“Horror is the natural reaction to the last 5,000 years of history.”
Imagine going out on a routine excavation. Perhaps not even related to any academic study. It could just be surveying for a construction project. The dig starts, and instead of just finding the usual rocks and soil, the workers find a very specific form of the abyss: A glimpse into the inhumanity that man has shown to man throughout history.
This will be another us writeup that spans the globe as it spans the ages. If there’s one thing that all humanity from all times and humanity can be counted on to do, it’s performing acts of horrifying cruelty. Sometimes the acts are committed out of the public eye, while others are officially sanctioned. As many years or even centuries as these atrocities were allowed to be forgotten, they have a surprising tendency to not stay forgotten forever.
10. Somersham
It’s no surprise to long-time TopTenz readers that the Roman Legion were not benevolent overlords. The evidence indicates that the empire’s decline entered its early stages, and the legionaries doubled down on their harshness rather than trying to win their favor. According to Isabel Lisboa of the academic journal Archaeologica, in the Third Century AD executions doubled, and by the Fourth Century they had tripled. Glimpses of that appalling reality have been found in such areas as the village of Somersham in Cambridgeshire County.
In 2001 Tarmac Trading began gravel excavation near the very unfortunately named Knobb’s Farm. They stumbled upon improvised cemeteries containing dozens of corpses divided roughly evenly between the genders, DNA tests revealing they were largely imported slaves. A full third of them had been decapitated before their burials. One, the remains of an old woman, was reported to have evidence of torture cut into her skeleton. Such cruelty has a way of taking the sting out of the decline and fall of this empire.
9. 36 Craven Street
This discovery sounds like something that would be made up for the Assassin’s Creed video game series, yet it was hardly disputed from when it was first reported in 1997. During a renovation, the basement of this London address was found to contain the bodies of at least 15 people, six of which were children. Curiously, there were also the remains of sea turtles. Forensic analysis found that the bodies dated back to the 1770s, which immediately raised the profile of the discovery because that was the time when the address had been the home of Benjamin Franklin, the founding father who was then an envoy for the American colonies. Ironically, it had been during renovations to convert the building to a museum for Poor Richard himself that the potentially scandalous discovery was made.
Fortunately for Franklin’s legacy, the historical record quickly exonerated him. To a point. It turned out the home had also been the residence of William Hewson, an anatomist with the Royal Society who was the son-in-law of the building’s owner. His noted, enlightened work came with some blemishes, in that he was deeply connected to the grave robberies that were so common for people in his profession that there were lobbying groups to legalize it (ultimately partially successful, as possessing a dead body was legal but damaging a grave or taking the effects the body was buried with were illegal). The current common consensus was that Franklin, a friend of Hewson’s before he left for home in 1776, was one of several who knew what was up but kept knowledge of those graves to himself.
8. Sand Creek
Even by the standards of US military abuses of Native American communities, the Sand Creek Massacre stood out for one fairly grim reason. On November 29, 1864, 700 US Cavalry soldiers attacked a community of about 1,000 local Cheyenne and Arapaho tribe members on an accusation that they had murdered a white family near Denver, Colorado. This was even though the community leaders were there at the government’s insistence and they had been peacefully cooperating up to that point. While the commander Colonel John Chivington would initially declare that they had won a glorious victory, Captain Silas Soule led an effort to correct the official story, reporting most of the 200 people who had been killed had been women and children, and that the attack had been unprovoked. Unusually, the government took the side of the Native American victims, though as reported by the National Park Service not a single cavalryman was so much as was charged with a crime. Ultimately, as it spurred many Native American attacks, the event was something of a My Lai Massacre of the American conquest of the West.
By 1988, the location was designated for preservation, and yet the specific site had long been forgotten. It took a combined effort of the National Park Service, Colorado State, and Arapaho and Cheyenne tribes to use historical accounts and metal detectors. For all that, it still required the finding of a forgotten 1868 map drawn by Lieutenant Samuel Bonsail of the site and cross-referencing elk hide paintings from survivors to locate the area. As it happened, a Cheyenne spiritual leader had already consecrated the location in 1978 anyway, which many believe was more a fitting memorial for the atrocity.
7. Crow Creek
Despite the previous entry, it is not our intention to patronizingly paint the Indigenous populations of pre-colonial America as any sort of utopia. There are few more vivid examples of how far they were from that postmodern conception than the findings at Crow Creek, South Dakota in the 1950s during an excavation for a dam project. Workers found the remains of 486 people who fell when a village was sacked circa 1350 AD, with the attackers showing no mercy based on age or gender. Indeed, many skulls had the characteristic damage from scalpings.
The generally accepted belief for why the victims had been attacked so viciously was that the region was suffering from a drought. Such a shortage of rain was also the cause of mass migration as far away as among Pueblo tribes in the Southwestern states. Analysis of the eye sockets on the skulls showed that the victims were suffering from iron deficiency anemia. Considering recent drought patterns, whether climate change is anthropogenic or not, it’s a resonant event in a particularly unfortunate way.
6. Potocani
As horrid as the events have been, at least for previous entries we’ve had likely explanations for why they happened. When Croatian construction workers working in Potocani village to construct a garage unearthed a mass grave in 2007, they stumbled upon evidence of a 6,200-year-old crime scene that only became more mysterious as it was investigated. The 41 victims ranged in age from their fifties to two years old. They were mostly killed through blows to the back of the head, many receiving multiple blows when the first could have been fatal, indicating that the executions were performed erratically.
More curious was that the victims were not related, though they largely came from what’s now Türkiye. That raised the questions beyond why they were murdered. Why were they even together in the first place? Analysis of the bodies also indicated no injuries to their limbs or faces, strongly indicating they made no effort to defend themselves. So why did they allow themselves to be put to death en masse? Across the millenia, such answers are unlikely to be found.
5. Tzompantli
The Tzompantli sound so much like propaganda from the conquistadors to justify their 1520s atrocities against the Aztecs that for decades historians suspected these supposed pyramids of human heads were made up. Unfortunately for past Central Americans, in 2015 the Institute of Anthropology found the remains of 119 of the reported seven in the Aztec capital Tenochtitlan. Initially, it was assumed that the dead were captured enemy combatants offered up as sacrifices to maintain the existence of the universe, but as with so many other entries on this list, it turned out that women, the elderly, and children were not spared the obsidian daggers.
In an extra grisly touch, some of the faces had been converted into masks. Some had obsidian blades, perhaps the same weapons that had been used to make offerings of them, were embedded in the nasal passages. The eyes were replaced with white stones, complete with smaller black discs on them to represent the pupils. Interestingly, while the Aztecs were savvy enough to use their enemies for their sacrifices, they also knew better to make larger demands of their more powerful subject states, reasoning that being able to offer a larger human tribute was a show of prosperity on the part of relatively large states and that making too large of demands on the smaller states would likely drive them to desperation. Such are the economics of systemic evisceration.
4. Sandby Borg
We’ve seen more than our fair number of massacres so far, but the mass murders in the village fort of Sandby Borg (located on Öland island on the Eastern coast of Sweden, approximately 220 miles from Copenhagen) that took place circa 500 AD are unusually vivid. One day, attackers went door to door putting to death every man and many children. One elderly man was both thrown onto a fire and had sheep’s teeth shoved in his mouth. Infants were opened up. The bodies, in all cases, were left to rot where they fell, so that one man was found by archaeologists in the doorway to his home.
What was morbid about the Sandby Borg massacre was that valuables such as silver brooches and spiral bead necklaces were left about the community, and there were no marks of injuries from self-defense or signs of significant damage to the walls. In short, all the evidence indicated that Sandby Borg was an immense inside job rather than a raid, which caught its inhabitants completely off-guard. It’s one thing to imagine a community falling to the blades of invaders, having time to grieve and no emotional connection to their attackers. What happened in Sandby Borg seems to have been an immense betrayal of trust, not a large Viking raid but more a massive and coordinated mob hit. It’s little wonder then that while archaeologists had to unearth the nature of the deaths, Sandby Borg went down in Swedish folklore as a cursed place.
3. Gough’s Cave
You knew before you clicked on this link that it was only a matter of time before the topic of cannibalism came up, didn’t you? But did you expect that the entry on the subject would take us not to a remote tropical island, but to Somerset, England? As reported in 2017 by the New York Times, remains were found in Gough’s Cave of Cheddar Gorge which showed that roughly 15,000 years ago, people were consuming each other. The presence of heaps of animal bones among the many gnawed human bones indicated that this was not done out of desperation, but out of ritual. That wasn’t even to mention that skull caps were being converted into bowls, something which would later be done by iconic Wisconsin grave-robbing murderer Ed Gein.
The human bones were also mistreated in another, more cryptic manner. Patterns of etchings were carved into them, which looked like tally marks arranged in zigzags. The meaning of these markings is long lost to history, likely forever. The only aspect to lighten the grimness of the discovery was the fact that at least these bodies did not show signs of traumatic injury to the skeletons, leaving open the possibility that the consumed had at least been able to pass away from natural causes.
2. The Forgotten Genocide
During a 1931 interview with Richard Breiting where he discussed his plans to commit genocide of undesirables, Adolf Hitler rhetorically asked “Who today remembers the Armenian Extermination?” While the 1915-17 Armenian Genocide has indeed been widely overlooked (with the White House only acknowledging it in April 2021) it turns out there was another recent genocide that Hitler could have referenced, and which would to a degree inspire the race experiments of the Holocaust.
In 1999, mass graves were uncovered in the Kalahari Desert in Namibia (the nation located on the Northwestern border of South Africa). In 1904, the nation was one of Germany’s few African colonies, and an attempt at a massive land grab led to widespread rebellion by the Nama and Herero tribes. The German military sent 10,000 soldiers under orders to take no prisoners. By 1908 they would be estimated to have killed roughly 80% of Herero and 50% of Nama, of populations of 100,000 and 50,000 respectively. Survivors were placed in concentration camps and often sexually assaulted. Dr. Eugene Fischer would take the children of these rapes and perform experiments on them, concluding they were racially inferior, conclusions which would be widely cited to claim a scientific basis for the Final Solution. One of his subordinates was none other than Dr. Josef Mengele.
Such was the degree of desperation of Namibia at the time (it had only achieved independence from South Africa in 1990) that even after the graves were uncovered, the government refused to formally acknowledge the genocide. It was only after Germany formally acknowledged the genocide that Namibian organizations acknowledged the atrocities. The government followed this up with $1.35 billion in reparations. Controversially, the funds were largely devoted to infrastructure projects such as energy development, and not to providing for the Nama and Herero descendants that had borne the brunt of the atrocity.
1. Kamloops, Marieval, and More
In June 2021, the wider world was given insight into just what sort of ghastly but officially sanctioned crimes were largely overlooked in Canadian history. Beginning in 1863, a massive program of cultural erasure was begun by the Roman Catholic Church when Indigenous children were taken away from households and placed in 130 schools such as the Marieval Indian Residential School in Saskatchewan, and a similar facility in Kamloops, British Columbia. This practice continued until the astoundingly late year of 1998. Beginning in 2008, a commission confirmed a longstanding accusation: The death toll from the abductions was much higher than officials had been willing to admit.
For example at Kamloops, 215 unmarked child graves were discovered. At Marieval, 751 child corpses had been discretely disposed of. The deaths were largely attributed to poor sanitary, heating, and nutritional conditions. Not to mention several failed attempts to escape rampant physical and sexual abuse. Even in January 2022, a search at the St. Joseph’s Mission in British Columbia reportedly yielded another 93 unmarked child graves. Who knows how many other covert deaths are still concealed at the more than 100 other schools?
Dustin Koski also wrote about horrific events in the future in the supernatural comedy Return of the Living.