, petitioning, and waiting for Governor Thomas Hutchinson to relent. He did not.

That evening, after Hutchinson again refused to let the ships depart, Samuel Adams reportedly declared that the meeting could do nothing more to save the country. Shortly after, men began filing out of the Old South Meeting House, not with a formal plan, but with a shared resolve. Somewhere between 30 and 130 men, many associated with the Sons of Liberty, some of whom disguised themselves as Mohawk Indians, a symbolic rejection of British identity. They moved quietly toward Griffin’s Wharf, where the ships were moored.

Over the course of roughly three hours, the men boarded the ships and systematically broke open and dumped 342 chests of tea into the cold, dark harbor, about 92,000 pounds in total. The ship crews did not interfere.

The reaction was swift and severe. In Britain, outrage was nearly universal, even among those sympathetic to colonial grievances. Parliament responded with the Coercive Acts, known in the colonies as the Intolerable Acts, closing Boston Harbor and stripping Massachusetts of key self-governing rights. Rather than isolating Boston, the punishment united the colonies.