10 Super Unsettling Historical Facts We Wish Were False

The world is a crazy place, and it always has been. Looking back through history, there are seemingly endless stories about real-life situations, events, moments, and acts that now seem very hard to believe. But they were real, they were documented, and in many cases, they are every bit as unsettling today as they were strange in their own time.

That’s the road we’re traveling down with today’s list. Scroll down and find ten jaw-dropping historical facts that are so creepy, disgusting, disturbing, or just downright weird that you’ll wish they weren’t true. Make sure you’ve got a comfortable—and reliable—seat, and mentally prepare yourself to take a turn into some of the strangest little offshoots and alleyways of history.

Related: 10 Total Accidents That Changed the Course of History

10 Battlefield Dentistry

Hundreds of years ago, dentures were sometimes made from the teeth of dead people. It makes sense, we suppose. You need to get your fake teeth from some reliable source, right? And with dental technology the way it was in the 18th and early 19th centuries, why not take real teeth from dead guys and repurpose them?

Human teeth could be mounted into ivory denture bases, and battlefields offered a particularly grim supply. Soldiers tended to be young, and their teeth were often in better condition than those of older people who had lost theirs to decay. Scavengers, soldiers, locals, and professional body strippers could collect teeth from the dead and sell them into the dental trade.

The practice became especially notorious after the Battle of Waterloo in 1815. Once the fighting ended, scavengers moved among the thousands of bodies, stripping valuables—including teeth. So many entered the market that human-tooth dentures became known as “Waterloo teeth.”

The teeth would be cleaned, sorted, and fitted into dentures for very much alive customers who probably preferred not to think too hard about where their new smile had come from.

What a disturbing economy!^[1]

9 Creep Alert!

Thomas Edison may have done a lot of great things, but his company also helped bring one of the creepiest toys imaginable into American homes.

After Edison developed the phonograph in 1877, inventors began looking for ways to shrink the technology and place it inside toys. William W. Jacques patented an early talking-doll mechanism, and Edison’s operation later refined the idea into the Edison Talking Doll, which went on sale in 1890.

The dolls had ceramic heads, articulated limbs, metal bodies, and miniature phonographs hidden inside their chests. When users turned a crank, the mechanism played wax recordings of young women reciting nursery rhymes such as “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” “Hickory Dickory Dock,” and “Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep.”

Because the recording technology was primitive, the voices came out thin, scratchy, and distorted. Even contemporary listeners complained that the words could be difficult to understand.

Unfortunately for Edison, creepy voices were only part of the problem. The dolls were expensive, the wax records were fragile, the mechanisms broke easily, and the crank could be lost. Buyers also had to turn it at roughly the right speed or the already-strange voice sounded even stranger.

The dolls were withdrawn from the market after only a short run. More than a century later, surviving recordings have been restored—and somehow sound exactly like the sort of thing you would expect to hear immediately before the lights go out in a horror movie.^[2]

8 Cat’s Got Your Phone

Did you know that researchers at Princeton University once turned a live cat into part of a telephone system?

In 1929, scientists Ernest Glen Wever and Charles William Bray wanted to understand how the auditory nerve responded to sound. So they anesthetized a cat, exposed its auditory system, and attached an electrode that could pick up electrical activity generated when sound entered the animal’s ear.

The signal was amplified and carried to a telephone receiver in a soundproof room roughly 50 feet (15 meters) away.

Then one of the scientists spoke into the cat’s ear.

The researcher sitting with the receiver could hear the words clearly.

The experiment showed that the auditory nerve transmitted electrical activity that closely matched the frequency of incoming sounds. Wever and Bray’s work became an important milestone in understanding how the ear converts sound into electrical signals and helped lay groundwork for later auditory research, including technology that eventually contributed to cochlear implants.

The researchers then performed control tests by changing or damaging different parts of the cat’s auditory system. Eventually, the animal was killed, and the signal disappeared after death.

So yes: for a brief and deeply unsettling moment in scientific history, a cat was effectively part of a working telephone.^[3]

7 Back from the Dead

You’ve heard of the Salem Witch Trials. But have you heard about the time people in Rhode Island dug up a teenage girl because they thought she might be a vampire?

In the late 19th century, tuberculosis—then commonly called consumption—continued to devastate New England families. The disease caused victims to grow pale, thin, feverish, and weak, sometimes coughing up blood. In rural communities where medical knowledge spread slowly, some people blamed the deaths on supernatural forces.

The Brown family of Exeter, Rhode Island, suffered particularly badly. Mary Eliza Brown died of tuberculosis in 1882, followed by her daughter Mary Olive in 1883. Years later, another daughter, 19-year-old Mercy “Lena” Brown, died in January 1892. Her brother Edwin was also gravely ill.

Neighbors began to suspect that one of the dead women was somehow feeding on Edwin from beyond the grave.

In March 1892, the bodies were exhumed. Mary Eliza and Mary Olive had been dead for years and showed normal decomposition. Mercy, however, had died only a few months earlier during a cold New England winter, and her body was still relatively well preserved. Blood remained in her heart.

That was enough to convince some observers that they had found their vampire.

Mercy’s heart and liver were removed and burned. The ashes were mixed into a liquid and given to Edwin as a supposed cure.

It didn’t work. He died less than two months later.

Robert Koch had already identified the bacterium that causes tuberculosis a decade earlier. Unfortunately for Mercy Brown, modern germ theory hadn’t reached everyone fast enough.^[4]

6 A Flood of… Molasses?

One of the strangest disasters in American history began with something that sounds almost comical: a flood of molasses.

On January 15, 1919, a massive storage tank burst in Boston’s North End. It held approximately 2.3 million gallons (8.7 million liters) of molasses. When the steel structure failed, the sticky liquid surged through the neighborhood in a wave reportedly moving as fast as 35 mph (56 km/h).

That sounds funny until you realize what a wall of syrup weighing thousands of tons can do.

The flood killed 21 people and injured about 150. Buildings were smashed, structures were pushed from their foundations, horses were trapped, and elevated railway supports were damaged.

Police, firefighters, sailors, and Red Cross workers rushed into the area, but the molasses made rescue extraordinarily difficult. Victims became trapped in the thick liquid and debris, while rescuers struggled to move through streets that had effectively turned into glue.

Cleanup took weeks, and molasses was tracked throughout Boston on shoes, clothing, wheels, and streetcars. Local legend later insisted that on particularly hot days, residents could still smell the sweet scent rising from the neighborhood years afterward.

A flood of molasses sounds like something from a cartoon. For 21 people in Boston, it was deadly serious.^[5]

5 Europe’s First Syphilis Epidemic Was Horrifically Severe

In the late 15th century, Europe faced one of the era’s most terrifying disease outbreaks. Beginning around 1494–1495, during the French invasion of Italy, a severe epidemic of syphilis spread rapidly among soldiers and civilians.

The disease appeared so suddenly—and its symptoms could be so gruesome—that contemporaries struggled to explain what was happening. Early accounts describe painful pustules, ulcers, fever, disfigurement, and sometimes death. In particularly severe cases, lesions could destroy tissue around the face and body.

For centuries, historians debated where syphilis came from. One famous theory held that sailors returning from Christopher Columbus’s voyages carried the disease from the Americas to Europe. Recent ancient-DNA research has strengthened the case that the broader family of bacteria responsible for syphilis and related diseases had deep roots in the Americas before Columbus.

But that still does not prove that Columbus’s crew personally brought venereal syphilis to Europe. Exactly how the European epidemic began remains debated.

What is much less debatable is how frightening the first outbreak must have looked. To people who had never seen anything like it, an epidemic of victims covered in spreading sores and disfiguring lesions probably felt uncomfortably close to a real-life zombie outbreak.^[6]

4 Computing Power

In the 19th century, a mathematician named William Shanks really loved numbers. In particular, he became obsessed with calculating the digits of pi.

You know: 3.14159…blah, blah, blah.

Well, Shanks didn’t care for the “blah, blah, blah.”

Working by hand over many years, he eventually calculated pi to 707 decimal places. That was an extraordinary achievement for someone relying on pencil, paper, and human arithmetic.

Unfortunately, only the first 527 decimal places were correct. An error had slipped into the calculation, making everything after that point wrong.

Then computers arrived.

In 1958, mathematician François Genuys used an IBM 704 computer to calculate pi electronically. The machine reached the same general level of precision Shanks had spent years working toward in roughly 40 seconds.

And it did not stop there.

The IBM continued calculating until it reached 10,000 decimal places, a task that took about one hour and 40 minutes. What had once represented years of painstaking human calculation had suddenly become routine machine work.

We’re glad Shanks wasn’t around to watch a computer race through the kind of calculation that had consumed so much of his life. Some technological progress is inspiring. Some is just rude.^[7]

3 Lincoln’s Other Theater Guest Later Murdered His Wife

When Abraham Lincoln and Mary Todd Lincoln went to Ford’s Theatre on April 14, 1865, they were accompanied by Major Henry Rathbone and his fiancée, Clara Harris.

After John Wilkes Booth shot Lincoln, Rathbone lunged at the assassin. Booth slashed Rathbone’s arm deeply with a knife before jumping from the presidential box and escaping. Rathbone lost a great deal of blood but survived.

Lincoln did not.

The trauma of that night followed Rathbone for the rest of his life. His physical and mental health deteriorated over the following years, and he eventually developed increasingly severe paranoia, jealousy, and erratic behavior.

Rathbone and Clara married in 1867 and later moved with their children to Germany. Then, on December 23, 1883, tragedy struck again.

During a violent episode, Rathbone shot and stabbed Clara to death. He then stabbed himself repeatedly in an attempt to take his own life.

He survived.

Rathbone was judged mentally ill and confined to an asylum, where he remained for the rest of his life. He died in 1911.

The man who had been sitting beside Abraham Lincoln on one of the most infamous nights in American history survived Booth’s knife—only to become the killer in his own family’s tragedy nearly two decades later.^[8]

2 The Pope Who Put a Dead Pope on Trial

In 897, Pope Stephen VI decided that one of his predecessors needed to stand trial. There was just one problem.

Pope Formosus had been dead for about nine months. But that did not stop Stephen.

Formosus’s corpse was dug out of its grave, dressed in papal vestments, seated on a throne, and brought before a church court in what became known as the Cadaver Synod.

A deacon was assigned to speak on behalf of the dead pope while Stephen hurled accusations at the body. Formosus was charged with illegally occupying the papacy and violating church rules connected to his earlier position as bishop.

Unsurprisingly, the corpse did not mount a particularly effective defense.

Formosus was found guilty. His papal acts were declared invalid, his vestments were stripped away, and the three fingers he had used to give blessings were cut from his right hand.

His body was eventually thrown into the Tiber River.

The spectacle horrified many Romans and helped turn public opinion against Stephen. Within months, he was deposed, imprisoned, and strangled.

History has produced some strange court cases. Very few required the defendant to be exhumed before proceedings could begin.^[9]

1 King Tut’s Parents Were Brother and Sister

Let’s end things on a creepy familial note.

For years, researchers suspected that Tutankhamun’s family tree was unusually tangled. Genetic testing of royal mummies eventually made the picture considerably clearer—and considerably more uncomfortable.

A major DNA study identified the mummy from tomb KV55 as Tutankhamun’s father, most likely the pharaoh Akhenaten. The so-called Younger Lady mummy from tomb KV35 was identified as his mother.

The surprise was their relationship. Genetic evidence showed that Tutankhamun’s parents were not merely distant relatives or even first cousins. It was consistent with them being full brother and sister.

Royal sibling marriage was not unheard of in ancient Egypt. Dynasties sometimes married within the family in an effort to preserve royal bloodlines, political legitimacy, or religious traditions.

Tutankhamun also suffered from several physical problems, including a foot disorder, and researchers found evidence that he had contracted malaria. Close-relative reproduction can increase the risk of inherited health problems. However, scientists cannot confidently blame all of Tutankhamun’s ailments directly on his parents’ relationship.

Still, the genetic finding leaves us with one extremely unsettling fact: one of the most famous pharaohs in history was almost certainly born to a brother and sister.

Ancient royal bloodlines were apparently very serious about keeping things in the family.^[10]