Recently, Reddit user No_Camera29 asked, “What’s a creepy fact you wish you never learned?” and people had a ton to say about world history that was wildly disturbing. Here are 23 facts you probably did not learn about in school.
NOTE: This post contains graphic descriptions of violence and death.
1.The Nazi atrocities during WWII are well-documented, but few seem to know about Josef Mengele’s experiments on twins. Reports suggest he performed tests on 732 pairs of twins at Auschwitz, mainly on the topic of inherited genes and attempting to prove that Jewish and Roma people were genetically weak. Survivors remember children having organs and limbs removed without anesthesia, other children getting murdered and then dissected, and still others getting injected with diseases.
One child remembers being brought into Mengele’s lab: “I was looking at a whole wall of human eyes. A wall of blue eyes, brown eyes, green eyes. These eyes, they were staring at me like a collection of butterflies, and I fell down on the floor.” Mengele also allegedly once threw a newborn infant into an oven because it was not a twin. After the war, Mengele escaped to South America. He was never caught and brought to justice. He lived until 1979.
Mengele also experimented on people with dwarfism and other physical differences, along with Roma people. One victim remembers Mengele forcing a Roma woman and a person with dwarfism to have sex.
Gali Tibbon / AFP via Getty Images
2.We cannot speak about WWII war crimes without mentioning Japan’s Unit 731. They conducted atrocious experiments on (mostly Chinese) prisoners of war, many on the topic of how much the human body could withstand before death. Many of the leaders were granted immunity from the US in exchange for the results of their experiments. Among other things, we know how to treat frostbite due to Unit 731.
3.And then there’s the horrors that occurred at Pitești Prison in Romania after the war. Between 1949 and 1951, the Communist Party tortured, humiliated, and killed political prisoners, many of them young anti-communist students captured by the Soviets, in a “reeducation” experiment where victims had to “unmask” themselves and become supporters of the Community Party. The victims were forced to renounce all religious beliefs, eat feces, and torture each other, among other horrific tortures. The experiment was led and carried out by guards and other prisoners.
4.Before you think testing on prisoners only happened abroad, you should read up on Holmesburg Prison in Pennsylvania. Dr. Albert M. Kligman performed dermatological experiments on prisoners for over two decades, exposing them to carcinogenic compounds, radioactive elements, diseases and infections such as herpes, and more. The prisoners were paid a small amount, but many did not understand what they were consenting to. These lasted until the mid-1970s.
It’s been reported that illegal medical testing still happens in American prisons today — for example, in 2021, it was alleged that high doses of ivermectin were tested on four inmates in an Arkansas prison with COVID-19 without informing them.
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5.And then, of course, there was the Tuskegee Study (though this was not done with prisoners), where scientists studied syphilis in 600 Black men (201 were controls that did not have the disease). None of them were told they had syphilis or understood what they were being treated for, and none of them were given penicillin, which was a readily available and effective treatment for their disease post-1943. Researchers even convinced local physicians not to treat the men — they studied them at the above Tuskegee Institute instead.
The experiment lasted 40 years and continued until the 1970s — it only ended because the Associated Press broke a story on it. Its last member died in 2004; overall, 128 had died either from syphilis or related complications, and the disease had been passed on to 40 spouses and 19 children. The government did not apologize until 1997.
6.The US also conducted STI experiments in Guatemala in the 1940s. The study was done on over 5,500 prisoners, sex workers (so that they would transmit the disease to others), soldiers, children (as young as one), and psychiatric patients. Over 1300 of them were purposefully infected with syphilis, gonorrhea, or chancroid, and only some received treatment.
7.In another unethical American experiment, the government set out to discover just how unsafe radiation was as they began developing the atomic bomb. They ran tests on terminally ill patients where they exposed them to different radioactive elements (like polonium, plutonium, and uranium) to see what would happen and how long it would stay in their blood. Patients were most likely not aware of what they were receiving — and many were not actually terminally ill. Human experiments with radioactivity continued into the 1950s — subjects ranged from children to jailed people to pregnant mothers, most of whom did not know what was being done to them.
Albert Stevens was one patient who was not actually terminally ill — he had been misdiagnosed with cancer when, in reality, he just had an ulcer. He later became known as the most radioactive person alive due to the amount of radiation in his body as a result of the experiments (6,400rem over the years, yet he lived until 79). He was never told he had been exposed to plutonium nor that he did not, in fact, have cancer.
Brooks Kraft LLC/Corbis via Getty Images
8.One more American test…during the Cold War, the CIA tested out if mind control was possible using drugs like LSD (and methods like electroshock and sleep deprivation) in a project called MK-ULTRA. Who were these tests done on? American prisoners, prisoners in foreign detention centers, those in psychiatric hospitals and schools, and unwitting CIA agents themselves. Some of the victims were pregnant mothers and children.
We still don’t know how many died or were permanently altered as a result of these experiments — which did not prove the possibility of mind control, though mind erasing seemed to occur. One death we do know happened because of MK-ULTRA was that of CIA agent Frank Olson, who jumped out a window after being sent to a retreat where he was given LSD without his knowledge. The CIA covered up the true nature of his death for decades — and when Olson’s body was exhumed many years later, there was evidence he had actually been thrown out the window, leading many to believe the CIA killed him due to his knowledge.
9.Another victim of MK-ULTRA? Notorious Boston mob boss Whitey Bulger. As a young man in prison, he was given LSD over 50 times. After his release, he would go on to lead the Winter Hill Gang, whose violence wreaked havoc on Boston for decades. He was eventually convicted of 11 murders, among other charges.
10.Let’s move on from the US for a bit. You’ve probably heard of the musical Evita, and you may even know that it tells the story of Eva Perón, who was the second wife of the president of Argentina, Juan Perón. But I doubt you know the journey her body went through after she died of cancer — first, Juan tried to build a giant monument to display her body. When he was forced into exile as a result of a coup, the new regime ordered Eva’s body be buried, though they didn’t want anyone to know where lest she become a revolutionary symbol. They stored her corpse in trucks, military locations, behind a cinema, etc…before it came into the possession of Major Arancibia, who reportedly engaged in necrophilia with the corpse and then shot his wife in the throat when he was discovered.
The corpse then went to Colonel Carlos Eugenio de Moori Koenig, who allegedly also had feelings for her and had his officers pee on her when the corpse did not return his affections. Her body was finally returned to her husband Juan, who was now remarried, though a freak accident killed the transporters. The couple kept Eva’s body on their dining room table. His wife Isabel would comb Eva’s hair and sometimes lie beside her. Juan eventually became president again, with Isabel succeeding him after his death, and she had the corpse displayed. She was eventually buried in her family’s mausoleum, though another freak accident during transport again killed all three men accompanying her body. She currently resides in her fortified tomb, which has a trapdoor and fake coffins to distract from Eva’s real one.
11.In a somewhat similar story, a man named Carl Tanzer, who worked at a Florida hospital, became infatuated with a young tuberculosis patient named Maria Elena Milagro de Hoyos in the 1930s. He believed Maria to be the dark-haired woman he’d dreamt about for years. After she died, he bought her a mausoleum and visited her constantly for two years before deciding to take her body home with him. He used wax, plaster, silk, and piano wire to refurbish her decaying body and lived with her for seven years. He allegedly also placed a tube in her vagina for intercourse. He was finally found out after he was seen dancing with the corpse through his window.
12.This is more sad than creepy, but there’s evidence that all of the crew members aboard the Challenger space shuttle survived the initial explosion and may even have been conscious until the passenger cabin hit the ocean. Robert Overmyer, NASA’s lead investigator, stated: ‘I not only flew with [Commander] Dick Scobee, we owned a plane together, and I know Scob did everything he could to save his crew. Scob fought for any and every edge to survive. He flew that ship without wings all the way down.'”
13.And the people of Pompeii weren’t killed instantly — most of them died in the 15 minutes following the explosion, suffocating from burning ash and gas. Some Pompei victims died not from suffocation but from the temperature of this gas, which boiled their blood until their skulls exploded.
14.Women used to give birth upright. We give birth lying down now not because of any medical advantage but because in the 1600s, France’s King Louis XIV popularized the practice. He preferred this position so he could see his children being born better. It’s possible this was also a “fetish” or that there was a “perverted” reason.
15.The “father of modern gynecology,” J. Marion Sims, is best known for inventing many techniques used in modern gynecology. How’d he develop these techniques? Testing them, without anesthesia, on enslaved Black women. One woman, Anarcha, had 30 surgeries performed on her. The speculum and rectal examination positions used today are both named after him, and a statue of him in Central Park was only taken down in 2018.
16.In the early 1900s, many women were employed painting watches because of their smaller hands. The paint contained radium, which the women were assured was not dangerous. They were even instructed to lick the brushes — like you might do now with thread — to get them to a fine point. But soon, the women became ill and died horrifically, with their bones literally being eaten away from the inside out.
17.Speaking of Radium, it used to be used quite commonly. It was used in makeup, toothpaste, hair creams, and food.
18.Valery Khodemchuk’s remains are still inside the reactor four building at Chernobyl. He was working in one of the engine rooms when the reactor exploded. His body has never been found.
Vladimir Shashenok also died while attempting to rescue Khodemchuk.
Sean Gallup / Getty Images
19.In 1999, a smaller-scale but still-deadly nuclear accident occurred in Japan when three workers were purifying uranium oxide. They put too much uranium in the tank, causing a nuclear chain reaction that released a deadly amount of radiation. Two of the workers, Hisashi Ouchi and Masato Shinohara, died as a result, but not until later. Ouchi, who received the largest blast of radiation, was kept alive for 83 days while he experienced the truly horrific effects of the radiation, which included his skin literally melting from his body. He had multiple heart attacks, but his family kept resuscitating him against his own wishes.
20.The US has lost six nuclear weapons, and they’ve had 32 official “broken arrow” nuclear weapon accidents. And we don’t have good numbers on how many Soviet nuclear weapons have been lost. Former secretary of the Russian Security Council, General Alexander Lebed, once claimed there might be over 100, though Russian officials denied this.
21.This one’s more of a creepy coincidence than a disturbing fact, but it still freaks me out. While Michael Jackson was playing for 3,000 fans at Shrine Auditorium in LA in a filmed performance for a Pepsi ad, a pyrotechnics display was set off too early, setting Jackson’s hair on fire. He was rushed to the hospital, having suffered second-degree burns. The creepy part? This happened almost exactly halfway through his life. He was 25 years, four months, and 29 days old. About twenty-five years, four months, and 29 days later, he’d be dead.
22.Speaking of Jackson — the like “Annie, are you okay?” from “Smooth Criminal” was said to be inspired by the CPR dummy, which actually has a name: Resusci Anne. The dummy’s face is based on a 16-year-old woman’s corpse that was pulled from the Seine in Paris in the 1880s. The pathologist who performed the autopsy made a plaster mask of her face, which became famous as “L’Inconnue de la Seine” (the unknown woman of the Seine) in France. When the first CPR dummy was created, one of its inventors was inspired by a L’Inconnue de la Seine mask after seeing it in a friend’s home. Oh, and ever wonder why the CPR dummy was originally a woman? Most doctors were male, and the inventors thought they’d prefer to press their lips to a fake woman’s lips rather than a fake man’s lips.
23.And finally, one last wildly disturbing fact…slavery is still widespread today. In fact, one in every 200 people is enslaved — over 40 million people. This is over three times as many people as were enslaved during the entirety of the transatlantic slave trade. Modern slavery (which is most common in Africa and Asia but occurs in every single country) often includes forced labor, forced marriage, and sex trafficking. The slavery industry makes around $150 billion a year.
What are some messed-up and disturbing historical facts that keep you up at night? Let us know in the comments below or via this anonymous form.