A zoonosis is a disease which is transmitted from animals to humans. With nearly 850 known zoonoses, many of which are almost never contracted by humans, there are bound to be many that we are unaware of. Besides entry number four, this list presents a number of fairly unknown zoonotic disease which, although rare, still infect hundreds or thousands worldwide each year. Each entry includes a brief rundown of symptoms, risks and treatment, as well as providing small factoids about the pathogen itself.

As the name suggests, the humble cat is the main carrier of Cat Scratch Disease. Transmitted through a scratch or bite, symptoms including painful regional and lymph node swelling and papules, which typically appear within one to two weeks of infection—although they can take up to to eight weeks to manifest. The majority of cases resolve themselves over time and do not require medical treatment with antibiotics, although in individuals with weak or compromised immune systems, such as children and sufferers of HIV, treatment is essential to prevent abscesses, pneumonia and even comas.

Endemic only to Australia, barmah forest virus is a non-fatal mosquito borne pathogen which is closely related to the equally non-fatal, but more common, ross river virus. The majority of individuals who contract barmah forest virus demonstrate no symptoms whatsoever, but in those who do the virus manifests itself within two weeks with a mild fever, headaches, lethargy, rashes and painful arthritis and swelling—particularly of the wrists and ankles. All of these symptoms, barring arthritis which can continue for up to six months or more, resolve themselves without treatment within a couple of weeks. Although relatively harmless, in susceptible individuals barmah forest virus has been known to cause Guillain–Barré syndrome or kidney inflammation, both of which can be fatal.

Carried almost predominately by sheep, orf is contracted when the virus comes into contact with cuts or abrasions on the skin. If normal wound infections procedures are followed, medical care should be unnecessary as there are no major complications which can arise from the disease. The main symptoms of orf are red papules or lesions at the site of infection.

With varying infection rates worldwide, Bang’s disease, or brucellosis, is a bacterial disease commonly contracted through the consumption of unsterilized and contaminated milk or meat from infected cattle, sheep, pigs or goats. It may also be contracted through cuts which come into contact with the bodily fluids of an infected animal. Symptoms arise within one month and initially include flu like symptoms such as fever, headaches, back and joint pain as well as fatigue. If left untreated Bang’s disease can lead to heart infection and liver abscess—both of which can lead to death—and also lasting symptoms similar to chronic fatigue syndrome. In pregnant women the disease can also cause miscarriages and birth defects.

Unlike many of the entries on this list, cryptosporidiosis can not only be frequently transmitted from animal to humans, but also from human to human. All infections result from the consumption of contaminated food or water. With an incubation period of up to ten days, the cryptosporidiosis parasite lives within the intestines of it’s host and can cause acute symptoms in the majority of patients, which can last up to two weeks. Symptoms include stomach cramps, vomiting, nausea, fever and dehydration. Treatments often target the symptoms rather the the parasite itself, and as long as one remains hydrated there should be few, if any, major complications. In patients with a compromised immune system, however, hospitalization is often required to prevent death from chronic dehydration.

Caught from contact with the infected feces of dogs, cats and foxes, toxocariasis is a parasite whose eggs can remain dormant within a host for up to two years before hatching. Once born, toxocariasis typically takes up residence in the intestines and cause moderate headaches, coughs and stomach cramps as well as a high fever should the parasite decide to relocate to an individuals organs. In rare cases the pathogen may infect the hosts eyes, leading to blurry vision and severe irritation, which if left untreated can lead to permanent blindness.

Probably the most well known entry on this list, rabies is of particular interest today as it’s no longer considered a total death sentence. Contracted through the bites and cuts from infected animals, rabies has an unpredictable incubation period followed by a rapid onset of destructive neurological symptoms, which eventually lead to death as the virus induces brain dysfunction. However in recent years the so called ‘Milwaukee Protocol’ has rose to prominence by saving around 8% of unvaccinated patients it has been used upon. That may seem low, but for a virus that once had a 100% mortality rate it is promising. During the Milwaukee protocol a patient with rabies is forcibly put into a drug induced coma and provided with high doses of antivirals. How exactly this technique works is unknown, although it is thought that by shutting down large portions of the brain it both prevents the brain dysfunction which typically kills, as well as providing more time for an individuals immune system to combat the virus.

Native to North America, Pahvant Vally Plague, or tulaermia, is a potentially fatal bacterial disease primarily transmitted from rabbits to humans via ticks and lice. One can also contract the disease by consuming contaminated food or water, or handling infected animal corpses. With an average incubation period of three to five days, many who have been infected are often surprised by the rapid onset of debilitating symptoms, which generally include a high fever, severe headaches, extreme weakness, lethargy, diarrhea, arthritis, chills, swollen lymph nodes and eyes as well as ulcers within the mouth or on the skin. Pahvent Vally Plague is considered a medical emergency which requires immediate treatment with antibiotics to prevent death from either dehydration, pneumonia or suffocation—resulting from respiratory depression caused by pahvant valley plague.

The severest form of leishmaniasis, black fever is a parasitic disease contracted from female sand fly bites in tropical and temperate regions of the globe. Infecting up to half a million people annually, and killing an estimated 50,000 of those, black fever is the deadliest human parasite known to man after malaria. With a untreated mortality rate of 100%, black fever’s symptoms are similar to to that of malaria—which often leads to a fatal misdiagnosis. Patients experience a high fever, blackening of the skin, ulcers, weakness, fatigue and anemia as well as spleen and liver enlargement. If left untreated black fever generally begins to attack the hosts immune system, which leaves the individual open to opportunistic infectious agents—many of which can cause pneumonia leading to death.

With a single colony hypothetically able to infect the entire human race, Q Fever is considered one of the most infectious agents known to man, as only a single Q Fever bacterium is required to be present for an individual to contract the disease. Although rarely transmitted from human to human (predominantly via sexual contact), the pathogen is far more commonly passed from livestock and domestic mammals to humans through contact with their bodily fluids—including milk, excrement and semen (There is a high rate of Q Fever amongst zoosexuals and zoophilies). Symptoms typically take up to three weeks to manifest and include, amongst others, a high fever, photophobia, extreme headaches and excessive sweating. Although there is a high risk of complications, including life threatening pneumonia and hepatitis, swift treatment with powerful antibiotics leads to a survival rate of over 90%. Antibiotic treatment for Q Fever typically has to be continued for months, or even years if necessary, as every single bacterium has to be eliminated fro the body to prevent relapse. There is typically less then a thousand Q Fever cases worldwide per year, and there is little threat of the bacteria mutating into something more powerful. Despite this, Q Fever is classified as a Class B bioterror agent due to it’s infectious and incapacitating nature.

Honorable Mentions: Anthrax, Avian Flu, Bovine TB, Cholera, Cowpox, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, Dengue fever, Ebola, HIV, Plauge, Salmonellosis, SARS (Debatable), Streptococcus Suis, Swine Flu, Typhus, West Nile Virus, Yellow Fever, Leprosy.

Underdogs have a special place in the hearts of many, whether it’s the upstart Celtic Iceni tribe led by Boudicca revolting against the Romans or the ice-veined Spartans fighting in one of history’s greatest last stands against the Persians at Thermopylae. Either through superior tactics or more technologically advanced weaponry, the outnumbered often achieve some form of victory, whether moral or outright. Here are 10 such examples of great historical underdogs.

10British East India Company
Battle Of Assaye

Arthur Wellesley, the major general of the British forces and future first Duke of Wellington, said this of the battle: It was “the bloodiest for the number that I ever saw.” One of the major battles of the Second Anglo-Maratha War, a conflict between the British East India Company and the Maratha Empire, the Battle of Assaye saw between 6,500–10,000 British soldiers face off against a 40,000–50,000 strong Maratha army.

Unfortunately for the British, their intelligence about the strength and location of their enemy was flawed. Not only were they in the wrong location, but they were much stronger than expected, having recently swelled by several divisions. Luckily for Wellesley, he was a better battlefield general than he was a strategist, as he quickly devised a plan to strike quickly, rather than wait for the reinforcements coming along under the command of Colonel Stevenson. (He had divided his army based on the faulty intelligence he had received, and the rest of his forces were miles away.)

However, the main reason for the British victory was the Maratha army simply didn’t believe that Wellesley would attack while being outnumbered so badly. This surprise led to a rout, one in which 5,000–6,500 soldiers of the Maratha army fell in battle. (The British lost about 1,500.) Later in his life, the Duke of Wellington reminisced about his many military triumphs and concluded that his victory at Assaye was the greatest of them all.

9King David IV And The Georgian Army
Battle Of Didgori

Otherwise known as David the Builder for his role as the architect of the Georgian Golden Age, King David IV of Georgia (the country, not the state) was faced with a problem that had plagued his country for years. The Seljuq Turks, Muslims from present-day Kazakhstan, had control over most of the Georgian state. (Various internal wars and earthquakes also helped to weaken the country’s resolve.) Ascending to the throne at the tender age of 16, David IV gathered together the various feudal lords in the area, formed an army, and began repelling the Seljuq occupiers, refusing to pay them any tribute.

Invigorated by the First Crusade’s success against Muslim armies, David IV initiated his plan to take Tbilisi, a great Georgian city and future capital of the country, which had been under Muslim control for nearly 500 years. So around 56,000 men began marching toward the city, camping at Mount Didgori, some 40 milometers (25 mi) from Tbilisi. Though contemporary records exaggerate the amount of forces facing the Georgians, conservative estimates put it at 100,000–250,000 men.

In a similar vein to Stalin and his infamous Order No. 227 (the “Not one step back!” order), David IV declared that retreat was not an option, barricading the route behind his men with trees and boulders. Then, in an act of treachery, he sent 200 heavily armed cavalrymen to the Seljuq leaders under the pretense that they were deserters. When they arrived, the Georgians attacked, killing the leaders and demoralizing the Muslim army. The Battle of Didgori was on, and it only lasted three hours, with the Seljuq Turks taking heavy losses, both as dead and captured, while the Georgians got off relatively light. (Actual casualty counts are hard to come by.) Tbilisi soon fell, and Georgia had its capital once again.

8Mexican Army
Battle Of Puebla

Picture it: Puebla, Mexico, 1862. The liberal Benito Juarez had been elected as president during the prior year, as the country began to fall into financial ruin, thanks to the enormous foreign debt they had accumulated over the years. Britain, France, and Spain each sent their own navies to Veracruz, demanding payment from the Mexican government. Deals were reached with Britain and Spain, who departed shortly afterward, but Napoleon III, nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte, saw an opportunity to establish a Mexican empire and refused to negotiate, landing an invading army instead.

Veracruz was stormed first, quite successfully, and the ease of the fighting convinced the French leaders that victory would come quickly throughout the country. Mexico City, the capital of the country, was the target, but a well-fortified city lay in the direct path the French decided to take: the city of Puebla. 6,000 French troops marched on the city, determined to wrest it from the hands of its ragtag band of 2,000 men. (As any military historian would tell you, a ratio of at least 3:1 is necessary for any sieging army.)

However, even with their superior numbers and artillery, the French were rebuffed in their assault. Starting at daybreak on May 5, the fighting lasted until early evening, with the French suffering five times as many casualties as the Mexicans. (Admittedly, the French only lost 500 people.) It was not strategically important—not only did the French ultimately take over the country for a short period, they even took the city itself a year later. But the victory served as a morale boost for the Mexican army, as well as the people of Mexico, who later created a holiday to celebrate the battle: Cinco de Mayo. (However, it is much more widely celebrated in the United States today than anywhere in Mexico, often under the misnomer of Mexican Independence Day.)

7Croatian National Guard
Battle Of Vukovar

When the president of Yugoslavia, Josip Tito, died in 1980, he left behind a fractured country, one cobbled together from formerly different states. (The six socialist republics were Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Slovenia, and Serbia.) Serbian nationalists seized the opportunity and tried to centralize control of the country in their capital city of Belgrade. However, most of the other states wanted to break loose, with Croatia being one of them.

On June 25, 1991, the Croatians declared independence, though sporadic fighting between nationalist groups and police had been taking place since the end of March. Two months later, Serbian forces marched on Vukovar with about 36,000 men, determined to take the city, an important regional center on the eastern border of Croatia. Unfortunately for the Croats, the defending force was only 1,800 strong, with some of the Croatian citizens of the city doing what they could to support the troops.

For 86 days, the defenders held off the Serbians, before they finally surrendered, having ran out of ammo. (Reinforcements from other parts of the country never came.) Casualties on both sides were high, with the Serbian forces losing nearly twice as many men; the Croatian defenders lost nearly all of their men to death or injury. The aftermath of the battle was even worse for the inhabitants of the city, as the Serbs butchered 200 Croats who had taken refuge in the city’s hospital and had been promised safe passage out of the city. Widespread executions by Serbian forces were reported throughout the city as well, as ethnic cleansing began to rear its ugly head.

6English Troops
Battle Of Crecy

Though not as well known or devastating to the French as the Battle of Agincourt some 70 years later, the Battle of Crecy was arguably the most important battle in the entirety of the Hundred Years War. Relatively little attention was paid to the English longbow in the country, a weapon widely seen as one of the most devastating weapons in medieval times. That all changed in 1332 under the instruction of Edward III; he realized a large mass of longbows, fired in unison, could defeat much larger armies.

For 14 years, he built up his army of longbowmen, training and equipping them at a much lower cost than the traditional aristocratic knights who had previously made up his army. In July 1346, somewhere around 10,000 men landed on the French coast, outnumbered by nearly three to one. In fact, the French king at the time, Phillip VI, was so confident in his numerical superiority that he made a list of English knights he planned to take prisoner once they had won. Unlike Agincourt, in which the terrain played a large role in determining the outcome of the battle, Crecy was won simply because no one had really seen the longbow in action, and its novelty proved to be the deciding factor.

The French, as well as many other countries, had often looked at archers as defensive troops, with the crossbow seen as the most superior ranged weapon. However, the English longbowmen could fire six to seven times more arrows per minute, contributing to them killing the French crossbowmen very quickly. Any who retreated were cut down by advancing French horsemen, who took it as a sign of cowardice. In the end, confusion and fear (as well as longbowmen) ravaged the French forces, and at least 10,000 of them met their demise. (An argument could be made this isn’t an underdog victory, as the English enjoyed such a strategic advantage, but it shocked all of Christendom nevertheless.)

5Irish UN Troops
Siege Of Jadotville

The year was 1961. Ireland had only been recently admitted to the UN, as the Soviet Union had vetoed them relentlessly due to their neutrality during World War II, and this was their first peacekeeping operation. Though they weren’t exclusively made up of Irish soldiers (there were Swedish and Indian men as well), the UN troops in the state of Katanga in the Congo numbered only 158 and were very lightly armed. Stationed at the wealthy mining town of Jadotville, the troops were ordered to defend the locals from Katangan militia and Belgian mercenaries.

Having dug trenches, the Irish forces used accurate shooting and timely mortar attacks to repel the 3,000–5,000 strong force trying to storm the town. Somehow, by the end of the fighting, 1,300 of the enemies were either wounded or killed, with only five of the Irish wounded. UN forces tried to make it to the city to provide relief, but they were unable to break through the enemy lines. Out of ammunition, the commander of the Irish forces, Pat Quinlan, was forced to broker a ceasefire. (Or surrender, depending on your opinion.) Much of the Irish population felt they had surrendered, ignoring them on their return and denigrating the memory of anyone who served in Jadotville. However, thanks to the efforts of one of the men, John Gorman, their reputation has since been revived.

Perhaps the most famous quote to come from the conflict was made by Pat Quinlan, the Irish commander of the troops: “We will fight to the last man. Could do with some whiskey.” (Unfortunately, Irish nationalism changed that quote; he had actually requested water.)

4Swedish Soldiers
Battle Of Fraustadt

Though not as decisive nor impressive a victory as the Battle of Narva, a fight in which King Charles XII led a force of Swedes to victory over a Russian army nearly four times its size, the Battle of Fraustadt and the subsequent Swedish victory was one of their best and last in the Great Northern War. Besieged by three separate countries (Russia, Denmark-Norway, and Saxony-Poland), whose leaders sensed weakness in Sweden’s young king, the Swedish army enjoyed several initial successes.

One of those successes took place in 1706 near Fraustadt, a town in western Poland. 18,000 Saxons, Russians, and their mercenaries entrenched themselves a short distance from the outskirts of the town, and 9,000 Swedes did the same. The Swedish general recognized he had a numerical edge in cavalry, nearly three to one, and used that to his advantage. Using a pincer motion and the classic aggression of Swedish generals, he sent his horseman around the enemy’s flanks until they reached the center rear of their main line of defense.

The Saxon and Russian army collapsed at this point, leading to a rout in which only about 1,000 Swedes were either killed or captured and almost 16,000 of the enemy met the same fate. In addition, about 500 Russians who were taken prisoner during the battle were executed as revenge for atrocities the Russian forces were said to have committed in the city of Courland.

3Eastern Jin Soldiers
Battle Of Fei River

Widely considered one of the most important battles in Chinese history, the Battle of Fei River pitted the Eastern Jin dynasty of southern China against the barbarous inhabitants of the Former Qin dynasty of northern China. While the numbers might be exaggerated (a claim you could make against virtually every battle in human history), traditional historical sources say 800,000 soldiers marched from the north to face only 80,000 Eastern Jin Soldiers.

However, the Qin army was mostly made up of random conscripted soldiers, many of whom felt no loyalty toward their commanders or even outright hatred. In addition, they were poorly equipped and even more poorly trained. Fu Jian, the leader of the Qin dynasty, had conquered nearly all of the northern kingdoms of China, with those in the south squarely in his sights. So his men marched toward the lands of the Eastern Jin, successfully capturing many of the border cities.

In 382, Eastern Jin forces, led by the general Xie Xuan, decided to make their final stand at the Fei River, a waterway that is now dried up. The Eastern Jin forces were on one side of the river, and the Qin army was on the other. Xie Xuan sent word to his enemies, asking them to retreat slightly to the west so as to allow his forces to cross the river and commence the battle. When Fu Jin, the emperor of the Qin dynasty, agreed, many of his soldiers believed they had been defeated and panicked. Seizing this opportunity, Xie Xuan struck, killing nearly all of his enemies. By the end of the fighting, there was so much death that one account says: “The dead were so many that they were making a pillow for each other on the ground.” Shortly afterward, the Qin dynasty, devastated by the loss, plunged into civil war.

2Polish Infantry
Battle Of Wizna

Often described as the Polish Thermopylae, the Battle of Wizna saw an extremely outnumbered Polish force defend the city of Wizna against the onslaught of the German army. Though this is commonly seen as the beginning of the German blitzkrieg, the invasion of Poland was conducted through more traditional military means. Nevertheless, the difference in strength was overwhelming: 700 Poles were in the city, facing off against 40,000 Germans. (In fact more recent historians have claimed there may have only been about 360 Poles in the city.)

The fighting broke out on September 7, 1939, and lasted for two and a half days. To boost morale, as the Poles had heard of the vast army which was bearing down on them, the commander of the Polish forces, a man named Wladyslaw Raginis, vowed to not leave any defended position alive. However, the Polish forces quickly found themselves out of ammo, with no hope of reinforcements. In addition, the German commander, Heinz Guderian, threatened to execute every one of the Polish POWs if they didn’t surrender. In the end, Raginis agreed, sending his troops out of the bunker. One of them, Seweryn Bieganski, recalled later: “The captain looked at me warmly and softly urged me to leave. When I was at the exit, I was hit on my back with strong gust, and I heard an explosion.”

While they were unsuccessful in keeping Wizna out of German hands, the defenders did allow Polish leadership and many other soldiers to escape to Western Europe, where they continued the fight against the Nazis.

1Korean Navy
Battle Of Myeongnyang

Originally an army commander, Yi Sun-Sin began his military career fighting the Manchu nomads who roamed Korea’s northern border. A short while later, he was made commander of the Cholla naval district and defeated the Japanese fleet in several battles, thanks in no small part to his kobukson, the famed “turtle ships” of the Joseon dynasty. Due to a plot by a Japanese double agent, Sun-Sin was arrested and tortured for refusing orders that he deemed to be too dangerous. (Which they were, as the double agent wished to destroy the Korean fleet.)

Spared the death penalty but demoted to a lowly rank, Sun-Sin bided his time until the Korean leadership called on him again. The Japanese had mounted another attack and seemed to have turned the tide. Thanks to the many defeats of the general who preceded him, Sun-Sin only had 12 ships left to defend the country with, and he decided to make a last stand in the Myeongnyang Strait, just off the southwest coast of Korea. Though sources differ, the vast agree that at least 133 Japanese ships met him there, determined to end the war once and for all.

Using his knowledge of the ocean around him, as well as the strength of his ships, Sun-Sin routed the Japanese, destroying 31 of their ships while losing none of his own. Part of the massive victory was because the Japanese tended to try and win naval battles in the same vein of the Romans when they faced off against the Carthaginians: They tried to board the enemy ships rather than ram them. This proved fruitless against the kobukson, and Korea was victorious.

“What happened to your second wife?” an interviewer once asked Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard.

He was referring to Sara Northrup, the woman who’d been at Hubbard’s side while he developed Dianetics and who later divorced him in a messy, public scandal. The whole world had watched their divorce fill the headlines of every paper. But still, when the question came, Hubbard just smirked and told the interviewer: “I’d never had a second wife.”

It’s an incredibly brazen lie—and a sign of just how much damage Sara Northrup could do to him. Her life is a story that the Church of Scientology is still trying to cover up because the amount of suffering she endured at Hubbard’s hands is nothing short of heartbreaking.

10 She Met L. Ron Hubbard In A Sex Magick Cult

Sara Northrup’s life was difficult from the start. When she met Hubbard, she was living at the home of physicist and occultist Jack Parsons. Both she and Hubbard were members of Aleister Crowley’s sex magick cult.

Northrup’s life was already filled with sexual abuse. She’d been molested by her father from a young age, a trauma that likely explains why she was already sleeping with Jack Parsons by age 13. However, he wasn’t just twice her age, he was her sister’s husband.

When Hubbard showed up, he must have seemed like a savior. Granted, he was every bit as strange as Parsons was. In fact, the two worked together to summon a Babylonian goddess, believing they could bring her to life by chanting, dabbing runes with animal blood, and masturbating on magical tablets.

But Hubbard was a war hero, injured in battle, or so he claimed. He won Northrup over by spinning stories about his heroism that most of the cult members wrote off as “tall tales.” But the young Northrup bought into them completely.

“I believed everything he said,” Northrup later said. “It just never occurred to me he was a liar.”^[1]

9 She And Hubbard Stole Jack Parsons’s Life Savings

Jack Parsons believed in free love. Bound by his own principles, he couldn’t do a thing but watch as his new friend, L. Ron Hubbard, started sleeping with his girlfriend, Sara Northrup. Parsons had to pretend to be okay with every bit of it.

Other lodgers at his house, though, could tell just how angry it made him. “There [Hubbard] was, living off Parsons’s largesse and making out with his girlfriend right in front of him,” one would later recall. “The hostility was almost tangible.”

Still, when Hubbard proposed that the two start a business together, Jack Parsons readily agreed to give him $20,000 to get things off the ground. Perhaps he just wanted to keep up appearances and pretend like it didn’t bother him. Either way, he was the only one who was surprised when Hubbard and Northrup took off to Florida with the $20,000 and a brand-new yacht, bought with Parsons’s money.

“He has given away both his girl and his money,” Karl Germer, one of Parsons’s friends, reported in a letter to Aleister Crowley. “It is the ordinary confidence trick.”^[2]

Parsons tried to sue them but quickly dropped the case. He accepted a few dollars of payment and, in exchange, let Hubbard and Northrup keep the yacht. It was a bad deal for Parsons, but he didn’t have much choice. If he didn’t comply, he was warned, Hubbard and Northrup would let the world know that Parsons had had sex with Northrup when she was 13.

8 Hubbard Was Still Married To His First Wife When They Got Married

Sara Northrup married L. Ron Hubbard because he threatened to kill himself. He’d asked her multiple times already, but she had refused every time until he made it clear: If she said no, his death would be on her conscience forever.

What Hubbard hadn’t told her, though, was that he was already married. Thirteen years earlier in 1933, he’d married Polly Grubb. She was the mother of his two children, and in exchange, Hubbard had taken off to New York to cheat on her with other women.

At this point, the two were so estranged that they hadn’t seen each other in about two years. But they were still married at Hubbard’s insistence. Polly had repeatedly asked for a divorce, but he kept turning her down.

Hubbard only agreed to a divorce after he’d been married to Sara for a good year and a half. But he still kept his marriage to Polly a secret. Instead, he took Sara with him to Polly’s house without explaining a thing, which forced her to try to figure out why these people were so hostile toward her.

It was his son, L. Ron Jr., who told her. Sara was devastated. She rushed out of the house crying and tried to get onto the next ferry that would take her as far away from Hubbard as possible.^[3]

In the end, she didn’t leave. Her new husband begged and pleaded until she stayed.

7 L. Ron Hubbard Brutally Abused Her

L. Ron Hubbard started beating his wife during summer 1946. It began when Sara’s father died. Despite her complicated feelings toward the man, Sara was overwhelmed with grief and sadness.

To Hubbard, her sadness was nothing more than an annoyance. When she cried, he would beat and strangle her into silence, complaining that she’d distracted him from his work.

Hubbard was losing his mind. He wrote a letter to Veteran Affairs (VA), begging them to help him pay for psychiatric treatment. But the VA never responded, and Hubbard got increasingly worse.^[4]

One morning, he woke up his wife by pistol-whipping her across the face. She’d been smiling in her sleep, he told her, and he was sure it was because she was thinking of someone else. Northrup fled into the night, nearly escaping her abusive husband again. But once more, she came back.

She felt sorry for him because she knew he was losing his mind. She later said, “I kept thinking that he must be suffering or he wouldn’t act that way.”

Staying only made it worse. By the time Northrup really did file for divorce, she’d gone through what the divorce proceedings described as “repeated” and “systematic torture.” He strangled her regularly. He threw her out of a moving car. He once kept her awake for four days straight and then tried to force her to overdose on sleeping pills.

Some of those scars would never heal. On Christmas 1950, Hubbard broke into such a rage that he deliberately ruptured her left eardrum. Her hearing would be impaired for the rest of her life.

6 Hubbard Tried To Beat Her Into A Miscarriage

None of those beatings, though, could compare to what he tried to do to her when she got pregnant.

One night, after Hubbard had gone into one his mad rages, he threw his pregnant wife onto the ground. They would not bring a child into this world, he had decided, and he would make sure of it. L. Ron Hubbard tried to make his wife miscarry by repeatedly stomping on her stomach.

By some strange miracle, the child survived. But this was hardly the first time that Hubbard had tried to beat an unborn baby to death.

His eldest son, L. Ron Hubbard Jr., claims that, as a child, he had caught his father standing over his mother with a coat hanger in his hand. And Hubbard Jr. says that his own birth, nearly three months premature, was the result of a failed late-term abortion:

“I wasn’t born. This is what came out as a result of their attempt to abort me.”^[5]

Hubbard admitted to some of the abortions himself. In his private memoir, he wrote that he and Polly’s marriage had resulted in “five abortions and two children.”

5 He Reported Her To The FBI As A Communist

As Dianetics started to take off and Hubbard became worth a small fortune, his eye started to wander. As he’d done with his first wife, Hubbard started to cheat on Sara with a young woman: Barbara Klowden, his 20-year-old PR assistant.

Sara didn’t take it lying down. After Hubbard forced her to go on a double date with Klowden, Sara started a revenge affair with one of his employees, Miles Hollister.

But nobody could bite back as hard as L. Ron Hubbard. He wrote the FBI a letter reporting his wife and her lover as “active and dangerous” Communists, calling Hollister “outspokenly disloyal to the US.”

J. Edgar Hoover actually answered Hubbard’s letter and invited him to meet with an FBI agent—which Hubbard did. He told them that Hollister had brainwashed his wife and driven her insane. Then Hubbard went into a mad rant about how Dianetics could bring an end to communism and how people said he was crazy but he definitely wasn’t.

The agent nodded politely, quietly making a little note in his book that just read: “Mental case.”^[6]

They never tried to bring in Northrup or Hollister. Perhaps, in part, it was because this was hardly the first time that Hubbard had tried to turn someone in. The FBI’s dossiers were full of letters from L. Ron Hubbard, reporting every German person he saw as an undercover Nazi and a “menace to the state.”

4 Scientologists Tried To Brainwash Her Into Staying With Hubbard

In their own ways, Hubbard and Northrup tried to make the marriage work. Northrup went to a psychiatrist and tried to convince Hubbard to get treatment for the paranoid schizophrenia that was destroying his life. But he wouldn’t listen.

Hubbard told her that she was in league with devils. Then he put two of his men, Richard de Mille and Dave Williams, to work at brainwashing her. As John Sanborne, one of Hubbard’s former confidants, recalls:

“He made this stupid attempt to get Northrup brainwashed so she’d do what he said. He kept her sitting up in a chair, denying her sleep, trying to use Black Dianetic principles on her, repeating over and over again whatever he wanted her to do. Things like, ‘Be his wife, have a family that looks good, not have a divorce.’ ”^[7]

It didn’t work. Northrup still wanted a divorce. In the end, Hubbard told her that he didn’t want to be with her, either. He was just worried about his reputation. There was only way out.

“If you really love me,” Hubbard told her, “you should kill yourself.”

In November 1950, Sara Northrup tried to do just that. While L. Ron Hubbard was out, she downed a bottle of sleeping pills and lay down, hoping never to wake up again.

It didn’t work. She woke up alive in a hospital bed, registered under a fake name.

3 Hubbard Kidnapped Her Baby

It was 1:00 AM on February 24, 1951, when L. Ron Hubbard and two of his friends dragged Sara Northrup out of her bed, still dressed in her nightgown. Hubbard had taken her baby. “We have Alexis,” Hubbard told her, “and you’ll never see her alive unless you come with us.”^[8]

They threw Sara into the back of a car and drove her to Yuma, Arizona. Not long after, Hubbard had a change of heart. He kicked her out, forced her to go back home, and kept the baby with him.

She tried begging Hubbard to give her back the baby, but Hubbard refused time and time again. Then, out of the blue, he called her and told her the worst thing imaginable: Alexis was dead, and he had killed her.

“He had cut her into little pieces,” Sara says he told her, “and dropped the pieces in a river and that he had seen little arms and legs floating down the river and it was my fault. I’d done it because I’d left him.”

Hubbard was lying. But Sara must have felt unimaginable pain when he said it. A little while later, he sent her a letter. He admitted that Alexis was alive and tried to blackmail Sara into giving him full custody.

“My will is all changed. Alexis will get a fortune,” he wrote, “unless she goes to you as she would then get nothing.”

He signed his blackmail note: “Goodbye. I love you. Ron.”

2 Polly Hubbard Had Gone Through All The Same Things

Sara publicized everything on the advice of a lawyer, who told her that she couldn’t keep all of this a secret any longer. “Tell the truth,” he told her, “for the truth will bring back [your] baby, if alive.”

She filed for divorce, and the papers became filled with horror stories about the man who had tortured her and taken her baby. Yes, she’d put it off too long. But now, it was clear that there was no other way to ever see her child again.

Polly Hubbard, Ron’s first wife, contacted Sara for the first time after reading about the divorce. Every word written by Sara was terrifyingly familiar to Hubbard’s first wife. Polly wrote Sara a letter of complete support:

“If I can help in any way, I’d like to. You must get Alexis in your custody. Ron is not normal. I had hoped that you could straighten him out. Your charges sound fantastic to the average person. But I’ve been through it—the beatings, threats on my life, all the sadistic traits you charge—twelve years of it.”^[9]

“Please do believe,” she wrote. “I do so want to help you get Alexis.”

1 Sara Had To Absolve Hubbard Of All Guilt To Get Her Baby Back

In June 1951, Sara Northrup got to see her baby again. For months, Hubbard had been hiding their child in Cuba, but now they were back in Wichita. Ron was willing to talk.

He’d completely given into his paranoid delusions. There was no sense of reality for him. Sara had no choice but to play along. In her words:

“He told me that I was under the influence of this communist cell. And that they were dictating to me what to do, and that I was in a state of complete madness. I told him, ‘Yep, I think you’re right. The only thing I can do is to work through it and do whatever they say.’ ”

He made her sign a paper absolving him of all blame. It was the only way that he would give her back her child.

“The things I have said about L. Ron Hubbard in courts and the public prints have been grossly exaggerated or entirely false,” the paper said. “L. Ron Hubbard is a fine and brilliant man.” That was what he cared about—not his child and not his wife, just his reputation.

But all Sara cared about was getting her child back. She signed the papers, and in exchange, he drove her and Alexis to the airport.

Hubbard stopped the car a few feet away from the airfield. He’d had a last-second change of heart. Shaking his head, he told her: “I’m not going to let you go.”

Sara clutched her child, got out of the car, and ran. She left her suitcase and all her things behind. Alexis’s shoe fell off, but Sara didn’t stop. She just kept running toward the airplane, toward freedom, with her child in her arms for the first time in four months.

“It was the 19th of June,” Sara later said, “and it was the happiest day of my life.”^[10]

When adapting a sprawling, intricate book series like A Song of Ice and Fire into a TV show, it’s no surprise that some characters had to undergo significant changes. In Game of Thrones, many fan-favorite characters were reimagined, simplified, or had their storylines altered to fit the show’s demands.

These changes have sparked plenty of discussion among fans, especially when the show’s version of a character sharply diverged from George R.R. Martin’s original creation. Whether it’s the loss of certain character traits or entire plot arcs being cut, these differences reflect the creative challenges and decisions involved in bringing such a complex world to life on screen.

Related: 10 Real Historical Events That Inspired ‘Game of Thrones’

10 Sansa Stark

Sansa Stark’s journey in Game of Thrones is one of the most compelling, yet her character arc in the show significantly diverges from her portrayal in George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series. In the books, Sansa remains in the Vale under the tutelage of Petyr Baelish, learning the intricacies of court politics and manipulation. Her evolution is subtle and gradual, reflecting her growing understanding of the dangerous world she inhabits.

Sansa, operating under the alias Alayne Stone, becomes more adept at playing the game of thrones, carefully observing and learning from Littlefinger while still struggling with her identity and her past. This slower, more complex transformation allows readers to see Sansa as a multifaceted character, developing her strength and cunning over time.

In the TV adaptation, however, Sansa’s development is more accelerated and sometimes feels less nuanced. The showrunners condensed several of her storylines, notably merging her character with Jeyne Poole’s traumatic experiences with Ramsay Bolton—a plotline that does not occur in the books.

This change, while highlighting Sansa’s resilience and ultimate rise to power, also drew criticism for its handling of her agency and internal struggles. Despite these alterations, Sansa’s arc in the show still resonates with many fans, particularly in how she emerges as the Lady of Winterfell. This role showcases her growth into a strong, independent leader.^[1]

9 Tyrion Lannister

In the books, Tyrion Lannister is one of the most complex and multifaceted characters. He is a deeply intelligent, often cynical, and occasionally ruthless individual who, despite his sharp wit, struggles with self-loathing and a sense of being unloved by his family. In print, his physical appearance is much more striking and severe than what is depicted in the TV series.

In the novels, Tyrion is described as having mismatched eyes—one green and one black—and much more grotesque. He is a dwarf with a disproportionately large head, a prominent brow, and a mouth full of crooked teeth. After the Battle of the Blackwater, Tyrion suffers a serious injury that leaves him even more disfigured; his nose is almost entirely cut off, leaving him with a hideously scarred face.

In the HBO adaptation, however, Tyrion’s appearance is significantly toned down. Portrayed by Peter Dinklage, Tyrion is a handsome man with only minor facial scars after the battle, and his injury is reduced to a single visible scar across his cheek. Furthermore, after killing his father, Tywin Lannister, in the books, Tyrion’s character takes a darker turn. His journey across Essos is marked by bitterness, self-destruction, and a thirst for vengeance against those who wronged him.

This darker portrayal gives Tyrion more depth, showing a man grappling with the consequences of his actions and the bleakness of his reality. In contrast, the television show softened many of these darker aspects, focusing more on Tyrion’s cleverness and humor. While the show did capture Tyrion’s sharp tongue and strategic mind, it often reduced his character to comic relief, especially in the later seasons. His political blunders and questionable decisions in the final season also disappointed many fans who felt the show had strayed too far from the nuanced, morally ambiguous character in the books.^[2]

8 Euron Greyjoy

Euron Greyjoy on the screen is a far cry from the menacing, enigmatic figure depicted in Martin’s novels. In the books, Euron is a much more complex and terrifying character. Known as “Crow’s Eye” because of the eyepatch he wears in the books, he is a ruthless pirate and sorcerer who dabbles in dark magic, uses a variety of mystical artifacts, and exudes a mysterious, almost otherworldly aura.

His presence in the Iron Islands is marked by fear and awe as he returns from exile with a fleet of ships, a crew of fanatical followers, and a mysterious horn called Dragonbinder, which he claims can control dragons. Euron’s ambitions are grand, aiming not just for the Iron Throne but also to wield unimaginable power through arcane means. In print, he has a more elaborate backstory, including his travels to the ruins of Valyria and his claim of having a dragon egg.

In contrast, the show’s portrayal of Euron is much less nuanced and significantly less menacing. Rather than the dark, calculating sorcerer of the books, show-Euron comes across as a brash, over-the-top pirate with a penchant for violence and shock value. His character is reduced to being a swaggering, almost comical villain, more focused on personal gratification than on the grand, ominous schemes that define him in the novels.

Key elements of his character, such as his use of dark magic and the Dragonbinder horn, are entirely absent from the show. This simplified portrayal left many fans disappointed, as Euron in the TV series lacks the intricate, chilling presence that made him so compelling in the books.^[3]

7 Brienne of Tarth

Brienne of Tarth, one of the most beloved characters in Game of Thrones, is portrayed as a noble and skilled warrior who defies gender norms with her strength and honor. However, her storyline in the TV show significantly differs from her journey in the novels. In the books, Brienne’s character has a much more extensive and complex narrative.

After Jaime Lannister gives her his sword, Oathkeeper, she embarks on a lengthy and dangerous quest to find Sansa Stark. This journey leads her through various trials that test her loyalty, resolve, and sense of identity. It is filled with deep introspection and moral dilemmas, showcasing her internal struggle as well as her external battles.

In contrast, the show condenses much of Brienne’s storyline, focusing primarily on her relationship with Jaime, which the show depicts as more overtly romantic. Their relationship is complex and filled with mutual respect and unspoken feelings, but in the books, they part ways with unresolved tension.

While her knighting by Jaime in the final season of the show is a powerful moment, this knighting doesn’t occur in the books. Furthermore, the TV adaptation omits significant interactions she has with other characters, like her complex encounter with Lady Stoneheart, the resurrected Catelyn Stark, who commands her to kill Jaime.^[4]

6 Stannis Baratheon

Stannis Baratheon, a pivotal character in Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series, is portrayed quite differently in the books compared to the show. In the books, Stannis is a rigid, duty-bound leader often perceived as cold and unyielding. However, his actions are driven by a strong sense of justice and responsibility, even when they conflict with his personal desires.

His unwavering commitment to what he sees as the rightful claim to the Iron Throne makes him a more complex and sympathetic character in the books. His use of Melisandre and her dark magic is also shown with more internal conflict, as he often questions the morality of his decisions and the true nature of her powers. The relationship between them is shown as deeply influential in the show, sometimes implying he is more swayed by her than in the books.

In contrast, the television series simplifies Stannis’s character, often reducing him to a stern, unlikable figure whose moral dilemmas are less explored. One of the most significant and controversial differences is his decision to sacrifice his daughter Shireen to the flames, a plot point that is hinted at but not executed in the books. This act, portrayed as a desperate measure to win the war, was seen by many viewers as a betrayal of his character’s complexity and the nuanced internal conflicts that define him in the novels.^[5]

5 Jeyne Westerling/Talisa Maegyr

In Martin’s books, Jeyne Westerling is the woman Robb Stark marries after a moment of vulnerability following the death of his brothers. Jeyne hails from a noble but minor Westerlands house that secretly serves the Lannisters, adding layers of political intrigue to her character and marriage to Robb.

Her relationship with Robb is largely driven by honor, as he marries her after sleeping with her, and she remains loyal to him despite the political complications. In the books, Jeyne’s story is tragic but understated—she does not attend the Red Wedding, and her fate remains uncertain as she is left behind at Riverrun under the watchful eye of the Lannisters.

In the HBO series, Jeyne Westerling’s character is replaced by Talisa Maegyr, a healer from Volantis who meets Robb on the battlefield. Talisa is a completely original creation for the show, embodying a more romantic and idealistic love story than the politically driven marriage in the books. The change from Jeyne to Talisa significantly alters the tone and depth of Robb’s storyline. Talisa is portrayed as more independent and strong-willed, contrasting with the more traditional and dutiful Jeyne.

This shift also simplifies the complex political machinations of the Westerling family and reduces the tension between Robb’s sense of duty and his personal desires. Talisa’s presence at the Red Wedding and her subsequent brutal death—along with her unborn child—intensifies the emotional impact of the scene, but it also diverges significantly from Martin’s narrative, leaving book fans with a very different interpretation of Robb’s downfall.^[6]

4 Doran Martell

Doran Martell is a master strategist in the novels, playing the long game with incredible patience and foresight. As the Prince of Dorne, he carefully plots to avenge his sister Elia’s brutal murder during Robert’s Rebellion. His character is deeply introspective, burdened by his responsibilities and the need to protect his people while seeking justice for his family. Doran’s plans are intricate, involving secret alliances and long-term schemes that gradually unfold throughout the books, showcasing his political acumen and deep sense of duty.

In contrast, the show reduces Doran Martell’s complexity, transforming him into a more passive and less influential figure. His screen time is limited, and his schemes are either glossed over or omitted entirely. He also has a complex political relationship with his daughter Arianne, a prominent character in the books but completely omitted from the show. In the show, Doran’s sudden death, orchestrated by Ellaria Sand and the Sand Snakes, deviates from the book’s narrative, where he is part of a larger political plot, and his death has significant consequences for the Martell family.^[7]

3 Asha Greyjoy/Yara Greyjoy

Asha Greyjoy, known as Yara in the television series, is a character who underwent notable changes in her transition from the books to the screen. In the novels, Asha is portrayed as a fierce and cunning leader who is deeply committed to her family and people. She commands respect among the Ironborn not just because of her lineage but also due to her proven abilities as a warrior and strategist.

Asha is also a key player in the Greyjoy succession struggle, using her intelligence and charisma to rally support for her claim to the Seastone Chair. Her character is rich with depth, balancing loyalty to her family with her desire for independence and power. In the show, while Yara retains much of Asha’s strength and leadership qualities, her character is somewhat simplified.

The television adaptation omits some of her more complex relationships and political maneuverings. For instance, in the books, Asha has a significant role in the Kingsmoot, where the Ironborn choose their new leader, and she presents a strong case for her rule, challenging traditional gender norms. In contrast, the show focuses more on her relationship with her brother Theon and her involvement in Daenerys Targaryen’s campaign. The show also depicts her as bisexual, with scenes showing her with both men and women. In the book, Asha is depicted as heterosexual with several male lovers.^[8]

2 Ser Barristan Selmy

Ser Barristan Selmy is a highly respected and legendary knight in the books, known for his unwavering honor and loyalty. After being dismissed from the Kingsguard by Joffrey Baratheon, Barristan seeks out Daenerys Targaryen in Essos and becomes one of her most trusted advisors.

In the novels, Barristan guides Daenerys through Meereen’s political landscape, offering wisdom in leadership and battle. He’s a formidable warrior and principled man, grappling with the moral complexities of serving a queen aiming to reclaim her throne. Barristan’s journey is rich and multifaceted, influencing key events in Daenerys’s court.

In contrast, the television adaptation cuts Barristan Selmy’s story short, killing him off unexpectedly in the fifth season. His death during a battle with the Sons of the Harpy shocked many fans, as it diverged significantly from his ongoing and important role in the books. This early demise deprived the show of a character who, in the source material, provides a crucial connection to the history and lore of Westeros.

Barristan’s impact on Daenerys’s decisions in Meereen is significant in the books, making his sudden exit in the show seem like a missed chance to explore his character’s depth. Killing him off early drew criticism from book readers who valued Martin’s careful crafting of Barristan’s narrative.^[9]

1 Lady Stoneheart

Lady Stoneheart, the resurrected and vengeful version of Catelyn Stark, is one of the most significant characters from the book and was completely omitted from the Game of Thrones TV adaptation. In the books, after Catelyn’s brutal murder at the Red Wedding, she is brought back to life by Beric Dondarrion, who sacrifices his own life to restore hers. However, she returns as a dark and twisted version of herself, consumed by a desire for revenge against those who betrayed her family.

Her appearance is described as ghastly, with her wounds from the Red Wedding still visible. Leading the Brotherhood Without Banners, Lady Stoneheart embarks on a ruthless campaign, hanging Freys, Lannisters, and anyone she believes had a hand in the massacre of her family. Her presence adds a layer of relentless vengeance and the supernatural to the story, making her one of the most feared and tragic figures in the books.

In contrast, the showrunners chose to exclude Lady Stoneheart entirely from the TV series, a decision that disappointed many fans of the books. This omission meant that viewers never saw the darker turn Catelyn’s character takes, nor the impact her vengeful actions have on the wider narrative.

The absence of Lady Stoneheart also significantly altered the arcs of several other characters, including Brienne of Tarth and Jaime Lannister, who have key interactions with her in the books. Without Lady Stoneheart, the show’s exploration of themes like resurrection, justice, and the haunting consequences of betrayal felt less complex and less tied to the Stark family’s sense of enduring tragedy.^[10]

Trains have been staples of our travel, shipping, and overall culture for a long time. Over the centuries, trains have grown up and expanded from the humble steam-powered versions of old to the modern, technologically advanced, driverless trains which cross entire continents with ease today and serve as the backbones of our transportation infrastructures.

In fact, many trains today are wholly automated. But even with modern technology, they are still extremely difficult to slow down in a short amount of time. Anything in their way is likely to experience a not-so-nice collision if it doesn’t get out of the way quickly.

Some statistics are quite surprising when it comes to trains. Did you know that a person or a vehicle gets hit by a train every two hours in the United States? This includes the most disastrous of all accidents—a train-on-train collision, which can have catastrophic consequences.

Approximately 1,000 people per year are killed in train accidents. However, the individual hit by the train sometimes survives and lives to tell the story of what it was like.

10 Sebring, Florida

In one of the most unusual cases of someone getting hit by a train, a 34-year-old woman in Sebring, Florida, was walking along the tracks just before 5:30 AM on August 17, 2018. The woman was suddenly hit by a passing train that she had not seen coming.

Almost unbelievably, the woman was still conscious afterward and capable of calling for paramedics to tell them that she was injured. At almost exactly the same time, another phone call came in to emergency services: It was the train crew reporting that they had hit someone on the tracks.^[1]

When paramedics arrived, they had to dig through some groves to find the woman. She’d been off the beaten path of the road. Nevertheless, they managed to take her to the hospital and treat her injuries. Imagine being able to tell that story for the rest of your life.

9 Eugene Barb

In the middle of the night on October 3, 2018, in Cincinnati, Ohio, 43-year-old Eugene Barb was walking along the train tracks after having been drinking—a lot. To put it plainly, Barb was drunk. As an oncoming train barreled down on him, the stumbling Barb tried to get off the tracks. But he didn’t quite make it in time, and the train hit him.

A man on the train reported that he had seen Eugene Barb hanging his legs over the rail that ran alongside the train tracks and then Barb moved out of sight as the train approached. The man heard a thud, which was the train hitting Barb.^[2]

The man got off the train to see if Barb was okay and knew instantly what had happened. Surprisingly, Barb was not only standing but walking toward the man’s general direction. Barb looked at the man, turned, and drunkenly stumbled off.

Rail authorities found Barb hours later close to where the accident had happened, but they didn’t press charges against him for trespassing. It seems that being hit by a train was punishment enough.

8 Darryle See

Darryle See is one of the more interesting stories about a survivor who came head-to-head with a moving train. One major cause of train accidents involving pedestrians or people in vehicles is headphones—the people simply don’t hear the train coming until it’s too late.

This was the case with 22-year-old See. He was hit in August 2013 when his headphones prevented him from hearing the approaching train until it was too late.^[3]

See was casually walking on the tracks and listening to music when the screaming mass of speeding metal smacked straight into him at 177 kilometers per hour (110 mph). It threw See like a toy over 6 meters (20 ft), and the force launched his shoes off his body. They landed approximately 46 meters (150 ft) away.

Though he doesn’t remember being hit at all, See was conscious and coherent by the time the police arrived. Except for a few broken bones, he was perfectly fine.

7 The Manhattan Incident

In mid-December 2017, an unidentified 41-year-old man was hit by a train in Manhattan in the worst of ways. He was standing on the platform of the New York subway at Union Square when two men crossed the tracks to assault him. They punched him in the head and fled the scene.^[4]

As he was punched, the 41-year-old victim fell to the ground and his head crossed into no-man’s-land. At that moment, the southbound Q train hit him directly in the head and fractured his skull. He was bleeding, as would be expected when someone gets hit by a train.

Miraculously, the man was okay. Police followed up on the incident by releasing video taken by the subway’s cameras of the two men responsible in hopes of catching the people who punched the victim.

6 Chicago, Illinois

In December 2018 in Chicago, Illinois, a man stepped onto the train tracks at the corner of 71st Street and South Exchange Avenue. He simply didn’t see the oncoming train.

The man walked right into the path of the train and was hit. The force knocked him to the ground onto the rocks surrounding the tracks. That’s when bystander Terrence Sims approached the victim, who was still conscious. The man asked, “What happened?” Sims replied, “You got hit by a train.”^[5]

The man simply said, “Nah.” Sims replied, “Yeah.” That was the extent of their exchange. Sims called 911 and waited with the man until help arrived.

5 Martha Sharp

In November 2018, 36-year-old Martha Sharp was hit on her butt by a train. The only reason she survived is that the train struck the left side of her body, propelling her away from the tracks and the moving train rather than sucking her underneath to be crushed by the train’s massive wheels.

The incident happened around 4:04 PM on East Fort Wayne Street in Warsaw, Indiana. Sharp was taken to the hospital and treated for cuts to her head from the force of being launched aside by a moving train.^[6]

4 Opole, Poland

In a terrifying incident that was caught on CCTV in Opole, Poland, a man was struck by a train in November 2015. The video is shocking. It shows the man approaching the train tracks on his bicycle at the exact moment that a speeding train comes seemingly out of nowhere. The cyclist runs right into the moving behemoth.

The CCTV video of the incident was posted on YouTube in December 2015 and quickly garnered over one million views. The footage shows the man instantly launched from his bicycle with ferocious speed. It’s a wonder he survived the accident—but he did.^[7]

3 Melbourne, Australia

Probably the most miraculous tale of survival on this list was caught on CCTV in Melbourne, Australia. In October 2009, the person struck by the train was a six-month-old baby—and he lived through the incident.

As the train approached, the baby was sitting in a stroller that was just a little too close to the tracks. As the child’s mother looked away for a moment while tugging at her pants, the stroller rolled into the path of an oncoming train.

The baby and stroller were carried along the metal tracks for a full 30 meters (98 ft). The driver had frantically slammed on the brakes, but trains are difficult to stop quickly.

When it finally came to a halt, everyone was amazed that the baby was still alive and had only suffered a bump on the head. Authorities said that the six-month-old just needed a good meal and a nap.^[8]

2 Elijah Anderson

Elijah Anderson was just four years old when Atlanta doctors started calling him Superman. On November 5, 2009, Elijah was out with his dog, Poochy, when the Jack Russell terrier ran off toward the train tracks. Elijah was trying to catch the dog when an oncoming 1,594-meter-long (5,229 ft) train struck the boy at 48 kilometers per hour (30 mph). Elijah didn’t even see it coming. He was too focused on getting Poochy home safely.^[9]

When paramedics arrived, they took Elijah to the hospital. He was treated for a concussion and received stitches in his head. Surprisingly, within 24 hours, his condition was upgraded from critical to stable. Two days later, the boy was back home and returning to a normal life with Poochy. The dog was unharmed and had also returned home shortly after the accident.

1 Friendship Heights Station

The accident which took place at the Friendship Heights Station in Washington, DC, caused major delays and almost took the life of the woman who’d been hit by the train. In a wheelchair, she approached the platform to board the train just like every other day. But this day would take a drastic turn for the worse.

CCTV video from the station captured this event as the woman went a little too far. She drove off the platform and onto the tracks—right into an oncoming Red Line train, which knocked the wheelchair-bound woman some distance. The staff quickly cut the power to the tracks. They found her still alive and rushed her to the hospital to be treated for her injuries.^[10]

While some people in the world do not have enough to eat, others with plenty sometimes engage in habits that are not only unhealthy, but could easily be described as gluttonous. Some people make the worst habits their regular diet, and others only occasionally binge on or partake in the most ridiculous things. Below are ten people who took eating to the next level—so to speak.

Abuse: A woman has almost nothing but Red Bull for months.

A New Zealand woman had some extra weight after a pregnancy and really wanted to shed those pounds quickly, so she did what any reasonable person would do, she started consuming almost exclusively Red Bull. She drank it mostly to suppress her appetite, but of course it also gave her energy without her needing to eat food. While the diet is very bad for her and has given her health problems, including a stroke, she did manage to lose a lot of weight very quickly. Apparently she really didn’t mean to consciously go on the diet, it just kind of happened.

Abuse: A girl decides to eat only carrots in an attempt to turn orange.

A girl wanted to win an argument with her roommates: she believed that eating lots of carrots could give you Carotenemia, and her roommates disagreed with her. She wanted to prove to her roommates that you don’t have to get a fake tan to look like an Oompa Loompa, you can just eat lots of carrots. So she went on a diet of only carrots and carrot juice. This diet is extremely bad for you, the orange skin itself is not thought to be harmful, and does eventually go away, but you will be throwing the nutrients in your system way out of balance.

Abuse: Nothing but beer and water for Lent.

An Iowan decided to try something totally new for Lent, and that new plan was to drink only beer and water for the entire period. The man brews his own beer at home and is fascinated by a group of Bavarian monks who had a beer they called “liquid bread.” Supposedly they would drink it during Lent because they were not allowed food. The man claimed he was trying to make a point about the history that booze has with Christianity, but more likely he just found a really good excuse to drink a lot all through Lent. Undoubtedly he spent the majority of the fasting period half comatose.

Abuse: Woman drinks ten liters of coke a day.

After an autopsy a coroner in New Zealand pronounced that a woman’s death was mainly due to her drinking roughly 10 liters of Coca Cola a day. Her friends also said that she smoked a couple of packs of cigarettes a day, and hardly ate. While it may be somewhat amusing that Coca Cola is trying to deny that their product had anything to do with it, they may just be trying to avoid a lawsuit. And we can hardly blame them, lawsuits are popular these days and you cannot really blame this on Coca Cola—the real culprit here is a lack of self control and a family that did not get the woman the help she needed.

Abuse: Twinkie Diet.

A man wanted to prove that there aren’t really good or bad calories, at least when it comes to weight loss, so he devised a totally sane plan to get to the bottom of the question. He ate nothing but Twinkies and the occasional Doritos, Oreos and cereal. However, he kept the actual caloric content really low. It turns out that his theory held up, and he did lose weight. Unfortunately for him, however, just because you lose weight eating nothing but junk food doesn’t mean it isn’t bad for you. The key takeaway here should be that if you want to lose weight, you need to eat fewer carbohydrates and move more, not that you should binge on Twinkies.

Abuse: A girl in the UK eats almost nothing but chocolate.

A girl in the UK eats almost nothing but chocolate, ever. Her parents try to excuse it by saying that she simply “has a food phobia”. While supposedly she is currently in good health, it seems very unlikely that good health will continue if a habit of almost nothing but chocolate continues long term. They say she “eats 15 squares of cooking chocolate and 10 chocolate fingers every morning”. It seems she also eats the same thing for lunch and will occasionally have rice krispies for dinner, but not unless they are completely slathered in melted chocolate. The only other thing she occasionally eats is the occasional small bag of Wotsists.

Abuse: Mother allows daughter to eat almost nothing but Chicken McNuggets for 15 years.

Stacey from the UK had to be admitted to the hospital after collapsing at work. It turned out that she has trouble breathing, Anemia and other issues, most likely due to her diet. You see, when she was young she tasted chicken nuggets, and—being spoiled—refused to eat anything else. Her mother made a few halfhearted attempts to get her daughter to eat something else, but gave up. Her daughter is approaching adulthood and has hardly ever eaten anything besides chicken nuggets. Although the doctors say that if she keeps up this diet, it is going to kill her very young, Stacey refuses to give up the diet, she just doesn’t feel she can eat anything else.

Abuse: Parents nearly kill child with Vegan Diet.

A pair of parents in Queens nearly killed their infant, through negligence. And by negligence, we mean that they refused to breast feed it or give it any milk or dairy products. In fact, all they allowed the baby were fruits, veggies and legumes. In other words, they had already turned their infant child into a vegan. They consider “Veganism”, to be like a religion to them. The two parents were sentenced to five to twenty five years, because the judge felt that they should simply have understood that a baby is too young for a vegan diet and needs better nutrition.

Abuse: Man has liposuction, uses the fat to fry meatballs for his friends.

An artist known for shock art had a liposuction operation recently. As an artistic statement he used the body fat to make meatballs and served them to his friends. He felt that because it was art it wasn’t actually cannibalism. But this is not Evaristti’s first ridiculous attempt to get attention. He has also dyed an iceberg with red paint and challenged people to press blend when he had live fish in a blender. We can’t help but feel that he might do better in a room with four padded walls.

Abuse: Dutch TV personalities eat each other’s flesh on air.

Two Dutch TV show hosts were struggling to come up with something that would make people pay attention to them, and after much soul searching decided that the best way would be to eat each other. They had a surgeon remove parts of buttocks and stomach. They then had a chef cook their own flesh and serve it to them complete with side dishes. While many people have claimed that it was a hoax, the hosts insist that it was indeed completely real, and even show people the scars to prove it. It isn’t completely unsurprising for these two, either. Previously, the same network dealt with controversy over a program where people who were sick competed to see which one would win a lifesaving organ.

You can follow Gregory Myers on twitter.

Magic and superstition have been present in human societies since the dawn of our species, and ancient Rome was no exception. Some of us would like to believe that the advancement of education and scientific knowledge should be enough to keep superstitious beliefs in check, but many signs around us tell us that superstition is here to stay. Fortune-tellers, cult leaders, horoscope writers, and casino owners (to name a few) know this very well.

This list is about the powerful effect that magic and superstition had on some of the beliefs of ancient Roman society.

10 Magic, Superstition, And Medicine

Some of the medical knowledge in ancient Rome was strongly linked to magic and superstition. Pliny the Elder records a number of health tips that few of us would take seriously. Here are some examples. Do not try this at home without medical supervision. We take no responsibility for the outcome of the following recipes:

Drinking fresh human blood was believed by some to be an effective treatment for epilepsy:

“It is an appalling sight to see wild animals drink the blood of gladiators in the arena, and yet those who suffer from epilepsy think it is the most effective cure for their disease, to absorb a person’s warm blood while he is still breathing and to draw out his actual living soul.” (Natural History, 28.4)

For treating bruises and strains:

“Strains and bruises are treated with wild boar’s dung gathered in spring and dried. This treatment is used for those who have been dragged by a chariot or mangled by its wheels or bruised in any way. Fresh dung also may be smeared on.” (Natural History, 28.237)

If you want to enhance or suppress sexual performance:

“A man’s urine in which a lizard has been drowned is an antaphrodisiac potion; so also are snails and pigeons’ droppings drunk with olive oil and wine. The right section of a vulture’s lung worn as an amulet in a crane’s skin is a powerful aphrodisiac, as is consuming the yolk of five dove eggs mixed with a denarius of pig fat and honey, sparrows or their eggs, or wearing as an amulet a rooster’s right testicle wrapped in ram’s skin.” (30.141)

9 Magic, Superstition, And Pregnancy

Pregnancy in ancient Rome was the cause of considerable anxiety. It is estimated that the number of women who died as a result of childbirth was higher to the number of men who died at war. As a result, a deficit of women suitable for marriage was always an issue in Rome. It is therefore not surprising that there were a few tips on pregnancy circulating around Roman society. Pliny the Elder tells us that:

“[ . . . ] if someone takes a stone or some other missile that has slain three living creatures (a human being, a wild boar, and a bear) at three blows, and throws it over the roof of a house in which there is a pregnant woman, she will immediately give birth, however difficult her labor may be.” (Natural History 28.33)

“If one wishes a child to be born with black eyes, the mother should eat a shrew during the pregnancy.” (Natural History 30.134)

8 Shapeshifters

Many stories circulated among ancient Romans about people changing their shape into animals and other beings. Here is one of these tales. If you think the werewolf legend is relatively new, think again:

“We came to the tombs, and my friend went to do his business among the gravestones, while I moved off singing and counting the stars. Then, when I looked back at my companion, he had taken off all his clothes and laid them at the roadside. My heart was in my mouth; I stood there practically dead. He pissed in a circle around his clothes, and suddenly turned into a wolf. Don’t think I am joking: nothing could induce me to tell lies about this. [ . . . ] He began to howl and ran off into the woods. [ . . . ] then I went to pick up his clothes, but they had all turned to stone.” (Petronius Satyricon 62)

It would not be surprising if at least some people in Rome believed stories like this one.

7 Witchcraft

Long before medieval times, witchcraft was known to the Romans. There is a famous passage in Roman literature describing a grotesque ritual performed by witches who were looking to brew a love potion. They intended to use the potion to gain the heart of a man named Varus, who had resisted the love spells cast by the witches so far.

The details of this ritual are described by the Roman poet, Horace (Epodes 5), who lived during the first century BC: A boy of high birth was kidnapped by a clique of witches. They buried the boy in the ground up to his chin, and they placed some food in the ground close to him, but he was unable to reach it. The witches hoped to starve the boy to death and make his liver grow as a result of the hunger. The boy’s liver was a key ingredient to brew the love potion.

This account is fictional, but it shows the place that witches and their dark arts had in the imagination of some Romans.

6 Interpretation Of Dreams

Like almost all other cultures, some Romans firmly believed in the idea that dreams could forecast the future. In the second century AD, Artemidorus of Daldis wrote a work named The Interpretation of Dreams, compiled in five books. Some of the ways in which he interpreted the meaning of dreams are both specific and curious:

“Dreaming about turnips, rutabagas, and pumpkins presages disappointed hopes, since they are massive [vegetables] but lack nutritional value. They signify surgery and wounding with iron implements for sick people and travelers, respectively, since these vegetables are cut into slices.” (1.67)

“Dreaming that one is eating books foretells advantage to teachers, lecturers, and anyone who earns his livelihood from books, but for everyone else it means sudden death.” (2.45)

5 Reading Animal Entrails

Hundreds of techniques to foretell the future are recorded in ancient Roman documents. We know, for example, that sacrificing animals and trying to read the future by interpreting their entrails was practiced not only in ancient Rome, but also in many other cultures. This magical art was known to the Romans as haruspicy, and a person trained in this art was a haruspex.

Cicero (On Divination: 2.52) claims that Hannibal, the renowned Carthaginian commander who defied Rome in the Second Punic War, was an expert in this technique. While he was still a military advisor (before he became commander), he used to give advice to his superiors based on the messages he could read on the organs of sacrificed animals.

4 Astrology

Trying to predict events based on the position of the celestial bodies was also widely practiced in the Roman world. Some Roman emperors, including Tiberius, Domitian, and Hadrian, believed in divination and astrology and even had some degree of training in these arts. Cassius Dio (Roman History 57.15) claims that Tiberius had a man executed after he had a dream in which he was giving money to that same man. Tiberius believed that he had that dream under the influence of some sort of enchantment.

However, there is evidence that not everyone was persuaded by the astrologer’s claims:

“I am amazed that anyone could continue to put their trust in such people, when the falseness of their predictions is every day made clear by what actually happens.” (Cicero, On Divination: 2.99)

The love-hate relationship that Rome had with astrologers was expressed by Tacitus with his typical directness:

“Astrologers are treacherous to the powerful and unreliable to the merely hopeful; they will always be banned from our state, and yet always retained.” (Histories 1.22)

3 The Shield Of Mars

The Romans believed that the god Jupiter gave the very shield of the god Mars to Nula Pompilius (the second king of Rome). This relic was known as the Ancile. It was believed that if the Ancile was harmed in any way, so would the nation of Rome. In other words, the prosperity of Rome was dependent on the integrity of the Ancile. Therefore, it was decided that the safest place to keep this relic was the Temple of Mars.

The nymph Egeria advised the king of Rome to create eleven identical copies of the shield in order to confuse potential thieves and keep the shield safe. A body of priests known as the Salii were responsible for protecting the Ancile and, ultimately, the prosperity of Rome.

2 The King Of The Wood

A shocking ritual was recorded at the grove of the goddess Diana at Aricia, south of Rome along the Via Appia (the road connecting Rome with Capua), by the shores of Lake Nemi. The grove of Diana had a priest, known as Rex Nemorensis. Those who held the position were always fugitive slaves who became priests by murdering the acting priest. This was the accepted norm of succession for the priesthood of Diana. As a result, the Rex Nemorensis was always on alert, carrying a sword, waiting for the next candidate to challenge him, and fearing for his life. (Strabo, Geography 5.3). This practice is summed up by T. Macaulay:

“From the still glassy lake that sleeps
Beneath Aricia’s trees—
Those trees in whose dim shadow
The ghastly priest doth reign,
The priest who slew the slayer,
And shall himself be slain”

The exact justification for this succession rule is not fully understood, and it has sparked the imagination of many historians and writers. Nobody has explored this issue in more depth than Sir James George Frazer, who used the institution of the Rex Nemorensis as a starting point of his colossal anthropological work The Golden Bough: a Study in Magic and Religion, published in 1890.

1 Imaginary Beasts

Ancient Roman writers left a number of accounts describing several imaginary animals. Interestingly, most these beasts were exotic, coming from remote locations.

Pliny (Natural History 8.75) describes a half-human, half-horse animal named the hippocentaur. According to his doubtful account, he personally saw one of these beasts shipped from Egypt to the emperor Claudius, preserved inside a container filled with honey.

Aelian also describes some peculiar species of one-horned donkeys and horses found in India. Drinking vessels made out their horns had a unique property: If poison was poured into them, the horns would cancel the effect of the poison, acting as an antidote. (On Animals 3.41).

Aelian (On Animals 9.23) reports the existence of the amphisbaena, a snake with one head at both ends:

“When it is going forward, it uses one head as a tail, the other as a head, and when it is going backward, it uses its heads in the opposite manner.”

Aelian fails to explain what relevance the terms “forward” and “backward” may have when applied to a being with a head at both ends, but we get his point.

In the 1950s, there was a real danger afoot. The Communists, as our brave senators warned us, had infiltrated the governments of the democratic world. And they’d brought with them their most powerful weapon: the gays.

As Senator Kenneth Wherry told the American people, “Only the most naive could believe that the Communists’ fifth column in the United States would neglect to propagate and use homosexuals to gain their treacherous ends.” We needed a device that could weed out these wily gays from their patriotic hetero peers. Our mission was clear: we needed a real-life, fully functioning gaydar.

The best minds in the world got to work. And they didn’t stop in America in the 1950s—in many parts of the world, our best and brightest are to working to build one today.

10 The Hoey Committee’s Investigative Techniques

In 1950, the best and brightest minds of the US Senate were organized into a special task force called the Hoey Committee. Their mission: to identify and root out the insidious gays hiding throughout America.

It would not, as they quickly learned, be as easy as they imagined. Senator Margaret Smith, during a meeting with America’s top medical minds, disappointedly asked: “There is no quick test like an X-ray that discloses these things?”

To her heartbreak, the surgeon general explained that homosexuality didn’t show up on most X-rays. He, at least, was answering their questions. Most medical experts, for some reason, rambled on with some nonsense about sexuality being “complicated” and “fluid” and refused to hand over the machine the senators apparently hoped would make all gay men in America start glowing with a neon red light.

After two years of research, though, the Hoey Committee identified some foolproof facts about homosexuals. Gay men, they announced, could be identified through a few key clues: They were unmarried, they “seldom refuse to talk about themselves,” and they tended to have what the council called “prissy habits.”

They started a complex system for tracking, eliminating, and destroying the lives of gay men, often crushing them so fully that they drove them to suicide.

And not a moment too soon. As their report warned, gay was contagious: “One homosexual can pollute a government office.”^[1]

9 The Canadian Government’s Fruit Machine

North of the border, the Canadians were hard at work on a special machine that they were convinced could identify any gay man. They called it the “Fruit Machine,” which, in the 1960s, was something you could name a machine, and nobody would say anything. In fact, the government would pay you $10,000, and everything would be fine.

It was a gigantic device, described by those who have seen it as looking “like something out of science fiction.”^[2] It had multiple cameras, giant steel girders, and a special screen designed to project gay porn.

A suspected homosexual would be called into the security official’s office and told: “We have evidence that you may be a homosexual. What do you have to say about this?”

If they denied it, the Fruit Machine would be their judge. They would be strapped in and shown a series of mundane images which, every now and then, would be livened up with the odd picture of gay porn. While they watched, the researchers would measure their pulse, skin reflexes, breathing, and pupillary response.

If your pupils expanded on the sight of gay porn, it meant that the pictures of naked men excited you. Or that the photo was a bit too dark for you. Or maybe that you were surprised. Or probably really nothing at all, since most tests showed that the Fruit Machine was wildly ineffective.

Still, the Canadian government was nothing if not cautious. Even if the machine didn’t work, they forced everyone who failed its test to resign from their jobs, thereby saving Canada from the horrors of having homosexuals walk through its streets leading normal, healthy lives.

8 The US Park Police’s Pervert Records

The United States Park Police played a special role in America’s mission to weed homosexuals out of government. They were put on a special task force when the government received some prized intel providing an insight into the mind of the homosexual man: Gay guys love parks.

The Park Police were expanded, with countless more officers brought on to help them with their missions, including weeding out “sex perverts.” Parks, the government had learned, were “popular cruising spots for gay men.” They needed a team to watch them.

One group of Park Police spent 12 hours, from dusk to dawn, staring at the bathroom in Lafayette Park and placing bets on whether or not the visitors were gay. In their report to Congress, they declared: “I do not believe a half a dozen legitimate persons go in there to answer Nature’s call.”^[3]

Thanks to their tireless work, the US government came to an important conclusion: Pretty well anyone who goes to the bathroom in a public park can be assumed to be a homosexual. And they took that intel seriously, even firing a CIA employee on the charge that he’d been spotted “hanging around the men’s room in Lafayette Park.”

7 J. Edgar Hoover’s Sex Deviates Program

J. Edgar Hoover personally pushed the FBI into leading what he called the “Sex Deviates” program. For decades, they would stop wasting so much time tracking down organized crime and domestic terrorists and, instead, focus their resources on America’s real threat: the gay menace.

Any person accused of being a closeted homosexual, on the FBI’s orders, was to be immediately reported to the chief of investigations.^[4] The FBI would take over from there, and they would put every resource at their disposal to work. FBI agents would follow men to their homes, keep tabs on which bars and restaurants they ate at, and have professional psychologists examine detailed records of their habits, searching for those telltale patterns of gayness.

Then they’d strike. Some eager FBI agents would pull the suspected homosexuals in early, while they were still just loitering outside those notorious park bathrooms. The truly diligent, though, would wait until they were the middle of what they called “an act of perversion” and until they’d gotten really good photographs of the act before bringing them in.

It was hard work, or work that made them hard, or one of those two—but it had to be done. Nobody understood that more than J. Edgar Hoover. After all, if the rumors about Hoover are true, he had an unfortunate habit of showing up at homosexual orgies—clear proof that those contagious gays had been coughing all over him.

6 The Gulf Cooperation Council Homosexuality Test

The quest for a foolproof way to spot gays didn’t end with the 1950s, and it wasn’t limited to the United States. Decades later, in 2013, Kuwait’s director of public health, Yousuf Mindkar, took up the cause himself.

Mindkar promised his people that he would introduce sweeping reforms to improve the nation’s gaydar, declaring to the world: “We will take stricter measures that will help us detect gays.”

His plan was to revise Kuwait’s visa stipulations to require doctors to certify any incoming visitors as heterosexual before letting them into the country.^[5] Mindkar wasn’t entirely clear on how the doctors would test their patients for homosexuality, but he was confident that it would be a simple procedure. He assured the press that any doctor in any country would be able to run a thorough test for the telltale physical markings of homosexuality.

Mindkar backed down because of criticism in the international community. FIFA expressed concern that his plan might bar some fans from watching the 2022 World Cup. The concern was echoed by many in the US, who suggested that the plan would bar everyone who likes soccer from entering Kuwait and then high-fived each other.

5 The Malaysian Guide To Spotting A Gay

A 2018 issue of Sinar Harian, a Malaysian newspaper, came with a helpful checklist to teach readers “how to spot a gay.”^[6]

The article came with a checklist of the classic telltale markings of homosexuality. Gay men, it explained, love beards. They also love branded clothing, are close to the family, and like to go to the gym. But once in the gym, it warned, the homosexual male will not exercise. Instead, he will merely ogle the other men, his eyes lighting up with joy whenever he spots a particularly handsome one.

Lesbians, it said, could be detected through their venomous attitudes toward men. Toward women, the article explained, lesbians are open and carefree. They will hold each other’s hands and hug each other openly. But they behave very differently around men. Lesbians, the article explained, hate men. What little joy they get out of life, they get from belittling them.

4 The Scientific Study Into Gay Faces

In 2008, Nicholas Rule and Nalini Ambady of Tufts University conducted an experiment into one of the great questions that have plagued scientists for centuries: Do gay people have gay faces?^[7]

They took pictures of heterosexual and homosexual people, carefully chosen to eliminate the effect of what they called “self-presentation.” They even Photoshopped out their hair and pasted them onto white backgrounds, trying to leave nothing but their cheekbones and eyebrows as hints into their sexuality. Then they showed the pictures to a group of 90 people and asked them to guess which faces were gay.

The participants, Rule and Ambady claimed, got the right answer more often than not, thereby proving that everyone can tell you’re gay just by looking at you (even if they don’t realize it). Apparently, you’re not fooling anybody, and you might as well drop the act.

3 Stanford University’s Gaydar Machine

In 2017, Stanford professor Michael Kosinski took spotting gay people by looking at their faces into the next era. He turned that idea into what he claims is a working “gaydar” machine.

Kosinski and his coauthor, Yilun Wang, had a facial recognition program scan 75,000 online dating profiles, organized into groups of “gay” and “straight.” Their AI was programmed to identify patterns in “gay facial features,” searching for the unique quirks that unite all gay men. Then they pitted their machine against humans to see who was better at identifying homosexuals.

The humans weren’t much better at telling if someone was gay by looking at their face than a coin flip, which sort of ruins the entire point of the study in that last entry, but anyway, the point is that the machine got it right 81 percent of the time for gay men and 74 percent for lesbians.^[8] Finally, they had created an effective gaydar.

Or, at least, it was an effective gaydar when it looked at people’s Tinder profile pictures. When they tried using it on pictures that people hadn’t put up on dating apps, it was significantly less effective. Still, they had finally developed a machine that could identify the sexuality of people who are actively and deliberately trying to make their orientations as visible as possible.

2 The Attempt To Isolate The Gay Gene

During the 2015 conference of the American Society of Human Genetics, a University of California researcher named Tuck Ngun made a bold declaration to the world: He had isolated the gay gene.^[9]

Specifically, Ngun had found “methylation marks” that he believed could be connected to homosexuality. His study had looked at 37 pairs of identical male twins that consisted of one homosexual brother and one heterosexual brother and identified five methylation marks that he claimed were clear biological indicators of homosexuality.

Sort of. The scientific community wasn’t exactly supportive. They pointed out that he looked at 6,000 methylation marks in just 37 sets of twins, which made it pretty much inevitable that he’d be able to find some kind of pattern between them, just by the sheer law of averages. And in this case, Ngun hadn’t even found a particularly good pattern—even in his test subjects, the “gay gene” he’d identified only showed up in 67 percent of the time.

1 Penile Plethysmograph

Some devices that have been employed as gaydars still see fairly widespread use today, like the penile plethysmograph. The Czechoslovakian Army once used it to determine if men claiming to be gay to avoid being drafted were telling the truth.

Here’s how it works: first, a scientist attaches a device shaped like a thin strip of metal to the penis. Then he puts on a variety of gay pornography (or whatever else they’re attempting to determine the subject’s response to) and uses the device to measure how erect the man gets looking at each image.

Admittedly, there are probably easier ways to figure out someone’s sexuality—like, for example, if a man attaches a thin strip of metal to people’s penises, shows them gay porn, and then takes careful notes on how erect they get, it might be a clue that he himself is gay—but somehow, this one has caught on and is still used in various scientific studies today.

It has been hailed as the most accurate sexuality test known to man—and with good cause. This test has proven to be an accurate determinant of a man’s sexual preferences 32 percent of the time,^[10] making it the most effective, proven way to tell somebody’s sexuality—other than flipping a coin.

Have you ever listened to a song and realized you had never really paid attention to the lyrics? This goes beyond simply mishearing the lyrics. Who hasn’t sung the wrong lyrics from time to time, right? This involves not truly understanding what the song is about. That’s how you end up singing something inappropriate at a bar mitzvah.

Here are some songs from musicals that will make you say “”Wait, THAT’S what that is about?”

Related: Top 10 Broadway Musicals You’ve Never Heard Of

10 “Edelweiss”–The Sound of Music

When The Sound of Music premiered on Broadway in 1959, the world instantly fell in love with Maria and the singing von Trapp kids. Nearly every song has entered the American vernacular—the titular opening, “Do Re Mi,” “So Long, Farewell,” and one kid-free tune: “Edelweiss.”

“Edelweiss” comes at a turning point in the show. Captain von Trapp has previously disapproved of his childrens’ singing, but when he hears his daughter playing the song, he’s moved. “Edelweiss” is meant to represent the Captain’s home country of Austria, as the edelweiss is a small white flower found in the Alps.

Over the years, rumors have spread that “Edelweiss” is an old Austrian folk tune or even the country’s national anthem. But Oscar Hammerstein II biographer Hugh Fordin says that even though “Edelweiss” was widely believed to be an old Austrian song, Hammerstein composed it for The Sound of Music.^[1]

9 “With You”–Pippin

From weddings to proposals, “With You” from Pippin has been used for years as a profession of love. On the surface, the lyrics do seem to point to a beautiful ballad meant for a loved one. Pippin claims his life would be “Twice as fair” if he could share his days with his girlfriend.

Except he’s not singing the song to his girlfriend. The scene is actually a huge orgy—Pippin weaves through women, comedically singing about “you” to dozens of women. The lyrics are meant to be humorously ironic, highlighting Pippin’s lack of commitment and genuine affection.

So unless you’re in an open marriage, probably leave this one out of the wedding reception.^[2]

8 “All You Wanna Do”–Six

There are thousands of songs with dark messages that are overlooked as such due to their poppy tempos or catchy refrains. Think about “Pumped Up Kicks” by Foster the People, which is actually about a school shooter. Or “Hey Ya” by Outkast, which, despite its upbeat meter, is about how love never really lasts.

In 2020, “All You Wanna Do” from Six the musical went viral on TikTok. Six tells the story of the six wives of Henry XIII from their point of view. “All You Wanna Do” is sung by Katherine Howard, Henry’s fifth wife, and details the history of how they met. On TikTok, people danced to the groovy title lyrics as Katherine talks about how all men want to do is have sex with her. This is already kind of sad. But if you listen to the whole song and not just the danceable parts, it gets even darker.

Katherine relays her first romance with her tutor: “He was 23 / And I was 13 going on 30!” And it doesn’t get better from there. As Katherine sings about her past boyfriends, the song ends with, “All you wanna do, baby / Is touch me, when will enough be enough?”

I’m not sure the kids on TikTok can really relate to that on a personal level. At least, I hope not.^[3]

7 “Not While I’m Around”–Sweeney Todd

“Nothing’s gonna hurt you / Not while I’m around” are the opening lyrics of this song from Sweeney Todd. Young Toby is held by his surrogate mother, Mrs. Lovett, as he protectively lets her know that he will do whatever it takes to shelter her from harm.

Sounds sweet, right? Not really. Lurking in the background of the show is Sweeney Todd, the murderous barber. Toby doesn’t know it, but at the moment, Sweeney is on a rampage, ready to kill anyone in his path (Spoiler alert: including Mrs. Lovett and Toby. And himself.) The song is meant to be ironic and sad, showing Toby’s innocence in contrast to literally every single other character’s murderous rages.^[4]

6 “Hope”–Groundhog Day

While this song may not be as popular outside of the theater community as other songs on this list, it’s the perfect example of a song that is significant only within the show itself.

Based on the Bill Murray movie of the same name, Groundhog Day follows jaded reporter Phil as he is forced to relive February 2nd over and over and over again. Both the movie and musical are humorous but have darker themes lying beneath them. One of the most jarring parts of the plot is after Phil decides he is done sleeping around, eating whatever he wants, and generally being a menace with no repercussions. Instead, he opts to kill himself.

It doesn’t work. He wakes up the next day and tries to kill himself again. In the musical, this happens during the song “Hope.” With lyrics like “Never give up hope / Never let yourself be defeated,” it’s easy to read this as an optimistic anthem. In reality, each chorus of the song shows Phil finding a new way to commit suicide, from dropping a toaster in the bathtub to jumping off a building.

The song ends with “Hold on to your faith / You may wanna live / But baby don’t give up hope,” revealing Phil’s true meaning was to keep hoping one day the suicide will work.^[5]

5 “You Will Be Found”–Dear Evan Hansen

“Have you ever felt like nobody was there?” is the opening line of this song from the musical Dear Evan Hansen.

Apparently, a lot of Christians feel that way because as soon as Dear Evan Hansen premiered on Broadway in 2016, “You Will Be Found” became an instant religious classic. The song skyrocketed from theater kids’ playlists right into public thanks to performances from Brigham Young University’s acapella group and other religious congregations.

The message of “You Will Be Found” is right there in the title. “Even when the dark comes crashing through, when you need someone to carry you,” main character Evan Hansen sings an uplifting tune. Or is he?

The person Evan is singing about isn’t himself, but a boy named Connor who recently killed himself. Evan wishes that everyone could be found, but Connor never had someone care about him the way Evan describes. It’s a heartbreaking lament about suicide, not a cheery little ditty to sing at church.^[6]

4 “What I Did for Love”–A Chorus Line

One of the most influential Broadway musicals of all time (and the seventh-longest-running Broadway show ever), A Chorus Line is noted for its lack of plot. The show consists of a chorus line of dancers telling their stories to a casting director, each one hoping to be hired. Through song, monologue, and dance, each performer is given a moment to shine.

“What I Did For Love” has become a part of popular culture thanks to artists like Bing Crosby, Aretha Franklin, and Josh Groban recording the song for albums. Out of context, the song sounds sweet: “As we travel on / Love’s what we’ll remember.” But the refrain “I can’t regret / What I did for love” doesn’t refer to a person; rather, it’s meant to convey the performer’s passion for dance and her reaction if she could never dance again.

It’s a song of intense suffering as the dancer recalls how she has poured her entire life and career into something that could be taken from her at any time. Some have even interpreted the song’s lyrics to be referencing the casting couch, a euphemism for performing sexual acts in exchange for a job. This was especially rampant in the 1970s when the show premiered.

Either way—it’s not about romantic love.^[7]

3 “My Favorite Things”–The Sound of Music

Okay, this song is pretty straightforward. So why is it on this list? Well, people not very familiar with musical theater have probably still heard this song on the radio in December. For some reason, “My Favorite Things” has become associated with the holiday season. Anyone listening to the lyrics “Warm woolen mittens / Brown paper packages tied up with strings” and mention of sleigh bells might assume that within the show, it’s Christmas morning or Eve.

In reality, this isn’t the case. “My Favorite Things” is sung by governess Maria to her children after they are frightened by a thunderstorm. It’s a sweet song that has gained international acclaim, but it has nothing to do with winter or Christmas.^[8]

2 “Everything’s Coming Up Roses”–Gypsy

This song has been referenced in everything from The Simpsons to The Muppets” but rarely with the original intent of the song.

The main character of the musical Gypsy is a stage mother who, halfway through the show, learns her talented youngest daughter has eloped. In a fit of rage and mania, she sings “Everything’s Coming Up Roses” to express her desire to have her older daughter, Louise, become a star instead. The title and refrain are a pun on the stage mother’s name, Rose. Thus, “roses” represent rose flowers and happiness, but also herself. Everything will come up Rose’s way.

Despite the big, brass notes and fun lyrics, the song isn’t triumphant or as happy as it seems. Ethel Merman biographer Brian Kellow says that the song is often misunderstood, as it’s meant to be a “chilling illustration of blind ambition with megalomania.”^[9]

1 “Cabaret”–Cabaret

The titular song of this tour-de-force of a show is quite famous thanks to stars like Ella Fitzgerald, Bing Crosby, and Judi Dench’s recorded renditions. Within the show, the song is sung by Sally Bowles, a pregnant former cabaret star. Out of context, the lyrics seem to be praising the joys of humanity: “Life is a cabaret old chum, come to the cabaret!”

The song has been used in movies and TV shows for years, usually as a delightful little ditty. But that’s not what the song is about. Sally isn’t happy at all—she’s coming to terms with the rise of Nazism in her home city of Berlin. Rather than addressing the emerging politics of the 1930s, she makes a vow to live her life in ignorance, having fun wherever she can. This includes making sure she’s unattached to her baby’s father, so the song ends with her deciding to get an abortion. In some stagings, such as the most recent Broadway revival, this is depicted through Sally punching herself in the stomach multiple times.

Unsurprisingly, the Louis Armstrong version of the song chose to leave those lyrics out.^[10]

Christian Marlberg is a freelance writer with an interest in travel, nature, and exotic food. His experiences include cooking with nettle, downing live ants & limpets, and picking wild onions. He is always on the lookout for quality fried eel.

When we consider our food, we rarely give it too much thought, and in fact, we sometimes note how ordinary it may be. However, there are some foods so unusual, and in fact horrific that they may simply remove any trace of an appetite. While past Listverse entries looked at some undoubtedly bizarre foods, this riveting account takes culinary cringing to an entirely new level. We will look at poisonous shark meat, neurotoxic fruits, and Bullfrog salad….

A previous list covered the dangers of Greenland Sharks to humans, including Inuit hunters who may be turned over in their Kayaks. However, a more subtle risk is posed by Greenland Sharks – to your palate, and health. Greenland Sharks lack the ability to urinate, causing massive amounts of ammonia and trimethyl oxide to instead be processed through the tissues of these sharks. The ever enterprising Greenland natives have devised a traditional meal known as Harkal, which is basically aged shark flesh. Not only is the smell of the shark flesh nearly unbearable, but the consumer faces potential organ strain, intoxication and sickness from the poisons still present in the flesh.

Kivaq is an extremely stomach straining and in fact dangerous food that completely tops any other bird based dish. The Icelandic heritage food known as Kivaq consists of the fermented (some might say decomposed) corpses of small marine birds related to puffins—murres, and gulls. The birds are captured with hunting nets, and sewn into aged sealskins before being buried underground for up to three years. The birds slowly marinate in seal oil in the cold arctic tundra. The resulting meal, when finally dug up, is not only somewhat repulsive, but in fact, may be deadly due to the potential for botulism. A famous research biologist’s last meal was Kivaq.

The African Bullfrog is disturbing to consider but it is classified as a delicacy in the African country of Namibia. However, bullfrog flesh is infused with the potent toxin known as Oshiketakata, which may lead to kidney failure, muscle damage and even death. Recommendations for processing the fickle frog meal include lining a pot with special wooden planks, which supposedly “neutralize” the toxin. The poison levels are reputed to be lower at certain times of year, which make the food acceptable to the brave, or maybe foolhardy, if combined with the wood planks. We cannot guarantee that the consumer will not croak….

There are some foods which simply defy the imagination. Possibly the most counterintuitive food is Asian Bat soup, which contains an entire bat placed in a soup bowl after boiling with chicken broth. The bat is dissected with a knife and fork, and the broth is then eaten with a spoon, along with the innards of the bat. Hair is present in the dish, along with the membranes of the bat’s wings. The dish is rather delicious, but we are forced to conclude that it is very unappetizing to see an entire bat floating in front of us. The bats are also capable of carrying a number of human transmissible diseases, and the practice is considered unsustainable by many conservation organizations.

Star Fruit is the most seductive and innocent looking food on this list. While other dishes may be complex or disturbing, Star Fruit is simply beautiful. The Asian plant contains five huge ridges, which form perfect stars when the plant is served sliced crossways. After eating this plant, you may begin to see stars in your head due to the neurotoxins contain in the “fruit”. Star fruit also contains massive quantities of Oxalic acid, the same poison found in Rhubarb leaves. Star fruit may therefor strike down those with weak kidneys, leading to death in some notable cases. The author has personally sampled and prepared Star Fruit. The “bite” of the plant and sense that it was not meant to be eaten were strongly experienced.

A number of exotic Japanese and Korean restaurants, including those seeking to appeal to western tourists are offering sushi that is not only raw, but partially alive. Miniature Octopus are brought into the sushi bars alive, and are quickly chopped in two pieces, leaving the writhing, reflex operated tentacles to be served on a plate with soy dip. Because the animal is an invertebrate with a partially de-centralized nervous system, the tentacles continue to grap, coil and squeeze as they are consumed. In several unfortunate and eerie cases, death has resulted from the disembodied tentacles conspiring to block the airways of diners.

The sturgeon eggs known as caviar are a popular dish in Russia, while Escargot, or snails are a popular French Dish. Extreme delicacy entrepreneurs are popularizing a new dish known as “snail caviar“, which consists of the raw eggs of land snails themselves. The eggs are placed on hardboiled quail eggs, or served alongside roast vegetables and exotic salads. Coming neatly packaged in little tins, there is a catch to this marvelous condiment, which carries the taste of fresh Earth. The eggs cannot be cooked, and deaths have been documented from the consumption of raw snails infected with brain parasites.

In the Southwestern US, Rattlesnakes are not only feared, but they are raised as food by specialty suppliers. Proponents of “rattler rations” note that snake flesh is biologically similar to Chicken, due to the reptilian ancestry of birds. It is a surprisingly Southwestern dish that makes a trip to the desert very….authentic…In southeast Asia, eateries are actively marketing their own snake snacks in the form of actual snake burgers, made from cobras and other snakes. Because Snakes are venomous, rather than poisonous, it is perfectly safe to eat snake flesh itself, as the toxin is not distributed through the tissues. After filleting and frying, you would never know you were not eating beef or chicken.

The insides of the digestive, reproductive and nervous system of certain animals forms the basis of some grotesque, but surprisingly popular dishes. A number of dishes feature the stomach linings, intestinal sections and even testicles of cows and sheep. The “trimmings” must be carefully cleaned due to the sometimes questionable body parts involved, but can be surprisingly flavorful to the strong-stomached diner. The lamb testicles are among the most popular, and are served breaded, while bull testes come marinated in sauce. In Europe, a most distressing food known as “chitterlings” may be served. The content is nothing less than pig intestines. Sheep’s heads and fish eyes also appear on “nose to tail” menus….Risks of deadly parasite infections have led to stronger regulations on the consumption of entrails and sheep heads.

Telling someone to “eat crow” is not exactly far-fetched, or even insulting if you are in Lithuania. Crow Pie is a traditional bird based dish derived from the meat of Carrion Crows. The birds are hunted at a fairly young age, and cooked at a high heat in oil before being served on a plate of roast vegetables. The meat is rumored to act as an aphrodisiac, and ostensibly is used to “manage” crow numbers. Crows have served as a traditional component of Lithuanian food, but consumption declined sharply during Soviet occupation of the country. Crow hunters are pleased to re-vitalize the dish, and have driven hundreds of kilometers in pursuit of crow flocks. Concerns have been raised over the possibility of contracting diseases from these scavengers. Crow is not considered Kosher or Halal for these reasons.