28 Messed-Up Historical Facts And Events That I'm Willing To Bet They Didn't Teach You In School

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27-02-2025

A while back, 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 29 facts you probably did not learn about in school.
NOTE: This post contains graphic descriptions of violence and death.
1. One of the saddest historical stories to me is about the first dog in space. Shortly after the Soviets achieved the feat of the first manufactured object in Earth's orbit, they built another spacecraft with a compartment for an animal. They chose stray dog Kudryavka (later dubbed Laika by the public), sending her into space with no intention of her returning. They had only left enough food for a single meal due to weight restrictions, and she could only move a few inches. She had a week's supply of oxygen and was expected to die of oxygen deprivation just seconds after it ran out. Instead, she died shortly after reaching orbit due to a rapid temperature rise in the capsule. The Soviet Union pretended she had survived for multiple days.
Laika had had a surgical device implanted into her to monitor her vitals. It showed she was terrified during the ordeal, with her heart rate three times its resting rate and her breath rate four times what it usually was. After she died, the spacecraft orbited with her body for five months before burning up and disintegrating.
2. While the validity of these claims is somewhat in question due to the difficulty of finding proof, it seems that British settlers deliberately at least tried to infect Native Americans with smallpox by giving them blankets from smallpox hospitals as gifts. Whether or not the ensuing smallpox epidemic came from such efforts, smallpox (along with similar illnesses) would go on to kill about 90% of Native Americans — who had built up no immunity — and eradicate entire tribes.
3. Speaking of Native Americans...you've probably never even heard of the largest mass execution in US history. It occurred after the U.S.-Dakota War of 1862, a short conflict resulting largely from Native Americans starving due to the US not following through on their treaties that promised food and money in exchange for land. After the Dakota people surrendered, 392 Dakota men were tried without representation in trials that sometimes lasted as little as five minutes, and 303 men were sentenced to death.
Then-President Abraham Lincoln was sent a list of the potential executions and sent back a list of 39 to die (later amended to 38). All 38 of these men were hanged. It would later be revealed that two had been hanged mistakenly (one had been acquitted, and one had been confused with another prisoner).
The Dakota people who had not participated in the war were moved to Fort Snelling, then a concentration camp. They were mostly women, children, and older adults. Conditions were terrible there, and hundreds died. The US soon annulled all treaties with the Dakota, claimed the land for themselves, and sent the remaining Dakota in Fort Snelling to a reservation. They then used the fort as a base while they went after Dakota people who had fled the initial conflict and moved deeper into Dakota territory, waging war against them. This only ended after they captured two Dakota men who had helped save hundreds of their people by getting them to Canada. Sakpedan (Little Six) and Wakan Ozanzan (Medicine Bottle) were drugged and taken from Canada back to the US, then tried for murder. No witnesses could report seeing either man kill anyone, but they were still found guilty and hanged.
4. One fact I didn't even know before this article was that Native Americans also enslaved Black people. The Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole Nations all had enslaved Black people, taking up 10-18% of their population. Many in these tribes fought to maintain slavery during the Civil War, fighting for the Confederacy. Post-war treaties freed their enslaved, but the tribes later took away their tribal membership. Black descendants of these enslaved people have had to fight for tribal recognition in the years since.
5. Did you know that not only were Japanese Americans interned in camps in the US during WWII, but German and Italian Americans were, as well? There was an internment camp in Crystal City, Texas, which interned German, Italian, and Japanese Americans. The interned dealt with cold winters, intense summers, unfamiliar animals like rattlesnakes and scorpions, copious mud, and 24-hour police presence. While conditions improved over time, leading to the government using the camp as a model and even featuring it in a propaganda video, Americans were still kept there against their will.
6. The scapegoating of immigrants — even those who have been here for years or even generations — unfortunately has an extremely long history in the United States. There were mass deportations of people of Mexican descent during the Great Depression, basically to open up jobs to white Americans. Many of the 1.8 million who were deported to Mexico had been born in America, and 60% were citizens. They included hospital patients, including a woman with leprosy who was driven over the border and left there. There was no due process. Oftentimes, police just raided places where they thought Mexican Americans hung out, grabbed a bunch of people (including children), and sent them to Mexico, whether they were citizens or not.
7. We also have a history of ignoring the contributions of immigrants. Much of the transcontinental railroad was built by Chinese immigrants (who had come to California for the gold rush) after not enough white laborers signed up for the dangerous, highly strenuous work. By 1867, 90% of the Central Pacific workers were Chinese. They received lower wages than white workers and faced more difficult work. Unlike white workers, they also had to pay for their own food and supplies. They worked six days a week, lived in remote field camps, and may have dealt with physical abuse. Some of the workers were only 12 years old.
After the railroad was finished, many workers remained working for the railroad or similar nearby industries, like coal. They dealt with racist attacks, including lynchings, and were barred from citizenship. New immigration exclusions also kept their families from coming to the US to join them. Even with all their terrible sacrifices, history has largely ignored their contributions, despite the fact that the railroad would not have been completed in even close to the same amount of time without them.
8. 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.
9. 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.
10. 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.
11. 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.
12. 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.
13. 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.
14. In some more pretty messed-up medical history, Bayer, the drug company, created a blood-clotting medicine for people with hemophilia in the 1980s. They used donated plasma before there was a test for HIV. Thousands of hemophiliacs got HIV — Bayer and similar companies had to pay out $600 million in lawsuits. Even worse? They created a new version that was heat-treated to kill HIV, which they sold to the US and Europe but kept selling the old meds to Latin America and Asia.
15. Back in the 1900s, the US 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.
Brooks Kraft LLC/Corbis via Getty Images
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.
16. 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.
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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.
Bettmann / Bettmann Archive
17. 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.
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18. 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.
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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.
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19. 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.'"
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20. 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.
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21. 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.
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22. 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.
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23. 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.
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24. Speaking of Radium, it used to be used quite commonly. It was used in makeup, toothpaste, hair creams, and food.
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25. 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.
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Vladimir Shashenok also died while attempting to rescue Khodemchuk.
26. 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.
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27. 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.
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28. 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.
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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.