From the start of the Qin dynasty in 221 BC until the end of the Qing dynasty in 1912, China was ruled by hundreds of emperors. Most of these men were ethnically Chinese, although some were also Mongol or Manchu. Though some of them were self-made men who took the throne by force, others were appointed heirs groomed for the title.

A few of them radically changed the history of their country, while others ended up only as footnotes. Many were competent and intelligent. Others were cruel and lazy. Some of them were quite fascinating and a tad bit strange to boot.

10 Toghon Temur

Established in 1271 by Genghis Khan’s grandson, the Mongol-ruled Yuan dynasty controlled China for almost an entire century. Although the Mongol emperors adopted some Chinese customs and really weren’t radically different from their Han predecessors, their policies discriminated against ethnic Chinese and favored Mongols.

In the four-tier social hierarchy of the time, Mongols sat at the top of the pyramid, followed by foreign groups like West Asian Muslims, northern Chinese, and then southern Chinese. The Mongols weren’t keen on giving up their cultural identity and generally tried to keep themselves separated from the Chinese, even enforcing different rules and laws for the two groups.

This officially sanctioned discrimination upset many Chinese and made Mongol rule unpopular. The Yuan rulers were widely perceived as incompetent and decadent, and no Mongol emperor represented these unsavory qualities better than the last one, Toghon Temur.

Toghon Temur, who had taken the throne when he was only 13 years old, was more interested in sex and Buddhist spiritualism than confronting the economic and natural disasters that had befallen China in the last few decades of Mongol rule. While his subjects were starving and dying from plague, Toghon Temur dressed up as a Buddhist priest and organized vast sex orgies in the Forbidden City.

As rebellions broke out across China, Toghon Temur and his chief minister contemplated the bizarre idea of killing anybody with the surnames Zhang, Wang, Liu, Li, and Zhao. These were five of the most common surnames among the Chinese. Had the plan been carried out, over 90 percent of the population would have been exterminated. By 1368, a rebel Chinese army led by Zhu Yuanzhang had captured most of the country, and Togon Temur fled his palace and took refuge in Mongolia, where he died in 1370.

9 Hongwu

In the same year that the last Yuan emperor left China, the rebel leader Zhu Yuanzhang proclaimed the beginning of the Ming dynasty and took the title of Hongwu. The new emperor was a notoriously tough, paranoid, and ugly man.

His early life was exceptionally harsh. After being orphaned at age 16, Zhu became a Buddhist monk and took to begging and wandering to survive. Through his travels across his home province of Anhui, Zhu witnessed the widespread starvation and suffering of the common people under Mongol rule. In 1352, Zhu joined a rebel army and quickly rose to become its leader, capturing the Mongol capital of Daidu (present-day Beijing) in 1368.

Once in power, Hongwu concentrated on driving out the last of the Mongols and restoring Chinese culture and values. In 1369, he ordered public schools to be built across the country, where students would study classic Chinese texts. Later, he reestablished the bureaucratic civil service exam, an emblem of Chinese culture that had earlier been abolished by the Mongols. He also reformed the tax system and left behind an influential legal code before his death in 1398.

Despite these accomplishments, Hongwu’s legacy is mostly mixed. While some historians have praised him for bringing an end to Mongol rule, others have expressed disdain for the inefficiency of his reforms and the brutal and paranoid nature of his reign. Anybody who criticized him was publicly flogged on their bare buttocks in court or sometimes even sentenced to death.

Distrustful of his own officials, Hongwu was also constantly afraid that he would be overthrown. In 1380, after uncovering an actual plot by his prime minister to depose him, Hongwu abolished the office and had the man beheaded. He then went on a mad purge to kill the man’s family and anybody he suspected of plotting against him, possibly executing as many as 100,000 people.

8 Wang Mang

Some 1,900 years before Mao Zedong founded the communist People’s Republic of China, China’s first “socialist” ruler, Wang Mang, seized power from a child emperor and founded the Xin dynasty in AD 9. Wang, an ambitious and socially conscious reformer, embarked on a number of policies that many later historians have interpreted as socialistic.

In an attempt to fix China’s dire economic situation and a starving and poor peasantry, Wang’s government took control of all the land in the country and ordered that rich landholders equally redistribute their estates. He also introduced price controls, banned the slave trade, and confiscated thousands of pounds of gold to weaken the power of the elite.

Not surprisingly, the country’s rich merchants and nobles weren’t very enthusiastic about Wang’s new policies. The reforms only worsened China’s terrible economic crisis, and Wang called them off after only eight years. Wang’s timing, however, proved to be too late. A civil war erupted, and both the elite and the peasantry that he had tried to help took up arms against him.

By the fall of AD 23, Wang realized that his situation was hopeless. As the rebels approached his capital of Chang’an (modern Xi’an), Wang lingered in his palace, consorting with magicians and trying to cast spells. On October 7 of that year, the rebels invaded Chang’an and stormed Wang’s palace. They beheaded him and then dismembered his body, bringing an end to the first and last Xin emperor.

7 Xuanzong

Xuanzong’s 43-year reign is considered the high point of the Tang dynasty (618–907), a time in Chinese history renowned for its beautiful poetry and cosmopolitan culture. Not all of Xuanzong’s time on the throne was great, however, and the later half of his reign also marked the beginning of the Tang’s decline.

For most of his time on the throne, Xuanzong was a very competent ruler. After becoming emperor in 712, Xuanzong embarked on a number of successful reforms, cleaning up the bloated imperial bureaucracy and keeping the frontiers of the empire well-protected with military governors who commanded professional armies.

In his later years, Xuanzong’s interest in governing declined. He used much of his time to dote on Yang Guifei, a concubine who was initially his son’s wife. Yang used her powerful influence over the emperor to advance her friends and family, helping her cousin Yang Guozhong to become prime minister. Her adopted son, An Lushan, was also made a military governor.

By 755, An Lushan had a falling out with Yang Guozhong and launched a rebellion to topple the Tang government. As the rebels began to close in on the capital city of Chang’an, Xuanzong and Yang Guifei had to flee the city for safety. After stopping at a remote village, the Imperial Army came to a halt and demanded that the emperor execute Yang Guifei and her cousin for their role in instigating An Lushan’s rebellion.

Faced with a revolt from his own troops, Xuanzong realized that there was no way out but to have Yang Guifei killed. The historical record varies about what happened next, but Yang either voluntarily hanged herself or was strangled to death by an imperial official. Xuanzong, devastated by his lover’s death, then gave up his throne and left the job of putting down An Lushan’s rebellion to his son.

6 Jianwen

In 1398, Jianwen succeeded his grandfather, Hongwu, as the second emperor of the Ming dynasty. This was a controversial move that had greatly angered Jianwen’s uncles, whose power he quickly moved to reduce. His uncle Zhu Di, a successful military veteran who helped keep the Mongols out of China, seized control of the northern part of the country and launched a rebellion to take the rest.

After fighting Jianwen for three years, Zhu Di and his supporters invaded the imperial capital of Nanjing in 1402. Although the city went down quite easily, Zhu Di had a bit of a problem: Jianwen’s palace was destroyed during the invasion, and nobody could find his body. Zhu Di claimed that his nephew accidentally died in the palace fire, but others believed that the old emperor had escaped and left China.

Four days after Jianwen allegedly died in the fire, Zhu Di declared himself the Yongle emperor. Yongle wanted his predecessor’s reign completely erased from history, going so far as to rewrite himself in historical records as Hongwu’s successor. He also launched a bloody purge across the southern side of the country, wiping out the former government’s supporters.

Despite the official story of Jianwen being dead, it seems that Yongle might have believed otherwise. In 1405, when he commissioned Zheng He’s first expedition to explore the world, Yongle told the renowned explorer to look for information about Jianwen. The old emperor never popped up during Zheng He’s travels, however, and whether he really died that day in Nanjing remains a mystery.

5 Zhengde

The emperor Zhengde, also known as Wuzong, is little remembered today except for his extravagant and shocking lifestyle. With the help of his friend Jiang Bin, Zhengde enjoyed kidnapping women and raping them.

In one infamous incident, after fighting a rebellious prince, Zhengde and his men raped an untold number of virgins and widows as they made their way across the city of Yangzhou. One historian said, “His violence plunged the city into such a panic that families grabbed any young men available to marry their daughters.”

Zhengde eventually abducted so many women that there was no room in the Imperial Palace to keep all of them. His “Leopard Quarter,” a second palace complete with a zoo, was where he spent much of his time. The emperor’s taste for sex was endless, and it was even rumored that he had a sexual relationship with his eunuch Wang Wei.

In autumn 1520, when he was 29 years old, Zhengde became sick after falling off a capsized boat and almost drowning. He never recovered from his illness and died several months later in the comfort of his Leopard Quarter. While his reign might have been short of any actual accomplishments, Zhengde’s larger-than-life personality and free spirit were celebrated in many works of literature after his death.

4 Jiajing

While many Chinese emperors survived assassination attempts by family members or rivals, only one of them was nearly killed by his concubines. Emperor Jiajing, the successor to Zhengde, reigned from 1521 until 1567. Although China enjoyed great stability under his long rule, Jiajing was also a very cruel man. In 1542, a group of Jiajing’s concubines decided that they would put an end to his tyranny.

On November 27 of that year, while Jiajing was sleeping alone in a concubine’s room, 18 of his other concubines suddenly came in and ambushed him. While some girls drove hairpins into Jiajing’s crotch, others wrapped a silk cord around his neck and tried to strangle him. The emperor eventually fell unconscious, but he survived the attack because his concubines couldn’t tighten their cord hard enough to kill him.

While her husband lay unconscious, Empress Fang had all of the conspirators behind the assassination plot immediately executed. After recovering from his close brush with death, Jiajing moved out of the Imperial Palace and dabbled with Daoist magic at a self-designed palace near old Zhengde’s Leopard Quarters. He then spent the next 25 years of his rule generally ignoring his duties, devoting himself instead to having sex with virgins and drinking “magic” potions made from bodily fluids.

3 Wu Zetian

Over the more than 2,000 years that China was ruled by emperors, Wu Zetian was the only woman who ever held the title. Originally a concubine of lowly origins, Wu became the empress after hatching a scheme to kill her own baby daughter. When the baby was only one week old, Wu suffocated her and pinned the death on Emperor Gaozong’s wife, Empress Wang. Since Wang often visited the baby’s nursery alone, the accusation stuck easily and she was dethroned.

In 655, despite opposition at the imperial court, Wu took Wang’s place as empress. Her first act was to get rid of Wang and a concubine named Xiao, a former rival who also had her heart set on becoming empress. Without an ounce of mercy, Wu had the two women executed by having their hands and feet cut off. Their bodies were then hurled into wine jars, where they choked on the wine and drowned.

Wu spent the next few decades consolidating her power and ruling behind the scenes. It was not until 690, after Gaozong was long dead and she forced two of her sons off the throne, that Wu became the official emperor of China.

While historians have traditionally criticized her as a violent ruler, her reputation has improved in recent times due to the stability of her reign, her reform of the civil service examinations, and her policy of keeping nationwide suggestion boxes in which ordinary subjects were allowed to criticize government officials.

Still, Wu’s ruthless attitude and secret police force made her many enemies during the time, and she was eventually forced off the throne after a coup in 705 by one of her sons.

2 Taichang

The death of Taichang, a Ming-era emperor who ruled for little more than a month in 1620, is said to be one of the dynasty’s greatest mysteries. After taking the throne on August 28 of that year, Taichang suddenly fell sick a few days later. Within two weeks, he had become so weak that he couldn’t sleep or walk.

By September 25, Taichang was desperate to try anything. Li Keshao, a man recommended to the emperor by 13 of his officials, gave and personally prepared for Taichang a special red pill. Miraculously, the emperor began to recover after taking Li’s pill. He could sleep again, and he regained his appetite as well. When the evening came, Taichang relapsed and was given another pill. A second dose failed to improve his condition, however, and the emperor died by early morning.

Taichang’s sudden death caused a great deal of controversy. Some cried of a conspiracy, accusing Li and the 13 officials who had visited Taichang the day before his death of assassinating him. It seemed strange that Li, a man with no real medical training, was allowed to give his mysterious red pills to Taichang.

It sooned surfaced that Taichang was given a laxative by an eunuch around the time that he started to get sick. There was also a rumor, earlier denied by Taichang himself, that an old concubine of his father named Zheng had deliberately worsened his health by sending off eight palace maids to have sex with him.

Zheng, a palace woman who wanted to become empress, was alleged to have acted in a plot with another palace woman and some other power-hungry officials to get rid of Taichang. Whether Taichang died from taking Li Keshao’s medicine, either accidentally or deliberately, has never been established.

1 Xuantong

Xuantong, better known by his personal name of Henry Puyi, was the last emperor of China. At age 3, Puyi took the throne after the death of his uncle Guangxu in November 1908. Puyi’s dynasty, the Manchu-led Qing, had been in a long decline at this point. In October 1911, a democratic revolution broke out, and Puyi abdicated only a few months later as part of the peace negotiations. After more than 2,000 years as a monarchy, China was now a republic.

Although he was now powerless, Puyi was allowed to keep his title as the Xuantong emperor, and the new republican government also let him live in his old palace in Beijing with an annual allowance. Aside from a 12-day restoration of the monarchy in 1917, Puyi’s life was pretty uneventful until he was forced to relocate to the city of Tianjin in 1924. During that time, Tianjin was divided up into a variety of different foreign concessions and Puyi stayed in the Japanese part of the city until 1931.

By 1932, the Japanese were in control of Manchuria, the ethnic Manchu Puyi’s ancestral homeland. The Japanese invited Puyi to assist as “chief executive” of the puppet state they established there, now known as Manchukuo. After two years in power, Puyi was made emperor of Manchukuo, a move which enraged his former Chinese subjects.

Once World War II was over, the Soviets abducted Puyi and held him as a prisoner in the USSR for five years. Puyi was terrified to go back to China because he was considered a war criminal for helping the Japanese, but the Soviet authorities denied his request to stay in the country for good.

In 1950, the Soviets returned Puyi to China, where he stayed in prison for almost a decade. After being released, Puyi worked as a gardener at the Beijing Botanical Garden. He spent the last few years of his life quietly working at this job, releasing a ghostwritten autobiography and dying of cancer in 1967.

Tristan Shaw is an American blogger interested in crime, literature, and history. His first two books, Mexico’s Unsolved Mysteries and 20 Unsolved Mysteries of Japan, are now available on Amazon for Kindle.

After Kenneth Arnold kick-started the UFO craze in 1947, a group of believers sprang up, claiming that they had sustained contact with flying saucers. These “contactees,” as they were known, told outlandish tales about talking to aliens via telepathy and visiting distant planets.

Their most famous spokesmen, such as George Adamski and his friend George Hunt Williamson, wrote best-selling books and lectured across the country during the 1950s. Though their popularity faded in the ‘60s and their stories were blatantly fake and unscientific, there’s no denying that the original contactees were a strange, interesting bunch.

10 Buck Nelson

The host of an annual UFO convention on his own Missouri farm, Buck Nelson was a humble, plainspoken man who self-published in 1956 a ridiculous pamphlet entitled My Trip to Mars, The Moon, and Venus. After two earlier UFO sightings, Nelson claimed that four occupants from a UFO had come to his house on March 5, 1955.

The visitors consisted of a young earthling, a pair of men from Venus, and a giant, 136-kilogram (300 lb) dog named Bo. After examining his house, the visitors told Nelson that they could take him on a trip to other planets sometime.

More than a month later, on April 24, Nelson’s new friends picked up him and his dog Ted for a trip to outer space. First, the men traveled to Mars, which Nelson described as colorful and similar to Earth. Next, they made a stop on the Moon. Then they finished the trip with a look at Venus, a utopia that had no need for jails, policemen, or wars.

After returning to his home planet, Nelson promised the aliens that he would tell everybody about his travels. He spoke to the media about his experiences and was supposedly questioned by the armed forces. At his farm conventions, Nelson sold pieces of Bo’s hair to back up his story. Skeptics noted that the Venusian dog hair was similar to the kind found on Earth dogs. He told them, “Dawgs is dawgs. Don’t matter what planet they’re from.”^[1]

9 Cynthia Appleton

On November 18, 1957, English housewife Cynthia Appleton was taking care of her children at home when she suddenly heard a high-pitched whistling sound in her sitting room. Once the sound stopped, Appleton saw a tall, blond man materialize near her fireplace. Using telepathy, the man instructed Appleton not to be afraid. He was a visitor from the planet Gharnasvarn, and his people wished to make contact with special earthlings like Appleton.

Over the next year, the man from Gharnasvarn would make seven more appearances at Appleton’s house, sometimes bringing along a friend. When not explaining how to cure cancer, the man would make pseudo-philosophical babble, insisting that time was not real and that all life was unified. During his last six visits, the man also shunned teleporting and opted to arrive in a big black car instead.

In September 1958, the Gharnasvarn man and his friend showed themselves to Cynthia Appleton one last time. They told the mother of two that she was pregnant. Confusingly, the child would be “of the race of Gharnasvarn” yet also her husband’s son.^[2]

In May 1959, Appleton gave birth to a baby boy just as the aliens had apparently predicted. Despite some media attention, the Appletons never saw the Gharnasvarn men again, and they soon quietly disappeared from the public spotlight.

8 Gabriel Green

Once a professional photographer, Gabriel Green gave up his career to pursue an interest in UFOs. He was the founder of an early UFO organization called the Amalgamated Flying Saucer Clubs of America, Inc. and also edited the group’s journal, the Flying Saucers International. In 1960, Green launched an independent campaign to become president of the United States, competing against Democrat John F. Kennedy and Republican Richard Nixon.

Though Green was a write-in candidate and had no political experience, he took his bid for president seriously. In an August 1960 interview, Green claimed that the “Space People” had asked him to run.^[3]

He admitted that he was reluctant at first, but he realized that Earth was doomed unless mankind listened to the wisdom of the Space People. In his official platform, Green promised the abolition of taxes, free college educations, and a spaceship mission to Mars.

Unfortunately, despite the support of the Space People, Green eventually withdrew from the race. In 1962, Green tried running for the US Senate as a Democrat but lost the election. After another failed bid for the presidency in 1972, Green quit his political ambitions for good, presumably content that the Earth was doomed.

7 Ted Owens

Calling himself the “PK (Psychokinetic) Man,” Ted Owens considered himself something like a real-life superhero. A member of MENSA, Owens was a genius with a 150 IQ who claimed that aliens had given him supernatural powers. Thanks to the help of “Space Intelligences,” he could do everything from controlling the weather to altering the results of a sports game.

According to Owens, the Space Intelligences were hyperdimensional beings who rode around in UFOs and kept a close eye on Earth. He first made contact with them in 1965 when one of their UFOs appeared and vanished before his car. They communicated with Owens via telepathy and were the source of his PK powers. In his own words, Owens was a test “to find out just how much of the PK power a human being can absorb and stand.”^[4]

Although Owens had his fans, he struggled to convince academics and scientists of his abilities. He obsessively collected newspaper clippings and records that allegedly verified his demonstrations and predictions. Most professionals treated him skeptically, however. Only some sportswriters, a CIA agent, and a NASA official believed his bizarre stories.

6 Aladino Felix

In 1959, under the pseudonym of Dino Kraspedon, Aladino Felix published a typical book of the contactee movement called My Contact with Flying Saucers. Felix, a Brazilian, wrote that he met the crew of a UFO in the state of Sao Paulo. The experience led to the UFO’s captain visiting Felix at his home a few months later, where he made the usual extraterrestrial warnings about the dangers of the Atomic Age.

Six years later, Felix resurfaced in the public eye, styling himself as a psychic. He made vague predictions about natural disasters, coinciding with one of the deadliest flash floods in Brazilian history in 1966. During a politically turbulent time in Brazil, Felix also prophesied spates of terrorist attacks in the country.

If some of Felix’s predictions proved eerily accurate, it might have been because of his own intervention. In 1968, Felix and 18 other people were arrested after being suspected of some bank robberies and bombings. The gang had even plotted to assassinate politicians, and it turned out that Felix was their ringleader.

Before he was sent off to prison, Felix vowed, “My friends from space will come here and free me and avenge my arrest. You can look to tragic consequences for humanity when the flying saucers invade this planet.”^[5]

5 Daniel Fry

On July 4, 1950, Daniel Fry was taking a walk in the New Mexico desert when a remote-controlled UFO landed 20 meters (70 ft) away from him. A voice from the UFO invited Fry to come for a ride. While the ship’s remote pilot talked to him, Fry was whisked away to New York City and back in only 30 minutes.

Fry’s host, Alan, had a lot to say to his bewildered passenger. Alan revealed that the aliens who were riding around Earth in flying saucers were originally earthlings themselves. Alan’s ancestors had built the legendary countries of Atlantis and Lemuria, two advanced superpowers that ended up destroying each other. The few survivors were forced to relocate to Mars, where they rebuilt their civilization and observed Earth from afar.

To spread the Martians’ messages, Fry founded a spiritual organization called Understanding, Inc. When it was founded in California in 1955, the group had only nine members. But it soon grew to have a number of members organized in 60 “units” across the world. Long after the original heyday of the contactees, the organization survived into the 1980s, although one academic study had noted it was by then “in serious decline.”^[6]

4 Orfeo Angelucci

A factory worker who had once suffered a nervous breakdown, Orfeo Angelucci and his contactee adventures were studied by the famous Swiss psychologist Carl Jung. Angelucci’s stories had a Christian tinge, involving angels, Lucifer, and even a meeting with Jesus Christ.

In possibly his most amusing anecdote, Angelucci claimed that he had swapped bodies with an alien named Neptune in January 1953. Angelucci remembered falling asleep on a divan on Earth but woke up in Neptune’s body on another planet.

Neptune’s companions, Lyra and Orion, showed Angelucci a projection of an ancient planet called Lucifer. The Luciferians tried conquering the people of other planets, and as punishment, they were imprisoned on Earth. According to Angelucci’s hosts, most modern humans were the descendants of the fallen Luciferians.

Like many of the other contactees on this list, Angelucci felt an obligation to save his fellow humans. While in the body of Neptune, Angelucci was shown a horrifying vision of the apocalypse. If the people of Earth failed to change their ways by 1986, their planet would be destroyed by a gigantic comet. Needless to say, the comet never came and Angelucci quietly died in 1993.^[7]

3 Reinhold O. Schmidt

On November 5, 1957, German-American farmer Reinhold O. Schmidt allegedly stumbled upon a balloon-like UFO in a remote part of Kearney, Nebraska. Curious, he approached the ship, but it shot a beam of light at his chest and paralyzed him. Then two men walked out of the UFO, searched Schmidt for weapons, and invited him inside. Oddly, the entire crew spoke German and their leader spoke English with a thick German accent.

After Schmidt was let out, the UFO took off into the air. Though he was worried that nobody would believe him, Schmidt decided that he had to contact the authorities. He took Kearney’s deputy sheriff to the spot of his encounter. Schmidt showed it to the chief of police and some other local notables as well.

The city authorities admitted to Schmidt that his story must have been true, but then they pressured him into denying it. When the story spread across the city, a defiant Schmidt was thrown in jail for a day.

Of course, Schmidt had many more encounters with the odd German-speaking UFO crew, and books and lectures naturally followed. It wasn’t long, however, before legal troubles had cast doubt on his claims. In 1961, Schmidt scammed an elderly widow out of thousands of dollars. He was convicted and sentenced to serve time in prison for grand theft.^[8]

2 Wilbert Smith

When the public first became interested in UFOs, there were two groups of believers in the spotlight. On the one side were the contactees who make up this list, laypeople who claimed they were talking, meeting, and traveling with beings from other worlds.

On the other side were more educated professionals represented by the likes of Donald Keyhoe, a naval aviator and cofounder of the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP). Keyhoe and his group dismissed contactee stories and tried doing more scientific investigations of UFOs using their backgrounds as military figures and scientists. The two groups never got along well. For example, Keyhoe often refused to be seen on TV shows with contactees.

Wilbert Smith, a radio engineer for the Canadian Department of Transport, was an interesting mix of the two competing groups. He served as a special adviser for the original NICAP, yet he associated with contactees like George Hunt Williamson, reporting to be in contact with the same extraterrestrial characters that Williamson’s circle knew. From 1950 until 1954, Smith also directed Canada’s Project Magnet, a government-funded research group that studied UFO sightings.

Smith’s conclusions greatly embarrassed the Department of Transport. He went beyond saying that the studied UFO sightings were real and argued that flying saucers were actually from parallel universes.

He believed that people could communicate with UFOs through psychic powers and pointed to bogus studies by a contactee group called Borderland Sciences Research Associates as proof. Unsurprisingly, Project Magnet eventually lost its funding, but Smith continued researching UFOs until his death on December 27, 1962.^[9]

1 William Dudley Pelley

William Dudley Pelley was perhaps the oddest contactee to come out of the 20th century. An extreme anti-Semite, he had worked as a screenwriter during the 1920s. But he left Hollywood because he thought Jews controlled the movie industry and the world at large.

After abandoning Hollywood, Pelley got involved in mysticism and published a popular article (and later book) about a near-death experience he had. Pelley claimed that he spent seven minutes in “eternity,” visiting God, Jesus, and hyperdimensional beings who told him that souls were reincarnated throughout time until they climbed the spiritual hierarchy and became white people.

When Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933, Pelley eagerly combined his mysticism and racism into the Silver Legion of America, a paramilitary fascist group that attracted over 15,000 members. In 1936, Pelley unsuccessfully ran for president under the Christian Party, a political party he founded.

After years of listening to Pelley’s tantrums and threats, Franklin D. Roosevelt and his government became annoyed. Pelley was arrested, charged, and convicted of sedition in April 1942.

Once he was released from prison in 1950, Pelley was forbidden from political activism. Instead, he channeled his energy into mysticism, and his writings became even more inane.

Using some of his earlier ideas, Pelley created a set of racist spiritual teachings called Soulcraft, teaching that Asian, black, and white people had souls which came from different planets. To appeal to contemporary crackpots, Pelley threw in telepathy and UFOs as well, meeting with and influencing such early contactees as George Adamski and George Hunt Williamson.^[10]

Although Soulcraft had a small set of fans, Pelley never regained the popularity of his heyday in the 1930s. He died practically forgotten in June 1965.

Tristan Shaw blogs at Bizarre and Grotesque, where he writes about offbeat folklore, history, and mysteries.

Barbershops have a rich history. This was particularly true ages ago when surgery, bloodletting, enemas, and tooth extractions were part of the norm (in addition to fresh shaves).

In our day and age, such establishments often serve as a locale for social interaction pertaining to contemporary issues. The following list examines barbers who traded in their shears for unspeakable acts of violence as well as unscrupulous patrons on a downward spiral of lunacy.

10 Contaminated Tools

On a daily basis, hundreds of citizens throughout India are unknowingly exposing themselves to serious infections like AIDS and hepatitis B and C via unsanitary roadside barbers. In a country where there is no system or organization to check safety protocols, thousands of barbers use just one razor or blade on a large number of customers.

At railway stations, bus stands, and even government hospitals, infected razors are continuously being used without the slightest bit of concern from the barber or the client receiving a shave. Upon questioning one barber about his knowledge pertaining to the transmission of HIV and AIDS, he erroneously responded by saying, “These things happen because of wrong acts and not because of shaving. If we will think that much, what will we eat.”

Nigeria has also seen its share of unsanitary barber practices. According to a recent study, a majority of professional barbers in the African nation serve as a potential core group for indirect HIV transmission “through the use of non-potent disinfectants and improper handling of sharp instruments.”^[1]

Case in point: The study found that kerosene has become a popular disinfectant on barbers’ instruments even though the solvent cannot inactivate HIV or other infectious diseases. This renders its use a mere senseless placebo.

9 Barbie Barber

Australia’s famed adult nightclub, The Vault On Ruthven, recently underwent a $2.5 million makeover on a new and improved interior that was once home to the Commonwealth Bank. Much of the construction expense went into transforming the old bank vault into an unexpected attraction—a nude barbershop.

For voyeur gentlemen seeking a fresh shave or cut, they now have the unusual luxury of being snipped and trimmed by Breanna Francis (aka “Barbie Barber”). The corset-wearing, topless hairdresser prides herself on her work and states, “I get a lot more money doing this than just hairdressing and more money than I would just stripping.”

Interestingly enough, the barbershop—just like the entirety of the strip club—is upper echelon in terms of class as opposed to the expected, seedy appearance that one might expect. In fact, the owners have taken great pride in the newly transformed vault. It is rightfully named “Don’s Barbershop,” an ode to the foreman who oversaw the entire construction.

Sadly, Don kicked the bucket prior to completion of the nude barbershop that he so proudly envisioned. In his honor, a grandiose plaque outside the door of the risque establishment has the inscription, “established 1937,” a creepy reminder of the year that Don was born.^[2]

8 Degenerate Barber

What was supposed to be a typical trim in a Spring, Texas, barbershop took an unexpected turn into perversion in August 2017. An unidentified mother was silently questioning why her children’s barber, 32-year-old Jeremiah Siqueido, was incessantly excusing himself to go to the back room of the shop.

Though one could simply assume that Siqueido had irregular bowel movements, the frequent breaks became not only a nuisance but oddly troublesome for the young mother of three. As she followed him to the rear of the store, the mother’s unremitting sixth sense was visually confirmed. Siqueido was caught with his pants down, masturbating while staring at her children from the shadows of the room.

“She was very, very explicit with what she saw with both of his hands and where they were positioned and what she actually saw. That was a big factor in our DA taking charges,” explained Harris County Constable Mark Herman following Siqueido’s arrest for indecent exposure.

It may come as no surprise that the child predator has had previous run-ins with the law. A decade earlier, Siqueido was sentenced to five years in prison after he poured boiling hot water on a two-year-old child. The young girl, whose mother was dating Siqueido at the time, suffered “third-degree burns from head to toe all over her body.”^[3]

To date, the sick and twisted barber awaits trial while being held on a $5,000 bond.

7 A Bad Day At The Office

The last thing expected by Ismael Dushan when he entered Levels Barbershop in Brooklyn in May 2018 was that he would be leaving the establishment in an ambulance. Tensions arouse mid-cut when Dushan began to complain about the trim he was receiving. The 33-year-old also refused to leave a tip, which further enraged his barber.

While his customer’s back was turned, the irascible coiffeur shoved the patron with such force that he was launched through the front window of the shop. Seeing that his customer’s face was now ripped opened by shards of glass, the devious stylist chose not to wait around for police questioning.

Interestingly enough, not a single employee at Levels could recall the barber’s name or how to reach him even though he had been employed at the barbershop for some time. To date, the fiery Brooklyn barber remains at large.^[4]

In spite of such injurious rage in Brooklyn, nothing compares to the ire of a Queens barber who used his scissors as a tool for murder. Following a scuffle that broke out at Select Stylez, 34-year-old Cedric Simpson repeatedly plunged his shears into the stomach of 19-year-old Carl Richardson in 2014.

According to police reports, Simpson became incensed after Richardson, a regular customer, inquired about a $50 debt that the barber owed him. Simpson was formally charged with murder after it was announced that Richardson was pronounced dead on arrival at Franklin General Hospital.

6 Buckets Of Urine

In the Emabutweni suburb of Bulawayo, Zimbabwe, sits a barbershop whose owner had quite a peculiar dilemma on his hands. For months, barber Mgadi Ndlovu had been robbed of his peace as well as his clientele, all thanks to welder Khumbulani Ndlovu who worked nearby.

For reasons that are unclear, Khumbulani developed a penchant for entering Mgadi’s shop with the sole purpose of urinating on anything and everything, including the barber’s tools. Mgadi said:

He sometimes comes to my workplace just to urinate in my shop. Whenever I ask him why he is behaving in such a manner, he would then start shouting and insulting me using vulgar language. At one time, he even came to the shop and took one of the buckets which we use for other purposes and urinated inside. When I asked him why he was doing that, he threatened to splash me with urine.

After countless golden drenches turned the barbershop into an odorous nightmare reminiscent of a nursing home, Mgadi decided to take Khumbulani to court. Citing a loss of customers due to the welder’s bizarre antics, Mgadi also claimed that Khumbulani made several unspecified threats against his life.

As expected, Khumbulani was arrested and made to pay a fine with the understanding that he must not communicate with or threaten Mgadi or enter Mgadi’s place of work. Khumbulani was also stripped of all barbershop bathroom privileges.^[5]

5 When You Gotta Go

On a quiet Wednesday afternoon in Columbus, Georgia, in 2016, customers at the Victory Barber Shop got more than they bargained for when Kenyatta Samar Griffin casually strolled into view. Standing in front of the window where he could be seen clearly by the shop’s clients, the 42-year-old calmly dropped his pants, exposed himself, and proceeded to defecate all over the sidewalk.

When he was done relieving himself, Griffin pulled up his pants and carried on with his day. An officer on routine patrol who had witnessed Griffin’s fecal work of art immediately arrested the inebriated man for public indecency. When questioned about the poop-covered sidewalk, Griffin claimed that the feces belonged to someone else.^[6]

If that wasn’t enough to turn one’s stomach, an unsatisfied customer in Shandong, China, expressed his disdain toward his barber in the most romantic way—by throwing bags of feces at the barbershop’s door. The odoriferous hobby became a daily ritual for the rancorous nuisance who was eventually tracked down after police viewed the shop’s surveillance tape.

In the end, the man was fined 500 yuan for his poop-flinging adventures and sentenced to nine days in “detention.”

4 Smokey Was Smoked

A long-running feud between an antagonistic resident, Heather Lemieux, and William Whitson of Smooth Cuts Barber Shop viciously spilled out into a Massachusetts street in 2015. After months of shouting matches, Lemieux carelessly continued her deliberate provocation of parading her pit bull, Smokey, around Whitson’s shop despite his pleas to stop.

One afternoon, however, Lemieux’s antagonistic ways came full circle when her intimidating four-legged friend attacked a smaller dog in front of Whitson’s barbershop. As the small dog’s owner cried for help, Whitson sprang into action. In spite of restraining Smokey by placing him in a headlock, the barber took his gallant efforts a step further and began stabbing the dog in the shoulder, neck, and chest as if he were slaying a werewolf.

Upon questioning, Whitson claimed that the pit bull bit his right hand and would not let go, prompting the stabbing in self-defense. Nonetheless, authorities rejected his narrative and charged him with animal cruelty and assault with a dangerous weapon. They also issued a temporary order of suspension for his master barber license.^[7]

Court records indicate that Whitson, a registered Level 3 sex offender, had a history of complaints pertaining to late-night disturbances outside his local barbershop. After serving 21 months and four days, he was released from prison still irked about his unjust sentence.

3 Temperamental Patrons And Barbers

Desiring to look prim and proper for the holidays, a 22-year-old man in Madison, Wisconsin, stopped by Ruby’s Salon for a haircut. During the cut, however, the unidentified customer kept “fidgeting” in his seat and moving his head, which caused great aggravation for the barber and owner, Khaled A. Shabani.

As opposed to voicing his annoyance like a sane individual, Shabani did what any frustrated lunatic holding shears would do. He twisted the man’s ear and then “snipped” off the tip.

With the customer in a state of shock and confusion, Shabani used clippers to shave off a strip of hair down the center of the man’s head. Authorities arrested Shabani on charges of mayhem and disorderly conduct while armed. They also stated that the botched haircut left the man “looking a bit like Larry from The Three Stooges.”^[8]

Such insanity pales in comparison to the wrath of 40-year-old Trenton barber James Dillard. While Dillard cut the hair of a client, the two men began to argue, prompting the customer to end the session early.

As opposed to leaving in a relatively civilized manner, the unidentified patron slammed the front door to the Beauty and the Beast Barber Shop, causing the glass to shatter. In response, Dillard confronted the man in the street, where a struggle ensued.

In the heat of the moment, the barber channeled his inner Mike Tyson and bit the 24-year-old man’s ear in half. In the end, the customer was rushed to a hospital while Dillard was jailed on charges of aggravated assault.

2 Demon Barber

Lloyd Dobrodumow, the owner of Jack’s barbershop, is quite the peculiar fellow who proudly touts himself as “The Demon Barber.” Inspired by the popular musical, Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, Dobrodumow’s fascination with the barbarous character became all too real for horrified Newcastle residents who witnessed a man burst out of the barbershop with his throat slit.

By all appearances, it seemed as if detectives had an open-and-shut case. Dobrodumow, who has a history of domestic violence and 17 convictions, was booked on one charge of wounding with intent to commit grievous bodily harm. Much to the surprise of mortified residents, further investigation revealed that the victim, Robert Smith, was the instigator.

According to reports, a fight broke out between the two men after a belligerent Smith began throwing beer cans at Dobrodumow. Smith also threatened to kill Dobrodumow and steal his dog. Then Smith called Dobrodumow’s wife a “slut.”

The barber threw a punch, not realizing that he was still holding a razor in his hand. Despite a 10-centimeter (4 in) wound to Smith’s throat that severed a main muscle and a saliva gland, witnesses reported that Smith began demanding £10,000 to “make it all go away.”

At Dobrodumow’s trial, Judge Tom Little stated that Dobrodumow had shown “genuine, tearful remorse” and believed the injury was not intentional. The Demon Barber was subsequently given a 12-month suspended sentence and ordered to pay £5,000 in compensation.^[9]

1 Revenge

On the night of February 5, 2015, a man wearing a black hooded sweatshirt walked into a packed barbershop in Warrensville Heights, Ohio, and carried out a horrific massacre that spawned a series of revenge killings. On the orders of heroin kingpin Tevaughn “Big Baby” Darling, Douglas Shine Jr. opened fire with two handguns inside Chalk Linez barbershop.^[10]

Shine shot Walter Barfield 19 times, including two execution-style shots to his skull. Lying dead in a pool of blood beside Barfield, who was the target of the massacre, was Brandon White and barber William Gonzalez, an innocent bystander who was gunned down beside his barber’s chair.

In the months that followed, a series of revenge shootings were carried out throughout Ohio. One of the perpetrators of the killing spree was 24-year-old Marcus Ladson, who executed Curtis Avent III outside a bar merely weeks after the Chalk Linez shooting.

Ladson, whose cousin Brandon had been murdered at the barbershop, mercilessly continued exacting revenge on anyone believed to have been a conspirator in the massacre. After being arrested red-handed at the scene of his last shooting, Ladson was found guilty of murder and 25 other felonies. He was sentenced to 127 years to life in prison.

Douglas Shine Jr., who carried out the triple homicide, was convicted of aggravated murder and other charges and sentenced to life in prison without parole. Meanwhile, “Big Baby” Darling, the man who orchestrated the barbershop killing, is currently serving a 14-year sentence on drug charges. Chalk Linez barbershop never reopened.

Adam is just a hubcap trying to hold on in the fast lane.

Growing up in the United States, you learn about all the big, quintessentially “American” sites and structures from a very early age. You’re told that they are important and given a vague explanation of why. Then you set about the task of never really thinking about them again.

That’s a shame because they can be quite fascinating—usually for reasons that they were never meant to be. Behind the stately columns and torches lies an entire world of weirdness hidden away from the public eye.

10 The Washington Mini Monument

The Washington Monument, the giant white obelisk in Washington, DC, was built in honor of the first US president, George Washington. You probably knew that. What you may not have known is that the monument has a forgotten baby brother.

Buried beneath an unassuming manhole right beside the famous landmark is a 3.7-meter-tall (12 ft) replica. Placed there in the 1880s, around the same time that the Washington Monument was finished, this shrunken clone served as a “Geodetic Control Point” for the National Geodetic Survey (NGS).^[1]

Officially named “Bench Mark A,” it was basically used as an exceptionally accurate starting point when making maps and planning railroad routes. However, due to its proximity to the monument, the NGS employees decided to dress it up a bit rather than use the standard plain metal rods.

Unfortunately, the miniature monument has sunk into DC’s marshy soil over the years. So it was given a proper burial. It was entombed in a brick chimney and sealed off from the world. It continues to sink about 0.5 millimeters (0.02 in) each year.

9 The Capitol’s Flag Factory

Aside from being your typical stately government building, the Capitol Building in Washington, DC, offers a special service: For a small fee, you can own an American flag that has been flown over the Capitol. So, if you wish to own a flag that is slightly more America-y than your neighbor’s, you’re welcome.

But before you reach for your wallet, there’s just one thing. The flag you receive will indeed have been flown over the Capitol, but only on one of three tiny, hidden flagpoles for 30 seconds.

Since its inception in 1937, the Capitol Flag Program (CFP) has supplied patriotic citizens with genuine “Capitol-flown” flags. However, when demand eventually outgrew supply, the CFP had to get creative. Rather than continue to sell the prominently displayed flags above the Capitol’s entrances, they just installed a bizarre “flag factory” on the roof.

Three unremarkable flagpoles, complete with a small service elevator and crew of workers, are used to fly as many flags for the state-mandated 30 seconds as possible each day. Security cameras have even been installed to prevent workers from flying the flags for a disgustingly disrespectful 29 seconds.^[2]

8 The Golden Gate Bridge-Boat-Tunnel Thing

While it isn’t a really a national monument, San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge is still a world-famous symbol of American ingenuity. However, this bright orange engineering marvel came dangerously close to not existing. San Francisco almost built a tunnel instead. Stranger still, they almost built a tunnel designed by a man who had presumably no idea what a tunnel actually was.

When shopping around for ideas about how to span San Francisco Bay in the early 1930s, city officials were delivered an unusual proposal by local inventor Cleve F. Shaffer. His eccentric concept called for two bridges to be built—one from each shore—which would each connect to its own ship floating stationary in the bay. A tunnel would run between the ships, which would be raised and lowered to allow sea traffic in and out of the city.^[3]

Aside from the fever-dream design, the problems introduced by the plan were many. The narrow spiral ramps within the bridge-ships would create nightmarish traffic jams. In addition, the fact that most of the bridge was freely floating was a recipe for maritime disaster.

Tempted by the relatively low price tag, the city of San Francisco came bafflingly close to accepting this design before settling on their now world-famous suspension bridge.

7 The Supreme Basketball Court

The “Highest Court of the Land” is a title that has long been held by the US Supreme Court. It is well-deserved, albeit in a metaphorical sense. A more literal example would be the secret basketball court which sits just above the courtroom.

Once used as a storage area for journals and other legal documents, the fifth floor of the Washington, DC, Supreme Court building was converted into an all-purpose workout area for off-duty employees in the 1940s. At some point, the focus shifted to basketball and a slightly smaller-than-regulation basketball court was constructed.

In recent years, justices such as Byron White and William H. Rehnquist have shot hoops there to blow off steam. Sandra Day O’Connor used it to host women-only yoga classes. A weight-lifting area even caters to justices looking to strengthen their cores.^[4]

Unfortunately, this court is off-limits to the public. As it sits just above the courtroom on the fourth floor, there are strict rules in place. Signs warn visitors not to play when court is in session because squeaky sneakers can really blow your concentration when deciding the legal fate of millions.

6 The Disturbing Vision Behind the National Parks

Many people are aware that Theodore Roosevelt founded the US Forest Service and more or less created the concept of a “national park.” However, most people don’t know that he had help—from some of the most distressingly racist people on the planet. They saw national parks as an opportunity to prove the importance of racial purification.

These men were Madison Grant, Gifford Pinchot, and a handful of other aristocratic supporters of eugenics, the belief that some creatures—including humans—are genetically superior to others. They were fond of warning of the impending “race suicide” that America would face if it didn’t replenish its stock of white people and even suggested that certain people should be legally forbidden to reproduce.^[5]

However, they were also very vocal about the importance of wildlife conservation. When Roosevelt approached them for help in establishing the national parks, they saw an opportunity to kill two birds with one stone.

Essentially, their idea was to use the parks as a metaphor for human society—the noble bear and elk (white people) deprived of land and resources by weaker but more numerous species (nonwhites). Luckily, the message was lost in translation and now we just like looking at all the pretty trees.

5 Crazy Horse’s Ironic Insult

In 1948, sculptor Korczazk Ziolkowski began work on possibly the most ambitious statue in the world. Using the very mountains of South Dakota’s Black Hills, he planned to honor Native American folk hero Crazy Horse with a massive memorial, the largest on the planet. Unfortunately, he didn’t bother to consult any actual Native Americans before starting work.

Aside from the fact that Ziolkowski began unknowingly blowing apart a sacred mountain with no permission whatsoever, the statue itself has proven problematic as well. The plan calls for Crazy Horse, mounted on horseback, to be pointing dramatically across the land.

This is a reference to a folktale in which a white man asks, “Where are your lands now?” The legendary warrior replies, “My lands are where my dead lie buried.” It makes for a moving image. But there’s one small problem: It is unbelievably rude to point in Native American culture.^[6]

Needless to say, Native American spokesmen have been condemning the statue for decades, comparing it to a Mount Rushmore that features the presidents picking their noses. Luckily, the statue is not yet finished. Here’s hoping that someone takes over soon who is willing to actually speak to the people being honored.

4 The National Mall’s Dodged Bullet

The National Mall in Washington, DC, is absolutely packed with monuments to great Americans and moments in American history. The Washington Monument, the Smithsonian, and the Lincoln Memorial all call this long, grassy stretch home. However, in the early 1920s, it came dangerously close to adopting a new monument, seemingly praising one of the darkest moments in the nation’s history.

Having only been abolished half a century prior, slavery was still an extremely tender topic during the early years of the 20th century. This is exactly why the “Mammy Monument” was so baffling.

Proposed by North Carolina Congressman Charles Stedman in 1923, this statue featured a large slave woman holding a white infant. It was to be a memorial to slaves who “desired no change in their condition of life.”^[7]

Understandably, in an era in which many white Americans were still struggling to decide if freeing the slaves had been the right move, a monument to slaves that looked upon slavery “as the happy golden hours of their lives” might have been problematic.

Nevertheless, the Senate approved the proposal, nearly constructing the statue ironically close to the Lincoln Memorial. However, overwhelming backlash ultimately caused the project to be canceled.

3 Lincoln’s Cave Drawings

Speaking of the Lincoln Memorial, it isn’t immune to Hidden Historical Weirdness Syndrome (HHWS), either. Like other HHWS sufferers, Lincoln’s famous shrine hides its secrets well. Only a select few ever get to see it, but there is a man-made cavern full of modern cave paintings hiding just beneath Abe’s massive throne.

During the monument’s construction in the naturally swampy Washington, DC, terrain, workers had to dig down 12 meters (40 ft) to hit anything solid enough to build on. Then they poured several concrete pillars to support the weight of the memorial. This inadvertently created a huge artificial cave system beneath the structure. In the years following its 1922 completion, it even began growing stalactites.

But the truly bizarre bits are the cave drawings—charcoal graffiti left by bored workmen over 100 years ago. Perfectly preserved in their sealed tomb, intricate illustrations of dogs, horses, flapper girls, and men smoking pipes stare from the giant columns supporting Honest Abe.

Plastic sheets have been placed to protect a few of these drawings, but most are still exactly as they were left a century ago. Tentative plans are in place to open this otherworldly time capsule to the public in the near future.^[8]

2 The Roosevelt Geyser

Today, the Theodore Roosevelt Memorial sits on a quiet island in the Potomac River in Washington, DC. In honor of the 26th president’s love of nature and conservation, it largely consists of a simple park. However, upon Roosevelt’s death in 1919, proposals for a memorial began pouring in, and the current design was nowhere near the most likely.

At first, officials were drawn to a plan put forth by architect John Russell Pope. On the southern banks of DC’s tidal basin—home of the Jefferson Memorial—a fountain would be constructed in honor of Roosevelt’s spirit, which “sprang out of the deep sources of the nation’s history.” However, this would be no ordinary fountain. Larger than life, like Roosevelt himself, this fountain would blast water to a staggering 61 meters (200 ft), twice as tall as the Lincoln Memorial.^[9]

Obviously, the man-made geyser idea never saw the light of day. Not only did many agree that it was too soon to build a memorial to the only one-year-deceased president, but the irony wasn’t lost on the public. After all, was such a monumental waste of water really the best way to honor the greatest conservationist in history?

1 Lady Liberty’s Makeover

New York City’s Statue of Liberty is far and away the most powerful symbol of the United States. Instantly recognizable the world over, this (now) green behemoth has welcomed ships to NYC since 1886. But bizarrely, her iconic look was not her first one—she was originally a Muslim woman.

Frederic-Auguste Bartholdi, the statue’s designer, had first planned to build the colossal statue/lighthouse for the opening of Egypt’s Suez Canal. She was to be a fellah (“Arab peasant”) clad in a simple Middle Eastern robe.

Entitled Egypt Carrying the Light to Asia, she would represent the Egyptians, her torch lighting the way for the rest of the world. However, after throwing obscene amounts of cash at the canal project itself, the Egyptian government passed on the costly—and entirely cosmetic—statue.

But Bartholdi was determined to bring his vision to life. So when the French government approached him to design a monument for the US for its centennial celebration, he jumped at the chance. After swapping her Muslim robe for a more Roman number and changing her official name to Liberty Enlightening the World, Bartholdi presented the United States with his now world-famous creation.^[10]

From ancient Greece, where small fried fish were peddled, to Aztec marketplaces, where tamales, insects, and stews were a delicacy, ready-to-eat street food sold by vendors has been around for centuries. It’s still a staple of many cities today. Whether you want a hot dog, taco, or something more unique, there’s a food truck for that.

These days, many who have taken to the profession have indubitably experienced their share of ups and downs, predicated on a volatile economy and uncertain monetary prosperity. The following ten entries examine several unsavory street vendors who boiled over in events too bizarre and disgusting to comprehend or imagine prior to eating.

10 A Spicy Sriracha Shower

You never know when you might cross paths with an unhinged individual destined to ruin someone’s day. For Carlotta Washington, her run-in with Islam El Masry turned into a racist food fight after she attempted to pay for her lunch in quarters in June 2018. El Masry, the owner of Small Pharoah’s halal cart in Portland, Oregon, became so perturbed about Washington’s change that he responded in the only eloquent way he knew how: by calling her the “n-word,” a “stupid f—ing b—” and demanding that she “get the f— away” from his cart.

As if his romantic tirade wasn’t classy enough, El Masry took his fury a step further by and hurling a Gatorade bottle at her. Not long after that, he proceeded to douse Washington in sriracha. Numerous onlookers came to Washington’s defense as she sobbed in disbelief, covered in hot sauce. Three police officers arrived on scene a short time later and arrested the temperamental vendor on misdemeanor harassment and assault.

Incensed by the vendor’s demented actions, local residents began harassing the owner of an Egyptian food cart in downtown Portland the following day. The only problem was that it was a completely different individual with no association to the sriracha-wielding cook. Some 15 to 20 people holding signs shouted obscenities at Gharib Muhammad’s wife as she operated their food cart. One man staed, “I remember what you did yesterday.”^[1]

9 ‘Can I Get A Large Coke?’

When approaching the food truck of Johnny B. Jones (aka “Big Dad”) in Springfield, Tennessee, one could order a burger and fries with a side of cocaine. It eventually became public knowledge that the beloved neighborhood cook was offering hot dogs along with the daily special, his infamous booger sugar. Booked into Robertson County jail on a six-count indictment in spring 2018, the 57-year-old could very well be trading in his apron for a fashionable orange jumpsuit.

Jones’s dire predicament began following a joint investigation by the Robertson County Sheriff’s Office and the Springfield Police Department’s narcotics division nearly a year prior to his arrest. It seems that arrogance was more of a factor than logic for the peddler, as detectives observed an innumerable amount of transactions at Big Dad’s stand, all while he turned famished frowns into smiles and, perhaps, rapid heartbeats. “It was a shock to us, what we found out,” said Detective Houston Evans. “I’m sure everyone else who heard about this is shocked, as well.”

The distinctive red and yellow truck that had become so loved by Springfield locals throughout the years is now a grim reminder of the growing drug problem throughout their state. In a final twist of irony, Jones’s home-style cooking food truck was situated near one of the most laughable localities, a police station and sheriff’s office.^[2]

8 Daily Specials

A woman in Long Island was smoking more than just sausage when she converted her hot dog truck into a miniature brothel. In 2012, Catherine Scalia, 45, decided to expand her business by handing out suggestive cards titled “Strips-R-Us” and advertising a “topless cleaning service” and “one-on-one strips.”

Disgruntled and nauseated neighbors not privy to her marketing strategies eventually complained to authorities, stating, “In the summertime she’s out in her bra and panties. It’s disgusting. She’s filthy, she’s dirty. How could men take that?” In her own defense, the mother of four contentedly gloated about her professionalism and unyielding restraint when it comes to children, asserting, “I zip up when I see kids.” In spite of such morality, Scalia soon found herself inside a jail cell after offering one of her daily specials to an undercover police officer.

This was not the first time that her flesh-peddling ways led her to the slammer. Scalia was arrested eight years prior after performing sexual acts on her co-chef in the “captain’s chair” of the same hot dog truck. According to one local resident who observed several satisfied clients blissfully leave her establishment, “They seemed pretty happy. Now I can see why.” One can only hope that her proficiency in cleaning is as highly regarded as her “home cooking.”^[3]

7 The Hot Dog Nazi

Michael Anderson of M.A.’s Gourmet Dogs in Anchorage, Alaska, garnered quite the reputation after serving up sizzling hot dogs with an attitude. Known as “the hot dog Nazi,” Anderson was infamous for his strict rules (such as refusal to serve anyone talking on a cell phone) and his tendency to lose his cool if customers dared to stray from his stringent regulations.

His bizarre tirades became endearing to local residents for nearly 20 years. That was until he was charged for unwanted sexual contact with a teenage employee in 2015. Ironically enough, the incident occurred near Anderson’s pushcart, situated in front of the old Federal Building, of all places. According to Anderson’s accuser, he coerced her with alcohol before touching her “down there.” In addition to his appalling advances, the 54-year-old vendor took a liking to gorging on marijuana brownies while on the job and washing it down with pints of vodka.

With several charges stacked against him and his reputation in shambles, Anderson killed himself in 2016, one day before he was set to go to trial. To date, the vacancy on the infamous corner he stood on for over two decades echoes a sobering memory of a troubled and wasted life.^[4]

6 Virgin Boy Eggs

An unmistakable, pungent aroma reminiscent of a nursing home is what you can find permeating the streets of the Chinese city of Dongyang. As local residents flock to their neighborhood vendor, buckets of boys’ urine boil over as eggs are soaked and cooked in the fragrant yellow “broth.” The unique snack, popular for its “fresh and salty taste,” is a local tradition that has been passed down by ancestors for centuries. “Virgin boy eggs,” as they’re so eloquently named, are claimed to have remarkable health benefits. Gallons of piss are collected from primary schools and used as the main ingredient by egg vendors throughout the city.

Virgin boy eggs are not only served up on street corners but in residences as well. In those instances, the magical yellow liquid is personally collected by locals from nearby schools under the guise of a therapeutic appetizer. “If you eat this, you will not get heat stroke. These eggs cooked in urine are fragrant,” said egg vendor Ge Yaohua. “They are good for your health. Our family has them for every meal. In Dongyang, every family likes eating them.” Interestingly enough, government officials listed the nauseating treat as part of the city’s cultural heritage, ensuring its popularity and consumption for centuries to come.^[5]

5 Satay Chicken

“Satay chicken, not dog?” asked a skeptical tourist on a Bali beach after purchasing mystery meat from a vendor. “I’m happy just as long as it’s not dog,” the man said before he naively devoured poor Lassie. Sadly, such revolting grub is commonplace in Indonesia, where dogs are tortured prior to their slaughter for human consumption. An investigation led by Animals Australia found that vendors throughout Bali have been deceptively selling canine meat to unsuspecting tourists under the guise of chicken. “Tourists will walk down a street, they’ll see a street store selling satay but what they are not realising is the letters RW on the store mean it is dog meat being served,” Animals Australia’s campaign director Lyn White said.

In a place where dog meat is legal, hoards of unscrupulous vendors hunt, steal, beat, hang, or poison the canines in order to turn a quick profit. An unapologetic 83-year-old, for example, resorted to snatching an average of 12 dogs a week due to the fact that he could not find another source of income. After capturing his prey, be it an older dog or a puppy, the elderly man described bludgeoning the animals with a metal pipe in a nonchalant fashion without the slightest hint of remorse.

As grotesque as his method is, it is far more troublesome that countless vendors have been known to use cyanide as a means to kill. Dr. Andrew Dawson of the New South Wales Poisons Information Centre stated that its use poses a significant threat, considering that, “Cyanide is not going to be destroyed by cooking. So there will be cyanide throughout the dog’s body. The actual risk depends upon how much poison is in the dog meat.” To date, no human deaths have been reported from the consumption of dog meat in Indonesia, yet. Time will tell.^[6]

4 A Special Ingredient

As if urine-soaked eggs weren’t stomach-churning enough, a 59-year-old paani puri vendor in India was arrested in 2011 for adding his own special flavor to his sauces. Naupada resident Ankita Rane, 19, began keeping a close eye on vendor Rajdev Lakhan Chauhan, who had a reputation for being “quite gross,” from the confines of her balcony. “We have seen him scratching himself or picking his nose if no one was around. I had always asked my friends to refrain from eating there, but they were so hooked to the taste that they rubbished whatever we said.”

That all changed, however, after Rane witnessed Chauhan urinating into his saucepans before blending his tangy delicacy into the paani puri mix or the neighborhood favorite, ragda. After several days of dousing his utensils with golden showers, the saucy street vendor was filmed in the act. The video was then shown to local residents. When neighbors in the area learned of Chauhan’s special ingredient, they surrounded his cart and took turns beating him up before dragging the devious urinator to the police station.

When questioned, Chauhan simply stated that he had nowhere else to pee and that urinating into the pans kept the residential streets of Bhaskar Colony clean. Despite his righteous intentions, police decided to detain Chauhan but were confused about what to charge him with: “In the end, all we could book him under was the Bombay Police act for urinating in public places.” Chauhan ultimately pleaded guilty and was fined 1,200 rupees before being let off with a warning.^[7]

3 Turf Wars

In 2016, when ice cream man John Cierco pulled up to his “favorite spot” in New York City, a sense of ire pulsed through his veins upon finding a pretzel vendor encroaching on “his” corner. Moments later, the pretzel peddler was pummeled over the head with a baseball bat.

Such barbaric acts over turf become surprisingly commonplace when profit-oriented territory determines ones success. In spite of cities not dictating certain locations for food carts or trucks, unwritten rules have allowed vendors to virtually own particular spots for decades on end. This has spawned violent turf wars by established vendors, who see newcomers as competition in a desperate economy.

In 2012, bullets flew outside Yankee Stadium when 52-year-old Horace Coleman shot two competitors multiple times with a .357 magnum. According to witnesses, Coleman, known on the streets as “Ace,” had been at war over his sidewalk turf for quite some time. “They were trying to bully him out of his spot,” said Coleman’s friend Gracie Olivera; that is until the pistol-packing vendor—dressed in a pinstripe suit, a flamboyant derby hat, and gold-framed sunglasses—took matters into his own hands. “He didn’t say anything. He walked up, pulled out and started firing. Bang! Bang! Bang!”^[8]

2 Human Tamales

Working on an anonymous tip in 2004, Mexican police raided the home of a tamale vendor suspected of having a dismembered corpse in his kitchen. Upon the discovery of carved-up body parts, detectives noted that the appetizing ingredients were in the process of being boiled on the stove with herbs and spices.

The homicidal vendor, who worked as a butcher for eight years, vehemently denied using human meat in the tamales that he sold from his cart. Nonetheless, police took it upon themselves to test the tamales for human remains as opposed to taking the word of a man halfway into the process of filleting a fresh cadaver. According to the resourceful chef, he killed the unidentified man in a drunken argument the day prior to seasoning him for lunch.

Following an analysis, police found no trace of human flesh in the food. However, police claimed to have found “other materials” and ingredients suggesting that the unorthodox cook was preparing to make a “new batch” of tamales while in the vicinity of his decomposing, edible victim, or soon-to-be cuisine.^[9]

1 Tarek El-Tayeb Mohammed Bouazizi

The only vendor on this list worthy of accolades is Tarek el-Tayeb Mohammed Bouazizi, who, on December 17, 2010, set himself ablaze, igniting a revolution. Working as a vegetable seller in the Tunisian town of Sidi Bouzid, Bouazizi’s dream was to save enough money to purchase a food truck. Sadly, the 26-year-old’s hopes and aspirations came crashing down when a policewoman confiscated his unlicensed vegetable cart and his produce. To add insult to injury, the officer slapped Bouazizi, insulted his dead father, and spat in the scrawny vendor’s face.

After his complaints to local municipality officials fell on deaf ears, a humiliated and dejected Bouazizi doused himself with fuel in the town’s square and set himself on fire. As Bouazizi clung to life in the hospital, outrage erupted throughout the country over the high unemployment, corruption, and autocratic rule.

Following his death on January 4, 2011, Bouazizi became a legend, with his martyrdom symbolizing the people’s struggle for survival and how it has shaken despotic Arab governments in what many have referred to as the “people’s revolution.” In response to the growing protests, Tunisia’s President Zine el Abidine Ben Ali fled to Saudi Arabia On January 14, 2011, bringing an end to his dictatorship after 23 years of power.^[10]

Adam is just a hubcap trying to hold on in the fast lane.

Our ancestors did some strange things out of boredom that we today would have trouble getting our heads around. Once upon a time, people burned cats for fun and thought competitive walking was the height of entertainment. No matter how hard we try, we may never be as crazy as our grandparents.

10Cat Burning

In today’s world, the killing of some animals is met with immediate outrage. In 17th-century France, cat burning was a form of entertainment.

Every year, Parisians gathered during midsummer bonfire in Place de Greve to play, dance, and sing. To make the gathering more interesting, the crowd gathered live cats into sacks, hung them over the fire from a mast, and watched them die slowly. The cats were chosen for their supposed link to the devil and witches. Sometimes, a fox was thrown into the fire. While the poor animals shrieked and cried, the people partied.

French kings and other important dignitaries were also known to take part in this sick fun. Sometimes, they got the honor of lighting the bonfire. Similar midsummer bonfire rituals took place in other parts of France and Europe. After the burning, people took the ashes home because they believed it brought good luck.

9Incubated Babies Fairs

Before the 20th century, premature babies had very little chance of survival. That was set to change when Dr. Martin Corney invented his incubator, but not many people trusted the machine. Hospitals rejected it, and investors were not forthcoming. To prevent the death of his invention and convince skeptics, Couney came up with a very strange and crazy solution. He built an exhibit in which premature babies will be put on display at fairs and parks. The first exhibit, or “child hatchery,” opened in Berlin in 1896. He soon moved to the US, where he opened an exhibit on Coney Island.

Couney’s exhibit looked like a normal hospital. He placed babies in wards and employed doctors and nurses to look after them. The only difference was that one side of the ward was glass, and people watched through it.

The exhibit was very successful. Parents brought their premature babies to Couney and did not have to pay for medical care. The customers were charged up to 25 cents for the show, and the money collected paid for all expenses. Most of the premature children on display survived. By the time incubated babies fairs ended four decades later, Couney had managed to convince everyone that his incubators were safe.

8Blackened Teeth

Today, we brush, floss, and even go the extra mile of whitening our teeth to give us that extra confidence when smiling. Back in 16th- and 17th-century England, however, a fad was born from the lack of dental hygiene.

At that time, sugar was very expensive because it was imported into the country. Therefore, only the upper class Elizabethans could afford it. Excessive use of the commodity rots the teeth. Elizabeth I lost many of her teeth because of her love for sweets, and people could hardly understand her when she spoke. The few remaining teeth in her mouth were black and decayed.

People began seeing black teeth as a status symbol. People whose teeth were not black enough applied cosmetics and used coals to blacken them.

Incidentally, despite the lack of care for dental hygiene, Elizabethans did everything they could to prevent bad breath. This was perhaps because people believed the plague could be contacted from the bad breath of those around them. They used vinegar, anise seeds, and other similar herbs to clear their mouth of bad odor.

7Pedestrianism

In the 19th century, competitive walking was the most popular spectator sport in America. The sport, known as pedestrianism, was born out boredom by the people who migrated to the cities after the Civil War and needed a new form of entertainment. In filled arenas, competitors walked around tracks almost nonstop from Mondays to Saturdays in front of spectators. (Sundays were excluded because public amusement was not allowed on that day.) The competitors walked to see who could cover the most distance during the race’s duration. Some of these competitors would reportedly walk up to 160 kilometers (100 mi) in 24 hours.

The sport was so popular that celebrities were known to visit arenas during the event. Future president Chester Arthur was a regular spectator at the arena. As in modern sports, there were rivalries among the stars, who earned a fortune from the prize money and sponsorship deals. There were scandals over fixing games and over drugs.

Pedestrianism was eventually replaced by competitive cycling after the invention of the safety bicycle by John Starley in 1885.

6The Alexandra Limp

From the moment she got married to the Prince of Wales, Princess Alexandra of Denmark was beloved by the British public. She was the 19th-century version of Princess Diana. Aside from her good looks and lively nature, Alexandra’s love for charity also endeared her to the public.She was so adored that people copied her every move and style.

After the birth of her third child in 1867, Alexandra contacted rheumatic fever, which left her with a limp. This gave birth to the Alexandra Limp, a fad in which women in London and Edinburgh started limping intentionally. To make the limp more realistic, women bought mismatched shoes. Subsequently, shoemakers began making uneven shoes intentionally. The fad got to the point where walking canes became one of the most sought after accessories of able-bodied females.

The Alexandra Limp was criticized by prominent newspapers of the day, many of which saw it as an act of mockery against the princess. Thankfully, it did not take too long before the fad faded.

5Headless Portraits

A lot of bizarre trends emerged after the invention of photography. The most famous of these trends was post-mortem photography, which showed us how death-obsessed the Victorians were due to the high mortality rate back then. However, that wasn’t the only morbid photography trend that was popular at that time. In 1853, a prominent photographer named Oscar Rejlander started an equally disturbing trend known as “Headless Portraits.”

Oscar, sometimes considered the father of art photography, combined negatives and formed pictures of living people beside their own decapitated heads. Soon, there was a huge demand for these photographs, and several photographers adopted the technique.

People took pictures in which their heads were everywhere but on their neck. They held their decapitated heads tucked under their arms, some placed theirs on a platter, while others even dangled it from their own hands with a knife on the other hand. No one was left out of this bizarre fun, as even children were known to take headless portraits.

4Fasting Girls

Anorexia nervosa is an emotional disorder involving the desire to lose weight by refusing to eat. The disorder is prevalent common among teenage girls and young women. Though this was thought to be a recent problem, it has been around for centuries. The most famous cases of anorexia nervosa can be found in the late 19th century, when a group of girls known as “fasting girls,” claimed to be able to survive without eating anything over a long period of time.

These girls were known as having anorexia mirabilis, a miraculous lack of appetite. Their ability to survive without food was seen as a miracle, and they became celebrities. People from different part of the world came to them bearing gifts and offerings to find the favor of God.

3Tear Catching

No one knows how and when tear catching began, but the first documented reference of the practice can be found in the Bible. The practice was also quite popular during the Roman period. Back then, mourners filled small glass bottles with their tears, and these bottles, known as lachrymatory bottles or tear catchers, were left in the burial tomb as a symbol of respect. In some cases, women were paid to cry into the bottles during procession. This was done to get as many full bottles as possible since a person’s value was measured by the tears produced during their funeral.

The practice was revived during the Victorian era. Mourners cried into vials equipped with special stoppers that aided evaporation. Once the tears evaporated, the mourning period was over. On the other side of the world, in Civil War America, Women wept in tear vials and waited till their husbands came back from war to show them how much they have been missed. The more the tears in the vial, the more she had missed her husband.

2Ant Farms

Moving now to the more recent past, the ant farm was a popular toy created by Milton Levine in the 1950s. The idea came from an army of ants he saw at a picnic during a Fourth of July celebration. Milton found ants captivating and thought that if he put them in transparent plastic designed to look like a farm scene, people would enjoy observing them. He named the product “Uncle Milton’s Ant Farm.” After advertising the $1.98 product in newspapers, ant farms became an instant hit, and Milton received thousands of orders from people around the country.

The ants Milton used in his product were gathered by ant rustlers, who were paid a penny for each one. To purchase an ant farm, a customer had to first buy the farm before ordering for his ants, which would be delivered in vials within a day. An instructional manual, special sand, and a liquid dropper were also included in the product.

In 2011, Milton Levine died at the age of 97, having sold more than 20 million ant farms during his lifetime.

1Uranium Sitting

In 1953, a bizarre fad known as uranium sitting was born on a Texas dairy farm. The fad began after the owner, Jesse Reese, claimed his wounded leg healed because he buried it in the soil of his farm, where a group of scientists had recently found traces of uranium. Believing the radioactive soil had healing properties, people with all sorts of ailment ranging from the cold to cancer came to him for help. He soon sold his cows and turned his farm into a “uranium dirt house.” To get better, the customers buried their sick body parts under the soil.

Several uranium dirt houses cropped up in other parts of the state. They charged up to $20 for the service and added trailer camps and landing strips to their place of business to accommodate the increasing crowd. Although they did not know the effect of uranium sitting, medical experts spoke against it and refused to approve the practice.

In 1955, R.E. Hight and his business partner, Walter Miller, opened a uranium dirt house in Corydon, having leased 1.5 tons of radioactive soil from Jesse. Despite the promises of healing, they made customers sign a waiver stating that no miracle was expected from the sitting. Barely months after their business took off, a newspaper published an article stating the sand used in Corydon was not radioactive at all. Hight and Miller hired a geological engineer to examine the soil. The engineer discovered that the soil contained hardly any radioactive particles . Consequently, people began to doubt the healing power of the sand, and the fad died.

China is in many ways a study in contradictions. For centuries, it ranked amongst the most civilized places on the planet, responsible for many innovations that would not be “discovered” in the west until hundreds of years later. In the 19th century, the country saw a calamitous backslide; foreign invasion civil unrest, and war weakened their infrastructure. In the wake of World War II, still reeling from Japanese occupancy, the Communist Party under Mao Zedong was able to wrest control of the country. During Mao’s reign, tens of millions lost their lives, particularly in the Great Chinese Famine of 1958-1961. Estimates vary wildly, with some claiming 15 million dead and others well over 45 million.

In recent years, things have improved; China has become the world’s largest manufacturer and an important player in the global economy, but shades of the past remain, such as the infamous “one child policy”. Below are ten of the stranger aspects of living in the world’s most populous country.

In western nations, the rich lead lives of often unchecked privilege, but even the wealthiest are not fully exempt from the law. Billionaire cheapstake “Queen of Mean” Leona Helmsley famously served nearly 2 years in prison in the early 90s, and even homemaking magnate Martha Stewart spent time behind bars. But in China, if you have the dough, and a little bit of clout, you can send someone else to prison in your place.

Although authorities have vigorously denied that this has gone on, often the “body doubles” don’t even closely resemble the accused, and facial recognition software has proven it. The practice of hiring someone else to stand trial and serve your prison sentence is so popular among China’s elite that there is a term for it: “ding zui” which means “substitute criminal”. In a case that echoes “whipping boys” of medieval Europe, 20 year old rich kid Hu Bin killed a man while drag racing in 2009, and was sentenced to 3 years. The man who served the trial looked dramatically different than Hu, but served the sentence and finally walked free in September of 2012. Likely to a pretty sweet payday.

China’s unchecked industry and rising number of automobiles has resulted in heretofore unheralded amounts of air pollution. In the capital city of Beijing, the smog is so thick buildings are obscured and people are encouraged to stay inside or risk damage to their lungs. While the Great Wall of China cannot be seen from space, the smog can; it is so thick, airlines are often forced to cancel flights. “Cancer villages”, neighborhoods where vast numbers of people are dying from breathing in carcinogenic fumes, have begun popping up in urban areas and near factories.

Air pollution is measured in parts per million (ppm), or how many particulates are in the air that are over 2.5 micrometers wide, and the World Health Organization gauges the threshold at about 20ppm. After that, one’s health might be compromised. The global average is 71. Beijing routinely tops 500, and has hit 775. The Chinese government has taken some steps to clean up the environment, but for people who are forced to wear surgical masks just to walk to the store, improvements seem slow in coming.

By far the world’s most populous nation, China’s numbers continue to grow. Banking on the vast population requiring housing, the government has tapped developers to build entire urban infrastructures to accommodate the hordes. Unfortunately, property prices have far outstripped inflation, and many of these vast cities (complete with skyscrapers, shopping malls, and outlying suburbs), have gone all but completely unoccupied. The real estate bubble has burst in much of China, and hundreds of billions of dollars in investments sit empty. Footage of such areas has a decidedly eerie, post-apocalyptic feel. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the New South China Mall, the world’s largest mall by gross leasable area, which has sat 99% empty since opening in 2005.

No one on earth has had such a complicated relationship with the dog as the Chinese. While some of the most ancient and popular breeds in the world hail from China (including the chow, pug, pekingnese, and shih tzu), they have also long been viewed as a food item. However, he popularity of dog meat (gou rou) has recently begun to decline. There have been cases of dogs headed to market being rescued by activists. As China enjoys an emerging middle class, pet dogs have become a status symbol, like an automobile. In 2011, a Chinese oil baron purchased a striking red Tibetan Mastiff named Hong Dong (Big Splash) for ten million yuan (approximately $1.5 million USD).

In most of the world, tanned skin is seen as a sign of beauty, with my many willing to endure extreme measures (and of course risk cancer) for a bronzed complexion. But in China, a traditionally agrarian country, it is pallid skin that is seen as a sign of beauty. Where common workers would be scorched by the sun, only the rich and privileged remained pale indoors. The Chinese make every attempt to maintain fair skin; on sunny days they are often seen holding umbrellas. But a recent trend in beachwear beggars belief in much of the western world.

Chinese women have been seen hitting the shores in “Facekinis”, protective masks that cover their entire heads with the exception of their eyes, nostrils, and mouths. The style is reminiscent of the masks worn by traditional Mexican ‘lunchadore’ wrestlers, and comes in a vast array of colors and patterns. Apparently, they are quite popular. In describing the success of the Facekini, one online retailer cryptically reported “We are already out of the pink ones…. All of them sell well. Orange is the most effective in protecting people from sea creatures.”

Centuries before the discovery of penicillin, the Chinese advanced their own strange cures. Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) advances the theory that health is determined by the flow of qi or “life energy” through the body in paths called meridians. Although practices such as acupuncture and fire cupping have become all the rage, their effectiveness is up for debate. Far more controversial is the use of animals in their medications, consumed to absorb the strength or essence of the creature. In an era when pharmaceutical companies seem to have an answer to most ailments, TCM has become more popular than ever, threatening to push multiple species into extinction.

One the most popular remedies is derived from the the so-called “bile bear”, whose plight is something out of a torture porn horror movie. The animals, some of whom are captured in the wild and others who are born in captivity, are relegated to tiny metal “crush cages” with barely any room to turn around. Their claws are hacked off and their teeth are sawed down to the gumline, rendering them unable to defend themselves. Then a hole is opened in the bear’s abdomen, where a catheter is inserted to extract bile (a substance which helps the body to digest fats). The animal is forced to wear an iron vest to keep it from removing the line. Bear bile has been described as a cure-all capable of curing ailments as diverse as headaches, liver trouble, and vision problems.

Another prevalent medication is rhino horn, particularly helpful for treating fevers and convulsions. The horn of a rhinoceros is composed of keratin, the same substance which makes up human finger and toenails, and studies have shown it to have no medical benefit whatsoever. Due to their rarity (most rhino species are critically endangered), horns are worth more per pound than gold or cocaine. A single horn can fetch a quarter of a million US dollars.

China is a vast country, third largest in area behind only Russia and Canada. At its widest point, it is some 3,123 miles across. Prior to 1949, this area encompassed five time zones, but when the Communist Party took over, the entire nation was relegated to a single time, 8 hours ahead of Greenwich Mean Time. This was a political move, a control mechanism meant to instill unity amongst the Chinese people, but it has certain drawbacks. For instance, in the far western areas of the country, the sun often doesn’t rise until after 10am. For this reason, some people use their own “unofficial time” to keep up with daylight. Hong Kong and the gambling mecca of Macau also maintain their own time zones.

Alcohol has had a part in Chinese society since ancient times, but the trade was in some ways suppressed in the early days of the Communist takeover. In the years since, it has become increasingly popular. There has been a recent trend toward selling the Chinese liquor baiju in the United States and other western nations. According to one American insider at the U.S. Meat Export Federation in Beijing, baiju “…tasted like paint-thinner and felt like a liquid lobotomy,”

Like all countries, China has a taste for the exotic, and one of their favorites is America’s subpar brew Pabst Blue Ribbon. The beer, which costs about a buck a can in the US, goes for 300 yuan in China (around $46 USD).

Many cultures believe in providing small sacrifices or offerings to the dead to ease their passage into the afterlife. The Greeks began the ritual of placing coins on the eyelids for the deceased to pay Charon the boatman, who would ferry them across the River Styx and into the underworld. Egyptian mummies have been found surrounded by riches and pets dispatched to keep them company. But few cultures in the world feel the need to provide a family member that died single a spouse to keep them company.

There are several variations of the ghost marriage, but the crux of the situation is that at least one of the spouses is dead (perhaps not surprisingly, this practice is meant to benefit the male). Sometimes a living female is married to a dead man, wherein she is forced to move in with his family and live a life of celibacy in preparation to join him in the afterlife. Other times, the bodies of men and women that did not even known each other are buried together. Perhaps not surprisingly, this has led to a morbid trade in grave robbing—the going rate for female corpses is around $50,000 yuan ($8,153 USD).

Asian nations have long been known for their exotic, sometimes unorthodox eating habits, dining on such fare as sannakji (live octopus), silkworms, and snake blood wine. But in the Zhejiang province of China, a traditional dish shocks even some of the most jaded palates. Long hawked by street vendors like hot dogs, “boy eggs” sell for about 25 cents apiece. At first glance, they resemble any other hard boiled egg, only instead of water, these are boiled in the urine of young boys (taken from elementary schools). The preferable stuff comes from lads under the age of 10.

Locals swear by the eggs, which are first soaked in urine, then boiled in it. After boiling, the shells are cracked, and they are allowed to simmer for hours in the brine. Their taste is described as fresh and salty, and they are rumored to have myriad health benefits, including protecting the body from heat stroke, relieving joint pain, and increasing circulation of the blood.

Mike Devlin is an aspiring novelist. He loves pandas.

Since the dawn of time, a problem has haunted a section of mankind. They just can’t stop their hair from falling out. With the hair loss industry estimated to be worth almost $3 billion, it is little wonder that many people have invented weird and wonderful treatments for this perpetual problem.

From the ancient Egyptians to modern man, many have tried and failed to stem the ravages of time and keep the hair on their heads. Maybe these bizarre cures didn’t work, but you have to admit they were creative.

10 Animal Fats

Man’s seemingly futile quest to retain a full head of hair isn’t a new phenomenon. Recorded evidence of baldness treatments extends all the way back to ancient Egypt. For Egyptians, appearance indicated a person’s status, role in society, or level of political influence. It’s no wonder that men who lost their hair would try anything to get it back.

The Edwin Smith Papyrus, the oldest-known surgical treatise on trauma, contains an ancient hair loss remedy. The papyrus recommends treating baldness by applying a balm consisting of the mixed fats of lion, hippo, crocodile, cat, serpent, and ibex. Although this may sound completely unpalatable to people today, it illustrates clearly how much Egyptians valued their hair.^[1]

9 Xervac

Balding men in 1930s America needed to look no further then the Crosley Corporation’s Xervac. Inventor Dr. Andre Cueto had spent several years researching the problem of baldness and came to the conclusion that hair fell out due to a reduction in blood flow to the scalp.^[2]

A user of the Xervac device would place a bicycle-style helmet on his head. This was attached by a hose to a large device on the floor. The Xervac then alternated cycles of suction and pressure to increase blood flow to the scalp. Supposedly, this process would lead to the growth of new hair.

As this device is no longer in use, we can conclude that it must have been just a load of hot air!

8 Pigeon Droppings

Hippocrates is often considered to be the father of modern medicine. His name is associated with the Hippocratic Oath, which urges physicians to “do no harm.” While his legacy lives on, his cure for baldness does not.

Plagued by baldness himself, Hippocrates recommended a treatment consisting of pigeon droppings, opium, beetroot, horseradish, and spices to cure hair loss. Although this had to smell funky, it would have done little to help the “follicly challenged” patients under his care.

Hippocrates is still remembered in the pursuit of a full head of hair. In a man with male pattern baldness, the rim of permanent hair around the back and sides of the head, which is used for hair transplants, is known as the “Hippocratic wreath.”^[3]

7 A Laurel Wreath

One of the most influential figures in world history, Julius Caesar (whose name ironically translates as “abundant hair”) was embarrassed by his baldness. Roman biographer Suetonius reported that Caesar’s baldness was “a disfigurement which troubled him greatly since he found that it was often the subject of the gibes of his detractors.”^[4]

A hairless head was regarded as ugly in Roman times. The poet Ovid wrote: “Ugly are hornless bulls, a field without grass is an eyesore, so is a tree without leaves, so is a head without hair.”

Caesar’s lover, Cleopatra, devised a remedy of ground mice and horse teeth. When that failed to work, Caesar began wearing a laurel wreath to hide his baldness. The wreath had been awarded to him for his many battlefield victories. Caesar’s technique was used in later years by great performer Elton John, who used elaborate and unusual hats to cover his baldness onstage.

6 Bull Semen

This cure is a load of BS—bull semen, that is.

Used in salons across the US and UK, bull semen is touted as a potential treatment for hair loss. According to this theory, bull semen is incredibly rich in protein (yuck) which will help to feed and stimulate hair growth.^[5] We can only speculate as to who first tried this or why, but it’s probably best to “moove” on to the next cure before we throw up!

5 Thermocap

The Thermocap, another wacky invention to help balding men, was marketed by New York’s Allied Merke Institute in the 1920s. Based on a series of experiments by French scientists, the institute claimed that hair follicles did not die but instead lay dormant, waiting to be restimulated.

The bald and somewhat gullible user would wear the cap for 15 minutes a day to allow the device’s blue light to stimulate new hair growth.^[6]

4 Headstands

In yoga, the headstand is known as the king of all poses due to the wide number of benefits. One is the supposed prevention of hair loss. The theory behind this is similar to that of the Xervac. By inverting the body, yogis believe that there will be an increase in blood flow to the scalp, which prevents hair loss.^[7]

For those unable (or unwilling) to do a headstand, many companies now offer inversion tables. These devices allow you to suspend yourself upside down for extended periods of time. If your world has been turned upside down by baldness, this might be the cure to make things right.

3 Hot Sauce

Although it’s too eye-watering for most, this remedy does at least have a toehold in scientific fact. In a 2003 paper published in the Korean Journal of Dermatology, scientists describe how capsaicin (the active ingredient in chili peppers) helped to regrow hair at a faster rate on mice.

Unfortunately, there is no evidence to suggest that this works on humans.^[8] If you are tempted to give it a go, please be careful that the hot sauce doesn’t get in your eyes!

2 Cow Urine

In traditional Indian medicine, cow urine is still used today to treat a wide range of conditions.

Known as gomutra, cow urine is purported to be effective in the treatment of hair loss. For maximum effect, the urine should be from a virgin cow and is supposed to be collected and drunk before sunrise. (Other doctors recommend against drinking urine as it can cause illness, rash, or both in humans.)^[9]

Don’t have access to a nearby cow? Fear not. In 2009, an Indian company released a soft drink containing 5 percent cow urine.

1 Castration

Our dear friend Hippocrates first reported this final cure for baldness—castration. His theory began when he noticed that eunuchs (castrated men) never lost their hair.^[10]

Unwilling to test this idea himself, Hippocrates stuck to pigeon droppings. However, a 1960 paper backed up Hippocrates’s theory when it found no development of male pattern baldness in people who had undergone castration. A hair “cut” too far, some might think!

Under the Uniform Commercial Code, Article 9, security interest holders in all 50 US states are generally permitted to repossess goods if a debtor has failed to fulfill their contractual obligations. This seemingly straightforward task that repo men and women face on a daily basis is often arduous, with perilous uncertainties.

More than a few debtors become violent, forcing repossession agents to take precautions and get creative to both acquire their quarries and keep themselves safe. On the other side of the coin, quite a few repo men have exhibited rather callous behavior, as well. The following ten accounts feature a myriad of grievous repossessions mired in absurd and wildly bizarre mishaps and meltdowns.

10 Tricks Of The Trade

Repo men are often met with challenges that make their recoup contracts quite impossible to execute. With scores of temperamental debtors hell-bent on retaining their possessions, agents habitually resort to trickery in order to pull off the perfect and, most importantly, subtle repossession. Take, for example, Max Hardberger, who specializes in ship recovery in some of the world’s most dangerous ports. During the height of Haiti’s rebellion in 2004, the retired ship captain managed to repossess a 10,000-ton cargo vessel right out of the chaotic and combative harbor. Such a feat was accomplished with the use of voodoo. Knowing that a majority of the country believes in the syncretic religion, Hardberger would hire a voodoo priest to intentionally distract his debtors, allowing him the opportunity to seamlessly gain custody of their ships.

Another ploy he utilizes in countries with corrupt or nonfunctioning governments is the help of prostitutes. “I use prostitutes a lot,” Hardberger said. “They are good actresses. They have to be.” On these particular jobs, Hardberger instructs the ladies to board the ship under false romantic pretenses in order to extract as much useful information concerning the logistics on board. This vital intel—the number of men aboard, presence of guards, amount of remaining fuel, functional generator, and so on—is reported back to Hardberger. who then goes on to craft a well-organized and exceptional repossession.^[1]

9 Preggers

Kevin Brian Federwisch could not have asked for an easier task when he arrived at a Houston home to repossess a 1994 Chevrolet truck in 2005. With the vehicle already in the driveway with its engine running, the job was an ideal scenario, by all appearances. As a result, Federwisch seized the opportunity and, within minutes, was driving away in the truck. At that moment, 36-year-old Rhonda Bland came bolting out of her home as swift as Jesse Owens before catapulting like an Olympian into the truck’s bed. Like a bat out of Hell, Bland—who just happened to be nine months pregnant at the time—began banging on the truck’s cab as Federwisch carelessly proceeded down the road, indifferent to her howling. At some point during Bland’s unexpected road trip, her husband called the police and reported that the repo man had kidnapped his wife. Like a gentleman, Federwisch eventually stopped at a gas station to let his gravid passenger out. Reports indicate that Bland was “relatively uninjured” but was taken to the hospital for labor pains, while Federwisch, 31, was arrested on charges of unlawful restraint and reckless driving.

Interestingly enough, Bland’s antics do not compare to another pregnant woman from Ohio who took her extreme stunts to a whole other level in 2012. Seeing how her SUV was already in the process of being repossessed, 21-year-old Sophia E. Davidson hopped inside the tow truck and sped off. At speeds reaching 105 kilometers per hour (65 mph), five police cruisers followed in pursuit as Davidson, who was eight months pregnant, swerved in and out of traffic. “I’ve never chased anybody driving a tow truck with a car on the back of it,” said Lt. Michael Mareno. Nearly 13 kilometers (8 mi) down the road, both back tires of the truck blew out, causing Davidson to crash both vehicles into a residential home. As one would imagine, she was arrested on charges of felony theft and fleeing police.^[2]

8 Home Sweet Home

In June 2016, 66-year-old Andrew Jackson Higdon III was contracted to replace the rooftop of a woman’s home in Louisiana. Following a verbal agreement, it was understood that Higdon would receive his payment only after her insurance issued a check. Regardless of such promises, Higdon’s impatience boiled over six months later, when he began demanding for his payment in full. Dismissing the woman’s proposed payment plan, the fuming roofer threatened to repossess her roof if her debt wasn’t settled in a timely fashion. As luck would have it, Higdon was a man of his word and followed through with his vengeful promise three days before Christmas. In the days that followed, thunderstorms poured down on the roofless home, causing an estimated $11,500 in damage. Higdon’s elation after his pricey stunt would be short-lived, however. He was arrested for criminal damage to property and criminal trespass.^[3]

Perhaps a home without a roof is better than having no home at all. Just ask Jo and Lonnie Harrison of Texas, who arrived at their vacation cabin in summer 2018 to discover that it was gone. “Who steals a house?” asked Jo Harrison. “It’s just really hard to even grasp that the house is actually gone. That someone hauled it away.” According to Sergeant Larry Shiver, who assessed the vacant lot of blocks and pipes, “I’ve never had a house reported stolen in my career yet.” The Harrisons eventually learned that their cabin had been repossessed and moved. Whether or not they will reclaim their vacation home has yet to be determined.

7 Inventory

It’s not unusual for repo men to come across peculiar belongings in reclaimed vehicles. Often, questionable possessions are dismissed; however, every now and then, agents will discover the unthinkable. Such was the case for workers in Salt Lake City, who, in all probability, soiled their shorts after finding pipe bombs in the trunk of a repossessed truck in 2012. Once the bomb squad detonated the devices, a SWAT team raided the home of 29-year-old Michael John Owens, who was arrested on two counts of possessing explosives.

As unsettling as that may be, nothing could have prepared the employees at All-Star Recovery in Memphis, Tennessee, who uncovered a ghastly crime in 2017. While taking inventory of an abandoned Chevy Malibu that was repossessed, workers popped the trunk, only to discover a bloated and nauseatingly putrid decomposing corpse.

The body was later identified as 42-year-old Anitra Summerville. Soon after, the coroner stated that he suspected foul play in her death, as if the public had not already arrived at that blatant conclusion. To date, the case remains open.^[4]

6 Compounding Grief

As preposterous as it is infuriating, in 2017, Wayne and Crystal Leatherman found themselves in a financial quandary pertaining not to a repossessed vehicle but their child’s headstone. The grieving parents, who had lost their five-year-old son Jake to leukemia the previous year, had fallen behind on payments when Reverend J.C. Shoaf of Southeastern Monument Company repossessed the grave marker. To add insult to injury, the Leathermans were made aware of the repossession only after visiting their child’s barren plot. “He repossessed it, like it was a car,” Crystal Leatherman told WBTV. “This is my lowest point.”

Apparently, dollar signs overshadow compassion in the world of business, as was the case for Mathison Motors in Clearwater, Minnesota. In 2015, while attending a family funeral, Wayne and Amber Walberg’s Chrysler Town and Country minivan was repossessed in the parking lot as the unsuspecting couple grieved indoors. Among the many personal items in their vehicle, including social security cards and birth certificates, were the ashes of their infant son, Zach. With heavy hearts, the Walbergs fruitlessly pleaded with the dealership for the return of their son’s urn, their cries falling on deaf ears all the while. Eventually, the distraught couple was informed that they had 24 to 48 hours to pay $350 if they ever wanted to get their infant’s ashes back. The callous threat prompted the Walbergs to take their case to local news stations, spawning a quick and unforgiving backlash from the community.^[5]

Overnight, Wayne and Amber were reunited with their son’s remains. In addition, Mathison Motors offered the return of their remaining items free of charge in order to temper the flames of disdain from the public. As for Reverend J.C. Shoaf, he, too, felt the mounting repercussions of his actions, stating, “We’d like very much so to return the grave marker back to Woodlawn Cemetery and give our appreciation to the media for helping us get this resolved, that the family would not owe us anything, we will mark their bill paid in full.”

5 Ride From Hell

In 2009, 59-year-old deadbeat Helen Walker heard a commotion outside her Staten Island home. Upon realizing her car was being repossessed, she sprang into action and jumped in the front seat of her sedan. With the car in drive and the engine floored, Walker sped forward in a brazen attempt to run down the reviled repo man. Reminiscent of a scene from a Hollywood film, the man was knocked onto the hood of the vehicle, where he held on for dear life as the crazed debtor rapidly zigzagged throughout the neighborhood. In spite of her daredevil maneuvers, the repo man miraculously managed to cling to the hood of the sedan for ten blocks before police caught up to the dynamic duo.

After several minutes that felt like an eternity, the vehicle finally came to a stop, bringing much relief to Walker’s nemesis. Moments later, the car-surfing agent’s feet touched the ground while Walker was being read her rights. Surprisingly, the victim only sustained minor injuries despite being taken on a roller coaster ride from Hell. As for Walker, she witnessed the repossession of her car in spite of her valiant efforts in addition to being arrested on assault charges.^[6]

4 Body Snatcher

Distraught over the passing of his mother-in-law (words seldom said), a man in Kent, England, took it upon himself to plan the funeral arrangements to spare his wife the burden. Before the woman was even cold, however, it became apparent that arranging the services would be a taxing endeavor. Almost immediately, Butterfly Funeral Services stopped responding to the man, who did not want to be identified, exacerbating the stress family members were already going through.

After days without hearing from the undertaker, the vexed griever took matters into his own hands to ensure a proper send-off. With a rented van ready to go, the man furtively entered the mortuary and reclaimed granny’s brittle corpse in broad daylight. He later stated, “I had no option. I had to get the body out.” Without his wife’s knowledge, he then casually brought the remains to another undertaker as if he was dropping off laundry at the dry cleaners.

According to reports, local police were made aware of his plans prior to removing the body yet took no action and proceeded without filing any criminal charges. Interestingly enough, Butterfly Funeral Services became insolvent, leading to the subsequent repossession of the funeral home. In total, 16 full urns remained on a shelf as bailiffs took inventory of the property. To date, attempts at reuniting relatives with their loved ones’ remains are ongoing.^[7]

3 Fatal Errors

As Leo Song backed his truck into a Southern California driveway in 2011, little did he know that his life would soon be forever changed. While he was in the process of lifting the targeted Buick, Lisa Via emerged from her mobile home, pleading with Song to spare her the burden of repossessing her car. Unable to accommodate her despairing request, Song proceeded to latch her vehicle to his truck prior to leaving the premises. As he pulled the truck out of the driveway, the shattering cries of Lisa’s husband caused the agent to instantaneously slam on the brakes. Unbeknownst to Song, Lisa came between the truck and the car as he pulled away. The 42-year-old woman was crushed to death.

Such a tragedy mirrored the fate of Georgia man Nabil Malouf in 1994. After being informed by a fellow employee that his silver Mercury Cougar was being repossessed, Malouf raced out to the parking lot to take action. Having no interest in debating Malouf, the two repo men climbed into their truck and proceeded to drive away with the car hooked to the back. Not to be deterred, Malouf attempted to climb onto the back of the truck when he slipped to the ground and was run over. In the days after his death, it was revealed that an internal confusion at Malouf’s bank had erroneously listed his car as being overdue when, in reality, the Mercury had already been paid off.^[8]

2 Pointless Tragedy

It was around midnight in May 2016 when Brennan and Ashleigh Best heard a knock at their door. To their dismay, it was Kenneth Drew, a 50-year-old Utah repossession agent who had come for their SUV. Predictably, a heated argument immediately ensued between Kenneth and Brennen, but the spat eventually subsided following an arrangement between the two: In order to keep his vehicle, Brennen agreed to make the overdue payment and provide Kenneth with proof within the next few days.

By all appearances, the matter was momentarily settled, and tempers were dying down. That is, however, until Kenneth saw Ashleigh speed out of the driveway. Prior to the men making a deal, Brennen had told Ashleigh to drive away. This infuriated Kenneth, given the leniency he’d showed the couple. Feeling as if he were taken for a fool, Kenneth hastily followed in pursuit.

Speeding erratically down the boulevard, Kenneth caught up to Ashleigh and began grinding the tow truck’s right rear tire into her door. At a speed greater than 80 kilometers per hour (50 mph), Ashleigh lost control, causing the SUV to jump a curb and crash head-on into a tree. The 35-year-old mother of two was pronounced dead at the scene. Eight months later, Kenneth Drew pleaded guilty to manslaughter and, subsequently, was sentenced to one to 15 years in prison.^[9]

1 Deliverance

Not far from Dublin, Ireland, in April 2010, Patrick Mulvey and Justin Tighe arrived at 58-year-old Donal Connaughton’s pig farm to repossess two power washers and a generator. Almost immediately, the two repo men were met by a hostile Connaughton, who refused to hand over the machinery. Scornful words soon turned violent, with a physical brawl ensuing. Several of Connaughton’s farmhands joined in the fray. Outnumbered, Mulvey and Tighe were soon overtaken. Defeated and with no feasible reason to remain on the premises, the two attempted to leave but soon came to the frightening realization that their nightmare was just beginning.

Proclaiming that the repo men had met the Devil, an enraged Connaughton latched a backhoe to the men’s tow truck, entrapping them. Mulvey and Tighe were then given two options: have their heads ripped off and eaten by Connaughton or strip naked and walk to freedom in the nude. Their unconventional predicament only worsened after they refused to bare it all, causing Connaughton to become even more incensed. As the men pleaded for their release, a crazed Connaughton brought out a black wild boar and demanded that they get into the pen with the agitated animal. “Go on, be a man, strip naked and get in with the boar,” Connaughton hollered before romantically adding that the wild swine would “show them what happens to inmates in prison.”

After an unspecified amount of torment, Connaughton agreed to their release under one condition: They would have to get on their knees and pray. After eagerly obliging, Mulvey and Tighe were told by the devilish debtor that they had caught him “on a good day.”^[10]

On November 11, 2013, Connaughton was sentenced to 12 months in prison after being found guilty of two counts of false imprisonment, threatening to cause serious harm, assault, and criminal damage.

Adam is just a hubcap trying to hold on in the fast lane.

For hundreds of years, witch hunters operated throughout Europe. Their motivations ranged from superstitions and paranoia to an incomprehensible religious zeal. Sometimes, it was just politics.

Nevertheless, it’s estimated that tens of thousands of people were executed for witchcraft in Europe. The witch hunters mostly framed terrified old women. But every so often, a witch trial turned up something much weirder.

10 Thiess, Good Werewolf Of The North

Thiess was an old man from 17th-century Latvia who informed a startled judge that he was part of a local troop of werewolves. He added that werewolves were not servants of evil and actually couldn’t “tolerate the Devil.” Instead, they were the “hounds of God.”

According to Thiess, on certain days of the year, the spirits of werewolves would journey to a “place beyond the sea” and descend into Hell in wolf form to battle the Devil and prevent him from stealing the harvest. The werewolves would triumph over the Devil and beat him with rods of iron. But if they delayed on the journey, they would find the gates of Hell barricaded against them and the harvest would fail.

Thiess’s own nemesis was a dead witch named Skeistan, who would face him in Hell and had once broken his nose with a broom. Under repeated questioning, Thiess insisted that werewolves served the Church and angrily shouted that they were closer to God than the local priests. He was ultimately sentenced to 10 lashes.^[1]

Theiss gained renewed attention in the 20th century because his testimony sounds remarkably similar to the benandanti (“good walkers”) and other southern European groups.

9 The Good Walkers And The War At The End Of The World

The good walkers (benandanti) were members of a widespread and apparently ancient dream cult uncovered by the Inquisition in the Friuli region of Italy. As the seasons changed during the “Ember Days,” the benandanti would enter deathlike trances and journey as spirits to a valley at the end of the world. There, they would wage an epic battle with evil witch-spirits to ensure the safety of the harvest.

One walker described the journey: “I had the impression there were many of us together as though in a haze, but we did not know one another, and it felt as if we moved through the air like smoke and that we crossed over water like smoke.”^[2]

The benandanti were identified at birth, usually by being born with a caul. Belief in them was widespread, and any walker who refused to enter the trance on the Ember Days risked being beaten by his fellow villagers. Without exception, they were shocked at the suggestion that shamanic spirit battles were un-Christian.

8 The Shape-Shifting Sky Battles Of Hungarian Witchcraft

The taltos were Hungarian mystics, presumably the remnants of the pre-Christian Hungarian shamans. They boasted their ability to leave their bodies and journey to distant lands and even into Heaven. (One taltos boasted that she had been lying as if dead for nine days while chatting to God.)

The taltos were most notable for fighting each other in the sky. While their bodies were in a trance, their spirits would take the form of bulls, stallions, fireballs, fiery wheels, or discs of metal. Then they would ascend into the skies, where they would duel in thunderous battles. Many taltos would show off wounds they claimed were gained in these battles, which determined the good fortune of their communities.

One taltos told a court that this was an ancient tradition and that legions of taltos had once waged war “in the skies for the empire.” She added that there were around 700 taltos in the country in 1725 and that “the light of their flag is shining all over the world.”^[3]

The taltos were the subject of a severe crackdown in the 18th century, and many were tortured or executed.

7 The Ladies From Outside

In 1587, a puzzled inquisitor in Sicily hastily sent a warning that “a new sect of witches has come into being.” The Sicilian witches deeply confused the Inquisition because they claimed to be in contact with spirits but didn’t fit the Church’s model of horrifying encounters with the Devil. Instead, they claimed to communicate in dreams with the “ladies from outside” (donni di fuora or donas de fuera), a race of beautiful beings with the feet of cats or other animals.

The ladies from outside were mostly helpful and not apparently evil, although they were reportedly upset by any mention of God or the Virgin Mary. They were ruled by a queen, sometimes called “the Eastern lady,” and her teenage consort. Most contact with them ended in sex, which was reportedly great. The inquisitors recorded one woman’s first journey outside:

She described a kind of witches’ Sabbat—but without devils or any of the usual nasty details; everything that Laurea de Pavia described was beautiful and delightful . . . there was a great plain there on which stood a large platform with two chairs. On one of them sat a red young man and on the other a beautiful woman; they said she was the queen and the youth was the king . . . they told her that she must not worship God or Our Lady. The ensign made her swear on a book with big letters that she would instead worship the king as God and the queen as Our Lady, and promise them her body and soul. After she had worshiped them like this, they set out tables, ate and drank and danced, and then the men lay with the women and with her and made love to them often in a short time.^[4]

6 The Cloud Sailers And French Sky Witches

The tempestarii were a class of storm wizards in ninth-century France. They obtained power through their supposed alliance with the people of Magonia, who sailed through the sky in ships that passed through the air like normal ships passed through water.

The Magonians paid the tempestarii to be their agents on Earth, and the tempestarii would in turn extort money from local farmers. If the farmers didn’t pay, the Magonians would summon a storm to destroy the crops.

The tempestarii are mentioned in several sources, most notably a polemic by Bishop Agobard of Lyon. He was angry that people paid the tempestarii and then pleaded poverty when it was time to tithe to the Church.^[5]

Belief in the sea in the sky persisted long beyond the ninth century. Gervase of Tilbury, a 12th-century historian, related how an anchor once fell out of a cloud and caught on a church. The people below saw a man climb down the rope, moving like a man underwater, and free the anchor. They seized him, but he appeared to drown in our air and quickly died.

5 Kresniks Were Vampire-Fighting Balkan Witches

Kresniks were spirit warriors from Istria, which is in modern Slovenia and Croatia. Like the benandanti, the kresniks were identified at birth by being born with a caul. They were called to serve at 7, 18, or 21.

Kresniks were shamanistic warriors whose spirits left their bodies while they slept and took the forms of various animals to fight witches and vampires. (The spirit usually left the body in the form of a fly before shifting to a more ferocious animal for the actual battle.)

When the realm was threatened by particularly evil spirits, the kresniks would band together and journey across the sea in eggshells to battle demons in the air above St. Mark’s Square in Venice (an extremely sinister and evil location as anyone who has been a tourist in Venice will tell you).

In some areas of Istria, it was believed that each kresnik had a werewolf-like evil counterpart called a kudlak. One kresnik and one kudlak were born into each clan at a time, and their spirits would frequently do battle in animal form to determine the fate of the family. Those suspected of being kudlaks were sometimes buried with their tendons severed so that they couldn’t return to walk the Earth.^[6]

4 The Peasant Who Used Witchcraft To Catch A Witch

Chonrad Stoeckhlin was a peasant who lived in an isolated village in the 16th-century Alps. In 1586, he accused an elderly local woman of being a witch. He explained that he had been told she was a witch by the phantoms of the night, a group of spirits who flew through the air above his village.

Chonrad said that he would leave his body and journey to mysterious realms with the phantoms. He was genuinely surprised when his testimony got him arrested for witchcraft, too.

According to Chonrad, his journey into the spirit world began when his dead friend appeared to him and ordered him to repent his sins. After he did so, he was visited by an angelic being with a red cross on his forehead who taught Chonrad how to leave his body and introduced him to the phantoms. In turn, they helped him to identify evil witches hiding in the area.

Chonrad Stoeckhlin was executed as a witch in 1587.^[7]

3 The Cunning Trance Werewolf

In the late 16th century, a werewolf panic swept through the town of St. Claude in the Franche-Comte of eastern France. At least one local was stoned to death by a mob of her neighbors after being suspected of attacking children in the form of a wolf. Several other accused werewolves were put on trial and tortured into confessing.

Jacques Bocquet, a local healer or “cunning man,” said that his spirit had attended a witches’ sabbath while his body remained at home. Another suspect said that he often entered extended trances on certain days, such as Maundy Thursday. He described them as draining experiences from which it took days to recover.^[8]

A different suspect, Pierre Gandillon, described transforming into a werewolf. According to Gandillon, he would enter a cataleptic state, lying completely rigid and unmoving on the bed. Then the Devil would clothe his soul in a wolfskin and he would journey to an evil sabbath.

2 Aunt Fairy

In Croatia, vilenicas were people capable of communicating with fairies (vila). Some remarkable testimony has survived, including that from a vilenica questioned by the Republic of Dubrovnik in 1660.

The vilenica was a young woman in her twenties. She said that she was in communication with an entity known as Tetka Vila (“Aunt Fairy”), who appeared to her in the form of a nun. The fairy told the young woman to pick a certain pair of roots if she ever wanted to speak to Tetka Vila. At that point, she would appear and advise on healing and how to identify evil witches.

Although this testimony resulted in a witchcraft trial, vilencas continued to practice elsewhere in the country. One priest mournfully noted:

I do not know if there are any witches or warlocks. Certainly not in public. But there is a witchcraft of some sort. They tie knots through some evil spells cast to forward marriage or obstruct it. [ . . . ] They do not apprehend that by collaborating with the Devil they bring evil.^[9]

1 The Cow Resurrection Game Night

In 1390, the Inquisition in Milan questioned Sibillia (some sources spell it “Sibilla”) and Pierina, two well-off women who confessed to being part of a cult which met regularly in the houses of wealthy Milanese merchants. They said that the meetings were led by a mysterious woman known as the Madonna Oriente (“Lady of the East”) or the Signora del Gioco (“Lady of the Game”).

The highlight of every meeting was a feast of beef at which the bones and hides were saved. At the end of the feast, the Lady would tap them with her stick, causing the cows to return to life. However, the resurrected cows were apparently unhealthy in some way as the testimony specifies that they were unfit for work.

This specific act of magic is reminiscent of several figures in European mythology, most notably Thor. The importance of bones also recalls Siberian shamanism, which holds that the soul resides in the bones. As a result, some writers have speculated that Sibillia and Pierina were part of an underground group with connections to ancient European shamanism.

However, this is disputed. The Inquisition itself apparently decided the testimony was unreliable and released the two women. But they were rearrested a few years later and executed for witchcraft.^[10]