Get Premium
Dark mode theme is available exclusively for premium users. Learn more about the benefits of subscribing.
No fees, cancel anytime.
Dark Mode 
No fees, cancel anytime 
30submissions
1week left
30 Surprising Stories From History That Are Somehow True
History is the best story ever told. It’s full of drama, intrigue, mystery, comedy and plot twists that will leave your jaw on the floor. Today’s HBO writers only wish they could come up with tales as wild as what’s actually taken place in the past. And if you need some reminders that truth really is stranger than fiction, you’ve come to the right place, pandas.
Redditors have been sharing stories from the past that sound fictional yet are somehow true, so we’ve gathered the juiciest ones below. From amazing victories to devastating tragedies, all of these tales sound like they came straight out of a creative novelist's mind. So enjoy making your way through the history lesson below, and be sure to upvote the stories that you wish you had been taught in school!
This post may include affiliate links.
#1
During WW1 The German navy built a ship and painted it to make it look like a British ship called the RMS Carmania in order to infiltrate and destroy British convoys. On the ships first outing, the first enemy it encountered was the real RMS Carmania, which promptly sunk it.
RELATED:
#2
The life of Harriet Tubman, one of the rare examples of someone who is a household name for being a bada*s who was actually about ten times more bada*s than people know about.
Things she did other than the Underground Railroad:
1) She financed and recruited for John Brown's Harper's Ferry slabe revolt raid, and the only reason she didn't fight in person was she was bedridden with malaria
2) During the Civil War, she joined the Union Army as a cook/nurse
3) She somehow class shifted into a spy/scout and helped Union leaders plan raids into Confederste territory, and she assassinated several Confederates
4) She rose in the ranks until she commanded a small raiding force of 300 Union troops from the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry Regiment, the second black US Army unit ever.
5) Her command, Company C, 54th, raided southern plantations, slaughtered slave drivers, and freed captive slaves
6) In the Combahee Ferry raid, where the 54th freed 700 slaves, she was also in command of three Union frigates, and when a Confederate division was advancing on them she fired broadsides from the three naval warships directly into the enemy troops.
7) She survived the war, and immediately turned around and started fighting for women's suffrage.
#3
Joshua Norton was just this random crazy guy from San Francisco who hated all this political nonsense that was going on at the time and figured he could do the job better at it himself, and thus "The Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico" was born. While he held no real power, the people liked him so much that they treated him like royalty anyways.
Any currency issued under his name was treated like real money at many establishments.
One day, he was arrested by a private security force because of his mental health, which enrage practically all of San Francisco. The Police Chief let him go because he had committed no crime, and Norton gave an Imperial Pardon to the guy who arrested him. After this incident, any police officer Norton passed would salute him.
Another time, when a riot had formed and was getting pretty violent, Norton simply stood in front of the mob and calmly prayed, which manged to disperse the mob.
And that's not even a fraction of the crazy stuff that he did.
#4
Sergeant Stubby. During world War 1, a soldier found a stray dog when training on the Yale University campus, and took a liking to him. The soldier snuck the dog onto the ship when he had to leave campus and when the dog was found by the commanding officer, he was allowed to stay because he had learned how to salute.
Stubby was injured a few times during the war, but he was useful with alerting his squad of surprise mustard gas attacks and gunshots before the human ear could detect the sound. He also found and comforted wounded soldiers and caught a German soldier by the leg of his pants until American soldiers got to him.
AKA. The bestest boi to ever live.
#5
In 1993 a man taught geese to follow his ultralight aircraft glider. They didn't know how to migrate, so he flew all the way to an area where geese generally migrate to with his geese following.
#6
In 1971, a teenage girl named Juliane Koepcke was on a plane that was struck by lightning and disintegrated in the air. She plummeted 3,000 meters strapped to her seat, and landed in the Amazon rainforest.
Her mom had been on the flight with her, and Juliane searched in vain for her mom, but Juliane was the sole survivor of the crash. She survived 11 days alone, treating her maggot-infested wounds with fuel and using tracking techniqies her father had taught her, before she found a boat that she used to make her way back to civilization.
What an absolute legend.
#7
Jeanne de Clisson (1300-1359) was married to a French nobleman who was beheaded for treason by the French King. Enraged, she sold their estate and purchased three black warships with red sails, and became a pirate queen of the English Channel who targeted French ships. She became known as “The Lioness of Brittany” and in her 13 years of piracy she would slaughter every member of a ship’s crew except for one so that last survivor could go back and tell the French king what had happened.
#8
Jack. A Baboon who was employed to change rail signals.
“After initial skepticism, the railway decided to officially employ Jack once his job competency was verified. The baboon was paid twenty cents a day, and a half-bottle of beer each week. It is widely reported that in his nine years of employment with the railroad, Jack never made a mistake.”
#9
The escape from Antarctica by the members of the Antarctic expedition led by Ernest Shackleton. The stuff they went through was unbelievable. Their boat, the Endurance was crushed by ice floes. They were stranded on the floes for over a year in temperatures well below freezing. They then took to three boats around 22 feet in length across the antarctic ocean looking for land. There were about 10 men in each boat. They missed reaching land by just a few miles at times. Two thirds of them got stranded on Elephant Island surrounded by ice while one of the boats went out in search of rescue. That boat made it through the Drake Passage, one of the deadliest places in the ocean. All but three of them got stranded with little food and water while the three men who left became the first people the cross South Georgia on foot. They found civilization. Rescued the men who came through the Drake Passage. Waited months until they could rescue those on Elephant Island. Every single person who came on the initial voyage survived with the worst lasting consequence being a single foot amputation.
#11
In 2007 a paraglider got trapped in the updraft of two joining thunderstorms and was lifted to an altitude of 33,000 feet. She landed over three hours later about sixty kilometers north of her starting position having survived extreme cold, lightning and lack of oxygen.
#12
The great molasses flood of 1919, a tank filled with 2m gallons of molasses burst and sent a tidal wave of molasses through the streets of Boston, 21 people were k**led.
#13
The Carrington Event.
In 1859 the Earth was hit by a geomagnetic storm from the sun. It caused auroras as far south as Rome. Telegraph wires caught fire and in general it was chaos.
If this happened today it would likely cause massive blackouts for weeks or even months and cause trillions in damage.
#14
The East German balloon escape.
In 1979, two families escaped East Germany to West Germany by a homemade hot air balloon.
#15
An English king named Ethelred, later called the Unready, took some troops to defend against a Viking invasion.
The weather was bad, so a lot of the Vikings’ ships crashed as they were landing. Ethelred thought that it would be dishonourable to attack them as they were stumbling onto shore, so he kept his troops back until the Vikings had a chance to get together and form proper battle lines before he attacked them. The better prepared Vikings then won the fight and slaughtered a bunch of Ethelred’s men and he and the rest were forced to run away while the Vikings went around pillaging.
#16
Edgar Allen Poe wrote a novel in 1838 in which 4 shipwrecked survivors, at the point of starvation, choose to resort to cannibalism. So they k**l the young cabin boy, Richard Parker, and eat him.
In 1884, a ship called the Mignonette sank. 4 crewmembers survived. At the point of starvation, they k**led and ate the youngest of them: Richard Parker.
#17
Wojtek was a bear who fought N**s in return for cigarettes and beer. He didn’t die until 20 years after WW2.
#18
In 1980 Lake Peigneur in Louisiana drained like a bathtub with the plug removed. Oil Drillers on a rig in the lake had hit a mine shaft below. The rig, barges, a tugboat and part of a nearby island got sucked into the largest man-made whirlpool ever.
#19
The Roman emperor Caligula once declared war against Neptune, god of the ocean. He led his soldiers to a beach and instructed them to stab the water.
#20
The Great Locust swarm of 1875. At one point the swarm was measured to be 100,000sq miles and the locust would eat everything in their path, even each other. The swarm was so thick that whenever it passed over an area it would block out the sun.
#21
The [Battle for Castle Itter](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_for_Castle_Itter) near the end of WWII saw US soldiers, French POWs, and the *German* army fighting on the same side to hold the castle against an SS tank division.
To make it even weirder, the French prisoners included several prime ministers and a tennis star.
#22
The Bone Wars! Two rival paleontologists, Othneil Charles Marsh and Edward Drinker Cope, were in a race for academic clout, so they both took off to places like the fossil beds of Montana and Utah to try and dig up as many dinosaurs as possible before the other guy. But they didn't stop there, and hired spies and sabateurs to impede the other's work, as well as trying to pass off sloppy or fake skeletons sometimes. The overwhelming majority of iconic dinosaur genre that we know were either first discovered or simply got a lot of new samples to work with, and were made iconic by the amount of publicity they received. This includes Triceratops, Stegosaurus, some remains of Tyrannosaurus, Apatosaurus, and many, many more.
This is also where the Brontosaurus confusion comes from. One of the scientists (I forget who) had already discovered Apatosaurus. The other then discovered a new skeleton of the same dinosaur, but intentionally put a skull from a different species, Camarosaurus, onto that skeleton and tried to pass it off as a new species entirely, Brontosaurus. The fake was unveiled pretty quickly but the name stuck. More recently, however, we have a lot more tools to distinguish smaller features from bones, and it was found that the skeleton that was originally passed off as Brontosaurus is actually barely different enough to receive its own genus, and the name Brontosaurus was revived.
I've always thought that this could make a fantastic show, especially if it includes dramatized "flashbacks" to how the dinosaurs in the skeletons died.
Edit: the Wikipedia page's intro describes it very nicely as well:
>The Bone Wars, also known as the Great Dinosaur Rush, was a period of intense and ruthlessly competitive fossil hunting and discovery during the Gilded Age of American history, marked by a heated rivalry between Edward Drinker Cope (of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia) and Othniel Charles Marsh (of the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale). Each of the two paleontologists used underhanded methods to try to outdo the other in the field, resorting to bribery, theft, and the destruction of bones. Each scientist also sought to ruin his rival's reputation and cut off his funding, using attacks in scientific publications.
Edit: Its worth noting that the bone wars have had a massive positive legacy on paleontology as a field, but left both scientists financially and socially ruined. An excellent bittersweet ending.
#23
Dr Robert Liston performed a operation that ended up with a 300% mortality rate. He was amputating a leg of a patient, during this he sliced off the fingers of a assistant, they both died of infection. He also slashed the coat tails of a spectator, who was so terrified that the knife pierced his vital organs that he died from fright.
#24
All of the assasination attempts on Castro, only 7 are confirmed, but there are 638 supposed ones. Basically they read like a comedy sketch. The CIA once places a cool sea shell rugged with explosives in a place where they thought Castro would see it, go “oooh cool shell” and pick it up. Despite this genius he died of natural causes.
#25
The London Beer Flood of 1814: a 22-foot-tall beer vat blew out and at least 100,000 to as much as 323,000 imperial gallons give or take flooded slum-dwellings, killing 8 people. Five of those people k**led were at the time at a celebration of life service for someone else
#26
In July 1518, residents of the city of Strasbourg (then part of the Holy Roman Empire) were struck by a sudden and seemingly uncontrollable urge to dance.
The hysteria kicked off when a woman known as Frau Troffea stepped into the street and began to silently twist, twirl and shake. She kept up her solo dance-a-thon for nearly a week, and before long, some three-dozen other Strasbourgeois had joined in. By August, the dancing epidemic had claimed as many as 400 victims.
The strange episode didn’t end until September, when the dancers were whisked away to a mountaintop shrine to pray for absolution.
The funny thing is that there is not really an explanation for what happened. Explanations range from a medical issues known as "hot blood", to curses being place on people.
#27
The CIA was researching psychic abilities for 30 years as a way to spy on the USSR. After 30 years, the program was terminated, and their conclusion was that psychic powers probably don't exist.
Edit: the actual conclusion was that the evidence for remote viewing was un-falsifiable (and therefore un-provable). Many of the more promising results were believed to be caused by information leakage, meaning that test subjects had prior knowledge about the subject they were asked about. They were unable to verify any of their results because of this, and even if the psychic abilities were real, they were unreliable at best.
Edit 2: The codename fro the project was "stargate" you can find the documents on the CIA website here.
#28
Louis the 19th was King of France for 20 minutes.
The shortest war ever recorded was around 40 minutes long.
During the Salem Witch Trials, dogs were also accused of witchcraft. 2 dogs were executed because of it.
#29
Harold Holt, the PM of Australia, went for a swim in the ocean in 1967 and was never seen again.
You Might Also Like: 27 impressive 3D tattoos
Add Your Answer! This post is a community curated
Add Your Answer!
Explore more of these tags
Related on Bored Panda
