Texas. The Lone Star State. The second largest state in the US is known all around the world. The stereotypical image is of a land full of tall, beefy cowpokes in ten-gallon Stetsons and Levi’s jeans. The positive side of Texas is its local pride (residents more often than naught think of themselves as Texans first, Americans second), rugged individualism, and its colorful and multi-ethnic history. Texas is a crossroads culture, with Spanish, Mexican, and Anglo-Celtic strands predominating. Texas is also home to a thriving Czech culture and features of thousands of German speakers whose dialect is so unique that it is called Texas German.

SEE ALSO: 10 Reasons The Terrorists Hate Us

There is a dark side to Texas too. Long before the days of Comanche raids and race riots like 1906’s Brownsville Affair, Texas was awash in blood. Some of the worst mass shootings in American history have occurred in Texas: twenty-three killed at Luby’s Cafeteria in 1991, five Dallas police officers killed in 2016, twenty-six worshippers killed at a Sutherlands Springs church in 2017, and twenty-two killed in El Paso just this August. Guns are synonymous with Texas, a place that still feels like the wild frontier.

Besides blood and guts, Texas is known for its tall tales, many of which feature ghosts and ghouls prominently. In this list, the real and supernatural will meet as real-life crimes and ghost stories will be discussed. A word of warning: the best known and most written about Texas killers like Dean Corll, the Texarkana Phantom, Joe Ball, and Henry Lee Lucas will not be discussed. This list seeks to highlight some of the lesser known terrors of Texas.

10 The Ghosts of Yorktown Memorial Hospital

Deep in Southern Texas, between the city of San Antonio and the Gulf Coast, lies Yorktown. The town was created as a result of the Old Indianola Trail, which connected the seaport of Indianola with the city of New Braunfels. For one reason or another, there seems to be something rotten about Yorktown. One of the chief causes of this rottenness is the supposedly haunted Yorktown Memorial Hospital.

Before closing its doors for good in 1980, the hospital, which was founded by the Catholic Felician Sisters, catered to patients seeking recovery from drug and alcohol abuse. It seems that many of the tortured souls who checked into the hospital have never left. For over thirty years the people of Yorktown have reported experiencing paranormal events inside of the abandoned hospital. Some of these experiences include the sounds of music floating through the hallways, talking dolls, and miasmic black shadows with piercing red eyes.

According to professional ghost chasers and students of the supernatural, the Yorktown Memorial Hospital gets its bad energy from the fact that some 2,000 patients died there between 1950 and 1980. It should be mentioned though that Yorktown is currently cashing in on the hospital’s haunted reputation, for Halloween tours do take place there. Still, given that so many have reported seeing strange lights and hearing inexplicable sounds, the Yorktown Memorial Hospital may be spook central after all.^[1]

9 Yorktown Wendigo

Sticking with Yorktown, the small town is supposedly home to something far worse than ghosts. According to eyewitnesses, many of whom have posted their experiences online for all to see, Yorktown is home to the dreaded wendigo. More often associated with the frigid woods of the far north, the wendigo is a beast taken from Algonquian folklore. Tales of the wendigo include stories of the creature as a massive, Bigfoot-like snow beast to a skinwalker that drives people to murder. Some wendigos even possessed the bodies of those who froze to death during lonely hikes in snow-covered mountains. The only consistency in the wendigo tales is that the creature is always described as ravenous—ravenous for blood.

Texas does not get as cold as Minnesota or Manitoba, but, according to Texas resident Izel Vargas, a bald and black-eyed wendigo roams Yorktown on misty nights. Scarier still, the wendigo of Texas is just one of the many skinwalkers that apparently calls Texas home. As for the Yorktown wendigo, there is a reddit page dedicated to exploring more stories about the town’s resident pale monstrosity.^[2]

8 The Goat Man of Lake Worth

It all started in July 1969. Across from Greer Island, on the north side of Texas’s Lake Worth, a crowd of startled spectators saw a creature that was neither a goat nor a man. In fact, as they claimed, the creature was a “fishy goat-man.” One member of the crowd had enough of their wits left to snap a photo of the monster. They captured a furry, hazy, and large white thing standing tall among the weeds.

Later known simply as the Lake Worth Goatman, this strange cryptid is not America’s only half-goat monstrosity, but it may well be its most documented. After first appearing in an article in the “Star-Telegram” newspaper, the Goatman quickly became a local celebrity, with area residents investing in traps and bullets in order to capture or kill the creature. Goatman hunters are so numerous that the website for the Tarrant County Historical Journal felt it necessary to post a warning about going after Greer Island’s most famous resident.

While written off as a hoax, the Goatman, which eyewitnesses claimed jumped on parked cars and grabbed at least one female on the night of July 9, 1969, was the center of several police reports for two months. Similarly, one of the cars attacked by the monster was found to have an 18-inch gash on one of its side doors. Local police investigated, but came up empty. Several decades later, in 2005, a reporter for the “Star-Telegram” received a letter lacking a name and forwarding address. The bizarre letter offered a confession. The writer said that they were once a student at North Side High School, and on July 9, 1969, they went out to Lake Worth wearing a mask. They did it just to scare their classmates.

This letter has never been verified, but it is more than likely true that the Goatman was some dumb teenager in a fur suit. But, on the off chance that a half-man, half-goat roams Lake Worth, it would be a good idea to visit the location with a camera and a well-oiled hunting rifle.^[3]

7 Rumors of the Devil

The 1980s were the decade of Reaganomics, Margaret Thatcher, popular excess, cocaine, and heavy metal. The 1980s were also the age of the “Satanic panic,” a protracted hysteria that blamed everything from MTV to “Dungeons & Dragons” for the supposed upsurge in Satanic crimes. The good people of Texas were not immune to this virus. Truth be told, one of the most infamous examples of the Satanic panic occurred in the small town of Childress between 1988 and 1991.

One evening, not long after the sun had set over the western horizon, a terrible discovery was made. Tate Rowland, a local teenager, was found hanging from a tree. The sheriff’s department interviewed everyone in the Rowland family, and to a person they said that Tate was not suicidal. However, the one eyewitness in the case contradicted this, saying that he saw Tate hang himself. The death was ruled a suicide. That’s about where things stood until May 1991, when 27-year-old Terrie Trosper, Tate’s older sister, was found dead in her own bed. Two deaths anywhere is alarming, but when it happens in the same family in a town of just 5,800 people, it cannot be a coincidence, right?

According to the science, that is exactly what the deaths were—a tragic coincidence. Despite family assertions to the contrary, investigators learned that Tate’s death was a suicide caused by a recent break-up with his girlfriend. As for Terrie, an autopsy found that she had died after choking on her own vomit. Terrie’s blood also showed high levels of the drug Elavil, which is most often used to treat anxiety and major depressive disorder.

These official findings were not made public in time to stop a panic. The rumor mill of Childress went to work even before Tate Rowland was buried. Reports flooded into the police saying that strange and unknown people attended Tate’s funeral, including one young male who chanted the word “suicide” throughout the service. This rumor ran in conjunction with several police reports filed in November 1988, which claimed that a truck carrying unidentified persons was seen trying to pick up children from local schools. Some even said that Tate himself was a member of a Satanic cult. There were even reports of people in black robes hanging out in abandoned buildings. One report went so far as to say a local teenager was seen eating the Bible.

Things took a very strange turn when Darwin Wilks, a friend of Terrie’s, tried to commit suicide by swallowing between 25 and 30 tablets of Elavil. His suicide note read: “I know something that the cops don’t know. I know who killed Terrie. I can’t live anymore”. A new autopsy on Tate Rowland’s body discovered that he too had taken Elavil before his death. Even more shocking were the findings of the second autopsy on Terrie, which found that she had contusions on her inner thighs and in her mouth. These wounds indicated that Terrie had been assaulted by at least two men prior to her death.

In the wake of these findings the legendary Texas Rangers put out a pamphlet outlining what to look for in ritual murder cases. Although Tate Rowland is still considered a suicide, and even though no murder charges were ever brought in the case of Terrie Trosper, many people down in Childress think that dark forces were at play back in those days.^[4]

6The Tragic Birth of the Amber Alert System

When a child goes missing or is abducted in the United States, the nationwide Amber Alert system is activated. This system inundates local news networks and cell phones with information about the missing child and any potential suspects. As with most pieces of legislation, the Amber Alert system was born out of a horrific tragedy.

On January 13, 1996, 9-year-old Amber Hagerman of Arlington, Texas was entertaining herself by riding her bike in the parking lot of an abandoned grocery store. Amber’s lazy afternoon was interrupted by a man in a black pickup truck, who snatched up the little girl and threw her in the cab. The only eyewitness, Jimmie Kevil, called the local police, who in turn began searching for Amber alongside fifty other municipal, state, and federal officers.

Sadly, all of these searchers could not find Amber in time. Five days after her abduction, a passerby found Amber’s corpse in a creek four miles away from the abandoned grocery store. Amber’s killer had snuffed out her life by cutting her throat in half. The fact that Amber was found naked and bruised confirmed that Amber’s killer had been motivated by lust.

As the weeks wore on, Texas authorities and the FBI told the press about some of their pet theories. They believed that the killing was a spur-of-the-moment act. They also suggested that some personal misfortune, such as a break-up or a loss of employment, had driven the killer to lash out at the little girl. More concrete help in the Amber Hagerman case came in 1997, when the Dallas Amber Plan was created. The plan would later become Amber Alert system in 2000.

Amber Hagerman’s name is known, but her killer remains as elusive as ever. The murder of Amber Hagerman is arguably Texas’s biggest cold case.^[5]

5 The Eyeball Killer

Beginning in late 1990, prostitutes in Dallas began dying at an alarming rate. It was obvious that someone was doing the killing, and that someone was a seriously sick individual. The killer signed all of his handiwork with his gruesome calling card—the removal of victims’ eyes.

The man later known as the Eyeball Killer was born Charles Frederick Albright in Amarillo, Texas in the Depression year of 1933. Adopted by the Albright family a few weeks after his birth, young Charles grew up in a comfortable, middle class life. But, underneath the surface, there was trouble brewing. Delle Albright, Charles’s mother, believed in harsh discipline. When Charles misbehaved, Delle would tie him to the bed. There were also times when Delle got pleasure out of making Charles wear girl’s clothing. When Charles was eleven, Delle enrolled him in a taxidermy class. Charles took to taxidermy like a natural, and before long he was skinning and stuffing dead birds. The only problem was that Delle would not pay for fake eyes for the dead animals, so Charles was told to use buttons instead.

Charles was an intelligent boy, but prone to mischief. At age 15 in 1948, he contracted crabs after sleeping with a local prostitute. A year later, he stole $380 from a cash register. Two years later, Charles was sent to jail for the first time after he was convicted of theft and receiving stolen property. Charles would be in and out of trouble for the rest of his life. In 1951 he broke into the Arkansas State Teacher’s College and stole nude pictures from a female dormitory. On one of these pictures Charles glued the eyes that he had cut out of a picture of a friend’s ex-girlfriend. Charles continued to steal, got married to a woman named Bettye Nestor, and, in 1981, was accused of molesting a 9-year-old girl. Four years later, Charles admitted to molesting the preteen daughter of a church friend. He received probation.

The first of the Eyeball Killer murders was discovered on December 13, 1990. The corpse belonged to 33-year-old prostitute Mary Lou Pratt. She had been found partially nude in a field. Albright had sexually assaulted Pratt before shooting her execution-style in the back of the head. The autopsy found that Pratt’s killer had removed her eyeballs with surgical skill. Two months after this homicide, 27-year-old prostitute Susan Peterson was found dead about a mile away from the Pratt crime scene. She too had had her eyeballs removed. A third prostitute was discovered on March 19, 1981. This victim, 45-year-old Shirley Williams, was found not far from an elementary school. Williams had been shot in the head like the others, and the cuts on her face indicated that her eyeballs had been removed with an X-ACTO knife.

Dallas now had a serial killer on its hands. It also had a major breakthrough in the form of eyewitness Veronica Rodriguez. Rodriguez, 26, was a known prostitute and drug addict. Therefore, few believed her when she said that she had seen Pratt’s murder. In fact, Rodriguez had been involved in a threesome with Pratt and her killer on the night of homicide. After the john had struck her in the head with a gun, Rodriguez had sought shelter in the nearby home of a truck driver named Axton Schindler. No clues were found in Schindler’s house, but investigators did learn that Schindler’s landlord was a 57-year-old high school science teacher and carpenter named Charles Albright. Albright owned other properties, two of which was very close to the three crime scenes.

A sheriff’s deputy recalled that Charles Albright’s name had come up on a tip line. A caller had told the deputy that Albright had once dated Pratt. The caller also said that Albright had an unhealthy fascination with eyes and owned a large collection of X-ACTO knives. Charles Albright was arrested on March 22, 1991. Police found in his home not only several X-ACTO blades, but books on serial killers and a copy of Gray’s Anatomy. While the murder weapons and missing eyeballs were never found, hair fibers found in Albright’s truck linked him to all three murders. However, Albright was only convicted of the murder of Shirley Williams. Today he is still behind bars in Lubbock, Texas, counting down the endless days of a life sentence.^[6]

4 The Servant Girl Annihilator

The capital city of Austin, Texas is known for being “weird.” Austin is a deeply Democratic city in a conservative Republican state. Austin is also home to hipsters of all stripes. Well, despite this, Austin today can never be as strange as the Austin of 1884-1885. During that particular epoch, a frightening serial killer roamed the city. No servant girl was safe.

The first murder came to light on December 30, 1884. The victim was an African American cook named Mollie Smith. Smith was found in a rare patch of Texas snow. Her body showed that she had been stabbed in the stomach, chest, arms, and legs. She had also been struck in the head with an ax. The next victim, Eliza Shelly, was found dead on May 7, 1885. Like Smith she was a black cook, and also like Smith she had been struck in the head with an ax.

The attacks ratcheted up after the murder of Eliza Shelly. Irene Cross was stabbed several times with a knife and was almost scalped on May 23rd; 11-year-old Mary Ramey was raped and stabbed through the ear on August 30th; and Gracie Vance and Orange Washington were found bludgeoned to death (one report likened their heads to jelly) on September 28th. The Annihilator was still not done. On Christmas Eve 1885, he struck twice in one night. The victims were 17-year-old Eula Phillips and Susan Hancock. These murders broke with the earlier pattern, for both women were killed in their homes and both were white.

As quickly as the murderer came to town, he vanished. By the end of 1885, the Servant Girl Annihilator was no longer committing crimes. All told, he killed eight people: seven women and one man. He mostly preyed on working class black women, and his weapons of choice were the knife and the ax. At first the Austin police blamed Jimmy Phillips and Moses Hancock, claiming that the pair had killed Eula Phillips and Susan Hancock. The authorities said that the two white men were copycat killers who tried to hide their crimes by making them look like the work of the local black serial killer. Phillips was convicted, but had his conviction overturned after six months. Hancock’s trial in ended in a hung jury.

Since that time, several suspects have been put forward. Author Shirley Harrison believes that Austin’s Servant Girl Annihilator was none other than London’s Jack the Ripper. This ideas was thrown around in the 19th century too, except in Harrison’s rendering, the killer is the Englishman James Maybrick not an unknown Malay ship’s cook named Maurice. Another far-fetched suspect is the writer O. Henry, who not only lived in Austin during the time of murders but also coined the name “Servant Girl Annihilator.”

The most plausible suspect was put forward by “Texas Monthly” writer Skip Hollandsworth, who claims that a 19-year-old black worker named Nathan Elgin committed the crimes. Elgin worked near most of the crime scenes, and in 1886 he was shot and killed by Austin police while trying to attack a woman with a knife.^[7]

3 Angel of Death

Nurses who kill are especially disgusting. There are few things that churn the stomach more than murderers who had once taken an oath to protect life. Texas nurse Genene Jones is one such revolting specimen.

Between 1981 and 1982, a string of suspicious deaths occurred at the pediatric intensive care unit of the Medical Center Hospital in San Antonio. One of the nurses who worked in that ward was 33-year-old Genene Jones. The adopted daughter of a nightclub owner and a former beautician, Jones was a mother of two when she abruptly quit her job as a nurse at the Medical Center Hospital and relocated to the town of Kerrville, Texas. Jones’s former colleagues described her as an intelligent woman, but very coarse and prone to making loud and lewd jokes.

Jones was arrested and charged with the murder of 15-month-old Chelsea McClellan in October 1983. Investigators said that Jones had injected McClellan with a toxic amount of a muscle relaxant called succinylcholine. Less than a year later, Jones was convicted of McClellan’s murder and sentenced to 99 years in prison. Also in 1984 Jones was sentenced to 60 years for the attempted murder of Rolando Santos. Still, despite these convictions, San Antonio citizens felt betrayed. After all, over sixty toddlers had died at the hospital between 1981 and 1982, and most suspected Jones of being the culprit. During a jailhouse interview in October 1998, Jones all but admitted to killing all of the children, saying: “I really did kill those babies”. In the same recording, Jones backtracked a little by clarifying that it was the voices in her head that were truly responsible for the intentional overdose deaths.

Now, as you read this, Jones is set to stand trial once again. In September 2019, the 69-year-old convicted killer was officially accused of murdering Richard “Ricky” Nelson on July 3, 1981; Rosemary Vega on September 16, 1981; Paul Villarreal on September 24, 1981; Joshua Sawyer on December 12, 1981; and Patrick Zavala on January 17, 1982. Shockingly, this new trial comes two years after Jones was scheduled to be released from prison as part of a new statewide push to lessen prison overcrowding.^[8]

2 Headless in Houston

1979 was a boom year for oil in Houston. The biggest city in the state, Houston got a lot bigger in the late 1970s thanks to American migrants who came from all over in order to get rich quick in East Texas. A few of these migrants met something other than good luck in Houston. In just two months in 1979, five people were murdered by a killer who took pleasure in decapitation. Forty years later, the killer remains uncaught, and Houston cold case investigators don’t have a single fingerprint to help them.

The first to die was Alys Elaine Rankin. On July 27, 1979, Bob Smith, one of Rankin’s coworkers, showed up at the Orchard Apartments located in the 5900 block of Glenmont in the Gulfton neighborhood of southwest Houston. He was there to give Rankin a ride to work. Smith, noticing that the 33-year-old Rankin, wasn’t outside to meet him, went up to her apartment. Inside Smith found Rankin in her bed. She was naked and dead. Her killer had tied her feet to the bed, while he had placed a pillow on her upper body. Smith removed the pillow and found that Rankin was missing her head. Homicide detectives would later add that Rankin had been sexually assaulted.

Two weeks after the discovery of Rankin’s corpse, another body was found. This one belonged to Mary Michael Calcutta, a new Houston resident originally from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The 25-year-old woman was found dead in her bathroom. There were differences between the Rankin and Calcutta crime scenes. Namely, Calcutta was found fully clothed and had had her throat slit. Calcutta had also fought her killer tooth and nail, which was obvious by the fact that Calcutta’s body was riddled with defensive wounds. However, investigators could not overlook the fact that Calcutta’s apartment was located only two floors above Rankin’s. Calcutta had also been sexually assaulted.

Amazingly, this was not the only weird thing about this case. On the same day that Calcutta’s corpse was found, an exterminator found the body of 26-year-old Doris Lynn Threadgill inside of a townhouse in northwestern Houston. Threadgill’s killer had cut her throat so bad that she had been virtually decapitated. The next body found belonged to 16-year-old Joann Huffman, who was found dead inside of Watonga Park on October 4, 1979. On the same day, at a used car lot, the body of 18-year-old Robert Spangenberger was found inside the trunk of a white Dodge car. Spangenberger’s head had been removed.

Houston investigators are not uniform in their opinions about these crimes. Some argue that it was all the work of one madman. Besides the Orchard Apartments connection between Rankin and Calcutta, Huffman’s body was found four miles away from the Threadgill crime scene. Eyewitnesses also heard screams and gunshots near Threadgill’s house on the night before both Huffman and Spangenberger were found. Other homicide investigators discount the single killer theory, arguing that Rankin and Calcutta were killed by the same person, but Huffman and Spangenberger were killed by different people. Some even argue that Threadgill’s murder is unconnected to the other four.^[9]

1 Angel of the Railroad

The golden age of the hobo has come and gone. Despite this, America’s railroads are still used by hundreds, if not thousands of roving vagrants. Many of these freight jumpers wind up in Texas. One man who used the rails was Mexican immigrant Angel Resendiz, who frequented the rails in Texas and the Midwest in order to find farm work. Besides farming, Resendiz worked as a serial killer. During his reign of terror, he killed between nine and fifteen people, thus earning him the nickname of the Railroad Killer.

Resendiz was born in Puebla, Mexico in 1959. Raised by a single mother until the age of six, Resendiz was passed around between family members until he went back to his mother for good at age 12. Resendiz earned quite a rap sheet down in Mexico after dropping out of school in the seventh grade. Not long after his arrest by Texas Rangers in 1999, his mother, 52-year-old Augustina Solis de Resendiz, claimed that her son turned mean after being gang raped by a crowd of boys when he was 12 or 13.

Whether or not this true may never be known. What is a fact is that Resendiz began killing sometime in 1986. By that point he had illegally crossed into the US on several different occasions, and it was after one such crossing that he murdered an unnamed homeless woman. Resendiz shot this woman four times before throwing her body away like trash inside of a farmhouse in Bexar County. In that same year, Resendiz was arrested in Laredo, Texas and convicted of using a fake US birth certificate. He was sentenced to 18 months in jail.

Resendiz apparently learned nothing after this brush with American justice, for he was arrested again in May 1991. This time he was deported back to Mexico after being caught trying to forge Social Security cards and illegally purchase weapons. Months after this deportation, Resendiz slipped back into Texas and murdered 33-year-old Michael White on July 19, 1991. White’s body was found full of bullet holes in the front yard of a San Antonio home.

For the next six years, Resendiz continued to live an itinerant lifestyle, drifting back and forth between the United States and Mexico. Then, in March 1997, Resendiz unleashed his bloodlust. On March 23, 1997, 16-year-old Wendy Von Huben, a runaway from Illinois, was found strangled to death alongside 19-year-old Jesse Howell. This crime scene placed Resendiz in Florida, for the pair were found along a pair of train tracks between Jacksonville and Tampa. In July 1997, it is believed that Resendiz beat a man to death with a pipe in Colton, California. Next, on August 29, 1997, 21-year-old Christopher Maier, a student at the University of Kentucky, was hit in the head with a 50-pound rock. Maier died during the attack, while his girlfriend was raped. The pair had been accosted after taking a shortcut that included walking over some railroad tracks.

Subsequent victims included 87-year-old Leafie Mason in Hughes Springs, Texas; 81-year-old Fannie Whitner Byers in Carl, Georgia; 45-year-old Claudia Benton in Houston; 73-year-old Josephine Konvicka in Fayette County, Texas; 26-year-old schoolteacher Noemi Dominguez in Houston; and 80-year-old George Morber and his 51-year-old daughter Carolyn Frederick in Gorham, Illinois. Most of these crimes involved sexual assault and weapons like axes and pickaxes.

After the last slaying in Illinois, Resendiz was placed on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted List. Although he managed to escape back into Mexico, his family convinced him to cross back over into El Paso, where he surrendered to Texas Ranger Drew Carter. While Resendiz’s fingerprints were found inside the Morber home, and although Resendiz was seen in Weimar, Texas after the murders of 46-year-old Norman Sirnic and his 47-year-old wife Karen (Resendiz sexually defiled Karen’s corpse), the Railroad Killer was only convicted in court of the murder of Claudia Benton. At his trial, Resendiz pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity, stating that he was an angel sent to Earth by God in order to kill the sinful. Resendiz ultimately asked for the death penalty and got it. He died via lethal injection on June 27, 2006. His last words were reportedly: “I deserve what I am getting”.^[10]

About The Author: Benjamin Welton is a freelance writer in Boston.

The dangers of space travel are well understood. Lists of its casualties include the entire Apollo 1 crew (Gus Grissom, Edward White II, Roger Chaffee) and the entire team of cosmonauts on the Soyuz 11 (Georgi Dobrovolski, Viktor Patsayev, Vladislav Volkov). The business of space travel is a risky one. Since the 1960s, more than 20 astronauts and cosmonauts have died in the pursuit of space exploration.

But that’s only one piece of the puzzle. Sally Ride, the first American woman in space, summed up the other half when she said, “The thing I’ll remember most about the flight is that it was fun. In fact, I’m sure it was the most fun that I’ll ever have in my life.”

Space exploration is equal parts danger and excitement, sprinkled with humor. The following are five cases of the harrowing nature of space flight and five cases of its goofiness.

10 Terror: Blinded During A Spacewalk

The very notion of a spacewalk, or EVA (extravehicular activity), is a terrifying one in which the astronaut leaves the confines and safety of his ship or station with only a tether to keep him from drifting into infinite nothingness. Particularly terrifying would be losing one of your most important senses during the venture. This is exactly what happened to Commander Chris Hadfield during a spacewalk in 2001.^[1]

During such a spacewalk, keeping an uninterrupted view is important for efficiency. So, an oil-and-soap solution is used to coat the inside of the spacesuit visor to prevent fogging. In an incredible irony, that solution was responsible for totally removing Hadfield’s ability to see.

Sweat or tears managed to come into contact with the solution and floated directly into Hadfield’s eye, which caused instant blindness as his eye began to tear up. Hadfield said, “I thought, well, I—maybe that’s why we have two eyes. So I kept working.”

With his one eye temporarily blinded, tearing up would normally be perfectly fine. After all, tears are our eyes’ means to clean themselves. But in the microgravity of orbit, the tears wouldn’t fall down Hadfield’s face.

Instead, they pooled up in a ball around his eye, a blob that eventually became so large that it spread to his other eye. He was completely blind, floating along with the world in outer space and alone outside of his spaceship.

Hadfield relied on his training and trusted his crew. Given enough time, his body produced sufficient tears to dilute the antifog solution and he was able to see through the puddle. After some negotiation with Houston, he was even able to continue working and finish his task.

Explaining the key to keeping calm even in situations as nerve-racking as that one, Hadfield said:

[It’s] looking at the difference between perceived danger and actual danger. Where is the real risk? Where is the real thing that you should be afraid of? Not just a generic fear of bad things happening. You can fundamentally change your reaction to things. It allows you to go places and see things and do things that would otherwise be completely denied to you.

9 Joy: A Music Video In Space

Not all of Commander Hadfield’s experiences in space were harrowing ordeals. He also found the time to work on a “family project” with his son. Namely, they recorded footage of the commander singing and playing “Space Oddity” by David Bowie with the International Space Station’s own guitar and edited it into a music video, the first ever made in space.

The guitar was transported to the ISS by Space Shuttle Discovery in 2001. Later instrument additions to the ISS included a flute, a keyboard, a saxophone, and an Australian didgeridoo.

Hadfield discussed David Bowie’s reaction to the video and said:

He described it as the most poignant version of the song ever done, which just floored me. I think, for him, he knew he was ill—it was getting to the end of his life. He wrote that song at the beginning, when he was still 19 or 20, before we had even walked on the Moon.

He had always fantasized about flying in space—Starman and Mars and all that other stuff, and I think for him it was just like a gift, to have that song updated with the lyrics, performed actually in space, just a couple of years before he was taken. To me, that might be the best part—that he got delight out of my particular version of the song.^[2]

8 Terror: Nearly Drowning In Space

Approximately 385 kilometers (240 mi) away from any ocean, lake, pond, creek, or pool, one would think that a fear of drowning could be safely ignored while serving aboard the International Space Station. Astronaut Luca Parmitano faced this danger during a spacewalk in July 2013 when he began to feel liquid pooling at the back of his head in his spacesuit.

He was sweating, he concluded, but not enough to account for what he was feeling. He tasted a droplet of the water. It was metallic and very cold, not at all like the drinking water available inside his suit.

After Parmitano consulted with his crew and mission control, the spacewalk was canceled. It wasn’t a hasty dash back to the station. Instead, they were given instructions to make an orderly withdrawal.

However, the two astronauts on the spacewalk had to take different routes to return to the airlock or their tethers would risk getting tangled. Luca Parmitano made his way back alone, with a helmet slowly filling with a mystery liquid.

During his walk back to the airlock, he needed to flip his body to avoid an obstacle. Due to that motion, the growing blob of zero-gravity water moved into his eyes and nostrils. He was blinded and fighting to breathe. At this point, his headset stopped working. He said, “I’ve been told that I was cool as a cucumber. The truth is that I was trying to talk.”

It took Parmitano 24 minutes to get inside and 11 minutes more to get his suit off. Inside the airlock as he waited for air to pressurize the chamber, he said:

[I] was just waiting for the [repressurization] to end, taking it one second at a time. At that point, I’m virtually isolated from a sensory point of view. I can’t hear. I can’t really see. I can’t move. Every time I moved, the water sloshed around.

Astronaut Chris Cassidy was Parmitano’s partner during the spacewalk. Describing when they were in the airlock together, Cassidy said:

[The water was] sort of bouncing around his nostrils. That’s when my senses really got heightened. So I grabbed his hand, just kind of squeezing it. He and I had never talked before that this would be our hand signal if we can’t talk. It just was a natural thing. I grabbed his hand and squeezed it. He squeezed it back, so I knew he was okay.^[3]

Cassidy then reported, “He looks fine. He looks miserable but okay.”

After Parmitano’s helmet was removed and the liquid mopped off, it amounted to an estimated 1.4 liters (1.5 qt). The source of the water was from a failed fan pump separator. Since the incident, a snorkel-like addition has been fitted to spacesuits, giving astronauts a way to breathe if their suits fill with water.

7 Joy: Smuggling Sandwiches Into Space

During the early NASA space missions, food was bland and tasteless, which left some astronauts craving something more. One astronaut in particular, John Young, took matters into his own hands and brought a corned beef sandwich with him on the Gemini 3 mission.

It was the first American two-man spaceflight, and he naturally offered a bite to his fellow astronaut Gus Grissom. The Gemini 3 transcript recorded the entire conversation:

“What is it?” Grissom asked.

“Corned beef sandwich,” Young replied.

“Where did that come from?”

“I brought it with me. Let’s see how it tastes. Smells, doesn’t it?”

Grissom took Young up on his offer to try some and then quickly put the sandwich away because the rye bread was falling apart as he ate it. Crumbs started to fill the cabin. Young admitted that the sandwich was “a thought . . . not a very good one.” Grissom stayed positive about it. “Pretty good, though,” he said, “if it would just hold together.”

All told, the conversation lasted less than a minute, but that sandwich caused Young to receive some heat from the US House of Representatives’ Committee on Appropriations. They called it the $30 million sandwich. George Mueller, NASA’s associate administrator for manned space flight, made the agency’s position on unofficial sandwiches clear when he said, “We have taken steps . . . to prevent recurrence of corned beef sandwiches in future flights.”

Despite those words, corned beef sandwiches were included officially in food offered to astronauts in April 1981. Perhaps it wasn’t coincidental that they first appeared on the menu on a shuttle mission commanded by Young.^[4]

6 Terror: Ballistic Landings

You may have heard the term “controlled descent.” It is a flat flight profile descent to Earth which doesn’t put much strain on a vehicle (or pilots). It’s like a paper airplane glide, slowly losing altitude until it lands on the ground. A controlled descent is the ideal way to land a spaceship like a Russian Soyuz capsule, which is used to ferry cosmonauts and astronauts back from the ISS.

The opposite of a controlled descent is a ballistic reentry. This is a harsh, steep drop back to Earth. It puts much more strain on the craft and its occupants.

In the event of a ballistic reentry, the Soyuz capsule is designed to try to shed as much speed as possible or it will slam to Earth and kill the people aboard. If a controlled descent is a paper airplane, a ballistic reentry is like a falling rock.

When Yi So-yeon, the first Korean in space, returned from her first visit to the ISS with US and Russian colleagues Peggy Whitson and Yuri Malenchenko, respectively, they did not land with a controlled descent. The reasons were unknown, but the capsule took a much steeper approach to Earth and ended up nearly 480 kilometers (300 mi) off course in Kazakhstan.

When the three space travelers emerged, they were greeted by a wide-eyed group of nomads. Yi said afterward, “The nomads were surprised when Yuri climbed out of the capsule. They very well would have been since a ball of fire fell from the sky and then a white object crawled out of it.”

All three crew members were largely unharmed, but the danger was real. When describing the high g-force descent and landing, Yi said, “I thought that this is how I might die.”^[5]

5 Joy: Peeing On The Whole World

During John Glenn’s five-hour mission to space (previous US missions had only lasted 15 minutes or so), he was trained to report everything he saw. Constellations, the endless blackness, and his own condition during zero gravity were all things upon which he remarked—as expected. But he also reported on the unexpected.

During his historic Mercury spacecraft flight, he radioed to Earth:

This is Friendship Seven. I’ll try to describe what I’m in here. I am in a big mass of some very small particles that are brilliantly lit up like they’re luminescent. I never saw anything like it. They round a little. They’re coming by the capsule, and they look like little stars. A whole shower of them coming by.

They swirl around the capsule and go in front of the window, and they’re all brilliantly lighted. They probably average maybe [2.1 or 2.4 meters (7 or 8 ft) apart], but I can see them all down below me, also.

Glenn referred to these particles as “fireflies.” Future missions were given the specific task of photographing and identifying these “fireflies.”

On the next Mercury spacecraft, astronaut Scott Carpenter deduced the cause as pieces of frost escaping from the spaceship and glistening in the sunlight. A beautiful but simple mystery was solved. Still, the topic of fireflies came up once again during one of the last Mercury missions.

Astronaut Walter “Wally” Schirra reported on the fireflies: “As I said before, their source was water released in the heat exchange process that cooled our spacesuits. Another source was urine. ‘We peed all over the world,’ I’m fond of saying.”

He and his fellow astronaut took several pictures of their own pee fireflies. Schirra said, “We logged each shot with a label—urine drops at sunrise, urine drops at sunset, etc. When the photos were processed at the cape, they were beautiful and I ordered a set of prints.”

Back on Earth, the urine drop pictures were mixed in with other celestial photos. During a debriefing after the mission, Dr. Jocelyn Gill asked about the photos, “Wally, what constellation is this?”

“Jocelyn,” Schirra answered, “That’s the constellation Urion.”^[6]

4 Terror: Exposure To Toxic Gas

What had seemed impossible when the space race between the US and the Soviet Union began in the 1950s became a reality in 1975: The two world powers worked together and not against each other for a joint space mission.

The Apollo-Soyuz Test Project was to show that two differently designed ships could dock together in space using a jointly designed docking module. The mission was a success and offered an optimistic encounter for humanity’s future.

After the meeting of spacecraft, which included exchanging gifts in space, the two crews from two different countries went their separate ways. It was on that return journey to Earth that the US crew faced a terrifying situation.

At an altitude of roughly 7,000 meters (23,000 ft) during their descent, their cabin began filling with a brownish-yellow gas that could have been the deadly nitrogen tetroxide used for maneuvering rockets.

Astronaut Deke Slayton played it down by saying, “We picked up a little smoke on the way, and we were coughing and hacking pretty good in there.” But their exposure lasted 9–11 minutes and was enough for astronaut Vance Brand to fall unconscious.

As soon as the capsule landed, the crew rushed to retrieve oxygen masks. Brand was initially unconscious, but a readjustment of his mask was enough to wake him. The crew was rescued and given medical care.

There were no long-lasting effects, but they did suffer temporary breathing irritation. Although the mission ended with a panic, it was ultimately a successful joint mission between two longtime adversaries. Another such joint mission didn’t happen for another 20 years until the Shuttle-Mir program.^[7]

3 Joy: Space Darts And Hide-And-Seek

It costs about $4,500 per kilogram ($10,000/lb) to put an item into Earth’s orbit. So luxury goods and entertainment options are limited aboard the International Space Station. Instead, astronauts sometimes need to make their own fun.

Hide-and-seek is a good game that requires nothing new sent from home. You might think that there can’t be many places to hide on a space station. But the ISS is slightly bigger than a football field and only 18.6 meters (61 ft) narrower than Star Trek’s USS Enterprise.^[8]

Another “homemade” entertainment option is space darts. While normal high-speed pointy metal darts would be a very bad idea in space, a variant was designed by astronaut Chris Hadfield. Using a battery to provide weight, Velcro, zip ties, and a piece of paper acting as a feather (like an arrow), he constructed a slow-moving dart that could adhere to a target. Thus, the great game of zero-gravity darts was born.

2 Terror: Stranded In Siberia

After his history-making spacewalk, the first ever performed, Alexei Leonov almost died. His spacesuit had bloated because of the unexpected conditions in the vacuum of space, and he could barely return to his craft. His only option was to bleed oxygen from his suit into space until he could once again fit into the airlock. He survived.

When he and his crewmate, Pavel (Pasha) Belyayev, later made their descent to Earth, their automatic guidance system malfunctioned. They had to guide the craft and select their destination manually.

During their descent, they once again faced possible death as their landing module remained connected to the orbital module by means of a communication cable. This twisted and spun them as they fell, forcing them into terrible g-forces that popped the blood vessels in Leonov’s eyes.

This malfunction caused them to veer massively off course. Leonov had aimed for the city of Perm and ended up 2,000 kilometers (1,245 mi) beyond it, deep in the Siberian wilderness.

Leonov wrote about the experience:

We were only too aware that the taiga where we had landed was the habitat of bears and wolves. It was spring, the mating season, when both animals are at their most aggressive. We had only one pistol aboard our spacecraft, but we had plenty of ammunition. As the sky darkened, the trees started cracking with the drop in temperature—a sound I was so familiar with from my childhood—and the wind began to howl.^[9]

The temperatures reached -30 degrees Celsius (-22 °F) that first night. Leonov continued his account:

But the light was failing fast, and we realized we would not be rescued that night. We would have to fend for ourselves as best we could. As it grew darker, the temperature dropped rapidly. The sweat that had filled my spacesuit while I was trying to reenter the capsule after my spacewalk was sloshing around in my boots up to my knees. It was starting to chill me. I knew we would both risk frostbite if we did not get rid of the moisture in our suits.

The two men stripped naked to rid themselves of the moisture buildup and dismantled their spacesuits. The inner layers were soft and flexible, but the outer ones were stiff and hard and had to be discarded. They could fashion no other shelter in time and had to take refuge in the crashed capsule, which had a gaping hole where the hatch had been.

Ultimately, the two men spent two nights in the bitterly cold wilderness before being rescued. Though they faced no predators, wolves and bears were a serious enough concern that the men lobbied that future cosmonauts be equipped with more powerful firearms in case they also had to survive a wilderness crash landing.

1 Joy: The Cupola Observational Module

The Cupola Observational Module is a small room on the ISS. The official use is described as “for the observation of operations outside the station such as robotic activities, the approach of vehicles, and spacewalks.”

But the more popular use is as a way to behold what Chris Hadfield described as “a self-propelled art gallery of fantastic changing beauty that is the world itself.” Countless astronauts and cosmonauts from many countries have floated, mesmerized in awe at the beauty of our world.

Italian astronaut Paolo Nespoli described his time in the cupola:

I had this feeling that I was a scientist peering down a microscope that allowed me to take pictures of this small sphere rotating below, discovering microscopic things. I’d look at the pictures and realize that those things were 20 kilometers (12.4 mi) in diameter.

Alan Shepard, the first American in space, described the feeling so often felt in the cupola, although he had a different window to look out of. He said:

Instead of an intellectual search, there was suddenly a very deep gut feeling that something was different. It occurred when looking at Earth and seeing this blue-and-white planet floating there, and knowing it was orbiting the Sun, seeing that Sun, seeing it set in the background of the very deep black and velvety cosmos, seeing—rather, knowing for sure—that there was a purposefulness of flow, of energy, of time, of space in the cosmos—that it was beyond man’s rational ability to understand, that suddenly there was a nonrational way of understanding that had been beyond my previous experience.

There seems to be more to the universe than random, chaotic, purposeless movement of a collection of molecular particles. On the return trip home, gazing through [386,000 kilometers (240,000 mi)] of space toward the stars and the planet from which I had come, I suddenly experienced the universe as intelligent, loving, harmonious.^[10]

He was one of the most evil, most dangerous humans who ever walked the Earth, yet he was praised and honored for centuries onstage and in text by people he would likely have murdered if given the chance. Aside from some obscure Victorian-era plays and poems, not much is known in the Western world about Tamerlane (aka Timur), but he is well-known to most historians.

The name “Tamerlane” comes from “Timur the Lame.” He was said to have received crippling arrow wounds for stealing sheep as a child. He grew to become a Turkic-Mongol warlord whose power base arose from the smoldering ashes of the disintegrating Mongol Empire in the late 14th century. He was extremely cruel and highly intelligent.

His tactical success at harvesting the soft, civilized human cattle of the wealthy cities of Central Asia drew many vicious men to his banner. He was a land pirate with the world’s strongest army at his command, capturing and killing the strongest and most cultured cities of Islam—cities that were much larger, more sophisticated, more religiously tolerant, and much better-defended than any in Europe at that time. He killed for loot, personal glory, and the dark joy that wicked men absorb from inflicting pain on others. He was the worst of the least recognized psychopaths in history, and his story provides a lesson and a warning for all humanity. Yet, he was also highly praised onstage and in text by respectable Western Christian contemporaries, and the reason why provides an interesting tale in itself.^[1]

Keep in mind that the horrific events in this list were engineered by a man who could not properly hold a sword, nor physically mount a war horse without assistance.

10 Skull Pyramids Of Isfahan

Isfahan was a Persian city that was artistic, prosperous, multicultural, and intellectual. Religious freedom and civil coexistence nurtured an environment where arts, medicine, music, philosophy, and architecture prospered. (Such was typical with most of Tamerlane’s targets.) What the city lacked at this time in their history was an army of very hard men to defend it. One medieval afternoon, when the citizens saw the sky-consuming dust cloud of Tamerlane’s many thousands of equestrian murderers approaching in battle formation outside the gate, they wisely surrendered without a fight.

Tamerlane acquitted himself at this time in an uncharacteristically sane manner and saved the city’s residents from needless slaughter. He left a garrison of troops to collect initial victory taxes and the booty from relatively minor looting. He camped his main army outside the city to plan future conquests and collect and distribute the loot.

Some of the ballsier, angrier, and obviously younger citizens of the city took umbrage with this exception to their proud history of resisting invaders—not to mention the high taxes he imposed upon them—and successfully killed Tamerlane’s 3,000-man contingent stationed inside the city walls while the warlord was camped outside. The citizens were at first ecstatic at the deed, until the horror of the reality of what they had done began to sink in. When Timur got wind of this stupidly treacherous act, he unleashed a terrible vengeance upon the city.

He ordered that every man, woman, and child were to be killed. His troops were given a quota for decapitated heads of the citizenry to be counted. Those soldiers who did not produce the quota would lose their own heads. A historian recorded that 28 towers of 1,500 skulls each were erected in the city before the man who recorded the act stopped the count in disgust and horror.

Roughly the entire population of 70,000 to 100,000 people (minus the well-hidden survivors who would soon turn cannibal) were cut to bloody ribbons. Even the cattle, dogs, and cats of the town were put down. Skull pyramids, though not new to history, were to become Tamerlane’s primary modus operandi in future conquests.^[2]

9 History’s Only Real Boogeyman

Spartacus, the leader of the slave rebellion, and Hannibal, the brilliant and deadly general, were the boogeymen for children of ancient Rome.

The ancient Greeks had the real-life Minotaur, King Minos of Crete. The Minoan living structures resembled a honeycomb of apartments with no hallways; one can imagine a real-world labyrinth. Imagine also the fact that the Minoans were most likely cannibals, eating the hostages/captured children who were offered as tribute to be sacrificed to their strange gods. It is not impossible to make the connection to the legend of the Minotaur, who ate human flesh and lived in a labyrinth, a “boogeymen of the ancients.”

But to really understand the what a boogeyman is, we have to single out an instance of Timur’s wrath as it unfolded during his revenge upon Isfahan, as recorded by a Bavarian prisoner who witnessed what happened after the initial convulsion of slaughter:

Then he ordered the women and children to be taken to a plain outside the city, and ordered the children under seven years of age to be placed apart, and ordered his people to ride over these same children. When his counsellors and the mothers of the children saw this, they fell at his feet, and begged that he would not kill them. He would not listen, and ordered that they should be ridden over; but none would be the first to do so. He got angry and rode himself [among them] and said, ‘Now I should like to see who will not ride after me?’ Then they were obliged to ride over the children, and they were all trampled upon. There were seven thousand.^[3]

Under different circumstances, the death of children as a by-product of the evil acts of men is pretty much just that: a by-product—collateral damage sustained in the pursuit of a further goal, be it conquest, looting, or battlefield glory. What Tamerlane did was far different. He is probably history’s only real boogeyman for children because he specifically targeted children in this instance and personally led the act, rather than handing down a dark order to be carried out by others, such as with Hitler or Stalin.

8 Beheading Of Badghdad

Syrian author Ibn Arabshah noted the phase of Tamerlane’s career that included the siege of Baghdad as a “pilgrimage of destruction,” and well-said he is. In the world of the educated, enlightened, and culturally rich cities of Asia, Baghdad was considered a pearl among pearls and probably the finest capital city of Islam (though there were plenty of Jews, Christians, and other religious minorities living in relative harmony within the walls). The troops of Tamerlane descended upon this cosmopolitan gem “like moths, locusts and ants,” and the city prepared for a terrible siege.

At first, the city was able to hold out valiantly, and Timur lost many men, but defeat was inevitable.

Tamerlane’s army had passed through the area before but had left it unmolested after the city’s leader and protector, Sultan Ahmad, had fled in terror and left his treasure there open to capture. During his cowardly exile, however, he had unwisely chosen to insult Timur’s physical handicaps and return to recapture the city while Timur was off on other conquests. Tamerlane would not stand for this. He marched on Baghdad.

When the residents of Baghdad saw Tamerlane’s immense army camped outside their walls, they then saw their city as “no longer [ . . . ] the house of peace, but as the palace of hell and discord.” The chilling sound of grating could be heard as the sappers dug underneath the city’s walls yard by yard. The panicked people struggled desperately to repair the walls as they began to crumble about them in the face of the sappers.

It is said that during the summer siege, the air was so hot that birds fell out of the sky mid-flight. This seems a bit of dramatic hyperbole, but is also said (from more reliable sources) that armor-clad troops manning the walls, boiling in the desert heat, would prop their helmets up with a stick so as to appear to still be defending the walls, and then they would head home to get out of the heat. When Timur saw this evident weakness of the garrison’s discipline exposed, he planned a general attack. The main assault began after six weeks and one day of siege.

An order was given, and countless scaling ladders and troops scurried over the walls like a river of army ants. The Tigria (Tigris River) offered no sanctuary or means of escape. Citizens attempted this route but were cut down by archers. The governor and his daughter made a desperate attempt to escape, but their boat was shot at and overturned. They both drowned.

As in India, troops were given a quota of heads to collect for the skull pyramids that were to be built. Two heads per soldier was demanded, and to fall short of the quota meant the loss of the soldier’s own head. Timur ordered that every personal dwelling be destroyed and that, “not one single house was to be left in the city unrazed.”

No quarter was given, not even to women, old men, or children. 90,000 human beings—mostly Muslims—were gutted that day. 90,000 skulls were erected into 120 stinking towers throughout the city of Baghdad.^[4]

7 Enemy Of The Hindus—Industrial Slaughter In Delhi

The Mohammedan conquest of India was probably the bloodiest story in history.—Historian Will Durant

Timur stated his motive for the invasion of India was that there was too much religious tolerance being shown to the Hindus by the sultans of Delhi. The aim of his invasion—on paper—was to correct this situation.

In the process of wakeboarding on the blood of his Northern Indian rampage, Timur had captured around 100,000 Hindu prisoners. He was eventually confronted in the field by a numerically superior force, but it was led by Sultan Nasir-u Din Mahmud, whose armies were already weakened by internecine civil war. The huge number of prisoners under Tamerlane’s mercy presented a potential fifth column if they decided to revolt while he was engaged in the field with the Sultan’s forces. He decided to take no chances. He cold-bloodedly ordered that all 100,000 Hindus were to be put to death preceding the battle for Delhi.

The order is detailed to an extent in Timur’s memoirs:

I proclaimed throughout the camp that every man who had infidel prisoners should put them to death, and whoever neglected to do so should himself be executed and his property given to the informer. When this order became known to the ghazis of Islam, they drew their swords and put their prisoners to death. One hundred thousand infidels, impious idolaters, were on that day slain. Maulana Nasiruddin Umar, a counselor and man of learning, who, in all his life, had never killed a sparrow, now, in execution of my order, slew with his sword fifteen idolatrous Hindus, who were his captives.

Although weakened, the fielded force of the Sultan was nevertheless formidable; it included 120 war elephants with poisoned tusks and chain mail armor. As the elephants charged his lines, Timur countered the charge with an act that was pure evil genius. He had many camels loaded with wood, set on fire, and prodded into charging the enemy lines, burning alive and howling in agony. This spooked the elephants so much that they turned around and charged their own lines, disrupting the unit integrity of the Indian army. Tamerlane was able to capitalize on this and achieved victory on the field.

The nightmare faced by the citizens of Delhi cannot be imagined today. In full awareness of what awaited outside the city gates, Hindu men burned their homes, with their women and children inside, and rushed into the battle, where they were killed.

After his utter destruction and massacre at Delhi, Timur returned to Samarkand with 90 elephants laden with precious stones on their backs. Tamerlane’s capital city of Samarkand, once ironically razed and pillaged by Tamerlane’s idol, Genghis Khan, was being built into the new swollen blood jewel of Central Asia. Its mosques, temples, and civil buildings were draped with the bounty of the Hindu holocaust and shone at night long distances in the desert with a pulsing glow that was pregnant with the promise of pain for all civilization.^[5]

6 Enemy Of The Christians

The Knights Hospitaller held one of the last remaining Christian crusader outposts in Anatolia at Smyrna. They had been one of the very few groups of Christian warriors to hold out against the Ottomans and the Turkish horde, so when Tamerlane arrived and offered to leave them alive and in peace (which was out of character), they felt confident in refusing the kind offer. The walls were attacked with siege engines and undermining, and stones were dropped in the harbor entrance to prevent reinforcements from assisting. The outpost fell, and all were put to death violently, with their heads mounted on stakes after the victory.

Sivas, in what is now Turkey, came under attack in 1399. The town’s garrison was mostly Christian Armenian soldiers. Tamerlane told the defenders of the city that, if they surrendered, no blood would be shed. They surrendered. He kept his word to the defenders—by burying 3,000 of them alive.

Timur had invaded Georgia a total of seven times in his campaigns against Christians in that area. King Bagrat V of Georgia proved to be a hard nut to crack, and for years, Timur had attempted to persuade him to convert himself and his country to Islam, but the king had a strong reign and refused. The destruction wrought by Timur’s consistent ravaging of his country, however, destabilized his hold on power, and he lost the throne. He devised a scheme wherein he would pretend to convert but remain a Christian secretly.

His ruse convinced Timur, and Bagrat was allowed to retake his throne, being offered 12,000 soldiers by Timur to help convert the rest of his country. The king told his son what he had done and ordered him to ambush Timur’s army before it arrived at the capital. This was done, and the army was destroyed.

Timur was furious and swore dark revenge. His troops marched through the countryside, devastating, burning, and killing all before them. He and his army arrived at the town of Kvabtakhevi, where the people had hidden in a monastery for fear of their lives. The young and strong were carried away from the town; the old and weak were run through with swords. The remaining townsfolk were given an ultimatum: to convert immediately or be burned alive in their monastery. The Christians chose martyrdom and a horrible death, singing psalms to God as the flames devoured their bodies.^[6]

Southern Georgia and Armenia suffered harshly from Timur’s attention. The area was destroyed systematically in 1399, with vast areas being depopulated. More than 60,000 Christian slaves were taken into captivity when Tamerlane overran Armenia and Georgia again in 1400. Timur returned yet again in 1403 to revisit devastation to these Christian lands that were still suffering from his previous visits. The Eastern Church, aka the Nestorian Christian communities of Asia, were virtually wiped from history by Tamerlane, except in Iraq, where some pockets still survive today.

5 Enemy Of Islam—The Rape Of Damascus

Tamerlane’s hordes were marching deep into Syria in December 1400. The pitiful citizens of Damascus may have witnessed, with great dread, fingers of charnel smoke from the shredded, burned cities of Aleppo and Hama rising up into the sky behind the silhouetted army that approached them. The sultan of Egypt brought a fierce Mameluke army to defend the city but returned after a few skirmishes. Usurpers were attacking the Egyptian throne in their absence, and they had to go back to defend it.

Facing impossible odds without the famed Mameluke warriors to defend them, the city nevertheless held out bravely for about a month before surrendering. Tamerlane received a massive ransom of plunder from the city and then turned his troops loose.

Much of the population suffered horribly. They were crushed in wine presses, bastinadoed, burned, or otherwise tortured. Rape was extremely prevalent. Many were enslaved. Many children were left to starve when their mothers were carried off into slavery, and Tamerlane marched the cream of the city’s artisans, craftsmen, and skilled workers back to Samarkand.^[7]

Tamerlane may have been a self-proclaimed Muslim, but some of his worst atrocities were carried out against his fellow Muslims, particularly during his campaign in Syria. His crimes in Damascus earned him the status as an official enemy of Islam from the Muslim leaders of the time.

In some parts of the world even now in the 21st century, the worst insult one child can say to another child is to call him “Timur.” It is a very stigmatic and hateful reference to the bastard offspring of the rape victims of the city and their modern descendants, who may show Mongol features in the face. It is quite something to say that a 600-year-old tragedy can bring tears, anger, and discord this far separated in time from the initial act.

It may also be noted that Damascus had long been famed for the high quality of their battle weaponry industry. Swords forged from Damascus steel were the envy of warriors worldwide. Even Islam’s most hated crusader enemies had praise for their craft. Following Timur’s depredations, all the finest sword smiths of the city were marched east to Samarkand to set up shop for the warlord. The industry never returned in strength, and Damascus steel became a sad, forgotten byword, finding its final resting place in unread library scrolls, forlorn poems, and tearful eyes of the city’s survivors and their descendants.

4 Enemy Of The Civilized World

Genghis Khan was responsible for millions of deaths and receives the top crown as the worst mass murderer in history, but Tamerlane was a very close and respectable second. Hitler had help from Stalin numbers-wise, and Mao’s Great Social Experiment ended in high numbers of deaths due to incompetence and the distorted social views of communism, not direct cruelty. Tamerlane was far different. He rarely left anything resembling a functional government in any of the places he conquered, and regional trade was never much of a concern. His armies looted, pillaged, and murdered for the sake of looting, pillaging, and murdering. Religious freedom was not a hallmark of Tamerlane’s empire. For that matter, his tolerance for his fellow Muslims could be shown by his ripping the guts out of the finest cultured and glittering cities of the medieval Islamic world, leaving behind an ocean of blood, tears, and horror. Even now, in the second decade of the 21st century, over 600 years later, most of those cities have not yet fully recovered even a fraction of their former status among the more advanced civil communities of the world.^[8]

In some ways, Timur can be considered to be even worse than Genghis Khan. Numerically, the body count was much higher under Genghis, but life in their respective empires was very different. In Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World, author Jack Weatherford pointed out that the Mongol Empire under Genghis “created the nucleus of a universal culture and world system. [ . . . ] With the emphasis on free commerce, open communication, shared knowledge, secular politics, religious freedom and coexistence, international law, and diplomatic immunity.”

On the other hand, 19th-century historian Peter Fredet wrote: “Never assuredly were there deeds of cruelty so awful and so multiplied, perpetrated either by Alexander-the-Great, or any other conqueror except Tamerlane.” British historian John Joseph Saunders noted: “Till the advent of Adolph Hitler, Timur (or Tamerlane) stood forth in history as the supreme example of soulless and unproductive militarism.” Historians have estimated that his campaigns caused the deaths of 17 million people, which, at that time, was about five percent of the world population, leading to a truly horrific legacy.

It wouldn’t surprise many that lawyers today can credit Tamerlane as a teacher of one small aspect of modern law. The incident in Sivas, where the defenders surrendered under the promise of “no blood would be shed” but were buried alive instead of being stabbed or cut is not only a worthy mention here because of its historic cruelty. This incident has become an anecdote for defining the “origin of contract theory and interpretation,” a rule of law taught today to law students the world over. Keeping to the letter of the law does not necessarily demonstrate that the spirit of the law has been conveyed. The spirit of the law must be demonstrated, a lesson that the defenders of Sivas learned the hard way.

Being buried alive by Tamerlane was not unique to the Sivas garrison. In a town called Sabzawar, Tamerlane suppressed a revolt by taking the town in a storm of an onslaught. Instead of his trademark skull pyramids, he made an example for future would-be rebels by taking 2,000 prisoners and plastering them one on top of another (while still alive, mind you) into a living, screaming tower of kicking, flailing limbs and horror “so that these miserable wretches might serve to deter others from revolting.”

3 Battle Of The Monsters—Ankara

It has been said that the two biggest dogs in the neighborhood will eventually fight. Such was the case with Tamerlane and the Ottoman sultan Bayezid.

Initially, some fairly innocuous diplomatic notes were passed between the warlords concerning border town disputes, refugees of one being harbored by the other, and so on, but things quickly turned ugly. Bayezid’s diplomatic attitude toward Tamerlane wasn’t helped by the fact that one of his sons, Prince Ertoghrul, was killed by Timur’s troops during the capture of Sivas, an Anatolian town belonging to the Turks.

The tone of the correspondence became more abrasive, culminating in Bayezid opening a letter with, “Know, O ravening dog named Timur,” questioning his courage and saying, “If thou hast not courage to meet me in the field, mayest thou again receive thy wives after they have thrice endured the embraces of a stranger.” In other words, “You are a coward, and when I capture you, I will make you watch as my troops gang rape your wives.”

Two things inadvisable to do to Timur would be threatening to have your soldiers gang rape his wives and calling him a coward. It was definitely on at that point.

Bayezid received word that Timur’s force was approaching from the east in Asia Minor, making a beeline for his capital at Angora (modern-day Ankara in Turkey). To meet Tamerlane as far from the capital as possible, Bayezid sped with all haste in that direction, not stopping to replenish supplies—especially water—through a series of forced marches in desert terrain.

Timur, meanwhile, had moved his massive army south, then west, and finally north, ending up between Bayezid and his capital. He began to lay siege. During the whole march, Tamerlane had been grazing his horses, refreshing his water stocks, and scorching the earth behind him, keeping his army fresh while denying the same to his enemy in his own territory.

Tricked and enraged by this large-scale flanking maneuver, Bayezid about-faced and started another series of forced marches to relieve his beloved Angora. His troops were suffering immensely from forced desert travel and lack of drinking water, but he looked to refresh them just before the battle.

When Timur’s scouts reported the approach of the sultan’s tired troops, he lifted the siege and deployed his army northeast of Angora in a town called Cubuk and deployed his engineers to create more misery for the enemy, still resting his troops while battle preparations were made. When Bayezid’s army reached the site of the battle, they were exhausted, and some were dying of thirst, but they looked to refresh themselves at the nearby water source. As they greedily swarmed on the river, they watched in horror as it dried to a trickle. Timur’s engineers had been hard at work damming that very source and timing the evaporation to coincide with the arrival of the Ottoman army. The only remaining nearby water sources were small wells poisoned by Timur’s men.

The two armies were massive. Some say as many as 1.6 million for Timur and 1.4 million for Bayezid. This is probably doubtful, but they were both extremely huge.

The battle started off at a rough stalemate until a large contingent of Bayezid’s Tatar cavalry switched sides and turned on his flank. Timur, himself having Tatar blood, had spent months sending his spies to urge tribal loyalties among Bayezid’s Tatar contingent and had promised rich booty in exchange for their betrayal of the sultan. The timing was perfect, and the tide decisively turned in Timur’s favor.

Bayezid refused to admit defeat and fought on bravely, surrounded by his loyal Janissary bodyguards until his army collapsed, and he was forced to flee. He was captured when his horse was killed underneath him. His sons fled, and his wife, who was in the follower’s camp, was also captured.^[9]

Victory against the Ottomans had seemed impossible for the best coalition of armies in Europe, and Timur, the lame conqueror, made it look easy. And he was 66 years old when he did it.

2 Ottoman Becomes An Ottoman

The Ottoman Turks were the terror of Europe and referred to as the “scourge of the world.” They had the last defensive bastion of Christian Europe under siege (the city of Constantinople), and had a very good chance of breaking through into Europe when Timur showed up on the scene. The Turkish shield was barely dented by the European sword. The hated Turks were at the peak of their power, and the main boogeyman in every Christian child’s nightmares was about to break out from under the bed. The battle lost to Tamerlane dramatically changed the course of European history in a way impossible for us to understand and appreciate as we read on more than 600 years later.

Bayezid’s situation was now quite different. After his capture, he was forced into a small iron cage on a wagon for the march back to Samarkand. He would then be put on display for Timur’s dinner guests, placed on the center of the dining table while his wife was forced to serve Tamerlane’s guests naked. Bayezid would be fed the crumbs of the table. It is said that he was so ashamed and miserable at his current lot and that of his desperately sad wife that he dashed out his own brains by slamming his head repeatedly and with great force against the bloody bars of his tiny cage.

He had gone from a gold- and silk-wrapped sultan, head of the most powerful military machine on Earth and the most powerful man in Europe and the Near East, to a pitiful self-parody—a caged king who served as a literal step stool to mount a horse and a footrest for an Asian warlord. Europe’s finest armies did nothing to the Ottoman sultan; Tamerlane made him a footstool, or an “ottoman” as we now call it.^[10]

1 His Desecrated Corpse Killed Millions In The 20th Century

When I rise from the dead, the world shall tremble.

In June 1941, Soviet scientists Tashmuhammed Kari-Niyazov and Mikhail Gerasimov were sent by Stalin to Samarkand to exhume the body of Timur for study. The goal was basically to see if his tomb was really his tomb, what his face looked like, and if he was actually physically lame. Stalin had a morbid curiosity about the notorious warlord, as did many Russians. For centuries, Russia had suffered under and paid tribute to fearsome nomadic steppe warriors, and their histories were entwined.

The keepers of the tomb warned the team about ancient curses, but they were rudely pushed aside, and their warnings were discounted. The casket of Timur was cut from precious black jade, the largest single piece in the world. Upon its opening, a pungent, sweet smell arose, which was supposedly the smell of several curses being unleashed but was probably due to the scented embalming fluids used to preserve the remains for burial. One of the inscriptions on the inside of the tomb (in addition to the one above) said, “Whosoever opens my tomb, shall unleash an invader more terrible than I.”

The remains were carefully, but unceremoniously, packed up and prepared for flight back to Moscow. Two days later, the Germans invaded the Soviet Union, launching Operation Barbarossa.

As for the forensic findings, Timur would have dragged his right leg when he walked, and he was missing his pinky and ring fingers on his right hand. His left shoulder was higher than his right to an odd degree. Gerasimov would eventually compose a bronze bust of Timur based on the skull, which is even today a prominent representation of his likeness.

In the meantime, the German Wehrmacht had pushed all the way to the Volga River and was locked in a do-or-die last stand by the Soviets. It was the most desperate hour for Stalin and the Soviets. It should be known at this point that Stalingrad was the bloodiest battle in all of recorded history . . . not just World War II.

Stalin had chosen this time to have Timur’s remains flown back to Samarkand for reburial with full rites. He chose to have the plane carrying the historic corpse fly over the front at Stalingrad for a month before detouring back to Timur’s place of rest. The Germans surrendered at Stalingrad shortly after Timur’s reinterment.^[11]

Stalingrad was the apex of Hitler’s push east, and once lost, the Wehrmacht would never regain the momentum. The Soviets would eventually push them all the way back to Hitler’s crumbling bunker walls in April 1945. Gerasimov was well-known for his forensic reconstruction of likenesses of other historical figures as well, such as Ivan the Terrible, Rudaki (founder of Persian literature), and the poet Yaroslav the Wise.

Realistically, the timing of the exhumation and the Nazi invasion seems mere coincidence, but even hard-nosed skeptics would be forced to consider some dark alternative theories to the existence of curses after reading the bloody chapter in history that is Tamerlane. If such a man can exist, and if he was allowed to commit such crimes by whatever Muslim, Christian, or Hindu god that exists, then why does the reality of a curse seem so absurd? Does there exist an evil so strong that it can radiate a curse centuries after the death of its founder?

+ An Ironic Gift To History

Europe’s reaction to the Battle of Ankara (Angora) was a mix of joy and dread. They were saved for the moment, but what possible chance would Europe have to defend against warriors more deadly than the Turks? At the same time, how could they not hail Tamerlane as the dark savior of the continent? Christian Europe was saved from the savage Muslims by the savage Muslims!

Poems, music, operas, and plays would be dedicated to the Muslim hero of Christendom for generations of Europeans, but the thought of Tamlerlane’s army—even more dangerous than the hated Turks, was a dreadful image to grasp.

Emissaries from all over the continent were sent to praise and appease Timur following the defeat of the Turks, and Timur himself was very warm and welcoming toward his new fans from Christianity. He warmly referred to the deeply Catholic king of Spain as “his very own son.”^[12]

Timur’s shocking annihilation of the Turkish threat brought immediate relief to Europe and may have bought just enough time for the continent to build up her strength to resist future Ottoman incursions. It took the Turks years to recover from the loss, as civil wars and instability weakened their empire.

Europe was to suffer a few major setbacks after Bayezid’s downfall, in particular the fall of Constantinople, but it was able to (at least barely) stave off enough crushing losses to the Ottomans until the tide started slowly turning in Europe’s favor in the 16th century. The beginning of the end of the Turkish threat to Europe occurred when Poland saved Europe from the Turks at the failed Siege of Vienna in 1529 and when a European naval coalition sank a massive fleet of Turkish slave–run war galleons near Lepanto in 1571.

Call it an opinion, but is it not morbidly ironic that Christian Europe was saved from Islamic annihilation by the most brutal Muslim warlord who ever lived?

Beau Boivin dreams of working remote and living in Costa Rica but still awaits that one scratch-off ticket that will get him there. He is very handsome, super smart, witty, suave, and debonair. Most of all, he is very humble about these facts—just ask him! You can visit his YouTube page here . . . send him a message and be his friend—you’ll be one of the few!