Time capsules are purposely built to contain interesting and unique items meant to be uncovered at a predetermined date in the future. This can often be a century or more after the capsule is buried.

Unintentional time capsules are something else altogether as they are far rarer and only appear when least expected. These are places and items lost for a time. But when they are revealed, they showcase what life was like in the past.

10 Amazingly Ambitious Time Capsules

10 Lost Purse From 1957 Discovered In 2019

In 1957, a young woman named Patti Rumfola was attending Hoover High School in Ohio when something terrible happened: She lost her purse. That stroke of bad luck for Rumfola turned into an incredible discovery in 2019 when her handbag was finally found by a custodian.

Unfortunately, it was a bit too late for Rumfola as she had passed away in 2013 at age 71. Still, the purse was found, and with some Internet sleuthing, the original owner was identified. The handbag was given to one of her daughters, who had the opportunity to peek into her mother’s life from 62 years in the past.^[1]

The purse, which had fallen behind some lockers, ultimately became an unintentional time capsule filled with the kinds of items you might expect to find in a young girl’s handbag in 1957. There were several pristine tickets to her school’s football games, a couple of library cards, a photograph of one of her friends, a wallet, and a small amount of change. Each of her five children kept a penny from the purse to remember their mother.

9 The Town Of Bodie, California

Shortly before the US Civil War broke out, gold was discovered east of the Sierra Nevada mountains. By the late 1870s, the site had grown to become a boomtown called Bodie with some 10,000 residents. By 1915, the gold was gone, and people had to leave the town for good.

Bodie became an unintentional time capsule because it’s more than 2,500 meters (8,300 ft) above sea level. In the early 20th century, it wasn’t easy to get in and out of the little town. As a result, the residents left most of their possessions there as it was too expensive to have them hauled over miles of mountain trails.

In 1962, California State Parks stepped in to establish the ghost town as Bodie State Historic Park. It is preserved in an arrested state, so nothing is disturbed except for the occasional repair to ensure that a wall or roof remains intact.

The place is exactly what people envision a ghost town to be. But more than that, it’s a glimpse back in time to the Old West without the kitschy tourist traps found in places like Tombstone.^[2]

8 Completely Intact Shoe Store Rediscovered After Half A Century

From the 1940s to the 1960s, the Fashion Shoe Shop stood as a staple mom-and-pop store. But it eventually shut down. Years later, it was bequeathed to a man who went by to see what the property looked like. He found a shoe store that had been shuttered several decades earlier.

The shop was something of a step back in time as the shoe store looked just as it had when the doors were locked years earlier. Instead of cleaning out an abandoned space, the new owner found a treasure in perfectly preserved vintage shoes. As the shoes were still inside their boxes, they were preserved without damage from dust, mold, or anything else.^[3]

The time capsule was also filled with fashion from previous eras. In such well-preserved conditions, the items were worth quite a lot of money. In addition, the shop had a Victrola Credenza Talking Machine full of vintage records, a vintage stove, and more incredible finds from 40 years ago when the shop was closed.

7 Abandoned Home In Ontario Revealed A Link To The Past

Not every abandoned property is a decaying mess that people should avoid. Occasionally, a place will turn up something surprising, which is exactly what happened when a home in Ontario, Canada, was discovered by an urban explorer in 2013.

The home wasn’t in the best shape. But looking past the “usual smell of decay and years of abandonment” revealed a hidden gem showcasing how people lived in the 1960s when the property was abandoned.

Inside the home was a plethora of items from the 1960s and earlier, including several musical instruments, a shaving kit, a shoeshine polish kit, a cache of vinyl albums, cartons of food far beyond their expiration dates, furniture, books, clocks, televisions, a gramophone, a piano, jewelry, and two complete sets of polished silverware, which are worth their weight in . . . well, silver.

It’s unclear why the home was abandoned with everything left inside. But it helps to paint a picture of the people who lived there more than 50 years before the property was rediscovered.^[4]

6 A Shop Boarded Up For 30 Years In Lancashire

Typically, when a shop goes out of business, its contents are sold, the building is vacated, and then it’s taken over by someone else. But something that seldom happens turned up in Accrington, Lancashire, in October 2008.

As builders were working in the area, they uncovered a shop that had been boarded up for at least 30 years. Instead of a decrepit empty space, they found a perfectly preserved corner shop and ice cream parlor. It was filled with items from the shop’s earliest days in the 1920s to products dating to the early 1970s.^[5]

These included cigarette advertisements from the 1950s, a magazine that went through the day-by-day happenings of then Princess Elizabeth’s tour of Australia in 1938, old-fashioned sweet jars, and ice cream spoons. The original owners had left the property over 30 years earlier without removing the contents.

Paperwork found within the shop dated back more than 80 years. It indicated that the establishment had belonged to the Boyd family for several generations. The building was renovated, but the items were preserved by the developer.

10 Places Frozen In Time

5 A Victorian-Era Pharmacy Hidden For 80 Years In Somerset Village

In the early 1800s, John Wellington opened a chemist shop at South Petherton, Somerset. He also sold groceries. After John’s passing in 1845, the shop stayed in his family for more than four decades. Then it was sold to W.C. White in 1887.

White operated the shop’s chemist side until he died in 1909. Then his son and heir, Charles White, continued with the grocery business only. Charles wasn’t qualified to dispense medications, so the store’s chemist side was sealed behind a locked door.

Despite having several other owners, it remained that way until 1987. That year, the shop was sold and the locked door was finally opened. Inside was the chemist shop precisely as it had looked when it was sealed 78 years earlier.

The Victorian-era pharmacy was purchased in its entirety by Flambards Theme Park in Cornwall. The shop was moved and reestablished exactly as it had looked nearly a century before. Some items didn’t make the transition—but not because they were damaged.

Certain chemicals were now considered dangerous and deadly. They were confiscated by the British Home Office. But everything else has been perfectly maintained and preserved.^[6]

4 A Long-Forgotten Closet Revealed A Treasure Trove Of Civil War Artifacts

In 2010, the former Carnegie Library in San Antonio, Texas, was undergoing some renovations when something unexpected turned up. The workers found a closet that had been walled up in the early 1950s. Inside, they discovered a treasure trove of artifacts dating back to the US Civil War.

More than 200 items were found in the closet. Although most were from the Civil War era, the oldest was a priceless copy of the 1615 King James Bible printed in London. Beth Graham, a spokesperson for the library system, described it as “in astoundingly good shape for being nearly 400 years old.”^[7]

At least one document was dated 1861. According to Graham, another was “a proclamation by the Governor of New Mexico calling up the militia to repel Confederate raiders coming into the territory from Texas.”

Several magazines were dated 1952, which suggests that the closet was walled up before the building housed the Hertzberg Circus Museum in the late 1960s. The library staff cataloged the items and put them on display at the San Antonio Public Library.

3 Parisian Apartment Left Untouched For 70 Years Discovered In 2010

In 1942, as the Nazis invaded Paris, playwright Solange Beaugiron, the granddaughter of Madame Marthe de Florian, fled the city. Beaugiron left behind her apartment but continued to pay the rent until her death at age 91, almost 70 years later.

It is believed that Beaugiron didn’t return at all between 1942 and her death in 2010. So the apartment remained closed. Initially Marthe de Florian’s home, it was filled with opulent furniture and paintings. All of them remained untouched.^[8]

The apartment was finally opened in 2010. Although it was an amazing unintentional time capsule of 1940s Parisian life, it also contained many valuable artifacts. One such item was a portrait of de Florian by Giovanni Boldini. It sold at auction for €3 million, a record for the artist.

Other paintings by famous artists, ornate furniture, a piano, a phonograph, and much more were uncovered in the apartment. Somehow, the place survived World War II without a scratch as did everything sealed inside.

2 A Supply Hut In Antarctica Contained Pictures Of The Ill-Fated Shackleton Expedition

In 1914, Ernest Shackleton set out to lead the first team across Antarctica. To ensure success, a secondary team known as the Ross Sea party made its way across the continent, setting up supply depots along the way.

Attached to the support team was Arnold Patrick Spencer-Smith, a photographer who documented the expedition. Sadly, Spencer-Smith died during the voyage. But he left an unintentional time machine in one of the supply huts. In 2013, members of the New Zealand Antarctic Heritage Trust found Spencer-Smith’s undeveloped roll of film.^[9]

Although frozen within a block of ice, the film was recovered nearly 100 years after Shackleton’s ill-fated expedition had cost Spencer-Smith his life. The negatives revealed 22 photographs, which were painstakingly restored to reveal the expedition’s images and the men who had traveled far across the frozen continent to make history.

As the pictures help to tell the story of the men featured in them, a single roll of film has become an unintentional time machine that linked back to the Antarctic Heroic Era. It is unlike anything else found on the frozen wasteland.

1 Lascaux Cave

Perhaps the ultimate unintentional time machine is a cave in France featuring Paleolithic paintings. The Lascaux Cave is hardly the only site with cave paintings. Still, it is arguably the most famous and notable for the incredible art found all over its walls.

The cave was discovered in 1940 by 18-year-old Marcel Ravidat, who was looking for his dog, Robot. The dog had fallen into a hole, which caused Ravidat to uncover one of the most important Paleolithic finds in history. He returned with three friends, and they explored the cave while taking notes and making illustrations of what they saw.

The cave complex was protected through the war and opened to the public in 1948. Unfortunately, human activity in the cave increased fungi and lichen growth, which damaged the paintings. Consequently, the caves were closed in 1963.

Although the former inhabitants likely never imagined that anyone would uncover their home 17,000 years later, the caves helped to preserve a snapshot of their lives and the native animals. As a result, this is the most important unintentional time capsule ever found. Today, Lascaux is protected as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.^[10]

Top 10 Incredible Time Capsules

About The Author: Jonathan is a graphic artist, illustrator, and writer. He is a Retired Soldier and enjoys researching and writing about history, science, theology, and many other subjects.

Cyanide, in its various forms, is a fast-acting poison that has taken millions of lives, most notably claiming the lives of 909 of Jim Jones’s followers at Jonestown. Even worse, cyanide was employed in the Nazi death chambers during World War II through the use of Zyklon-B, a cyanide-based pesticide.^[1] The gas would claim countless lives.

In an ironic twist of fate, many notable Nazis would later die by the very poison they so heavily utilized, administering the agent themselves as the war unraveled and their lives fell apart. Staring down the barrel of the Allied invasion, these Nazis knew their time was up and opted to take their own lives.

Twisted irony? The easy way out? Or did they finally get a rightfully deserved taste of their own medicine? Either way, the Nazis handed these cyanide capsules out like candy, leaving many to die from a taste of their own medicine. Here are ten notable Nazis who died by cyanide poisoning.

10 Hermann Goering

Herman Goering was a Nazi leader and was very active in many of the most horrible, fascist events which took place over the decades between the time the Nazis first began to gain early traction until the climax of World War II. He even survived to see the Nuremberg trials. Goering famously created the Gestapo, which enforced the party’s domination.

In 1934, Hitler had feared that there were too many political figures who had gained too much power among his ranks. From June 30 to July 2, a purge of those he felt were political threats, called the Night of the Long Knives, was carried out. This purge was, of course, done in part by none other than Goering’s Gestapo secret police. In all, at least 85 people who posed a threat Hitler’s power were assassinated. Goering would also go on to help plan and invent the Nazi concentration camps, where Zyklon-B would take so many lives.

Goering lived to see the end of the war and the Nuremberg trials, where figures of the Nazi party were to be held accountable for war crimes. He was convicted and sentenced to hang for his actions. He begged the court for a bullet to the head, but they steadfastly refused. On October 15, 1946, the night before he was to be hanged, Goering took a cyanide capsule in his cell. He was found dead, having been poisoned by the substance.^[2]

9 Odilo Globocnik

One of the lesser-known, though equally terrifying, figures of the Nazi Party was a man by the name of Odilo Globocnik, an Austrian Nazi who had a hand in coming up with the plans to exterminate the Jews of Europe. Keeping it a secret, the Nazis named this project Aktion Reinhardt, and this monster was involved every step of the way.

Before the Nazis took hold of his native Austria, Globocnik was very active in building local support for the movement—that is to say, Globocnik was a Nazi by choice, not through force, without a doubt. His responsibility for the deaths of millions of people, especially in Poland, is undeniable, but eventually fate would have its way with him.

Captured in Austria by the Allies in a 4:00 AM raid on May 31, 1945, Globicnik chose to end his own life than face justice. He placed a cyanide suicide capsule under his tongue that he would hold there, allegedly for several hours, before ingesting it around 11:25 AM. He died within minutes.^[3]

8 Joseph Goebbels’s Children

The date was May 1, 1945, and Hitler and Eva Braun had already taken their own lives as the Soviet war machine moved in on Berlin. The Nazi empire they had dreamed of was falling apart into literal rubble, buildings collapsing everywhere, with major party members trembling in fear at the thought of facing the Soviets. Those with enough status were able to hide in bunkers, including the propaganda minister himself, Joseph Goebbels. Goebbels had six young children at the time, and rather than see them have a chance at life under the Allies, he chose to administer poison to them in the final days of the Nazis.^[4]

Initially, they had called upon a Nazi doctor, a dentist originally from the Panzer division called Death’s Head named Helmut Kunz, but he was unable to bring himself to carry out the murder of six innocent children. Another physician, Ludwig Stumpfegger, would end up carrying out the deed by rendering the children unconscious and placing a 0.5-cc cyanide capsule between each of their teeth and crushing it.

7 Richard Glucks

The Allied invasion, as it toppled the Nazi war machine, resulted in many cowardly Nazi suicides, as they knew that their trials for war crimes would not treat them kindly. Was it possible that actual guilt drove them to suicide? Or was it shame and primal fear? We may never know. Another among the Nazis to do so in the end was a man named Richard Glucks.

Glucks was a soldier before the rise of the Nazi Party, like many others, and would quickly move up the ranks to concentration camp inspector. He inspected the death camps and was the man who would often make the sickening decision of how many people would be executed and how many would stay alive.^[5] This man even made a joint decision with Himmler that the hair of the victims of the concentration camps would be used for yarn for the Nazi soldiers. He deserved every bit of fate he received.

After being shell-shocked in an Allied bombing, Glucks was laid up in a hospital, when he, too, swallowed a suicide capsule filled with cyanide. (There has been some speculation that he was killed by Jews as revenge for his role in the Holocaust.)

6 Hans-Georg Von Friedeburg

A navy admiral during the Nazis’ reign of terror, Hans-Georg von Friedeburg was a high-ranking military official who oversaw U-boat operations and commanded the Kriegsmarine. A decorated war leader, Friedeburg would move his way up through the ranks throughout the life of the Nazi Party and would cause Hell on Earth for the Allied forces at sea.^[6]

Unlike the others on this list, its unlikely that Hans was actually a war criminal. In fact, he aided the Allies in drafting the papers of German surrender, though he had heard, true or not, that he would still likely stand trial, probably due to his rank. Admiral Hans-Georg von Friedeburg would commit suicide on May 23, 1945, by the administration of cyanide.

5 Martin Bormann

Martin Bormann was a dark, shadowy figure, even as the head of the chancellery of the Nazi Party, who worked most often directly with Hitler himself. Bormann, with his closeness to Hitler and depth within the party, had a far-reaching influence on decisions throughout the party and the entire country. He pushed hard for the creation of concentration camps and the subsequent use of slaves. Martin Bormann was undoubtedly a monster and nefarious Nazi from the early days of the party’s inception.

Bormann went through great lengths to cover his tracks and flee Germany to escape to South America, where he would hide from the Allies for the rest of his days. For half a century, this was believed to have possibly been Bormann’s fate. However, in 1998, a DNA test confirmed that a postal worker who had claimed to have found the bodies of Martin Bormann and Ludwig Stumpfegger (the man who had killed the Goebbels children) had not been lying. Both men died of cyanide poisoning on May 2, 1945.^[7]

4 Robert Ritter Von Greim

One of the masterminds behind the aerial attacks on England, including the famous Battle of Britain, Robert Ritter von Greim was an airman for the Luftwaffe. He would later move up the ranks to field marshal, where he would continue the German terror from the air upon Allied forces. He was also a major figure in planning Operation Barbarossa against the Soviet Union.

On May 8, 1945, von Greim was captured in Austria by American soldiers. On May 24, he killed himself while in custody in Salzburg by crushing a cyanide capsule in his mouth.^[8]

3 Heinrich Himmler

One of the most notorious and nefarious figures in Nazi history was Heinrich Himmler. Beginning his tenure with the party in 1923, Himmler was a longtime party loyalist who quickly shot up in the ranks. Himmler would go on to be a leading figure in the Gestapo and various other Nazi-supporting police forces and was the twisted mind from which the infamous SS was born. While other men on this list made their contributions to the Holocaust, Himmler himself planned the extermination of the Jewish people under Nazi Germany. There is no doubt of this man’s long history as a terrifying war criminal.

Himmler became minister of the interior in 1943, and surprisingly, he was actually expelled from the Nazi Party that year, though he wasn’t killed. As the war unraveled and things spiraled out of control for Germany, Himmler knew he would be brought up on war crimes charges. He attempted to flee but was captured by the Allies. On May 23, 1945, to avoid having to stand trial for war crimes at Nuremberg, he took his own life.^[9] His method of choice, of course, was a cyanide suicide capsule.

2 Eva Braun

Any list about notable Nazi suicides would be incomplete without a mention of Eva Braun, Hitler’s longtime mistress and eventual wife. Braun lived a life of quiet desperation, tucked into the underbelly of the Nazi charade while Hitler championed his strange and bizarre visions of the world through the unrelenting force of the Nazi war machine. Braun attempted suicide twice while she was with Hitler. Lonely and despondent, she was definitely dissatisfied with life.

While not part of the war machine itself, Eva Braun was right there at Hitler’s side all the way until the end of both of their lives, when they would die together as the Nazi German world collapsed around them. The Soviets were closing in on Berlin, and Hitler went with Braun into a secret bunker, where she would ingest a glass vial filled with the same cyanide poison that so many Nazis used to die by their own hands.^[10]

1 Adolf Hitler

While it’s no secret that Hitler went out with a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head, this list must be closed with the man whose face lives on in infamy and terror, the man who had used the cyanide-based Zyklon-B to kill so many people throughout Europe during the Holocaust. Scores had been poisoned by cyanide in the gas chambers of the Nazi death camps, tricked into supposed showers or locked into rooms, only to die from a canister of gas which seeped through the wall. And according to some, Hitler, too, would have a date with cyanide.

In 1968, a Soviet intelligence officer published a book claiming that the USSR had recovered Hitler’s body, identified it, performed an autopsy on it, and found that Hitler had been poisoned with cyanide.^[11] Today, some accounts of Hitler’s suicide only mention the gunshot; others say he took cyanide along with Eva Braun and then shot himself. In a bunker beneath the rubble of the fall of the Third Reich, there will forever be doubt as to what happened on that fateful day of April 30, 1945, but it’s very much within the realm of possibility, considering everyone else on this list, that to absolutely ensure his death, Hitler added in the method of suicide the Nazis favored the most: cyanide.

I like dark stuff, horror, history, the macabre, and philosophy.