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27-02-2025
- Science
- Buzz Feed
28 Messed-Up Historical Facts And Events That I'm Willing To Bet They Didn't Teach You In School
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 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 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. Bettmann / Bettmann Archive via Getty Images Suggested by u/Flashy_Hearing4773 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. Donaldson Collection/Michael Ochs Archives / Getty Images 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, 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. Bettmann / Bettmann Archive via Getty Images 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. Keystone/Hulton Archive / Getty Images Suggested by u/_forum_mod, u/so-very-intelligent, and u/PuffinChaos 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.'" NASA/Space Frontiers / Getty Images Suggested by u/Zolome1977 and u/tommytraddles 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. Marco Cantile/LightRocket via Getty Images Suggested by u/Tired_Lambchop111 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. Hulton Archive / Getty Images Suggested by u/bitchspicedlatte 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. Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group via Getty Images Suggested by u/writeyourwayout 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. Daily Herald Archive/SSPL / Getty Images — u/Clean_Signature_6997 24. Speaking of Radium, it used to be used quite commonly. It was used in makeup, toothpaste, hair creams, and food. H.W. Cherry/Library of Congress/Corbis/VCG via Getty Images 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. Sean Gallup / Getty Images 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. -/JIJI PRESS/AFP via Getty Images Suggested by u/Buggsir and u/Meanderer_Me 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. Historical / Corbis via Getty Images Suggested by u/TalkNerdy2MeXD and u/F1eshWound 28. And finally, one last wildly disturbing 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. Horacio Villalobos#Corbis/Corbis via Getty Images Suggested by u/No-Personality-4591 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.
Yahoo
27-01-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
37 Really Messed-Up Facts That You Will Wish You Hadn't Read — But I Bet Your Morbid Curiosity Will Get The Better Of You
A while back, Reddit user No_Camera29 asked, "What's a creepy fact you wish you never learned?" and people had some super disturbing responses that we wrote about here. Now we're back for more creepy facts — here's what they had to say. 1."The youngest mother ever was five years old." —u/Fantastic-Ratio-7482 MORE INFORMATION: Lina Medina was five when doctors discovered she was seven months pregnant. She had gone through precocious puberty, meaning she had already had her first period, and her body had begun to go through puberty-related changes. She went on to give birth via C-section to a healthy baby boy who was raised as her sibling. The identity of the father has never been released. 2."One creepy fact I wish I never learned is that there's a rare disorder called Cotard's Syndrome, aka Walking Corpse Syndrome. People with this condition believe they are dead, do not exist, or have lost their internal organs. It's incredibly disturbing to think about the profound psychological and emotional impact this disorder must have on those who suffer from it." —u/Daina-P 3."Chlorine in a pool doesn't have much smell. However, when chlorine binds with nitrogen-containing contaminants, chloramine is created. Chloramine doesn't have much disinfecting power but has a MUCH stronger 'chlorine-y' odor. When chlorine reacts with urea (from urine), it creates ammonia, and ammonia reacts VERY well with chlorine to create chloramines. Thus, the 'chlorine smell' you notice at a public pool doesn't mean there's chlorine; it means the pool is dirty. A correctly maintained pool should not smell much." —u/SirEDCaLot 4."You can vomit shit if you have an intestinal blockage." —u/FinancialOffice1304 5."That you don't actually smell dead and rotting animals. You are tasting the particles in the air. I could have gone my whole life not knowing that little tidbit." —u/Justsomefireguy 6."Mountain lions are very secretive and sneaky. They are quiet hunters and usually don't let you see them unless they want you to see them. Most times, you may walk right by one without ever knowing they are 10 feet away and can kill you on a whim. They also sound like a woman screaming in the forest. Do not attempt to find the screaming woman in the forest." —u/GamingWithBilly MORE INFORMATION: Here's what a mountain lion sounds like. 7."There is a disease called Kuru that causes uncontrollable laughing and is transmitted through cannibalism." —u/Heavy_Bodybuilder_15 "Prion disease! It's really rare, you can only get it by eating infected brain tissue." —u/Remote-Physics6980 MORE INFORMATION: This disease was prevalent in Papua, New Guinea, in the '50s and '60s due to their ritualized practice of eating parts of dead family members. Kuru can spread by eating the brain of one infected or by coming into contact with open sores someone with the disease has. It could take years or decades for symptoms to develop. Symptoms included tremors and changes in walking, speech, and mood, as well as uncontrollable laughter. There is no cure, and victims would die after becoming unable to eat. 8."There's a condition that causes hair follicles to turn into nail follicles, and no one knows anything about it." —u/Velkause 9."Cockroaches can live weeks without their head." —u/FlatWilly22 10."How much child sexual abuse is actually going on. I worked in a criminal defense capacity, and if you knew how many people were raping kids and downloading child sex abuse images and videos, you'd never let yours out of your sight. I don't work there anymore, but I can't look at anyone the same. Zero trust." —u/Open-Illustra88er states have fought to allow child marriage to remain legal." —u/ERedfieldh poll found that] one in ten people in France is a childhood incest victim." —u/Navalito 13."After a horse dies, their hooves can fall off, and what's left behind is…a trypophobia nightmare. Like, it's fascinating how disturbing it is to look at. It was a good reminder that while I've seen some fucked-up shit, there's always the possibility of one more thing out there that will haunt my thoughts for eternity." —u/OneSpiffingGent 14."When flatworms mate, two 'males' use their bifurcated penises to fence one another. The winner, or the flatworm who stabs the other with its penis dagger, remains a male, while the loser becomes female and will be impregnated." —u/Extremely_unlikeable 15."Your brain chooses to ignore your nose. If it didn't, you would notice it in your point of view constantly. You only see it in your point of view when you want to see it." —u/IdentityHacker42 16."Dead people fart hours after passing. My dad died at home, and the paramedics just left him there until morning. Always thought that was weird because when my grandpa died at 1 a.m., a mortician came within 30 minutes to pick him up, but my dad was left in my house with me and my brother staring at him for about 12 hours." —u/Glass_Can_5157 17."Pugs and other brachycephalic dogs can have their eyeballs out of their skull." —u/PseudonymIncognito "I have a story! My former roommate had a senior pug; one day, the pug sneezed, and his eye just kind of popped out, then completely nonchalantly, he was just like, 'Oh yeah, that happens sometimes,' and just took his knuckle & popped it right back in. My partner at the time and I were like, 'NO, WHAT THE FUCK WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT WHAT JUST HAPPENED!?' and he explained something about how because their faces are smashed, their eye sockets aren't quite right." —u/bonenecklace 18."Sometimes, during normal delivery, the placenta gets stuck inside the uterus. We then have to manually extract it by putting our hand and arm inside, feel for the placenta, and scoop it out bit by bit." —u/darcydidwhat 19."Dead bodies can move on their own. ... Limbs or other body parts can sometimes twitch or jerk, giving the appearance of movement even though the person is deceased." —u/kalkranl being cremated, a human body will begin to curl up on itself. ... Basically, it looks like the body is sitting up with its head bowed. I heard that on a podcast, and it haunts my dreams." —u/booklovercomora MORE INFORMATION: It won't quite "sit up," but it may appear to do something similar if the temperature is right and the body is cremated quickly after death, before rigor mortis sets in. This is called the "pugilistic pose." It's more common with funeral pyres. 21."When a neurosurgeon cuts off a piece of your skull due to swelling, they [sometimes] store it in your abdomen to be used later when the swelling has completed." —u/Kitchen-Lemon1862 22."Tumors can grow teeth." —u/RadiantHC "They can also grow hair, bone, and muscle. "Enjoy that thought!" —u/adorkablekitty MORE INFORMATION: These are called teratomas, and here's what they look like. 23."Statistically, you're [300 times] more likely to get struck by lightning than win the lottery. Guess I'll stick to my day job as a professional lottery player." —u/Time_Medicine1714 24."CPR only works 2-10% of the time." —u/BigD4163 MORE INFORMATION: The overall survival rate for CPR for cardiac arrest outside of a hospital setting is 7.6%, but it can be as low as around 2% or even less for those over 90 or with conditions like cancer, heart, lung, or liver disease. Even in a hospital, the survival rate is around 17%. Oh, and almost half of people who survived because of CPR wish they hadn't received it. 25."Wounds left untreated for too long can result in maggots literally crawling underneath ... your skin. Unfortunately, something not entirely surprising to my older partners familiar with nursing homes." "As an EMT, there are quite a few fucked-up things about the human body I could comprehend when seeing them in person, the visceral reaction is just 'Awwww FUCK NO." —u/nosce_te_ipsum "The weirdest thing about that is, it's actually good for you. Maggots will only eat dead flesh; they leave your healthy tissue alone, and you don't WANT that dead flesh hanging around because it will cause infection. The deliberate use of maggots in medicine has been around for centuries and still happens today." —u/ItsDominare 26."My sister got an organ transplant. They don't remove the original one. They literally stack the donated one on top of the original one. They do this so that in case of rejection, they can still rely on the original organ until another donor becomes available. I believe there's a case where someone was walking around with seven kidneys. Gotta collect 'em all!" —u/Tolwenye 27."[A 1983 study found that] 40% of police officers abuse their spouses. When you give a profession the ability to harm people with impunity, it attracts the worst kinds of human beings like moths to a flame." —u/greed 28."Fir trees are able to grow in lungs. A 28-year-old man went to the doctor. ... He had inhaled a fir tree seed. That seed then sprouted and started to grow in his lungs. The doctors thought it was a tumor when looking at the scans." —u/mr_starwars69 29."Any person born in the US or Canada after 1951 has a higher percentage of nuclear material in their bones due to the extensive nuclear tests carried out during the Cold War." —u/Fenix_Pony MORE INFORMATION: Numerous nuclear tests and atomic blasts in the '50s literally changed our atmosphere, creating new isotopes that permeated all living things, including us. Not just our bones, either — our brains and our eyes, too. Contrary to the poster, this isn't just true in the US and Canada, and it would have affected anyone alive in the '50s, not just those born still affects us today, though to a lesser degree. 30."The amount of people who go missing every year is staggering, like over 600,000 in the US alone. And while a lot do get found shortly, there are still a ton that don't." —u/Doctah_Whoopass fact..."In the USA, a child goes missing roughly every 40 seconds." u/softandflaky MORE INFORMATION: Since many missing persons are cases of people intentionally disappearing, misunderstandings, or cases where their body is found fairly quickly, only about 1% of these remain missing. Still, with such high numbers of missing people, this is still thousands. And as for children, the percentage of children who are not found appears to be a little higher, at 2.2%. 32."There are creatures living on your eyelashes that eat the dead parts of them so those dead parts don't break off and fall into your eyes. It's a symbiotic relationship. They get a nice safe home and a food source, and you don't get eyelash debris in your eyes." —u/UDPviper MORE INFORMATION: These eight-legged parasites are called demodex mites. They eat dead skin and oil and actually end up cleaning your eyelashes for you. They also live on our eyebrows, and at night they come out from this hair to eat, lay eggs, essentially poop. This is all harmless unless there are too many of them, which can happen if they reproduce rapidly due to a large food source like a blocked oil gland. a thing called 'eyelash lice.'" It's usually caused by having pubic lice, touching your genitals, then touching your eyes. —u/CarlSpencer 34."There will soon be more dead people on Facebook than living ones. Given the current growth trends, it's predicted that within a few decades, the number of deceased user profiles will outnumber those of living users, turning it into a digital graveyard." —u/TheFalcon-13 35."How much of the ocean remains unexplored (80%). I just wonder what is down there." —u/pollytato 36."Hamsters hibernate. ... I wonder how many hibernating hamsters were buried thinking they were dead." —u/bella_morte MORE INFORMATION: A hamster will only hibernate if it's cold — below 68 degrees Fahrenheit. Its body temperature will then drop, and its breathing will slow — sometimes to the level of only one breath every two minutes. If you aren't sure if your hamster is dead or hibernating, check for their heartbeat — and heat the area up to above 68 degrees. It might take them a few days to wake up. finally..."When two people kiss, they make one long tube, butthole to butthole." — What disturbing fact do you wish you never learned? Let us know in the comments! Submissions have been edited for length/clarity/accuracy.
Buzz Feed
27-01-2025
- Health
- Buzz Feed
37 Really Messed-Up Facts That You Will Wish You Hadn't Read — But I Bet Your Morbid Curiosity Will Get The Better Of You
A while back, Reddit user No_Camera29 asked, "What's a creepy fact you wish you never learned?" and people had some super disturbing responses that we wrote about here. Now we're back for more creepy facts — here's what they had to say. 1. "The youngest mother ever was five years old." — u/Fantastic-Ratio-7482 MORE INFORMATION: Lina Medina was five when doctors discovered she was seven months pregnant. She had gone through precocious puberty, meaning she had already had her first period, and her body had begun to go through puberty-related changes. She went on to give birth via C-section to a healthy baby boy who was raised as her sibling. The identity of the father has never been released. 2. "One creepy fact I wish I never learned is that there's a rare disorder called Cotard's Syndrome, aka Walking Corpse Syndrome. People with this condition believe they are dead, do not exist, or have lost their internal organs. It's incredibly disturbing to think about the profound psychological and emotional impact this disorder must have on those who suffer from it." — u/Daina-P 3. "Chlorine in a pool doesn't have much smell. However, when chlorine binds with nitrogen-containing contaminants, chloramine is created. Chloramine doesn't have much disinfecting power but has a MUCH stronger 'chlorine-y' odor. When chlorine reacts with urea (from urine), it creates ammonia, and ammonia reacts VERY well with chlorine to create chloramines. Thus, the 'chlorine smell' you notice at a public pool doesn't mean there's chlorine; it means the pool is dirty. A correctly maintained pool should not smell much." 4. "You can vomit shit if you have an intestinal blockage." — u/FinancialOffice1304 5. "That you don't actually smell dead and rotting animals. You are tasting the particles in the air. I could have gone my whole life not knowing that little tidbit." — u/Justsomefireguy 6. "Mountain lions are very secretive and sneaky. They are quiet hunters and usually don't let you see them unless they want you to see them. Most times, you may walk right by one without ever knowing they are 10 feet away and can kill you on a whim. They also sound like a woman screaming in the forest. Do not attempt to find the screaming woman in the forest." — u/GamingWithBilly 7. "There is a disease called Kuru that causes uncontrollable laughing and is transmitted through cannibalism." — u/Heavy_Bodybuilder_15 "Prion disease! It's really rare, you can only get it by eating infected brain tissue." — u/Remote-Physics6980 MORE INFORMATION: This disease was prevalent in Papua, New Guinea, in the '50s and '60s due to their ritualized practice of eating parts of dead family members. Kuru can spread by eating the brain of one infected or by coming into contact with open sores someone with the disease has. It could take years or decades for symptoms to develop. Symptoms included tremors and changes in walking, speech, and mood, as well as uncontrollable laughter. There is no cure, and victims would die after becoming unable to eat. 10. "How much child sexual abuse is actually going on. I worked in a criminal defense capacity, and if you knew how many people were raping kids and downloading child sex abuse images and videos, you'd never let yours out of your sight. I don't work there anymore, but I can't look at anyone the same. Zero trust." — u/Open-Illustra88er 11. And..."Several states have fought to allow child marriage to remain legal." — u/ERedfieldh 13. "After a horse dies, their hooves can fall off, and what's left behind is…a trypophobia nightmare. Like, it's fascinating how disturbing it is to look at. It was a good reminder that while I've seen some fucked-up shit, there's always the possibility of one more thing out there that will haunt my thoughts for eternity." — u/OneSpiffingGent Warning This image is graphic Click to reveal 14. "When flatworms mate, two 'males' use their bifurcated penises to fence one another. The winner, or the flatworm who stabs the other with its penis dagger, remains a male, while the loser becomes female and will be impregnated." — u/Extremely_unlikeable 15. "Your brain chooses to ignore your nose. If it didn't, you would notice it in your point of view constantly. You only see it in your point of view when you want to see it." — u/IdentityHacker42 16. "Dead people fart hours after passing. My dad died at home, and the paramedics just left him there until morning. Always thought that was weird because when my grandpa died at 1 a.m., a mortician came within 30 minutes to pick him up, but my dad was left in my house with me and my brother staring at him for about 12 hours." — u/Glass_Can_5157 17. "Pugs and other brachycephalic dogs can have their eyeballs out of their skull." — u/PseudonymIncognito "I have a story! My former roommate had a senior pug; one day, the pug sneezed, and his eye just kind of popped out, then completely nonchalantly, he was just like, 'Oh yeah, that happens sometimes,' and just took his knuckle & popped it right back in. My partner at the time and I were like, 'NO, WHAT THE FUCK WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT WHAT JUST HAPPENED!?' and he explained something about how because their faces are smashed, their eye sockets aren't quite right." — u/bonenecklace 18. "Sometimes, during normal delivery, the placenta gets stuck inside the uterus. We then have to manually extract it by putting our hand and arm inside, feel for the placenta, and scoop it out bit by bit." — u/darcydidwhat 19. "Dead bodies can move on their own. ... Limbs or other body parts can sometimes twitch or jerk, giving the appearance of movement even though the person is deceased." — u/kalkranl MORE INFORMATION: It won't quite "sit up," but it may appear to do something similar if the temperature is right and the body is cremated quickly after death, before rigor mortis sets in. This is called the "pugilistic pose." It's more common with funeral pyres. 22. "Tumors can grow teeth." — u/RadiantHC "They can also grow hair, bone, and muscle. "Enjoy that thought!" — u/adorkablekitty MORE INFORMATION: These are called teratomas, and here's what they look like. u/jonas90210 / Via These can be malignant or benign. These tumors are thought to have the ability to grow things such as teeth because they are made up of germ cells that can form different types of tissue. Due to an issue with cell differentiation, they are still able to turn into different cell types years or even decades after fetal development. 23. "Statistically, you're [300 times] more likely to get struck by lightning than win the lottery. Guess I'll stick to my day job as a professional lottery player." — u/Time_Medicine1714 MORE INFORMATION: The overall survival rate for CPR for cardiac arrest outside of a hospital setting is 7.6%, but it can be as low as around 2% or even less for those over 90 or with conditions like cancer, heart, lung, or liver disease. Even in a hospital, the survival rate is around 17%. Oh, and almost half of people who survived because of CPR wish they hadn't received it. 25. "Wounds left untreated for too long can result in maggots literally crawling underneath ... your skin. Unfortunately, something not entirely surprising to my older partners familiar with nursing homes." "As an EMT, there are quite a few fucked-up things about the human body I could comprehend when seeing them in person, the visceral reaction is just 'Awwww FUCK NO." — u/nosce_te_ipsum "The weirdest thing about that is, it's actually good for you. Maggots will only eat dead flesh; they leave your healthy tissue alone, and you don't WANT that dead flesh hanging around because it will cause infection. The deliberate use of maggots in medicine has been around for centuries and still happens today." — u/ItsDominare 26. "My sister got an organ transplant. They don't remove the original one. They literally stack the donated one on top of the original one. They do this so that in case of rejection, they can still rely on the original organ until another donor becomes available. I believe there's a case where someone was walking around with seven kidneys. Gotta collect 'em all!" — u/Tolwenye 27. "[A 1983 study found that] 40% of police officers abuse their spouses. When you give a profession the ability to harm people with impunity, it attracts the worst kinds of human beings like moths to a flame." — u/greed 28. "Fir trees are able to grow in lungs. A 28-year-old man went to the doctor. ... He had inhaled a fir tree seed. That seed then sprouted and started to grow in his lungs. The doctors thought it was a tumor when looking at the scans." — u/mr_starwars69 29. "Any person born in the US or Canada after 1951 has a higher percentage of nuclear material in their bones due to the extensive nuclear tests carried out during the Cold War." — u/Fenix_Pony MORE INFORMATION: Numerous nuclear tests and atomic blasts in the '50s literally changed our atmosphere, creating new isotopes that permeated all living things, including us. Not just our bones, either — our brains and our eyes, too. Contrary to the poster, this isn't just true in the US and Canada, and it would have affected anyone alive in the '50s, not just those born still affects us today, though to a lesser degree. 30. "The amount of people who go missing every year is staggering, like over 600,000 in the US alone. And while a lot do get found shortly, there are still a ton that don't." — u/Doctah_Whoopass MORE INFORMATION: Since many missing persons are cases of people intentionally disappearing, misunderstandings, or cases where their body is found fairly quickly, only about 1% of these remain missing. Still, with such high numbers of missing people, this is still thousands. And as for children, the percentage of children who are not found appears to be a little higher, at 2.2%. 32. "There are creatures living on your eyelashes that eat the dead parts of them so those dead parts don't break off and fall into your eyes. It's a symbiotic relationship. They get a nice safe home and a food source, and you don't get eyelash debris in your eyes." — u/UDPviper MORE INFORMATION: These eight-legged parasites are called demodex mites. They eat dead skin and oil and actually end up cleaning your eyelashes for you. They also live on our eyebrows, and at night they come out from this hair to eat, lay eggs, essentially poop. This is all harmless unless there are too many of them, which can happen if they reproduce rapidly due to a large food source like a blocked oil gland. 34. "There will soon be more dead people on Facebook than living ones. Given the current growth trends, it's predicted that within a few decades, the number of deceased user profiles will outnumber those of living users, turning it into a digital graveyard." — u/TheFalcon-13 MORE INFORMATION: A hamster will only hibernate if it's cold — below 68 degrees Fahrenheit. Its body temperature will then drop, and its breathing will slow — sometimes to the level of only one breath every two minutes. If you aren't sure if your hamster is dead or hibernating, check for their heartbeat — and heat the area up to above 68 degrees. It might take them a few days to wake up.
