It’s safe to say there’s no end to horrible facts from human history. In fact, there are so many that we’re still discovering new ones. The following list includes the nine most awful things we’ve learned over the past few weeks, from a Soviet cosmonaut’s horrifying last moments and the fluke accident that killed a beloved children’s author.
Serial killers at large
Every so often, we see a story of a serial killer on the news, most of them from years and years ago. Men like Ted Bundy, Dennis Rader and Danny Rolling are some of the best-known. However, we recently learned people like this are definitely not a thing of the past.
According to Thomas Hargrove, who’s kept incredibly detailed records of murders all across the United States, there are over 2,000 serial killers running rampant across the country right now. Now, that’s a terrifying thought.
Death by soup
We sure put a lot of faith in our healthcare providers, but, at the end of the day, they’re humans who make mistakes. In the case of Ilda Vitor Maciel, they just happened to make a really bad one.
At 88 years old, Maciel was being looked after in the Brazilian hospital Santa Casa de Barra Mansa. One of the nurses came in at feeding time and mistakenly injected her dinner of soup into her IV, instead of her feeding tube. Maciel died of a stroke 12 hours later, with her family wholeheartedly believing it was this outrageous mistake that cost her life. The hospital disagrees, saying the two incidents were unrelated.
Killed by a high kick
Goodnight Moon is one of our all-time favorite children’s books, setting a cozy scene that puts kids right to sleep. However, it’s hard to look at the beloved classic the same after we learned how the author, Margaret Wise Brown, died.
Brown had just received an appendectomy during a trip to France in 1952. One of her nurses came in to ask how she was feeling, and she replied that she was feeling fantastic, giving a big kick in the air to punctuate her point. Unexpectedly, that’s what killed her, as the movement dislodged a blood clot that had formed in her leg and traveled through her body to her brain.
Tragedy during a tragedy
We all know how many brave men and women stepped up to help on 9/11 – police, paramedics and firefighters. Many of them didn’t make it out of the towers, but, in the case of Daniel Suhr, he didn’t even get inside before tragedy struck.
While rushing to help, Suhr became the first firefighter killed when he was hit by someone jumping from one of the upper floors. Those around him tried unsuccessfully to save his life. Understandably, this was a devastating blow to his family, but his sister looks at it a different way. She said her brother’s death meant that the men from his firehouse were saved, as they would’ve been inside the first tower to come down if they hadn’t been looking after him.
Buried alive
Alexander the Great might be one of the greatest military leaders in history, but his death was absolutely terrifying. No, he wasn’t killed by some grand enemy or taken out by a devastating plague. Instead, scientists think he was buried alive. It’s thought that he suffered from Guillain-Barré syndrome, which put him into a state of paralysis for nearly six days – long enough that his faithful followers thought he was dead.
In the days after his “passing,” people marveled over the fact his body hadn’t started decomposing, most likely because he wasn’t actually dead… Yet. While this would mean he was buried alive, the same scholars also think he would’ve been in a coma by this point and wouldn’t have been aware of his circumstances.
Teeth hoarder
Few people actually like the dentist, and they’ll probably like it even less after hearing this disgusting fact. In 2018, construction workers were renovating a building in Valdosta, Georgia, that had previously been used by Dr. Clarence Whittington, a dentist in the 1900s. When they pulled away one of the walls on the second floor, they found about 1,000 different human teeth.
Why this man was keeping his patient’s teeth is unknown, but things get far, far worse. It turns out this isn’t the only building in the state that’s contained a hidden stash of teeth – there are at least two more.
‘Trunk Lady’
It’s probably not a good thing to see two people unload a trunk from their vehicle and abandon it in a field. It definitely wasn’t in the case of “Trunk Lady.” On Halloween 1969, Florida police were called to investigate this exact scene.
When they opened the container, they found, to their horror, the body of a dead woman. Of course, the victim’s name came, in part, from where she was discovered, but it stuck because they couldn’t figure out who she was. It took 53 years of on-and-off investigations for authorities to finally figure it out. The victim was Sylvia Atherton, a mother from Arizona. Perhaps the worst part is that even with this new information, they’re no closer to finding out who killed her.
Vladimir Komarov knowingly flew to his death
Vladimir Komarov was a Soviet cosmonaut sent into space on Voskhod 1 in October 1964 and, again, on Soyuz 1 in April 1967. The second flight was horrifying, as he knew he was heading toward his death.
When the vessel was inspected before launch, there were over 200 structural problems, but Komarov still agreed to go. Why? To save his friend. He said, “If I don’t make this flight, they’ll send the backup pilot instead. That’s Yura, and he’ll die instead of me. We’ve got to take care of him.”
It wasn’t long after making it into space that the problems started. Now, everyone knew Komarov was going to die – something he bluntly told the ground officials. His wife was called, so they could decide what to tell their children. Eventually, it came time for his ship to re-enter orbit, and the parachutes wouldn’t open. The last thing that could be heard was Komarov’s “cries of rage as he plunged to his death.”
He was the first person to die in a space flight.
Ivy League photo scandal
While this might not seem as horrifying as being buried alive or dying from a high kick, the case of the Ivy League unclothed photos is disturbing in an entirely different way.
Between the 1940s-70s, many of these top-rated schools recruited incoming students – male and female – to pose for photos while undressed. The purpose was, allegedly, to study how prevalent cases of lordosis, scoliosis and rickets were. This means there were once revealing photos of many well-known American figures, including Meryl Streep, Bob Woodward, Diane Sawyer and some very prominent politicians.
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After their discovery, the images were transferred to the care of the Smithsonian Institution, and they were supposedly destroyed by 2001. However, ever since 2020, photos of Yale students have been put up for sale by private collectors, meaning, clearly, they weren’t protected as well as it initially seemed.